Sha Sha Higby’s Performance: A Space-Time Continuum at ArtCenter

REVIEW

Sha Sha Higby performance at ArtCenter (Photo – Stephen Nowlin)

A combination of performance art, primitive ritual, and just plain weirdness, the appearance of Sha Sha Higby at ArtCenter last Thursday night was something like entering a space-time continuum, played out in a side gallery of the Williamson Art Gallery.

By Garrett Rowlan

Billed as Dance and Costume, Sha Sha Higby’s hour-long appearance in front of an SRO crowd was understandably short on choreography, inasmuch as the artist began the show by appearing like a chrysalis out of a feathered womb.  She wore a multi-layered costume, with the headpiece elongated like the monster in the Alien or Predator movies, but with masks on either end creating a two-headed figure.

This Janus-headed figure was oddly appropriate to the performance. With the ambient soundtrack of bucolic associations, the projected sylvan background, and Ms. Higby’s gentle swaying with a smoothness of a Tai Chi practitioner, the effect was positively Edenic, mythological–like seeing a rain forest priestess somehow displaced to a college in the twenty-first century. She picked up and presented various objects to the audience, many of whom pounded provided noisemakers.  The objects had the air of fetishes found in an archeological dig: a puppet of sorts, a reddish bowl, and so forth. Presented with these shaken, waved totemic shards, the audience at times seemed like a roomful of ethnographers trying to reconstruct an anthropomorphic meaning. Behind her layered masks, Ms. Higby provided an aural obbligato, a veritable Babel of cooing sounds, which were less a made-up language and more one as-yet undiscovered by Western ears.

All in all, it was a performance hypnotic, primitive (in a ethnographic sense), and even transformative, reminding those assembled of the distant origins we all share.

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