PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Brilliant ‘Fort Head’ Full of Twists, Turns

Known locally as a dancer in Bella Lewitzky’s company (1973-76) and a teacher of dance at UCLA (1978-81), Chris Burnside returned to the Southland on Wednesday as an autobiographical performance artist. However, throughout 105 minutes of personal testimony about what he called “one gay man’s journey through the Vietnam-era military,” Burnside relied extensively on movement design as an extra layer of commentary.

Presented at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, his “Fort Head” used expressive gesture, sculptural poses, physical mimicry and occasional passages of intense and, at the end, liberating dance to artfully underscore and punctuate his spoken narrative.

Drafted in 1969, Burnside immediately found Army life to be disastrously incompatible with both his calling as an artist and his identity as a confused, repressed homosexual. It was a different era in gay consciousness, he tells us, but, clearly, the military mentality hasn’t grown at the same rate: The processes of collective brutalization that he describes still endure.

Most often, the clash of sensibilities that Burnside experienced yields memorably rueful or off-the-wall comedy--as in his accounts of the bizarre excesses in what he wryly terms “manly-men training.” But, with a pause, a shift of vocal tone or a turn of the head, his piece suddenly grows darker and more piercing as it details his suicide attempts and other crises of self-discovery.

Titled after the nickname of a Texas military base notorious for abundant illegal drugs, “Fort Head” is the classic tale of an innocent who tries to beat the system and develops a keen sense of irony in the process. Burnside’s secret ballet lessons off the base add an extra layer of comic subterfuge to this story, and his unrequited love for another soldier a dimension of heartbreak.

Burnside is currently the chair of the dance department at Virginia Commonwealth University, but he relives the rigors of 1969 basic training with such vulnerability to each memory that the years melt away and you sit at Highways worrying about his chances of survival. A vivid, involving performance memoir full of devastating surprises.