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hut #1

Hut #1.

JORO BORO

DATE ∙ December 2009

LOCATION ∙ The Border, Brooklyn, New York

DIAMETER ∙ 4 feet

ARTISTIC COLLABORATORS ∙ Joro Boro (music), Marisol Montoya (video editing)

Hut #1 was an impulse. I didn’t intend to build huts. The garbage was always good in the industrial building where my studio was in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and I would happily collect things from the dumpster on the off chance that I would use them. (It was only later that I began to feel less self-satisfied about the steady supply of free waste.) One day I took what was lying around my studio—some branches, rods, cardboard tubes, chicken wire, fake fur and fabrics left over from past projects, and quickly built an improvised structure. It was a refuge. A lair. Most importantly, something to go into. I sat inside in silence.

I had recently completed Our Lady of Detritus, a portable performance installation, with composer/vocalist Kristin Norderval and performer Mariana Ferreira. We performed over a six-week period at public sites in four NYC boroughs in places like Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing, and Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. It was a crazy circus of a performance with free “trash miracles” and an unscientific survey in English and Spanish asking viewers, “What is the last thing you threw away? How long did you have it?” It was sprawling and open; people came and went; they saw what they saw when they happened to be there. The blind men and the elephant.

Hut #1, Roof.

JORO BORO

I did what I set out to do. I wanted to make experimental performance more democratic. I wanted to bring my work to people who do not go to “underground” venues or have the intention, time, or money to find them. I wanted the work to be available in a larger way. And it was—under highways, on street corners, where people barbecue, and in the bus station that is the navel of New York City. People participated who would probably not have otherwise. And for that I was grateful.

But I also felt that the work was diffuse. I missed having a container and I realized why theaters are important. They allow us all to be together in some special space so that magic can happen. They hold things. I was feeling the need for a container, so I sat in the little hut that I built in my studio.