“The apparel is quite special,” my friend Rose mused. She was right.
While awaiting entry into Club Alive, my field of vision swam with humans sporting face gems, organza, velvet bell bottoms, pink pleats, and patent leather. The monthly, genre-fluid performance party helmed by artist-experimenter Kye Grant [who—full disclosure—has written for this publication -eds] has typically been held at Kelly’s Olympian, but for the 2024 Time-Based Art Festival, Club Alive gained new breathing room at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s 10,000 sq foot main space.
Club Alive’s artist statement is actually a question: How alive are you willing to be? It stuck with me, and I revisited the question throughout the night. How alive am I right now? Okay, how about now?
Inside PICA’s roomy warehouse, dancers twirled ribbons to a heady remix of Lady Gaga’s “LoveGame.” A crowd congregated around Grant who—clutching a copy of Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person—opened the show with an amped-up monologue.
Abruptly, the bright edge of a rainbow parachute was thrust into my hands—it’s a familiar sensation, scratchy and synthetic. The fabric unfurled across the warehouse and into air as the crowd clung to its edges, bobbing up and down. We were all kindergarteners once. People began to dash beneath the parachute, screaming and laughing. I spotted a glimpse of Rose’s head just before she dove under.
If you’re not interested in social contact, stay far away from Club Alive. Deceptively simple participatory artworks punctuate its programming: the aforementioned nostalgia-triggering parachute, a series of claps sent around a wide circle. At one point, the show’s resident “hypists” led the entire warehouse in a game of freeze.
Club Alive also embraces more contemplative collaborations, with works that validated my suspicions that audiences want to become part of the art, as long as they feel warmly invited. Plant DD and grandma salty (artists Shawn Creeden and Salty Xi Jie Ng) co-created a vulnerable performance piece that invited audience members to recite excerpts from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. Artist Erika Callihan (who I have collaborated with in the past) collected contact information for Who’s Driving Here?, an ongoing project to create bumper stickers from participants’ childhood photos.
The night’s musical performers included bewigged duo Personality Test—whose sound I overheard accurately described as “like if Throbbing Gristle had a Boiler Room session”—and the glitchy, energetic Seattle-born electrothrash project Flesh Produce.
Grant followed each set with a short interview, asking artists about emotional processing and creative practice. House band Special Permission—Grant and Wolfgang Black—offered frequent interludes, chanting over spare beats: Has anyone ever given you special permission? It’s time to give yourself special permission.
Near midnight, partiers clustered around the stage, all eyes upon Grant. In a gesture of finality, they dove into the crowd, a decision that felt like a trust fall.
Grant’s crowd diving brings to mind a performance by singer and musician Yawa, earlier in the night, where the artist plucked a kalimba, gifted an orange to an audience member, and radiated positivity and aliveness. “I’m enjoying the process of myself,” she said.
“You’re overflowing with euphoria. How do you maintain it?” Grant asked her.
“I have faith,” Yawa responded.
Our other 2024 TBA reviews:
Te Moana Meridian Proposes Moving the Prime Meridian
Future Club Alive event info can be found @kyealive
