BOB CARROLL

Performance piece performed by Bob Carroll, A SALMON SONG
[Note: Documentation of this event is in the Hallwalls archive at the Poetry Collection, a special collecton of the State University of New York at Buffalo Libraries. To learn more about what Hallwalls is doing to make this analog material digtialy accessible, please visit Migrating Media, our collaboration with Squeaky Wheel, Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the Experimental Television Center.]

[NOTE: The although the calendar/timeline information indicates "A Salmon Song", this is more than likely a mistake or was what Carroll had given as a title at the time of announcement. This is probably "The Salmon Show", about which Jeanne Carstensen writes in "Spawn On! Bob Carroll and the Art of Dying" (an artilce that appears in "After" the No.8 issue of ARTicles, the annual journal of the National Arts Journal Program). In the article, she Carstensen writes about the one-man show which was, according to according to Carrol a "stand-up, fall-down, song-and-dance comedy act,": "THE SALMON SHOW was about death, rebirth and the abuses of corporate capitalism. It was also the story of the life cycle of the salmon, as told from the point of view of the fish. 'To the spawning grounds!' Bob would wail as he balanced on one foot and undulated his long white arms. 'Steelhead trout, we're moving about, cherry masu we're comin' on through...' Grunting and scatting, making great gawky leaps across the stage and keeping a constant beat by stomping his fs feet and slapping his rump, he acted out salmon migrating and spawning, Indian fishin and the onset of industrialization: The cosmic flow is replaced with the cash flow, salmono are canned, Black Panther George Jackson is thrown in the can and the whole shebang ends up in the multinational money box" (p 162) In a January 5, 1979 review in The New York Times, Mel Gussow states "Bob Carroll's 'The Salmon Show and Others' (on weekends in the Envelope at the Performing Garage) is an out landish fish story. This is nothing less than the life cycle of the salmon as told from the point of view of the salmon combined with a cosmic dissertation on the Industrial and other Revolutions. The evening is ecological, ebullient, and as purifying as a mountain stream." Carstensen sites Los Angeles Times writer John C. Mahoney describing a 1980 performance of "The Salmon Show" as "the single most effective...piece of contemporary radical political theater I have seen."
A full PDF of Carstensen's article was accessed  on Oct. 11, 2010 at:
http://www.najp.org/publications/articles/articles8.html    - C.T.]

Some publications related to this event:
February, 1979 - 1979