This item caught my eye from Thomas Cott's daily email, "You've Cott Mail."
From The Stranger [Seattle weekly], issue dated 9/3/08
Last week, a piece of performance art almost literally drove a woman crazy. Some performers were doing something secret in a gigantic, silvery box that filled the small stage of [Seattle’s] Rendezvous Theater. The woman wanted in.
"My biggest fear has always been that someone will rush the box," said Korby Sears, the organizer and host of STRIKETHROUGH, a monthly series in which he invites different performers to do something that nobody can see inside an eight-by-eight-foot box made of Dow insulation panels on a small stage that shares a building with a bar. "And she rushed the box." The few other spectators in the theater said that the woman rushed the box, trying to tear it open and lobbing pint glasses and bulbous glass candleholders at the performers inside. The performers happened to be Implied Violence, an ensemble that just won a Stranger Genius Award. (Only one of them, Megan Birdsall, suffered slight scratches.) The aggressor demanded to know "who was in charge." When nobody piped up, she stormed out. The woman, another witness said, "must've been suffering from antiperformance anxiety." Sears discourages people from coming to STRIKETHROUGH, but if you drop by and want to sit outside the box for a few minutes, it's not strictly forbidden. The series has everything a normal performance would—except an audience. Sears asks performers to write an original piece that's 15 to 90 minutes long, rehearse it, run tech rehearsals, and perform it. Sears tacks up posters and sends out press releases (wherein all the text is struck through) listing the date, location, and time of each performance, followed by a notice in bold: "NO ONE ADMITTED. No public. No press. No family. No friends." For every STRIKETHROUGH, Sears sends a postcard to Mayor Greg Nickels, asking him to stay home on the night of the performance.
See The Madness of Strikethrough for the whole story.
