Body language

Paula Hunter gets personal

by Johnette Rodriguez

Paula Hunter has learned what recent Pultizer-winning playwright Paula Vogel has been saying for years -- she had to go to New York to have her work better appreciated in Rhode Island. When Hunter presented Mounting Evidence last spring at the Carriage House Theatre, she didn't have packed audiences. But when she performed that piece at Manhattan's Dance Theater Workshop in September, she got a rave in the New York Times, a mention in The New Yorker, and an invitation to another venue, Dixon Place, in January.

Now she's bringing it all back home, for an encore of Mounting Evidence and a new piece called Getting Known. Hunter came to performance art by way of dancing -- "I'm much more of a natural storyteller, but I've studied so long to be a mover." She mentions Viola Farber and Bessie Schoenberg as the most influential on her own work. Schoenberg in particular pushed her to let go of hypercritical judgments of herself or anyone else, in order to let sensory impressions, emotional memories and humorous observations flow through her work.

"Performance art came out of a need to personalize performance," Hunter noted in a recent conversation. "If you're not doing that, you should go back and write a play or something.

"The thing about performance art is that people do come for the movement," she reflected. "There's nothing like bodies lit and moving in a distilled, abstract way. But for me, it's a collage of movement and text and the sound of my voice. Performance art that really works draws from the concrete and the abstract all at once."

Hunter, who does voice-overs for commercial ads and uses snippets from those ads in Getting Known, emphasized that the voice can have the same kind of physical quality as the body: "The projection, timing, texture, the lightness and darkness of it, the movement of it -- that's wonderful choreography -- I try to play with that a lot."

To great effect. Although the "mounting evidence" in the title of her piece refers in one sense to her mother's aggressive ovarian cancer (diagnosed in May, 1995, Mary Hunter died in August, 1995), Hunter shades her voice in so many ways throughout the work that she can be self-mocking and hilarious one minute and breathtakingly poignant in the next. Touching on her own hypochondria, her mother's haunted childhood (her grandfather committed suicide during the Depression), and her eccentric family life, growing up in East Lansing, Michigan, Hunter is so obviously present and candid, while remaining articulate and cogent. She truly transforms her material through carefully choreographed movements, a gripping, funny, right-on-the-money text and the skillful interweaving of inflection, accent, pause and tone.

"My mother was very quiet, but she focused on us to be creative," Hunter recalled, leaning forward in her chair and punctuating phrases with a dramatic flair. "She was very depressed, but she came out of it when she was creating something and she was repelled by a life that didn't include that. Making things in my household was almost mandatory. If you weren't an artist, you might have been kicked out. But growing up with her was exhausting --- thank God she had the painting," she continued. "I was angry at her for so long. I wanted her to think the senior prom was important, but she didn't. That was her way of telling us that if you delve into the everyday, you won't survive."

But survive she did. In a rambling turn-of-the-century house on Providence's East Side, with a 13-year-old daughter, a 10-year-old son and a husband who teaches history at Brown, the 44-year-old Hunter has found ways to be a less traditional dancer, to be more experimental with her work, precisely because local audiences had not seen a lot of performance art. She presented a showcase of pieces at Rhode Island College in December, 1996, which included Ruth, inspired by the Biblical Ruth's need to belong to Naomi's tribe, but in this case it's a dog trying to join a family; a duet called The Queen and Her Bee, about the bee pleasing the queen and getting his sense of importance from someone else; Shrink, about Hunter squeezing into little places, performed with a small child's chair -- "there's always a Woody Allen side of me that just wants to tell the funny line!"

And then there's Getting Known: "I've been fascinated by the very human urge to rise above the common humankind, our drive for those 15 minutes of fame, that feeling that our life isn't anything if we haven't been photographed."

Growing up with a father who "wasn't convinced that truth and fact couldn't be mixed," Hunter keeps reassessing him: "Was this a constant tapestry of folk tales or was he a pathological liar?" She remains fascinated with issues of truth and falsehood: how easily can people tell the difference anymore and why it is important for a society to sort it all out.

Putting these ideas together with a short story she wrote based on her father telling her how to "get known," Hunter has created the new piece Getting Known, which the Village Voice has termed "a brilliant, hard-as-nails memory trek." It explores her father's propensity to spin yarns, her own everyday fibs and our universal acceptance of certain ways in which past truths blur into present myths.

"I like to have the messiness of reality, but life is so utterly unpredictable, and I really wanted to herald that and to get that across," she explained. "At the same time, I want it to have a really polished, highly professional look. Can you imagine a math problem that was wrong? I want to respect what this work can say.

"It's also definitely a story of trying to get my work produced in New York -- there are almost made-up moments," Hunter admitted, with a chuckle. "This character is full of herself and thinks she can do anything to get noticed."

And guess what? She has. With the New York notices and a wealth of material at her fingertips, Hunter is well on her way to making a body of work that gets national, not just New York recognition. And while she's at it, her new hometown may just discover her as well!

Paula Hunter will perform at the Carriage House Theatre, 7 Duncan Avenue, Providence, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and on Sunday at 3 p.m. Call 831-9479.