James Grigsby, whose elaborate solo performances often achieved an operatic furor, knew how to carve out an impenetrable solitude for himself. Hours before his audience would arrive at the MoMing Dance and Arts Center, once Chicago’s premier performance art venue, he would enter the dark, vaulting theater with his thermos of herbal tea and meditate. Then he would begin a long routine of stretches and vocal exercises–all for pieces that rarely lasted longer than 30 minutes.
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Grigsby, a self-proclaimed generalist, grew up in Forreston and made his first splash as a baton twirler, winning a scholarship to Western Illinois University to be a drum major. He studied music there and at the Juilliard School, but the conservatory’s exclusive focus on technique left him feeling constrained. He jumped over to the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance for a while before winding up with a master’s in sculpture and design from the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1977 he helped develop Columbia College’s graduate program in interdisciplinary arts, where he taught for ten years.
His carefully groomed, highly theatrical work was utterly at odds with Chicago’s performance scene in the 1980s, which tended toward the jagged and ragged. While others indulged their every psychological trauma on stage, Grigsby played it cool, a sequined snake oil salesman peddling everything from religious artifacts to marital bliss to lessons in clairvoyance. Decked out in outlandish but impeccably tailored suits and shifting between personae on a dime, he moved catlike about the stage, delivering coiled monologues with a bemused, slightly distracted stare, as though the words were being beamed to him from a faraway galaxy. He was often busy with some absurd task as he spoke: watering a cardboard garden, building an enormous Rube Goldberg machine, operating a mechanical stuffed bird attached to his head.
The James Grigsby Memorial happens Friday and Saturday, August 23 and 24, at 6:30 PM and Sunday, August 25, at 3 at Live Bait Theater, 3914 N. Clark, part of the theater’s Fillet of Solo Festival. Tickets are $10; a portion of the proceeds will help start an art collection in Grigsby’s name at the Forreston Public Library. Call 773-871-1212 or see the sidebar in Section Two for more information.
