Saturday May 3, 2003 Noon-2pm
The performance Saturday went wonderfully. Saturday was warm and pleasant as we walked to Lafayette Park after practicing the action a couple times. The park was fairly empty for a nice Saturday. The biggest surprise was that the barriers blocking Pennsylvania AVenue had been removed! The usual group of tourists was on Pennsylvania Ave, snapping photos of their friends and families in front of the White House. Our group, which had dispersed during the walk over, joined and formed a line, the fronts of our shirts spelling out "Intention" and the backs, "Innocence", before we split apart to mill in the Park. After we had done this a couple times, we noticed one of our participants talking to a police officer. He was friendly though, and seemed more interested in the art work than in interfering with the performance. Though the original plan had been to form the words in random locations in the park, we quickly decided to always form the line in front of the White House, taking over the space visually and forcing the tourists to take our message into account while they snapped their photos. Happily, many people intentionally took photos of themselves in front of our action, helping us document the work! Even if we don't get any mainstream press coverage, we're in plenty of people's photo albums from their trip to DC! As we were meeting to decide whether to halt the action at 1pm as planned, to stay and contnue, or to move to another (more crowded) location, a huge group of middle school students from Ohio on a field trip entered the park, wearing matching blue t-shirts in contrast to our matching white t-shirts. We quickly decided to stay and perform for this new, and enthusiastic, audience. As we formed our message again, we were immediately surrounded by 11, 12, and 13 year olds, some of them shouting support for Bush, others encouraging us, some perplexed, trying to decipher the message as all the letters slowly gathered and fell into place. There were many guesses until finally everything fell into place. As we broke apart, several of us engaged the students and their teachers in conversation about the art piece, the war, and what the kids were doing in DC. We wound up performing until 2pm, an hour longer than we had originally intended. While the response we got was not overwhelming, several participants were able to dialogue with members of the audience, and the size of the audience made this comfortable; none of us were so pressed with questions and comments that we didn;t have time to enjoy the beautiful weather, and appreciate the nature of the piece we were performing. There was a definite sense of accomplishment by the group collectively, and we split apart after a quick discussion of the piece, agreeing to help Julie present this piece in other locations and in many different contexts. Thank you and congratulations to everyone who participated in the piece or helped document it. Thank you to Julie for conceiving and directing the piece, and for thinking to use the piece for "Wearnica". Hopefully, this wil be the first of several more public performances of this work!
