Dolores Wilber remembers her father crying four times: Once, when he gave her a chemistry set for Christmas that required that he be there to perform the experiments.
“But he was never around,” says Wilber, a striking city native whose newest piece, “JerkSnatch,” opens at the Blue Rider this weekend.
So Wilber set off to do the experiments by herself behind his back. And when her father realized it, he sat down and wept.
The three other times: When he caught her, at 16, in bed with her boyfriend; when, while teaching the kids to skeet shoot, he accidentally clipped a seagull, and when, years after the spectacle of Watergate, he finally admitted — in the heat of an argument with his daughter — that Richard Nixon was “nothing but a crook, a common crook.”
“JerkSnatch,” a performance art piece that features three men in different weight classes — heavyweight, welterweight and featherweight — doesn’t at any time feature the incidents with Wilber’s father, but it is those sensibilities that inform it.
“My dad died four years ago,” says Wilber, who has, at different times, been a community organizer, graphic designer, the art director of the magazine In These Times and an assistant director for the seminal performance group Goat Island. “When the priest gave the eulogy, he talked about this man who raised four children and did everything he could to make them happy. At first, I said, `That eulogy has nothing to do with my father.’ But I know now that I know nothing about what it’s like to be a plumber, married for 45 years and raising four children. Now that I’m a 45-year-old adult, I’d like to know him.”
Like all of Wilber’s pieces, “JerkSnatch” offers a visual panorama that is both startling and disturbing. In this piece, which features Matthew Hansell and Mike Stumm, both former members of the Wooster Group (the East Coast experimental theater group), and Steven Thompson, a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who has appeared in work by Lawrence Steger and Ron Athey, Wilber reinvents “jerking” and “snatching” so that they have nothing in common with the weightlifting events from which the words come.
In the piece, the men come together and pull apart, using everyday gestures and behaviors. In one scene, Hansell and Thompson repeatedly leap up and bump their chests. In another, a near-naked Stumm and Thompson place their hands on each other’s heads and gently roll them around and around.
“Goddamn you — you didn’t know me,” Hansell screams at Thompson at a particularly poignant moment.
“That’s me talking to my father,” says Wilber, “right at that point. I don’t think I look at my father with rose-colored glasses. And the piece is not just about my dad, but about men, about the foibles of men, how I see them struggling to get through their lives.”
The men Wilber chose for the piece have been crucial to its development, so much so that it is impossible for her to imagine doing it with any other cast.
“I enjoy collaborative work; I don’t enjoy individual work because I get lonely,” she says. “Collaborations can be painful because you get intimate very fast. That’s both fabulous and terrifying. You see the best and the worst of people right away. In this piece, there’s a lot of testosterone.”
“JerkSnatch” is also a curious piece because — as the men in it themselves pointed out — it would be nearly impossible to do in reverse.
“It would be different,” admits Wilber. “My last piece, I had Clare Dolan with her ass up in the air, on stilts, and a lot of my men friends were really angry about it — they said, `If you were a man, people would be really critical.’ But I’m not a man. And what they saw as vulnerable, I saw as powerful, and they didn’t feel comfortable with that image.”
“JerkSnatch” isn’t comfortable either, although it is easily Wilber’s most emotionally vulnerable work.
“I’d like to keep going,” she says of the intensity of the work. “I like to offer up disturbing images, to see what happens next.”
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Wilber’s piece will be performed this weekend only, but there’s plenty of competition on the performance front. On Friday night, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes headline a grand reopening party for Randolph Street Gallery. And on Saturday, Sheila Donahue closes out a short, erratic run at the Lunar Cabaret.
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the facts
Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., “JerkSnatch” by Dolores Wilber, Blue Rider Theater, 1822 S. Halsted St. $10. 773-252-1717. Blue Rider is wheelchair-accessible.
Friday, 8 p.m., Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, Randolph Street Gallery, 756 N. Milwaukee Ave. 312-666-7737. The gallery is wheelchair accessible.
Saturday, Sheila Donahue, Lunar Cabaret, 2827 N. Lincoln Ave. Call 773-327-6666 for performance time. Lunar Cabaret is wheelchair accessible.
