The Bertolucci interview took the process one step further by making the film director an observer/commentator on the performance. The piece concluded with Jane Dibbell as Bertolucci speaking about his next film, which was to be based on a newspaper story about the kidnapping of a wealthy industrialist’s son: “[B]ut the father isn’t so sure he wants to give up the cheese factory, the villa in Roma […] after all, he hardly knew the boy […]. It’s going to be a wonderful film. Make lots money.” Then turning to a pathetic naked baby doll, “You like the cinema, eh? […] You know, children are the real enemy … It’s the eyes, so SAD. … You don’t know if they are going to respect you, or kill you ….” He sums it up with “I like being film director … my finger is always on the pulse.”
Hixson’s LA pieces were all collaborative efforts that began with images and gestures lifted from films. These images were not imitated by the performance but digested and reconstructed. Likewise, everyday activities were distilled to a specific set of images and gestures and extracted from context. The two were montaged together, simultaneously erasing the boundary between our two levels of experience — mediated and direct, and pointing out the disjuncture. This technique was applied to texts taken from newspapers, television, movies, plays, and novels, and intercut with monologues and dialogues developed by the performers from their own undramatic, pedestrian personal experiences and observations. In Flatlands (July 1983), an American road story about the place we remember that never was and the horizon line we never get to, excerpts from The Great Gatsby, the flight log of a Florida plane crash, personal anecdotes, and one-sentence news headlines of unidentified disasters were juxtaposed without giving any one category of information greater weight or significance than the others. This leveling out of fact and fiction, tragedy and triviality, severs events from their consequences, as history is cut loose from memory.
Had Hixson chosen to go to New York instead of Los Angeles her work, no doubt, would have taken a very different course. But she didn’t. She came to LA in the late 1970s when suntans were chic, Venice was cheap with artist studios down by the beach, and everyone was still “laid back.” Hixson got a job as a waitress in Venice, then the hangout of macho sculptors and light-and-space conceptualists. She met and moved in with her new lover, urban planner Gary Squier and, in 1978, enrolled in Otis Art Institute’s graduate program. Hixson and Squier left Venice for a loft on Industrial Street in LA’s budding downtown art scene.
Unlike New York, with its geographically concentrated art community in downtown Manhattan, southern California’s sprawling network of universities and art schools was the breeding ground for the performance art activities of the 1970s. Hixson’s entrance into performance was through this system. Kristin Bonkemeyer, a sculpture student at Claremont graduate school, sculptor Steve Nagler, a recent Claremont graduate, and his girlfriend, choreographer Pam Casey, a student in the experimental dance program at Cal. State-Fullerton headed by choreographer Lynn Hachten, had been working with Hachten on a collaborative piece combining sculpture and dance. Bonkemeyer introduced Hixson to the group and invited her to work with them. Also invited to join were two other Fullerton faculty members — dancer/choreographer Wilson Barrileaux, and director/performer/ theater teacher Ron Wood who was also Hachten’s husband.
The seven became an official collaborative performance group when the piece Invention #1 was to be presented as a work-in-progress at Claudia Chaplin’s Santa Monica loft space, IDEA. Her associate, Peggy Dobreer, insisted that the group had to have a name in order to be on the program. Hixson and Bonkemeyer ducked into a closet for a hasty consultation. Picking up on the only thing available for inspiration, the object-oriented Bonkemeyer dubbed the group Hangers. Between 1979 and 1981 Hangers created and presented six collaborative pieces. In a town that had no geographically locatable art community, no institutional support structure for this kind of work, no rules of procedure, and no high-visibility publicity mechanism, not only was self-producing a necessity, it was and still is in keeping with the free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit of LA.
Invention #1 was performed in the summer of 1979 at the Pilot Theater, a tiny black-box space on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. At $2.50 a ticket it sold out its ninety-nine seat house on two consecutive weeknights, and launched a group that would become the spawning ground for many of today’s most prominent LA performance artists. Hangers served as a kind of laboratory, not unlike the early days of the Judson Dance Theatre in New York, but given the nature of LA without any single location or space identified with it. The group quickly followed up in the fall of 1979 with Invention #2 at Stage One, a new gallery in Orange near Fullerton, and Invention #3 in the winter of’1979/80 at the Hyperion Theater in Hollywood.
The energy and conceptual structure of the pieces was the result of a collective decision-making process and a rotation of roles in which everyone functioned as director/choreographer and as performer. Content, derived from images and objects brought by each performer, was determined by an associative improvisational process. At first, what held these montages of seemingly unrelated, movement-based tableaux together was a common aesthetic involving the performers’ relationships to ordinary objects and pedestrian movement. Actions contradicted visual images, and costumes played a key part in Hangers’ vocabulary of social signage, often raising questions of gender stereotypes, an issue later to become central to Casey and Nagler’s work. Early in 1980 Ron Wood brought Jane Dibbell, an actress in the theatre program at Fullerton, into the group. Dibbell introduced texts from both literature and newspapers. Using them like objects, she developed monologues to counterpoint the movement-based images of the group. Dibbell became Hixson’s prime collaborator between 1981 and 1983.
While Hixson was experimenting with a way of working and beginning to find her own image vocabulary with Hangers, she was exposed to two other people who were to have a profound influence on LA performance — Rudy Perez and Rachel Rosenthal.
After nearly two decades in New York’s downtown dance scene, choreographer Rudy Perez came to LA in the fall of 1978 to teach a term at UCLA. His performance at IDEA early in 1979 of his famous 1964 Judson Church piece, Countdown, and other solo works was more than just an inspiration for Hixson and Hangers. It became a foundation on which to build. Seduced by the climate, the light and space, and the raw “youngness” of LA with its air of unlimited possibility, Perez stayed on to form a new company and teach workshops. In the next six years he created an impressive body of new work, and with the demanding eye and hand of an eccentric and unorthodox drill sergeant he provoked, prodded, and nurtured an entire generation of emerging performance artists. Hixson was one of them. She credits his big multimedia pieces Take Stock and Traces, presented at Royce Hall in 1981, in which he collaborated with visual artist Mark Stock, as having a direct influence on the final Hangers piece, Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies, particularly on the way she worked with pedestrian movement. After Hangers disbanded, Hixson invited Perez to use her Industrial Street loft for his now legendary Art Moves workshops.
During this period Hixson also met Rachel Rosenthal, who was teaching performance classes in the continuing education program at Otis. Hixson took the class in the spring of 1980 and later did Rosenthal’s intensive DBD workshop held downtown at 240 S. Broadway — the building that housed LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in its early years, the brand-new High Performance magazine, and the studios of Linda Burnham and Barbara Smith. In Rosenthal’s classes Hixson met Joyce Wexler-Ballard, J.P. Kovacs, Anna Homler, and Molly Cleator, all of whom later became performers in Birds, with Cleator becoming one of the core collaborators. While Perez provided Hixson with a conceptual and structural model for orchestrating movement, combining everyday gestures and objects, and utilizing space, Rosenthal introduced her to her own inner voice and demonstrated how to tap into the essence of and transform personal experiences and emotions into representative images.
This became immediately evident in the next Hangers piece, Kicked Upstairs, performed in May 1980 at Hixson’s Industrial Street loft. Eight additional performers were added to the eight-member group, and for the first time Hixson’s personal sensibility was revealed and brought a distinctive point of view