Playing House
There were boots piled up at the door, chips and beer on the table. On a warm waft of air, commingled French and English from the kitchen. Windows steamy from a crowd two deep on every wall.
And then they were right there in front of you, the performers, only inches away. No chance to turn away. Surreal, too real. All over the house, that little post-war bungalow in the suburbs: inside, outside, the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and in a small white room in the basement with one open wall.
We are all performers: mothers, fathers, workers, lovers. Citizens and neighbors. But the home is usually a private space. Fait Maison turned the purpose of a house inside out, it put the most private performances on display. It went right past community and made strangers into family. That's what it felt like taking pictures at Fait Maison; I was chronicling my wonderfully insane family.
A Fait Maison happening was intense. Like family, performance art is a visceral experience. Sometimes it didn't make sense, not until much later. A performance could hit me after weeks of sitting at the back of my mind, a psychic jack-in-the-box or one of those peanut cans with snakes inside, waiting to be sprung. Like that snake joke, the performances were usually either strikingly profound or profoundly unintelligible.
The experience of active watching was unusual and moving. You don't watch performance art, you're in it: it watches you. Unlike TV and unlike theatre, there's nothing passive about performance art. The viewer isn't a spectator; they are an integral part of the action, a crucial element in the dance between the do-er and the see-er. Performance art is nothing without an audience.
NB: Fait Maison (French for "home made") was an art collective and performance series in Gatineau, Quebec. It is now disbanded. For more info, Anna Khimasia wrote a nice bit for Gallery 101 about them.