Every spring since 2004, a make believe funeral procession has meandered through Hyde Park, occassionally interupted by snippets of site-specific performance art. It was conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, is performed by 36 dedicated followers, and utilizes more than 3,300 styrofoam cups. Oh yeah, and only 18 people get to see it.

What in the sam hell?

The piece is called Floodlines, and it's being performed this Saturday as part of Refraction Arts' FuseBox Festival . Through the magic of internet technology (read: we exchanged some emails), Austinist got to pick the brain of Jaclyn Pryor, the show's creator. Warning: the following contains non-linear thought.

Not to pigeon-hole your work, but is this a dance performance? Is it visual art? Is it performance art? Is it theatre? All of the above?

That's a good question. I would first say that it is performance art, and I would add that it is (multi-) site specific performance art, which is an important dimension given the very public venue (the streets and sidewalks of Hyde Park) of the work. It's also an art installation, but with live bodies instead of static objects, and it builds on avant-gardist traditions of happenings and conceptual art. As for dance, yes, in the sense that it's bodies moving in space (and that the kinesthetic and visual is privileged over text and linear narrative), but my training is in physical theatre.

So, this piece is "mapped onto the topography of Austin" -- how are you encorporating Austin's topography into the performance?

All of the staged vignettes, of which there are about 20, are built into the natural environment. Architecture is a very important element in my work in general, and it feeds me lots of ideas, too. For this I am greatly indebted to Anne Bogart and Mary Overlie, with whom I've studied Viewpoints. So, for example, one of the simplest vignettes in floodlines is a woman on a swing -- that swing was not something we imported. It's not an external idea. It was inspired by a swing that happened to be hanging at the corner of Grooms and 35th Street. It was inspired by an accident. We have infused it with new meaning, we have given it a story -- or placed it inside of a larger story -- but what's different here, to put it into a theatrical paradigm, is that the "set" did not come after the "script", it came before (and will remain after the performance, too).

This piece has been performing for three years, right? Is it the same piece every year? Is it a continuing journey? Are we just into sequels now?

The idea is the same every year, but things have also changed with each performance. There are 36 performers, so each year we have some of the same dedicated folks, and some news folks (often people who have seen the show in previous years). The environment changes, too, so we have to adjust things accordingly. In 2004 and 2005, for instance, we had a vignette based around this totally bizarre and amazing fence surrounding a power plant in the middle of a residential alleyway. Well, two weeks ago I noticed that it had all been torn down -- it is a huge open field now. So the challenge now was, "What goes in the field? . . . How do we fill that space with meaning and maintain the integrity of the piece?" That's just one example. The piece is also about repetition with a difference, what playwright Suzan Lori-Parks calls rep and rev (repetition and revision), so it makes sense to adapt and revise the piece from year to year. History changes, too, and that changes the way people watch. This is the first show post-Katrina, for example, and so all the water and flood imagery in the piece, I imagine, will carry that weight.

You say this piece was conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, and your first performance was in 2004 -- what was happening for you in the interim?

In 2001, I was living in New York, in lower Manhattan, and that was just awful and traumatizing. I became slightly obsessed with 9/11 in its aftermath -- it penetrated by subconscious in disturbing ways, too -- I had a lot of dreams and nightmares. In 2002, I started grad school at UT and so I started to organize a lot of my thoughts and preoccupations as performance research. That's how the piece grew. So, in truth, at this point, it's the product of 5 years of work.

Why does the audience travel in a car? Who's driving? Do we get out of the car as performers approach us?

Well, the cars are all marked with funeral stickers and each has a driver -- the audience is put in role, so to speak, as part of a funeral processional. The audience stays in the cars, like it would during a funeral processional, and the images appear en route -- they "flash up" and then disappear from view.

On the FuseBox website it makes mention of "3,300 styrafoam cups" -- should I even ask, or should that just be a surprise?

It's actually more than that now! I feel a little guilty about that since it's Earth Day on April 22, but it has important meaning for the piece, so I justify it to myself that way . . . plus we keep them from year to year. And I hear that Styrofoam is recyclable now. On a conceptual level, though, what I'll say is that Styrofoam is something that lasts, and that's why it's important to this piece.

And just to finish up, what's this I hear about there being a Jewish element to the performance?

Well, without giving up the whole show (because it is very much about staged surprises), I would say that throughout the conception of this project I was very influenced by German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, who uses the terms "messianic time" and "historical materialism" to refer to a vision of history in which the past, present, and future are not linear (though perhaps perceived that way) but rather simultaneous, all happening at once. As an artist, this concept is very liberating; it gives me permission to play with time as well as space, to stretch it out, condense it, loop it, reverse it, make two (or three or four . . .) disparate things happen at once. As a Jew myself, and a first generation American, I also have a complicated sense of the United States as not really home -- in my family, for instance, home and homeland was always a distant place, not "here" and "now" . . . so the rhetoric of 9/11, the discourse of war, homeland, and homeland security, all that stuff, hits me in a slightly strange way. Which is all to say that I feel as if I understand immigration, migration, contradiction, the sensation being in two places at once, on a visceral level. So that's in the piece, too. It's in my costume, it's in the physical journey of the piece through the streets, it's in the funeral. It's the underbelly of the whole thing. I think that it's the underbelly of a lot of my work.

You can get more info on this piece, offer your thoughts, or give feedback on the performance at the blog Jaclyn has set-up for this year's project. Find your link to tickets, etc at the floodlines page on the FuseBox Festival website.

Photo (c) Jaclyn Pryor