The following is an extended version of the article that appears in our September 2024 issue.
The Rennie Harris Puremovement company blended powerful hip-hop techniques. They gave lectures and workshop demonstrations during their November 1998 visit with VMFA’s Fast/Forward series.
Clarke Bustard, writing in the June 28, 1987, edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, put it this way: “From the start, Fast/Forward, the new music and dance series of the Virginia Museum [of Fine Arts], has been about different drummers, the non-conformists and experimenters of the arts.”
Through Richmond’s cultural history various individuals and groups attempted one-offs or limited special events that brought the world outside to town.
Artist-turned-entrepreneur James Warrell sought to boost attendance and save the first Virginia Museum, at Capitol Square (1817-1832), by offering after-hours attractions like a concert on the Celestina, which created music with spinning glasses, and a visit by the famous chess-playing machine — an “automata” — called The Turk (later deduced by Edgar Allan Poe to be in part operated by an inside man). These entertainments didn’t allay the damage caused by Capitol Square landscaping and debts to partners.
A century later, the rambunctious arts department of Richmond Professional Institute (later Virginia Commonwealth University) ran a three-year “Bang!” arts festival that in March 1966 brought artist and musician John Cage to town. He performed in the old Scottish Rite Temple building at Park and Harrison and played the building like an instrument.
The Richmond Artist Workshop creative collective (1976-1982) loosely programmed a space for the avant garde at 1717 E. Main St. There, visiting artists performed, such as musician and critic Eugene Chadbourne, saxophonist and sound sculptor John Zorn, violinist Polly Bradfield and the punk rock duo Half Japanese.
From 1984 to 2001, the influential Fast/Forward program introduced Richmond to a variety of performance artists, some established, others on their way. They weren’t finding their niche but making niches of their own.
The roster brimmed with an array of notables. Monologist, writer and actor Spalding Gray (“Swimming to Cambodia”); contemporary composer Philip Glass (“Koyaanisqatsi” and music for “The Hours”); jazz vocalist Bobby McFerrin, whose a cappella “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” landed in the soundtrack of the movie “Cocktail”; a pioneer of modern dance, Merce Cunningham; actor Eric Bogosian, of one-man showpieces and a year away from “Talk Radio”; the antic puppeteer and artist Paul Zaloom, also known as the television scientist of “Beakman’s World”; and three-time guest Laurie Anderson, the composer, musician and artist whose “O Superman” unexpectedly achieved radio airplay in 1981 and TikTok usage in December of last year.
Composer, singer and choreographer Meredith Monk made two Fast/Forward appearances. Her November 1988 show, “Book of Days: A Music Concert with Film,” at VCU quickly sold out.
Prior to today’s immediate video streaming, WCVE Channel 23 broadcast a recording of the show in April. The station aired live the first hour of McFerrin’s February 1988 concert. The delay for Monk stemmed from editing the complex performance.
The VMFA entered a dynamic phase with the backing of Sydney and Frances Lewis, who ran the national catalog sales company Best Products. Their 1984 contribution of contemporary work, along with that of philanthropist Paul Mellon, put the museum on the cultural forefront.
Frederick R. Brandt, who had also overseen the Lewis collection, became director of the 20th-century art department. A trio of vigorous administrators promoted current work: Julie Boyd supervised the Institute of Contemporary Art in the basement of the museum, which presented artists from Virginia and elsewhere (in 1988, musician and artist John Cage with watercolors, lecturing and an ensemble performance), and associate curators of modern and contemporary art Ashley Kistler and Margo Crutchfield. They understood that within absence is possibility.
Crutchfield explains, “The museum’s West Wing was under construction and galleries closed. The opportunity was tremendous. Made all the sense in the world to us to bring in the moving arts, because in 20th-century art, there’s been a huge fertilization between all the disciplines — dancing, painting, sculpture. All these different boundaries have been challenged, expanded, fused and broken into new forms.”
The Lewises served on the board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “They were doing some of the most experimental work in the country,” Crutchfield observes. “They said to us, ‘Let’s try it here.’ So we started out with all those connections to BAM and those artists. [The Lewises] wanted to see the museum not only revitalized but completely transformed, as they did with the contemporary galleries.”
Brandt, Boyd and Kistler aided the program’s launch. “And we just took it and ran with it,” Crutchfield says. “This was not an easy thing to support. A lot of it was controversial, never been seen in Richmond before, and it was really important at a time that was full of energy and curiosity and adventure. I was privileged to be a part of that.”
Boyd, Kistler and Crutchfield created the name in a brainstorming session. The title and its right-leaning slash resonated with their intention and stood out in print and varying graphic representations.
The partially subsidized Fast/Forward season subscription cost from $45 to $80, with discounts for museum members and students. Individual ticket prices were usually under $20.
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Fast/Forward flyers
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The performers participated in brief residencies with workshops and lectures to educational and cultural organizations. The productions occurred in the museum’s Cheek Theatre or Lewis Hall, at VCU’s performing arts center, and the Carpenter Center (now the Dominion Energy Center).
