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."

The first weekend of Out There kicks off with Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People in a piece called Everyone, which has received kudos in New York, but has yet to tour elsewhere in the United States. Everyone is a delicate hybrid of movement, text, and music that fuses audience and performer into—everyone or anyone. That's the idea, anyway.

"One of the things that comes up over and over for me," Gutierrez says, "is the different implicit and explicit rules that are at place in a theatrical context between a performer and viewer. This assumption that I [the artist] am supposed to entertain you and that you will, in turn, be entertained by me. That the performance is what constitutes who I am. I'm intrigued by the way that bodies are very ordinary, and I'm intrigued by the way a dancing body can articulate something esoteric."

The New York Times declared Everyone "an adrenaline burst, smart and moving and full of questions, the way only real art can be." This piece is literally not for everyone, however, because Gutierrez has cordoned off the McGuire Theater's 385 seats, which allows for only eighty-five attendees per performance. Says Gutierrez, "If you want something to look different, you have to change the way you look at it."

The second weekend belongs to The TEAM. The third welcomes the visual and performance artist Claude Wampler, a forty-one-year-old whose show Performance (career ender) is shrouded in secrecy. Wampler was introduced to Bither via choreographer Sarah Michelson, for whom Wampler designed the visual installations for Michelson's dance piece Daylight (for Minneapolis). "I heard about how good Claude's other pieces were," says Bither. "I've been both intrigued and put off by her ideas in the past. I admire her courage and really see her as a lone voice and an innovator, someone who's fought hard to bring the world of installation art and performance together in some of the most provocative ways that I'm aware of. The piece itself is unlike anything else I've seen. It will test people's patience. This will be the piece most people will be talking about. What she asks the audience to do is audacious, that's the only word for it."

The final weekend features feedforward, a Walker co-commission by David Neumann/advanced beginner group. This is Neumann's first time at the Walker with his own work, though he has performed here with other groups. Neumann's feedforward is a humorous, spectacle-filled movement piece that examines America's number one obsession: sports.

The Bessie award-winning "smart joker of dance" from New York is known for his exuberant and goofy, but ultimately touching work. His trick is a precise one-two punch: make 'em laugh, then ask them to contemplate the mysteries of Life, the Universe, and Everything Else. Add an animal costume and a gold bomber jacket. Pure genius. If not genius, let's say ingenious.

Because feedforward is a co-commission, Bither, as of this writing, had yet to see the finished piece. His willingness to support new work is, of course, one of the many reasons why his contemporaries admire him. "Philip is one of the few presenters in the country who really does his homework and keeps up with what's going on," says Neumann. "I'm really starting to be launched as a theater artist, and that's generated from Philip seeing something [of mine] and saying, 'I think you're onto something.' He's a trendsetter. He might not like that term, but he brings something to the Walker, and then everyone else says, 'Oh!' "

"Commissions are a risk," admits Bither. "But you have to take those risks. Funding is going away, and I worry that presenters have become risk-averse. They want to present work that people will love, naturally, but artists are very dependent upon institutions [for support]. That's where the Walker stands apart nationally.

"It can be frustrating that, locally, people aren't aware of how important the Walker has been internationally and nationally," says Bither, whose measured voice speeds up as he leans forward in his chair, palms planted calmly on the table. "But anyone who's come to Out There over the years knows that these are pieces that anyone who's interested in theater needs to see! This is the future of theater!"

Reach Jaime Kleiman at jaime@jaimekleiman.com