Feeling the heat

DAILY SHOW Garneau's Heat:05 ranges from impromptu performances in the park to her recent It Hurts Worse to Break a Leg at Columbia College.

A tub of water is closely miked, and sounds of drips and drops reverberate throughout the dimness of Columbia College's intimate Hokin Annex gallery. A series of instructions taped to candle-lit tables invites seated visitors to call "an elderly parent, grandparent or other person you would like to call." A few people have accepted the challenge and are engaged in public conversations with their relatives. "Yes, I am gainfully employed," a young woman says reassuringly into the phone. In between the snippets of conversation and liquid noise, Nicole Garneau, dressed in stark white pants and a white long-sleeved T-shirt, writes with a wet cotton swab on a black chalkboard about the death of her grandmother, Lucile.

"It's good to have a job when you are at the bedside of someone who is dying," she marks in watery text as the letters evaporate and slowly disappear. Garneau's job, she writes, was to swab her grandmother's thirsty mouth, and her grandmother's job "was to die."

This emotional scene, from an interactive piece titled It Hurts Worse to Break a Leg, is part of Garneau's Heat:05, a yearlong series of daily performances commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Some 739 people died during one blistering July week, most of them elderly and alone. Garneau was inspired to mark the anniversary with a performance after reading Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave, which examined the disaster and its social causes. "The book is so wonderful," says Garneau. "Here he's presenting this social autopsy, with all this research and all these statistics, but it's written in a very accessible way. The book really draws you into the kind of real social drama around the issues of the heat wave."

Garneau began planning her daily performances, and soon realized her work would likely be highly emotionally taxing. "Especially when you're dealing with people who have died, I feel like the least I can do is do something hard," she says. "I felt like it would be interesting to try to do something that would make me uncomfortable a little bit, or to try something rigorous that had to do with duration, that had to do with just marking this thing more conceptually."

So far, she's done almost everything across the spectrum of performance: burlesque shows, open mikes and college class presentations. She's even performed at informal venues like aboard El trains. Friends have given her tasks to complete, such as take a sandwich on the train during rush hour and ask fellow riders for a beverage. Another asked her for a series of private phone performances once a month, all of which involved "loving letters to a faraway object."

And she's come up with a few shows on the spot: "One night, I was planning on going to an open mike, but I came out of the subway and the sky was dark blue and there's a full moon and it just was beautiful. I was like, 'Forget the open mike, because I gotta hit the beach in my white clothes, and I have to make something pretty underneath this full moon.'" That night, she did an improvisational movement on the beach, a ghostly figure dancing in the dark.

Back at tonight's performance, Garneau's been interrupted by a phone call of her own from her mother. When she follows instructions and sits down to talk, an audience member spontaneously stands up, grabs the swab and writes on the board about her own grandmother's death, writing, "The last time I saw her was three days before she died." Garneau finishes her phone call, and realizes her performance has mutated, so that now she is in the audience reading quickly evaporating text about someone else's experience.

Like that impromptu performance, much of Garneau's plan is yet to be determined. "I'd like to do something on the steps of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and I've been thinking that might involve a lot of candles—perhaps 739 candles," she theorizes, before dropping back into reality. "I haven't asked anybody at the Museum of Contemporary Art for permission to do that, but there's something about that site that's very appealing to me." Still, she's not worried. "I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow," she laughs. "But I'm not panicking about that at all. I know I'll come up with something."

This week, in conjunction with the Apartment Burlesque Orchestra's last show, Garneau will perform The Belted Lady, a piece based on a character whom she describes as "an autoerotic belt fetishist."

See The Belted Lady at the DANK Haus Friday 22 or visit www.nicolegarneau.com for a detailed Heat:05 performance schedule.