Kistler reflects, “Once the series took off, which it did almost immediately, it never flagged, and it attracted a loyal and enthusiastic crowd.” She managed logistics and served as liaison between the museum and artists.
“Each of those performers and companies called for different requirements,” Kistler says. “We were so intent on maintaining the series, we were willing to do whatever it took to get them here and make them comfortable. Hospitality was always at its best.”
The Richmond of Fast/Forward was grittier — with fewer notable restaurants, a squabbling city council, a rising murder rate and, yet, a lively arts and music scene. The homicide numbers moved Dika Newlin, performance artist, septuagenarian punk rocker and VCU professor to create her Weimar cabaret lament of “Murder City.” (The recently inaugurated Newlin Prize for music is named for her).
This period of artistic foment grew from VCU’s School of the Arts, artist-run galleries such as 1708, Artspace, the Neopolitan (1983-85) and, importantly, available spaces for cheap rent.
Behind these, though, loomed the worldwide AIDS crisis and U.S. arts groups struggling with moralizing scolds and opportunistic politicians. Richmond’s skirmish in the “culture wars” involved the 1708 Gallery’s June 1990 display in its Shockoe Bottom windows of work by gay artist Carlos Gutierrez-Solana. The nude male forms rankled then-Commonwealth’s Attorney Joseph D. Morrissey.
During this time, too, discussions arose about the human stewardship and disregard for the natural environment. These concerns were addressed in the October 1994 performance of “Pangaean Dreams” by Rachel Rosenthal. Times-Dispatch critic Francis Schools observed that Rosenthal delivered “this serious point by assuming the roles of priestess, prophet, poet, feminist commentator, geologist, archaeologist and comedian.” She juxtaposed the deterioration of the body through aging with the damage committed against the world’s climate. Her big ideas aptly occurred in the piece titled after the supercontinent Pangaea that covered most of the planet 200 million years ago. The compelling two-hour performance seemed effortless and the audience was enraptured.
Fast/Forward drew in the cosmic Sun Ra Arkestra (1989) and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company of dancers, which in 1986 employed a local dog in the opening of their “frenetic and strong” choreography. The troupe returned in 1994 to affirm the fragilities and glories of living, although Zane died of AIDS in 1988 and Jones is HIV-positive but remains a living monument of dance. Then came the revolutionary bebop master Amiri Baraka and the Blue Ark, which through jazz and poetry traced the Black experience.
The Elizabeth Streb Ringside company astounded VMFA audiences in April 1990 by combining choreography and gymnastics.
While the audiences came, some didn’t always stay. Critics took notice of people leaving the concerts of saxophonist and sound sculptor John Zorn, as well as multioctave opera-trained singer, pianist, AIDS activist and diva of darkness Diamanda Galás. Theater artist Robert Wilson’s 1996 performance fit its name of “A Space Filled With Time,” with five hours of monologue, poetry and literatures. “It’s in the history books, but it was difficult to follow,” Crutchfield recalls. “The few who stayed until the end should’ve gotten gold medals.”
Nonetheless, the shared experience by audiences powered exuberant conversations afterward. Describing some of the events resembled the sharing of dreams — or nightmares. These constituted “You just had to be there” moments.
The October 1996 performance of the 16-member Merce Cunningham Dance Company concluded with a 30-minute stage cross by the 77-year-old pioneer of modern dance. He at last moved with and eventually sat in a foldout chair. A teary-eyed audience leapt to a standing ovation.
Crutchfield expresses pride for the April 1995 weeklong residency of the Urban Bush Women troupe. Their social commentary and expressions in spoken word, movement, drumming and song, rooted in Black traditions, left audiences moved and uplifted.
The Canadian Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s February 2000 performance almost didn’t happen because of visa challenges that stranded them in New York. Kistler worked through that obstacle.
Marie Chouinard
Once here, Chouinard, a choreographer and body artist, presented a retrospective of 11 works that entailed considerations of ritual, sexuality and bodily functions.
Amid otherwise slow and elegant movements for “Petite danse sans nom,” Chouinard ceremoniously urinated into a bucket. Stunned silence was punctuated by laughter and applause.
Complaints soon came to the museum.
“That was a difficult situation,” Crutchfield says, adding, “And it was a beautiful performance. I’m very proud of how the Virginia Museum supported the series. That was pretty extraordinary.”
Ultimately, the VMFA’s personnel shifted and the series didn’t continue. Crutchfield is philosophical about it. “Times change,” she says. “Things don’t last forever. I can’t tell you why it wasn’t carried forward; I’d moved on and continued working with amazing artists.”
Opportunities beckoned for both Crutchfield and her husband, art historian, professor and then-VMFA Outreach Coordinator Kevin Concannon. Crutchfield became senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and later the two took positions at Virginia Tech.
“And then, it was ahead of its time,” Kistler observes. “Now that I look back on from 43 years on and reevaluate, I see how what those artists did is now reflected in the present.”
Today’s combination of presentations at the VMFA, VCU’s Institute of Contemporary Art and galleries such as 1708, and the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for the Arts, can trace threads of their programming DNA back to Fast/Forward.
