Among the performance programs accompanying the MCA’s interactive exhibition Performance Anxiety will be Spalding Gray’s Interviewing the Audience, in which the acclaimed monologist strays from his usual format to talk live with members of the audience. Strolling through the theater lobby prior to the event, Gray solicits volunteers from the audience and then interviews them on stage one at a time. Gray gets to know each person publicly, as they share personal stories about their everyday lives.

Michael Thomas, the MCA’s Assistant Director of Public Relations and a member of the Flux editorial board, recently talked with Gray about audiences, art, and Performance Anxiety.

Michael Thomas: What does interacting with the audience allow you to do as an artist that a straight monologue does not?

Spalding Gray: In 1980 or 1981, the Kitchen asked me to do a new work for them. I thought, hey, great, because it forced me to think in a different way than monologue. They wanted something unique, a performance piece that could be done in one evening. Why this was important is that it made me think in a different way. I had been really ripping into the autobiographic monologues for about two years. It was this terrific unleashing of personal memories. And I wanted to get a break from that but also get a break through performance. Not like go on a vacation but do a different kind of performance. The idea was that I would do Interviewing the Audience, which would reverse the thing, so that audience members would get a chance to tell their story, and I would get a chance to be genuinely curious in a public space. Because I have discovered that through performance and acting that I am more alive and more focused in front of an audience. I think better. I develop my monologues in front of an audience. So I thought, I’m going to try this.

MT: How is it during the performance that their life in essence becomes art?

SG: If you want to call it “art.” I’m a really iffy guy about that word. If you really wanted to define it that way, the part that would be “art” would be me being the editor who shapes the response. I am working with the person up there to try to give my own shape to it by cutting off a response or initiating a new question. That’s a very conscious process. I consider myself an autobiographic collage artist, pasting and cutting pieces from my life. So the attempt with them is to build and paste and cut until we finally get to a story. People have caught on to that while I’m interviewing them.

They’ll say, “Hey, you want to hear a story? I’ll tell you a story. Here’s one, if that’s what you’re looking for. I just recently started to sky dive.” This guy did this in Vermont, in Burlington. “I have been afraid of heights all my life.” I go, “Me too!” Now we have this bond going. I said, “Tell about what happened.” And he said, “When I jumped off that plane I screamed.” Then he stopped and said, “Well it was an expletive.” I said, “Well, why can’t you tell us what you said here in the theater?” So I finally got him to scream “fuck” on stage, and it became a reenactment of the real event. Here he was talking about the courage of jumping out of a plane, and he was afraid to say “fuck” in a public space. So that became the next jump. And that became the metaphor for the jump. And then that, in a way, became art, an event. It was a performance event.

MT: Would your preference be that people not know ahead of time that Interviewing the Audience is an interactive piece?

SG: No, I want them to know because even if they know, they don’t really know, because they don’t know how it’s interactive. What their first fantasy is, inevitably, and they’re like children in this way, is that they’re going to be out in the audience and I’m going to have a giant spotlight and a fishnet is going to drop down on them. And they are going to be pulled up on to the stage and they are going to be forced to perform. So you get people coming in that are anxiously saying to me, “Oh, don’t you pick me tonight.” And you know well the lady doth protest too much. They’re the ones who want the fishnet tossed over them. I think the audience should be aware so that they are at least forgiving when they suddenly realize, wait a minute, we’re the topic.

I went into a long rap with a 19-year-old student that was driving to the airport in North Carolina recently, and she said she saw my live show but liked the videos better. And I let her know why I thought she didÑbecause she had grown up with a TV screen in Denver, Colorado, and that’s something she was in control of, could manipulate, and that the live performance was a complete freak show for her. At which point she got lost on the way to the airport, and then did a U-turn with the tires squealing. She said, “I’m not trying to kill you Mr. Gray.” And I said, “How do you know?”

MT: What is art?

SG: What comes to mind is the High & Low show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York some years back. Eric Bogosian, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, and myself were asked to do individual pieces. Like Interviewing the Audience, here was a chance to do something off the top of my head. I went to various schools in ghettos of New York, such as Spanish Harlem and the Bronx, and found kids who had never been to a museum before. They were given throwaway cameras, and we were given full run of the museum with no other people in there, and no guards even. And they photographed their favorite pictures, and then I asked them to photograph their favorite spot in the community or ghetto they lived in. And then we did a slide show and I interviewed them on stage. It was really great. I think probably a lot of the so-called art crowd of the museum was somewhat offended. An abstract de Kooning had been put in the slide projector wrong. When it came up people started screaming, “It’s upside down.” They were arguing, ” No, no, it’s sideways.” They were yelling out and no one could get it right. The guy at the projector kept turning the slide. And the little boy on stage who I was interviewing, this little black kid from East Harlem, said, “Oh no, I’ll know when it’s right when I see the tiger eating the monkey’s tail.” I just thought, Susan Sontag, here we come. It was just a very beautiful moment.

If I have any feeling about so-called “art,” I’m interested in the deconstruction of art, so that you keep throwing stuff in the face of art. In other words, when I go to a museum now, I am still and always have been, more interested in the people than the paintings. If I go into a museum without people, then I can look at whatever’s on the wall. But when I’m in a museum with people, I still choose the people’s behavior and the way that they’re observing the painting to looking at the painting myself.

MT: Well, that’s a major component of the Performance Anxiety exhibition. Visitors can either choose to participate and become a part of the so-called art, or they choose to be a voyeur, in essence …

SG: Interviewing the Audience is that way. Audience members have that childish panic, which I like. They’re going to be forced to get up. It probably rings of the Last Judgment, doesn’t it, in a way?

MT: As someone who overcomes his anxiety in order to perform, what advice would you give coming to the MCA who are not used to experiencing an exhibition like Performance Anxiety in a museum setting?

SG: This is a good question, and that’s when I think of myself as solipsistic in not taking into account how nervous those people must be up on stage and how comfortable I am. I’m nervous in the street. I’m nervous in the airport. I’m nervous on my way to the performance space. But in it I’m golden. It’s my center. And I have to realize that most of the people sitting across from me are absolutely the opposite. They’re shaking. So, if I was to . . . I couldn’t give advice. I’d have to do a workshop, in which I’d really work at having the person just sit there and listen, and I’d make suggestions. To be present is to be aware of your breath, and it’s such a simple, silly thing. In my life when I’m anxious if I can actually do something as subtle as take this breath now, it changes everything. So that’s the biggest advice: breathe.