Performance Art in the 'Hood

For several weeks, my neighbors on the block below us spent hours each weekend standing in the street with plastic jugs of water at their feet. There were about 10 people, all adults, and they were all dressed in white. We had no idea what they were doing or why. My daughter and her friend across the street took to spying on this group, hiding behind a tree at first to peek out at the goings-on, and later, having gained some courage, simply gawking in plain view on the corner. I was able to spy comfortably enough from our front porch. The group formed two lines facing each other. Cars had to slow down to get past them. At first, as an ex-Californian, I thought that perhaps this group were engaged in emergency preparedness training (all that water in jugs). Or, I pondered, perhaps they were some new cult (hence the white clothing), an explanation that seemed to fit our offbeat Hyde Park neighborhood.

One Saturday after a couple weekends of white-group assembly, two fellows in a car pulled up in front of the house beside us. They lugged two blue lounge chairs out of the back of the car and placed them in the yard across the way in the strip of grass between sidewalk and street. Then they took off, leaving the lounge chairs stretched out as if a parade was scheduled. What holiday? The neighbors in white, I noticed, were back at it.

Later, I happened to be hanging out in the front yard when a weird thing happened. The two fellows pulled up in their car again, wearing white swimsuits this time, and they ran across the road, lay down in the lounge chairs, and commenced to read magazines. It was a nice day, but our neighborhood is no beach. Amused, I watched some more. The folks in white down at the corner had formed two lines, their jugs at the ready. Something, it seemed, was about to happen.

Sure enough, a caravan of cars and trucks slowly came down the road, each crammed with people. Hmmm... What was going on? People in the vehicles were leaning out with video cameras, filming what THEY saw, as if those of us on the street were somehow the spectacle.  My neighbors in white let loose with all that water, drenching some other folks, I wasn't quite sure who. Of course, I called for the girls and my husband to come witness the commotion. It was all over in a few minutes. The two fellows got up from tanning, hopped in the car, and left. Huh, we said, just another day in the neighborhood.....

The next day was one of those days that comes along maybe four times in a year in which all I want to do is read cookbooks, plan meals and cook. After a leisurely morning perusing Martha's ideas for family meals, I gathered up my shopping bags and set off for an expedition at Central Market, an upscale Austin grocery store. I set off in the car and drove slowly past my assembled neighbors, who were back at it and who paid me no mind.

At the next block, I passed a large white wooden church that sits on  lot fronted by an embankment. About ten couples, all women and all dressed in white wedding gowns or some white variant thereof, stood in frozen poses on the raised yard of the church, with each pair facing inwards as if ready to assume its vows. I slowed down to have a good gander. The scene was surreal, but beautiful. Across the street, a man, dressed - you guessed it - in white, sat as if having a picnic with two small children, also dressed in white. They were perfectly still.

At the next intersection, I saw the most striking set of white-clad figures. Three middle-aged women, each with an empty shopping cart and each dressed in a toga of sorts, formed a line that stretched across half the crosswalk. They stood immobile, frozen in the motion of pushing their carts. I stopped at the stop sign and took my time to look at them; there was something so other-worldly about them. Just then a hearse turned the corner, led by a jogging bearded man wearing a skullcap and long sideburns and followed by a caravan of cars, each with a Star of David in the window. The passengers in the cars were, like the folks the day before, busy taking videos of all the sights they saw.

It dawned on me that I was seeing some kind of performance art or street theater. Which made me extremely happy that I live on a street in a neighborhood in a city that engages in such pastimes, even though I recognized that, at the time, I was having a very private day while all these folks were having the most public of days. Perhaps it was the contrast that made it all the more appealing.

I found out later that the group had a name: Floodlines. The piece, conceived after 9/11 and in its final and seventh year, asks, What does memory feel and look like? Presumably the actors dressed in white to appear ghost-like, people caught in a moment of life past. You can see a photo of the wedding pairs and read a short article about the ensemble in our local newsletter (p.14).  I'm thinking from the photo that maybe they weren't all women after all. And the Austin Chronicle ran a nice article about last year's performance that conveys a sense of how surreal it was. Finally, the artist (or her friends) has a blog about the piece.

Oh, and about those lounge chairs...Turns out somebody swiped them overnight between the Saturday and Sunday performances, this being an urban neighborhood after all. But then, that's how we all set things out on the curb for free that we want people to take, so perhaps it was an innocent mistake. The two tanners knocked on my neighbor's door Sunday morning, a bit upset, and asked her if she had seen the chairs they had left outside. Of course, she was befuddled and said no, she didn't know where the chairs were. The men rounded up some others in a hurry, I guess, because the two men were sitting there, tanning, when I took off in the car. I wondered if the blue lounge chairs belonged to them or if they had borrowed them from a roommate: "Hey, Dave, you know your two blue lounge chairs? Yeah, well, a funny thing, we saw you weren't using them, so we took them and left them on a front yard in Hyde Park and somebody ripped them off. I know, weird, huh? Anyway, sorry....."