Sexual politics

Holly Hughes' challenging Clit Notes

by Johnette Rodriguez

Holly Hughes didn't start out to be a cause celebre for arts funding, but when she became one of the four artists "defunded" by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 (the grant was reinstated in 1993), she found herself thrust into a limelight that was distracting to the progress of her performance work and distressing as a turn for the country. She brings her current performance piece, Clit Notes, to the RISD Auditorium tonight and Saturday (April 3 and 5) as part of Perishable Theatre's Dewar's Ma & Pa Series.

"Three of the four of us were singled out for our sexuality," Hughes recalled, in a phone conversation from Kalamazoo College, where she is currently doing a six-month residency. "NEA reviewers had come to see my performances, but they took images in my work out of context. It was just a very blunt caving in to the bigotry of the U.S. Congress at that time.

"Not that it's much different today," she sighed. "As someone who was around and conscious in the late '60s, I never thought we'd be in this place that we're in now."

But even though those who blew with the conservative wind seven years ago have not relented in their attacks on grants to artists, Hughes and many solo artists like her are continuing to create work that challenges perceptions and attitudes.

"That's why I keep going," Hughes confessed. "People come up to me and tell me, `You helped me understand my family."

That may be because her own family is featured so heavily in Clit Notes. In it, Hughes outlines her childhood in Saginaw, Michigan, where "there wasn't even a bookstore," in an extremely Republican household, in which her mother would talk about the imminent danger from "the yellow race."

"It's a new, improved autobiography," Hughes noted, about the piece. "It's about making myths, poetry and comedy out of your personal experience. I talk about the push-pull of being an outsider -- the romantic idea of being an outlaw vs. the reality of feeling like you're exiled in your own culture and within your own family. I try to look at that from both sides and also at that difficult terrain that so many people experience in their family -- there's all these strains and gaps between you but there's also something powerful that connects you."

From her small Midwestern hometown, Hughes went off to a private liberal arts college in a slightly larger Midwestern town, Kalamazoo. Sharing her Kalamazoo College alum status with another performance artist, Lisa Kron, and with this reporter, Hughes described her arrival at Kalamazoo as "like coming to Paris."

"It's where I came out, in a sense, and named my desire for women, but it's not atypical for college students to question their sexuality," Hughes recalled. "But I couldn't find a gay community here. I recognized that my sexuality set me apart and also felt really early on that I wanted to be an artist. I didn't know what form that would take -- I was a painter here.

"Either of these things make you an oddball, especially in American culture, where there's so much suspicion of being an artist or a writer -- there's so much anti-intellectualism," she continued. "So even at school, art is tolerated up to a certain level and then it's `Let's get real, let's get the MBA or something that will bring home the tofu pups.' "

But, after majoring in visual art at Kalamazoo and drifting around Michigan for over a year after graduation, Hughes headed for New York in '79, where she took classes at the New York Feminist Art Institute and gained her first exposure to the likes of Spalding Gray, Stuart Sherman and Laurie Anderson.

"I was intrigued by how different it was from my ideas of theater," she related. "It was often very stripped down. It was just one person telling stories. It also seemed connected to something I'd gotten a lot out of, which was consciousness-raising. I was in a CR group, with women sharing stories about a topic, like `your father' or `religion.'

"That just seemed like such an amazing idea, coming from Saginaw, Michigan, that you could make art out of these topics in your life," she went on. "And of course as a woman you are taught to denigrate your experience in such a way that when I teach right now, my students think they have nothing to say."

Hughes got involved with a women's theater group, the W.O.W. Cafe, and the next thing she knew she was doing shows, using performance work as a way of building community with other women artists -- "instead of stocking Tofu Pups at the food coop or silk-screening posters about Nicaragua or mimeographing newsletters."

Though Hughes doesn't believe that there is one specific gay or lesbian aesthetic in making theater or performance pieces, she does recognize that there are certain sensibilities, like camp and drag, that have influenced her work. The outrageous comedy of camp could only come from an outsider perspective, she feels, and she was drawn to drag's look at the ambiguities of gender and sexuality.

"I remember seeing drag theater when I got to New York and thinking, `Why don't girls get to have this much fun?,' " she remembered with a laugh. "More recently my work has been influenced by other solo artists, such as David Cale -- I love the magic realism in his writing -- and Lisa Kron -- the apparent simplicity of what she's doing, but actually she's spinning sophisticated parables out of her personal experience."

Hughes also loves reading memoirs, autobiography and biography, and she links the American emphasis on re-telling stories with the social change that happened in the Civil Rights Movement, through the testimony of those living under segregation; in the CR groups, where women exchanged experiences of oppression and misogyny; and in the 12-step movement, with someone in recovery telling a story that may speak directly to someone else in the room.

"I'm fascinated by it as a teacher, because the stories my students tell me are far more fabulous than anything you could make up," she said.

To shape Hughes's own stories into performance, she works with a director (Dan Hurlin for Clit Notes) and in workshop situations where she tries to get a sense of how people will respond.

"To go deep in your work, you have to go to places that scare you," Hughes reflected. "You have to go beyond what you feel would get a laugh or be a tearjerker."

By all accounts, Clit Notes does both.