Smoking in the Stairwell

After a while I actually began doing some of these performances in public, although the cows of East Texas stayed safely in their pens and fields. I would rent a hotel room at a local Motel 6 and advertise in the paper an elaborate performance workshop called “Feeling & Finding the Neal Medlyn Way.” I announced a performance art campout in a local park gazebo, only to have people arrive and find me “dead,” with a cassette playing my requests for them to do a series of activities together. I was young then, you guys.

Somehow doing this kind of thing became my life’s work: making performances. From Texas, I moved to Berlin, set off some fireworks indoors, ran out of money, and then eventually moved to New York and walked over to Kim’s Video on St. Marks Place and rented News From Home.

In it, the voiceover is letters from Akerman’s mother. We never hear the artist’s responses. We just see the long, slow pans. The empty shots of platforms. It was my favorite movie. It somehow seemed to be made for me—recently arrived here, utterly in love with New York.

I watched other films of hers. I just loved her implied presence, the sense she was just hanging around, not needing to comment, just there. Her work is very beautiful and has a sort of quiet, lonely, slow madness to it.

Then when she had her show at The Kitchen, Maniac Shadows (April 12–May 11, 2013), she literally was suddenly just around in my life. I had been working in the box office at The Kitchen for six years at the time. At first, it was just a few shifts here and there as a house manager, a way to make some extra money that my friend Adrienne Truscott hooked me up with. Later, when my life as a dancer in work by Adrienne and David Neumann and my occasional sound design work with Miguel Gutierrez petered out, I became part-time as the box office manager. Most people who work at The Kitchen work upstairs, so the ground floor can be empty for long stretches of time. Sometimes, based on show schedules, I open or close the building, going around turning on (or off) breakers and opening doors.

During Maniac Shadows, I was making a show about Pina Bausch and doing some of the writing while at The Kitchen during slow times. This is what I wrote:

It didn’t necessarily make sense that I loved her work so much, or maybe I should say that I was haunted by her work so much. All my work is usually pretty messy and loud. As a performer I’ve always wanted to feel the kind of out-of-body ecstasy I’d see in my Pentecostal church three times a week when I was a kid. I wanted to make massive, unwieldy work that relied on presence. But I like to think there’s a lot of the same kind of internal asperity and meticulousness and rigor in my work as there is in Chantal Akerman’s. Or maybe it’s safer to say I admire those things about her.

I’m not sure why she kept finding new corners in the building to smoke in. I never asked. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to smoke in there. I only came upon her actually smoking once. On a landing between floors. We said “Oh hey” to each other. I loved that month or so that she was there. It was nice knowing she was there, the way she was there in her films when I first came here. It was a special time for me at The Kitchen.

BIOS

Neal Medlyn is an artist whose work straddles the lines between theater, performance art, comedy, and music. His most well-known works are his seven show Pop Star Series and Champagne Jerry, the subsequent iteration of his work with popular music. He has been gainfully employed at The Kitchen since 2007.