Art Lies, Volume 8, August-September 1995 Page: 6
42 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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BUSSING OUT
Brad Tyer chases
The Topchy Gang On The RunThe Zocalo Mobile Village is, in its concrete
aspects, a reconditioned 30-foot International
school bus outfitted with a lighting system, pub-
lic announcement speakers, FM transmitter,
video recording and projection capabilities,
diner-style cafe, and a 25' by 7' performance
platform perched on the bus' roof.
It is, in theory, an "audience interactive, user-
friendly celebration of multi-cultural diversity,
artistic expression, and controlled chaos" that
hopes to blur the lines between real life and
theater so hopelessly that the question becomes
irrelevant.
And in its human aspect, the Zocalo Mobile
Theater is ten or so artists/exhibitionists on
wheels, trying like hell to make some noise.
What it will mean in practice remains to be
seen, since at the time of writing, Zocalo's two-
week east coast tour - scheduled to include
performance happenings in New Orleans, Bal-
timore, New York City, Boston, and
Provincetown - is still two days from hitting
the open road. Ten artists are planning to take
part, each contributing varying degrees of ex-
pertise in music, theater, spoken word and per-
formance art. The company's mission state-
ment suggests that the Zocalo performances
are expected to act as "catalysts for collabora-
tive and/or improvisational works from artists
of the host communities," which may or may
not come to fruition. The New Orleans per-formance is booked at a nightclub/performance
space, whereas Boston's gig is scheduled to
take place in the town square in front of a week-
day lunchtime business crowd, so it's likely that
no two performances will be the same.
The word "adventure" gets tossed around a lot
when the members of Houston's Zocalo The-
ater and Performance Company discuss the up-
coming trip, which is an optimistic way of say-
ing that nobody knows precisely what's going
to happen. And that, it seems, is a good part
of the point.
Houston-based sculptor and performance art-
ist Nestor Topchy is the driving force, figura-
tively and literally, behind the Zocalo company
- a year and a half old nonprofit arts organi-
zation that makes its home in an old light-in-
dustrial compound in Houston's Heights neigh-
borhood leased form Houston District Attor-
ney Johnny Holmes. Topchy has taken
Zocalo's revolving cast of characters on prior
excursions to Edinburgh's Fringe Festival, New
York's Busker's Fair, and the International Per-
formance Festival in Mexico City, but the east
coast tour will be the first in the bus, and the
new wheels mesh perfectly with Topchy's vi-
sion, which has as much to do with cultural
mobility as with art, and absolutely nothing to
do with the art-for-art's-sake credo so often
invoked as justification for the shifting crite-
rion of performance art.
4 21
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Allen, Mark; Carroll, Donald & Huerta, Benito. Art Lies, Volume 8, August-September 1995, periodical, August 1995; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228040/m1/6/: accessed May 7, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .