Giving us ''Everything She's Got'': Processing the Script-as-Archive in Jess Dobkin's Queer Performance Art

Giving us ''Everything She's Got'': Processing the Script-as-Archive in Jess Dobkin's Queer Performance Art Benjamin Gillespie (bio) Jess Dobkin’s emergence onto the Toronto performance scene in 2002, with her confrontational, albeit tongue in cheek, performance style in cabarets, theatre festivals, and art galleries, has garnered considerable attention. Her recent full-length work, Everything I’ve Got, based on the sum of Dobkin’s conceptual performance ideas, historicizes the inspirations for her entire artistic oeuvre. This performance emanates outward from Dobkin’s body as she reflects on her position as woman, mother, lesbian, and artist, among other roles that make up her identity.1 Using an archive of past performance “ideas,” Dobkin performs her own anxieties regarding performance’s ephemeral nature and also ruminates on her art as an ongoing process rather than a finite art object. She becomes her art, both literally and figuratively: literally because her body is the material on which she tests various technologies, prosthetics, and costumes, and figuratively, because the show’s conceptual framework makes a promise that she intends to fulfill—to give us everything she’s got. For Dobkin, these ideas make her very presence possible (and meaningful) and constitute the formation of the piece. While the script for the piece reads like a play, I think it is more accurately read as a record or trace of Dobkin’s creative process, always remaining a supplement to the actual performance. The script is the poetic text that serves as a score for the highly visual staging of her “ideas for performance.” While descriptions of these visuals on the page do not resonate in the same ways as they do in live performance, they help to give a sense of the theatrical dimensions of the piece and organize Dobkin’s disparate representations into a coherent whole. As David Román and Holly Hughes argue in their introduction to O Solo Homo, the problem of presenting a solo performance as a script is that it simply cannot translate the [End Page 52] complexities of the show. This is especially true in performance art where the performer’s body is lost in a printed document. However, according to Román and Hughes, these publications are essential in order to “establish [an] archive of queer performance” (14) that moves beyond performance’s ephemerality. By publishing Dobkin’s script in CTR, it becomes a performance work that can be accessed by many more than those present for its live incarnations. The script can also be read as part of the artist’s processing of her queer identity—the subject of Everything I’ve Got—making this script an archive of an archive and a performance always in process. Dobkin has suggested herself that while the piece may utilize theatrical conventions, she sees it as more of a “blueprint ... that holds the markers and text of the work” (Personal interview). It is not, she says, “a document that is then followed the way that many scripts are. The script is developed alongside the creation of the work ... through sketches that were then translated into script form” (Personal interview). The script is not a complete record of the performance but a remnant of her past work. The event of publishing this script, then, contributes to the central questions that come up again and again in her work—especially this piece—around the nature and meaning of performance art. Dobkin in fact identifies Everything I’ve Got as a record of her “interest in questions about her artistic process,” asking “what happens to all the work we have left to make? Where and how do our artistic ideas live, both made and not yet made?” (“Jess Dobkin”). Her questions related to documentation are literalized through the use of vivid images throughout the piece. Dobkin turns props and costumes into artifacts—the first being a mirror ball suit—by meticulously placing them under, beside, and around a large travelling trunk set up stage left. This effectively creates a shrine to document the performance as it progresses. This recurring action also allows the shrine to grow throughout the piece, commemorating her past work and its relation to her current...

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