Stage Flight

Every January for the past twenty years, the Walker Art Center has presented its Out There performance series, a month-long festival celebrating the future of contemporary performance, ranging in scope from traditional, innovative theater pieces to full-out theatrical experiments. The man responsible for scouring the planet to find artists who are sufficiently "out there" to merit an invitation to Out There is Philip Bither, William Nadine McGuire senior curator for performing arts.

Bither doesn't look like an arbiter of the avant-garde. Quite the opposite, in fact. Charming and friendly, with brown hair and a slightly reserved smile, Bither is the sort of person to whom people naturally gravitate. His manner is relaxed, even though he spends a good portion of his life on the road searching for the Next Big Thing. The day we met for our interview in the Walker's iPod-white administrative offices, he was nibbling on a Clif Bar, which seemed apt; you get the impression that Bither eats many meals on the go. After all, programming the Walker's entire performing arts roster—Out There is but four shows out of approximately fifty on the docket for this season—probably is a lot like running a marathon.

Because Minneapolis is in what some on the coasts think of as flyover country, it's easy to assume that Bither's programming mimics or borrows from that of larger institutions, such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But BAM's executive producer and artistic director, Joe Melillo, says it's the other way around. Every curator wants to know what the others are doing, certainly, but Bither is one of the people other curators look to first. "Philip was here at BAM in the late eighties," says Melillo. "He has an inner Geiger counter that sends out an energy to an artist that signals he's listening to them. So when he appropriately inquires about their creative process, [artists] are comfortable being vulnerable with him."

Ben Cameron, program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (an organization that funds some of the Walker's programming), believes that Bither is a visionary. "When Philip came to the Walker [after John Killacky, performing arts curator in the 1990s], he brought his own aesthetic to the work. Philip's generosity shows not only in the way he works with artists or on grant panels. He inclines toward artists who . . . ask questions of the larger world. Whenever you talk about the great presenters of the country, Philip Bither comes up on that list. He is unquestionably one of the best."

Bither isn't unaware of his reputation and influence in the contemporary performing arts world. "The Walker has sparked a kind of movement for art centers in America that includes performance in their institutions, such as the Chicago Institute of Art and MASS MoCA," he says. "The Walker was the model on which many of these programs are based."

The Walker Art Center's performing arts department has a long history of supporting avant-garde artists, ranging from such local performers as Laurie Van Wieren and Patrick Scully to New York City-based firebrands such as Holly Hughes and Karen Finley (she of the chocolate body armor). During the so-called Culture Wars of the 1990s, the Walker's Killacky notoriously threw the institution into the fray by providing a forum for the very artists most likely to raise the ire of the "family values" crowd, presenting such pieces as Law of Remains, a theater work by HIV-positive artist Reza Abdoh that dealt with the legacy of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer in some of the most direct and gruesome ways imaginable.

In 1997, after Killacky left to head San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bither filled his position. Bither's artistic sensibilities aren't as politically charged as Killacky's, but are no less wondrous or challenging. And of all the work the Walker showcases, Out There continues to be a program to which Bither and the Walker are particularly dedicated. The apex of the Walker's performance season, Out There offers four weeks of continuous programming during one of the cruelest months of the year. It brings artists here from Holland, Argentina, England and other places to which Minnesotans ordinarily don't have access. This year's artists—Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, The TEAM, Claude Wampler, and David Neumann—are all new to the Walker. Most have never left the East Coast.

The TEAM consists of a core group of twelve members who are barely out of grad school, ranging in age from twenty-six to thirty-two. Their show, Particularly in the Heartland, is about three siblings who are suddenly orphaned on a farm following a Wizard of Oz-like tornado, a symbol of The Rapture to come. The work is politicized, yes, but not polarizing. It's highly physical, surprisingly patriotic (in the original sense of the word), and unexpectedly optimistic. Heartland has won numerous awards overseas at various Fringe Festivals, including the big daddy of them all, Edinburgh.

"My personal hunch," says Bither, "is that The TEAM is on to great things. I would like to see artists in their twenties be smart and innovative and not be pessimistic, and I was intrigued and moved by the work that The TEAM made."