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Orioles. Lee Breuer transvalued the comic book in his series of »animations« by giving them metaphysical content, and by transvaluing the football game he offers a sociology of sport. In the best tradition of the avant-garde he radically refunctions popular iconography to produce a more intelligent and socially relevant work than most found in » political « theater. While Breuer admits he is interested in the art, statement of the piece that it is about movement in space he also believes it is less an intellectual than popular work. »I really am interested in trying to do art with popular imagery so that art’is not totally effete the way some conceptual statements are.« He’s proud as hell that cops and kids enjoy his piece as much as his friends in the theater and art worlds do. Mixing metaphors on sports, politics, sexuality , big business religion, and theater The Saint and the Football Players is yet the virtual staging of a myth. (Thursday, February 5, 1976) jgü&SßSS&gSbb. j 1 Events and happenings "Y Lb S) have been held in £ШЬ~ -f-MÊj Sk ВВ £ sport locations (golf cou rses, • courts). жШШЯШШк W FI Ц O tf* O Sport as a ШШЁЗЁЁЁШЁЁI&£ * Jl/ C' topie ■№ w contributes Щ \ the central metaphor for Ж numerous plays. Artists have often utilized the sports image W for и particular purpose. For example, Lutze and Dieter Froese’s performance at 112 Greene St. Gallery some time ago: people outfitted in over-sized football uniforms walked htrough an intricate papergrid system. But Froese’s intention was not to deal with the sport per se; the football trappings provided a convenient image for the » high-contrast destruction«. Now Mabou Mines presents the » theater « of sport itself as art in The Saint and the Football Players. The piece exploits the kinetic and demotic qualities of football images and moves to illustrate aesthetics inherent in the sport. The image of the football players is undeniably the prime sports icon of today’s collective unconscious, a potent totem erected by the immense power of the game’s rituals, the media, and mass public participation. No other sport is so instantly identifiable as American. In this performance, however, political and social implications remain just that-implicit. This is an attempt to bring an outdoor, popular sport into an art situation and examine it carefully. The result is quite possibly a completely unique experiment and certainly one with a catholic attraction. Jack Thibeau’s » Xerox poem,« The Saint and the Football Players, provided a nonverbal » text « for this visual theater piece. In its original poetic form Thibeau presents familiar images: a saint (postcard variety) and a touchdown photo. The found images are officially related by the Herox process,

unified on one surface and in grainy tope; re-xeroxing creates an effect that is both tawdry and mysterious. The simple images suggest possible significances, complex reverberations. » Meanings « oscillate between the laughable and the intensely mystic. Obviously, the work comments on a sports convention, the I-saw-God-when-I-scored syndrome. Just as obvious is the notion that this cornball package might be richly evocative at other levels. The ridiculous is always present, in the romande idealism of scoring and winning, the simplistic piety. Yet the football event clearly involves primitive, but often beautiful, mechanics capable of generating a sort oj spiritual attitude, a kind of ecstasy that arises from any extreme and rigorous physical discipline. Serially arranged into charged relationships, the poem’s figures appear to be doing something more. This is a very serious gag. The poem opens and closes with a symbol: four concentric circles. A ritual is invoked: the Saint presides. The suppliants explore their path, not diagramed in the play book. Moved but not moving, the players exist beyond language, beyond logical construct, beyond narrative; the dotted line braks, is broken. It disappears and re-emerges from the other direction a pass out of this world. Ccontacted, the Saint works her magic. A presence sifts among calibratedfields, precise arcs of thrown balls, plotted X’s and О ’s. Sensing the big play, disciples of the game work for a vertical gain. They leave us symbols of themselves, containers for our arbitrary assignments of understanding. I’ve always had this feeling that an image starts at its source and as it comes out from the source it becomes more complicated and literary. I wanted to isolate one of these images at its very source where it’s pre-verbal. This preverbal thought structure seems to operate on very few words. This is very visual to me, where a lot of poets are aural. When an idea comes to me with words I use the words, but when it gets beyond words, as in this instance, I use another medium to express what is sitll a verbal conception Jack Thibeau. Director of the Mabou Mines performance group, Lee Breuer, became interested in the poem, feeling that its particular qualities related closely to his current working method and intent. Mabou Mines produces theater that is primarily visual; elements of dance , sculpture, artist’s performance, and contemporary music tilt the emphasis more toward »art« than » theater «. The group builds material through collective creation, using text (often by Breuer) as the source of an image which is then elaborated. In this collaboration with Thibeau, a similar process took place. A subjective understanding and response toward material and contributor was assumed, with only occasional gesture to faithful adherence or literal interpretation. Breuer considers the performance to be a free translation of the poem as opposed to any standard concept of a theatrical adaptation For example, the piece uses a movement structure, a sequence of football images, not an exact representation of the poems’ figures in a serial and static mode. The work then is a performed poem which retains notional and structural