"Matt and Jamie"(2008) photograph by Micheal Boles

Whoop Dee Doo Showcases talent and trend at the “Gateway to the West”

A version of this story appeared in the November/December, 2008  print issue of Review Magazine.

The Impala was dancing us down I-29, on a muggy and windless August afternoon. The smooth grooves and perfunctory booty-beats of Beyonce Knowles were an apt score to the traffic as the vehicle slowly lurched then abruptly sped up, only to grind to a halt. Every summer, Kansas City’s interstates are filled with construction, but this weekend was unique: it was American Idol tryouts. I was certain the delay was because of an influx of last-minute starry-eyed fame-seekers desperate to make the cut — or worse, disappointed rejects sluggish to get back home. The car idled as we waited in anticipation, not unlike the contestants with their aspirations for popularity and fame, but we also had less grand expectations — Omaha, Nebraska, or bust.

I have videotaped five productions of Whoop Dee Doo in Kansas City, Missouri, four at la Esquina and one at Rockhurst University’s Greenlease Gallery. After the show had traveled to Getsumin gallery in Osaka, Japan, and Rocket Projects in Miami, Florida, I was invited to document Whoop Dee Doo’s return to the Midwest, at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art’s Endless Summer.  Whoop Dee Doo is a difficult event to explain. Self-described as “part Japanese game show, part Hee Haw, and part high school talent show,” it acts as a faux-public access television program — faux, because even though video cameras record each performance, there is no broadcast to anyone. The Kansas City area has no public access programming, but Whoop Dee Doo seeks to emulate the local charm that comes from a free-for-fall public access channel. The mix has included lip-synching drag queens and singing dogs, breakdancers and cloggers, scientists, game-show hosts, the cheerleading-inspired performance art troupe Rah-Booty, and the homoerotic electro-pop band, Ssion. This approach, more puréeing than blending, sounds borderline exploitive on paper, but somehow everything congeals, whether it is the way the show blurs audience and performer through abrupt dance intermissions, through each act’s eagerness to perform in front of a new audience with cameras rolling, or through careful curation. Over each episode, I have seen Whoop Dee Doo develop through the lens of my Canon XL2S from a nascent experiment in local merriment to a more seamless intertwining of influences like The Lawrence Welk Show to America’s Got Talent. Unlike the American Idol contestants looking to escape the middling, mundane, Podunk-ery of the Midwest, Whoop Dee Doo revels in it.

***

Kansas City artist Jaimie Warren was sitting on the steps of the Bemis Center smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of white wine. She was voicing her concern about a woman named Red Rum, who was being programmed at the end of the event because Warren had justifiable concerns that her entourage, which includes an African-American named Monkey Man, might offend someone. Matt Roche stood above Warren and nodded with an intense sullenness. Having just removed his blue werewolf makeup from a dress rehearsal, Roche still wore dark circles under his eyes that gave him a cartoonish look of exhaustion, like his life had been drained. Roche also had his hair grayed out, and his withered posture exaggerated its aging effect. Warren took another puff of her cigarette as her platinum blonde hair blew in the summer breeze.

Warren is the charismatic ringleader, creator, and sometimes host of Whoop Dee Doo. I have always known her as an ambitious scenester who is able to muster an assemblage of eccentric young artists and the who’s-who of the already established Kansas City art community. Her demeanor is intoxicatingly jolly and is only amplified by her unconventional fashion, which can only be described as ’80s glam-grunge. For performances she over-applies makeup and wears neon spandex with matching pop-referencing sweatshirts. My conversations with Warren are casual, and at times her enthusiasm for Whoop Dee Doo fills her sentences with “like’s” and “you know what I mean’s.” While preparing for the upcoming Omaha event, Warren would seem distracted in thought, trying to mentally assemble the event, and then suddenly recoil giggling with delight.

Warren cites the Chicago-based public access television show Chic-A-Go-Go as her primary influence for Whoop Dee Doo. “I was always interested in community art,” she says, “but I was trying to think of ways of doing it that weren’t like, ‘let’s have homeless people make art and put it in a white cube gallery and invite the homeless people into the gallery.’” She explains that Whoop Dee Doo is an attempt to bring different groups of people together in a way that is honest and wholesome. “Since Kansas City’s got such a small community, it seems like people are always trying to collaborate with other communities, so I try to push that idea and make it this overall event that’s trying to have true integration of all these different people and make it kind of weird but very fun experience.”

