Ground seized by those contrarian Barbarians

The performance art group My Barbarian likes to flip life around and stir things up. Behold its "Pagan Rights."

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

November 26, 2006

Inside My Barbarian's Boyle Heights studio, a storefront next door to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting hall, performance artists Alex Segade and Jade Gordon discuss their hippie heritage as they wait for partner Malik Gaines to arrive for rehearsal.

"All our parents were involved in the counterculture, so growing up they tell lots of stories about the wonderful time before you were born," Segade says, laughing.

Quoting the kind of thing she used to hear from her mother, Gordon intones: " 'When I met your dad, he was wearing purple cowboy boots and I lived in a stone cottage in the moors of Scotland.' " Segade: " … afraid we were going to be shot by this warring faction of the Brown Berets." Gordon: " … and deported from Switzerland for doing experimental naked theater."

How do you rebel against that?

"You don't." Gordon says. "You just try to take it further."

Over the past few years, the My Barbarian collective has taken precisely that tack. Inspired by '70s-era pop music, pantheistic ritual and centuries-old theatrical forms, Gordon, 31, Segade, 33, and Gaines, 32, have struck a resonant chord in local and international art circles by reworking the peace, love and understanding ethos for a new generation.

Consider "Pagan Rights," a 16-minute video being screened at the Orange County Museum of Art as part of the museum's California 2006 Biennial. The piece begins with My Barbarian's members in the desert, dressed like druids in caped robes. Next, they're romping nude, save for candy-colored fake-fur animal masks, in a forest glen. Sequences involving tarot cards, beachside processions and a tree-hugging maypole ceremony follow. The finale: Gordon, accompanied by bongo drummers and a flute player, holds a snake in each hand and invokes the Egyptian goddess Isis as she dances in front of a nighttime campfire.

Culled from a longer theater piece given its debut at the Evidence Room last year, "Pagan Rights" impressed Biennial guest curator Rita Gonzalez. "Almost more than any of the artists in the Biennial, My Barbarian, to me, typifies California," she says. "When I see their work, I think: 'Only in California.' " Unlike performance art traditions or experimental theater that comes mostly out of New York, Gonzalez says, "They play with these West Coast New Age-y, leftie, kooky stereotypes but also go much deeper in a way that makes you think about the collapsing of these artificially situated high and low poles of pop culture and high culture."

My Barbarian began developing its self-described "artsy craftsy" thrift store aesthetic eight years ago in Los Angeles when Gaines, son of conceptual artist Charles Gaines, directed Gordon in a play produced by his UCLA classmate Segade. Chemistry ensued.

The trio put together a band and began playing local rock clubs. "We kind of co-opted these nightclubs and turned them into performance spaces."

They didn't exactly fit in. "We'd go on with our clown makeup and people would get weirded out," recalls Gordon. "Which is part of our goal, obviously," Segade adds. "But it's funny that the art world is where we've landed for the time being, because I guess our approach to theater and music looks more like the approach a lot of artists have to art."

During their early days as a band, My Barbarian obsessed on its act, which they dubbed "show core," based on its shared love-hate affair with Broadway musicals.

"We spent the first three years together dealing with this idea of 'Broadway damage' — people who know too much about musicals," says Segade. "At the same time, we were completely in love with Bob Fosse and his self-destructive work ethic and also were kind of obsessed with Kander and Ebb, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber — amazing songwriters who didn't fit in with the cool kids."

More recently, Gordon, Segade and Gaines wrote a 15th century-style morality play and conducted a midnight séance at the MAK Center's Schindler House ("Web of the Ultimate," 2004). They sang in the snow wearing Noh-inspired masks for baffled Aspen arts patrons ("Silver Minds," 2006). They went on a quest for unicorns in L.A.'s Runyon Canyon ("Unicorn L.A.," 2003) and, arriving for a Toronto concert in a speedboat, they dressed in tights and capes while brandishing flags celebrating marijuana legalization and gay marriage ("Gods of Canada," 2005).

"The Canada Day thing was kind of contrarian, but that's often our way of thinking," notes Segade. "It was all kind of ironic but at the same time sincere, which is our general mode. You go to Canada, famously not nationalistic, and create nationalistic superheroes. You're in a modernist home like the Schindler House so, of course, you just had to become a medievalist."

For "MB: The Mary Blair Story" at REDCAT's 2004 NOW Festival, My Barbarian offered a sympathetic portrait of the legendary animation artist, nicknamed "Marijuana Mary," who was often considered too outré for Walt Disney's tastes. Segade says, "The way to make it interesting for us was to critique Disney — at Disney Hall. We need that kind of tension."

The artists cite key influences including such self-contained collectives as Vermont-based Bread and Puppet Theater and the '70s-era German music commune Amon Düül II, along with Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" theories, English folk-revivalists Fairport Convention, and Tropicalia, the politically charged musical movement popular in '70s Brazil. As for more current points of reference, forget it. "We actually aren't very interested in our contemporary world," Segade says. Adds Gordon, "None of us watch television." Segade explains, "We almost consciously isolate ourselves from mass culture. Right now it's hard to find something you can feel a sincere connection to because everything is so market-driven, you don't know if you're being manipulated."

Hands-on approach

TO avoid any whiff of slickness, My Barbarian makes its own costumes, props and masks. Gordon does most of the sewing, relying on fabric remnants donated by set decorator friends or picked from L.A.'s garment district. Segade specializes in papier-mâché masks and writes a lot of the lyrics. Gaines composes most of the group's music. Everyone choreographs. But the division of labor, by design, is hardly strict.

"That's one thing that differentiates us from certain kinds of theater, where everyone has their departmental job," says Segade. "If the lead singer is also the person in charge of sewing the pants for the drummer, it creates a whole different vibe, you know?"

"It's more of a communal feeling," adds Gordon. "We strive for this sense of craftsmanship and authenticity and homemade-ness, which is another thing that draws us to older music."

The artists ground their antics in a thorough grasp of cultural precedents. Segade earned a bachelor's in Renaissance literature at UCLA, studied film at USC and is now back at UCLA working on an master's in fine art. Gaines, who already has a bachelor's in history from UCLA and a critical studies master's in fine art from CalArts, is enrolled in UCLA's Ph.D/graduate program for theater. Gordon, a Los Angeles County High School for the Arts grad, is studying cultural anthropology at UCLA.

RoseLee Goldberg, director of Performa, a New York-based arts organization and author of "Performance Art From Futurism to the Present," appreciates My Barbarian's deceptively sophisticated brand of showmanship.

"It's like their brains are riddled full of holes and art history pours through them," says Goldberg, who invited My Barbarian to appear at Performa Biennial 2007. "It's not just about putting on medieval masques or ancient Greek costumes; they really get inspired by looking back in time. My Barbarian has chosen to use rock 'n' roll and punk music as their vehicle to use that material and generate another kind of musical form."

For My Barbarian, that form takes shape when Gaines, the group's de facto musical director, shows up. When three backup musicians arrive a few minutes later, the six performers crowd into the wardrobe closet that doubles as a practice room and briefly discuss upcoming gigs while Gordon finishes hemming the shoulder of Segade's toga-like gown.

Then Gaines eases into a droning chord on his vintage synthesizer. Drummer, saxophonist and guitarist join in. Amid the thrashing squall Gordon and Segade step up to their microphones and begin chanting an ode to ancient civilizations real and imagined: "Gomorrah, Xanadu, Babylon, Atlantis / Gomorrah, Xanadu, Babylon, Atlantis / You were too beautiful to live."

My Barbarian is at the gate.

*

My Barbarian

What: "Pagan Rights" in the 2006 California Biennial

Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, until 8 p.m. Thursdays

Ends: Dec. 31

Price: $10; free on Thursdays

Contact: (949) 759-1122; www.ocma.net

Also

What: "Mythological Mass" at Safari Sam's, 5214 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

When: 8:30 p.m. Dec. 17, in the middle of slate of acts that starts at 7

Price: $10

Contact: (323) 666-7267