For which the city alone
Is audience

Dear friends and supporters,

I know so little about skateboarding: the peculiar slow prosthetic device, the act tethered to its grating soundscape. But Kyle Beachy’s book The Most Fun Thing absorbed me. I am grateful for it as for the advent of “forced love.” I proclaim my newfound devotion. Our trajectories become our lives. We compose a path, like reading the city as if it were a book always starting, multidirectional, pages big enough to walk across. The skateboarder’s journey inscribes a line. If we could view the pattern from above, would it resemble cursive script? What might we read in this opposite of skywriting? A signature?

During the pandemic, a memory now fading fast, the depopulated urban landscape revealed itself from out of the suffering, in concrete poetry, in ever renewed and unpoliceable unfoldings. New habits established themselves, some improvements, others products of the return of childhood and isolation. One for me involved peering from behind a curtain for the day’s last look at the intersection of Hoyne Avenue and Division Street, of which one window of our house affords a view, as if it represented something beyond itself. I saw vacated streets. One person walking, maybe two at counter directions, one or both wearing a protective mask. An ambulance, lights flashing. A parade of protesters marching still. One night under a cold rising moon I saw, by some quirk of immaculate timing, as I looked my last at the dying of the day, a human figure midair upside-down like a spinning starfish pinwheeling through the intersection, disappearing behind a parked car. He reappeared, walking back in the direction from which he had been flung, unbothered by his to me brutal aerial acrobatics, then appeared a third time, gliding like piloting a gondola. All was revealed. He skateboarded the wrong way down one-way Hoyne Avenue, a solitary figure in the nocturnal city. I wondered what offstage obstruction, what deep seam or lapse of commitment had been his obstacle. He must have thought his tumble had gone unwitnessed, a performance for which the city alone is audience. I was the city.

Hoyne Avenue derives its name from Thomas Hoyne. The Chicago History Museum lists the Thomas Hoyne Residence, located on Michigan Avenue between Lake and Randolph Streets, as a stop on the Underground Railroad. After the 1871 fire that burned the wooden city, Hoyne presided at the meeting that established a free library. In 1863 he traveled to Boston to bring back a lens measuring 18 1/2 inches for the then largest refracting telescope ever built, for the Dearborn Observatory housed at the University of Chicago.

At the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry on June 2nd, 2022, Kyle Beachy, who wrote the skateboarding book that I mentioned, co-convened an anti-conference titled The Useless Tool (Skate Sessions). Along with masters such as Alexis Sablone, the scholar Tina Post, and the founding members of Natty Bwoy and Froskate, he invited the novices of Every house has a door. Lin and I created a performance for the occasion, Lin directing me in a solo, a miniature novelty, that marked our first post-pandemic return to live performance. We presented it for a small room full of audience holding their boards while they watched. We abstracted some choreographies—movements and structures—from the strange activity as we knew it from the outside. We drew out the poetics of its language, or more accurately borrowed Kyle’s ability to do that, engaging him as a reader for our little work, with lines from his book like this one: His kickflip firecracker is a dream maneuver, a thing of insane imagination that opens, or reveals, a second dream world– interrupted with my movement that gestured toward syntactic completion of the thought, migrated to a nonverbal dimension. Or, to translate into more straightforward language (as I reassured my at the time 90-year-old mother over the telephone), I was not on a skateboard. I was pretending. 

The esteemed brothers Katon and Kahari Blackburn of Natty Bwoy bestowed a second life on this performance, inviting us to reprise it as part of their March 30th Family Day at the great public facility of the Chicago Children’s Museum. They suggested that we offer a “wilder” version, for an audience of children. We will add some elements of participation, since distinctions between performer and audience remain somewhat porous, as they must, in childhood. Kenya Kao Ra Zen Fulton will take over the role of the reader from Kyle Beachy.

The occasion of this unexpected invitation prompts me to observe how it has become more true than ever that we seldom know the direction in which our work will grow, the communities in which it will take root, especially out of seeds planted in extreme quiet and solitude. Creativity responds like a tropism to the beckoning light, to any source of life, any joyful resilience, human or non-human, to which we remain open, attentive enough to apprehend and to value as such. Which is all to say, if the city alone is audience, like any audience, it hears and it guides, and if we let it, it keeps us young.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg