Xavier Lopez Performance #11A: Cacophany Anodyne and Hamlet's Ghost Introduction.

 

In 2016, there were only a handful of us, each of us taking the stage one after the other. From spoken word poetry and more traditionally Latino performance. I was the last one that hot, August night and as a cacophony of layers and layers of looped recordings of the tune "Theme From A Summer Place" played while I, dressed as a ghost handed out flowers into the audience, later I painted in chocolate and strawberry syrup, and dressed as a giant teddy bear--none of us had any idea that we were the first ones to put together a festival of Performance Art that was brave enough to claim the term Latinx. We had no idea that this was the first all-Latinx performance art festival--in all of its difficult to classify, irreverent, problematic, transient glory. The night itself was wonderful; then we became part of university curricula across the globe when Marvin Carlson claimed us in Routledge's textbook "Performance: A Critical Introduction."

The first performance of the night began with me placing multiple "boom boxes" out throughout the room all playing the same track in a kind of staggered "row row row your boat"sort of way. Then I came out as a ghost and handed flowers to the audience.

 

For the last twenty years I have been working with Sheet Ghost installations, performances and sculpture. Beginning first with my performance art in 1993, wherein I first used the "sheet ghost" in a significant way--I have found the ghost to be an amazingly expressive means of dealing with many issues ranging from the extremely personal to themes of isolation and even more abstract ideas as was the case in the most recent installation I did for the Seattle Office Arts & Culture's "Dialogues in Art" series, wherein I dealt with issues of homelessness. In Hope/Home, the first installation with multiple figures, the sheet ghosts became stand-ins for my family as we dealt with a period of homelessness that we experienced when I was still very young. Over the course of several installations I have seen my process become increasingly narrative and more and more theatrical.