The Infra Thin, performed at the 2024 Hollywood Fringe Festival, is a performance series by Michael Gardner exploring the fragile threshold between thought and form, memory and re-enactment, intimacy and distance. Each vignette—part memoir, part art-historical séance—invokes figures such as René Ricard, Laurie Anderson, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, and others, blending performance, storytelling, and conceptual art in an embodied dialogue with art history. This show is a continuation of what began with my CalArts 2022 Artist Residency.
I am not sure what I want to say about this experience: one has only 15 minutes to set-up for their performance, and then 15 minutes to take it all down and leave the space open and clean for the following artists, and navigating this one detail; a detail that had the potential from knowing experientially after my 35+ years experience in the professional theatre (Broadway and all that) to override one's ability to actually PERFORM after this brutal set-up situation, I nonetheless pressed on, telling myself that, "whatever happens or is, will be a part of my experience and I will not allow anything from that specific to interfere with the work I need to do onstage, and if such an unexpected ensues, then I will absolutely know how to use it in a positive form for the work. Without my fabulous friend Marisa Ward - who has toured with everyone from Aerosmith to Stevie Nicks and more, and my daughter helping as "roadies," this set up would not have happened.
The performance opens with A Violent Silence and The Field, grounding the inquiry into sound, ritual, and the edges of perception. The subsequent monologues - Eddy and the Dike, René Ricard, Laurie Anderson, Shirley MacLaine, New York and the Angelus Novus, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Keith Haring & Sandra Bernhard - form a constellation of encounters that map my personal and cultural lineage. The Infra Thin transforms autobiography into collective memory, folding performance, philosophy, and pop-cultural history into one another. The result is a living archive of art’s ghosts — those who linger between inspiration and expression, presence and absence.