There is a tenuous balance with this kind of gambit, since what is weird for one person can be completely upsetting for another. “We had a group of eight-year-old professional fiddlers who were coming out of a Christian organization,” Warren says. “The mother drove up in her mini-van and took a look at (a provocatively dressed drag queen) and drove away, and we lost that act.” Admittedly, this was a mild repercussion compared to an earlier curated event, when about a dozen police officers wielding pepper spray showed up to clear out Your Face, a gallery Warren and a few of her friends had opened after graduation from the Kansas City Art Institute. Since that experience, Warren has been honing her networking to create collations of artists and students to see her vision through — minus the searing pain of non-violent tactics of crowd control.

“You totally look like Jesus right now,” Warren said to me. I was blocking the Nebraska sun, making a silhouette, as giant mountainous clouds that you only find in religious landscape paintings filled the air. While Warren contemplated the show’s programming outside in the summer breeze, inside a horde of artists and students were transforming one of the Bemis Center’s pale gallery into a fantastical pretend TV set.

The gallery was stuffy even with a wall of built-in electric box fans spinning, but Robert Heishman was teaching a group of kids from a local urban girls club, Girls Inc., the “jump-rope dance” for the next night’s big premiere. Heishman, wearing a tucked-in button-up long-sleeved shirt, greeted us covered in sweat. The Kansas City photographer was brought on as a coordinator for the Omaha production. He had made a big impression on Warren and saved a large chunk of the predicted budget by getting everyone to carpool. As Heishman laid out the pre-show itinerary, I noticed that there were predominately two kinds of people helping with construction: bearded men and young-looking women. The men carried large colored cubes from the top floor of the Bemis Center to fill the gallery, as the women painted neon-colored shapes on cardboard. Among the open paint cans arranged on the floor like hurdles were large Sony Betacam SP Camcorders. These cameras, each nearly the size of a bazooka, had their own headsets and microphone connections that fed directly into a backroom full of monitors. Telepro (an Omaha production company donating time and equipment) would be directing the camera operators’ movements and editing live through an elaborate board full of switches and toggles.

As production went on into the night, it was energized by lots of Red Bull, ’90s R&B songs (specifically, Bell Biv Devoe’s), and cheap bottled wine. The next morning as everyone made last-minute scrambles to finish, it was clear the romance from the night before was gone. The set was nearly complete, the giant colored cubes brought down from the night before were arranged like a cubist metropolis, and the ceiling was covered with shiny metallic Mylar sheets. This gave the set a futuristic feel, but like the future imagined in the late ’70s — really chic and glamorous. All of this foliage left the gallery cramped; maybe 40 audience members could sit and another 25 or so could stand around. This, of course, was not counting the four cameramen, multiple performers who were coming and going, and the dozen artists who acted as filler for the dance segments when the audience seemed reluctant to join. The strategy was to rotate the audience between acts and simulcast the show out into the hall for others to watch.

Omaha audience members were swept in, looking bewildered by the surrealist TV set and giant commercial studio cameras. The sounds of their curiosity acted as the drum roll while Warren, dressed as McDonald’s French fries, and Roche, as a blue werewolf, took a space on the stacked blocks next to stage. The two stood looking like a commodity-laden version of American Gothic: Warren staring past Roche, Roche holding a microphone much like a pitchfork and staring at the audience with a grim reservation. The two were awakened from this brief moment of uncertainty, by the camera director’s update: “Ready to roll.”

The audience members had been content to sit and watch the twirling and glistening hip thrusts of the first act, the Diva Soma Belly Dancers. The second act, a purple-suited black gospel group called the Angels of Faith, played a version of Testify by Parliament. Their version — a less sexed, but still mildly funky one — can be summed up by their exchange of Parliament’s line, “I just wanna’ testify what your love has done for me,” for, “I just wanna’ thank you Lord for bein’ so good to me.” The unabashedly churchy take on George Clinton’s love song might have been cringe-inducing beyond the pews, but when the band leader said, “We’re gonna’ make this a dance party! How many ‘you know how wonderful Jesus is? He’s wonderful, ain’t he?”, the audience cheered.

After the performance I heard someone in the crowd say, “I don’t usually go to church, but I’d like to be a part of theirs.” It struck me that it was possible they were not considering joining the gospel band’s flock, but Whoop Dee Doo’s. How was Warren was able to convince so many people (19 from Kansas City and 2 from New York and Chicago) to come to Omaha for three days to build sets, perform (sometimes in costume), and sleep on shared mattresses — all without monetary compensation? She says, “I just ask. They must just feel loved.” I asked if Whoop Dee Doo was about love. She became uncomfortable and gave me her usual spiel, the show’s primary goal being to spotlight local talent. During a phone interview, I pressed her further about this possible connection. “Would you in any way compare Whoop Dee Doo to a religious ceremony? Do you see any parallels in that?” I asked.

“I haven’t,” she said. “Not that I wouldn’t. Do you?”

I explained that a variety show has a hierarchy that separates the performer from the audience, but having her event in a gallery sidesteps those rules, making it easy to bleed performer and audience. This also happens at religious events, specifically in Pentecostal churches. When Pentecostals pray in tongues, everyone is connected in an orgiastic environment, and they all feel united toward one point of enlightenment. This riotous jubilation is similar to Whoop Dee Doo’s goal.

She was not convinced: “But at the same time, wouldn’t you say it could be compared to a band playing and everyone dancing with the band?”

“The thing with the band is the audience knows they are there to listen and be entertained and there’s not going be any awkwardness unless it’s like a Rocky Horror Picture Show thing,” I said, “and even then people are anticipating to be uncomfortable. I feel like with Whoop Dee Doo there is a surprise of being seduced in a way that you weren’t anticipating it — and a really good religious experience does that.”

“Well that’s fucking cool!”

The apex of the show at Endless Summer was an impromptu music video with Tilly and the Wall. The indie-pop band from Omaha and incorporates a unique approach to percussions — tap dancing, rather than drums. Having appeared on The Late Show and Sesame Street, they lent Whoop Dee Doo’s show a sense of credibility. Combined with many of the events previous acts, The Dancing Grannies and The Omaha Pug Club, Tilly and the Wall performed Alligator Skin, causing the gallery audience to explode. Warren’s vision, a colorful cacophony of all-inclusive fun, seemed to be a success. Refreshing the audience worked; newly energized viewers were swept up in the dance parties as the riotous mood swelled with joy. Everyone was moved by the sprit of Whoop Dee Doo.

You would not know it by the silly joke-cracking sock puppet and the dancing children that Chic-A-Go-Go was a unique kind of protest. The theme song — “We’re laughing and we’re dancing, and it’s fun! On the Shores of Lake Mich – I – gun, the kids are dancing and having fun! Through riots and fires and scandal and shame, we kept dancing just the same!” — reveals a community’s response to urban plight. Unlike the broad history of variety shows that are defined by their need to entertain, Chic-A-Go-Go is a living statement that entertains out of a sense of self-resilience from Chicago’s diligent and steadfast inner-city dwellers. So what struggle does Whoop Dee Doo represent?

“There’s this idea that Kansas City is the southern-most northern city, the western-most eastern city, and so on, and that it’s somehow the center of everything — but maybe it’s also the void where nothing quite comes together,” says Hesse McGraw, a curator at the Bemis Center and a previous editor at Review. McGraw’s geographical metaphor reflects for many not just the literal qualities of being at the center, but also the complacency it yields. Artists in Kansas City struggle between the comfortable cost of living that the Midwest offers, and their own ambitions for becoming a part of the larger cultural conversation. Warren creates a unique expression from this struggle. Her great happiness for community organizing is combined with an almost manic drive for attention and presents a contradiction of zeal and ordinariness. Behind the mania-induced performances, however, remains a sincere response to an ubiquitous fog of the mundane. Her work transmogrifies the mundane into a sugar-coated Saturday-morning experience. This vivid form of banality makes Whoop Dee Doo’s brand of everydayness an intoxicating mixture that combats stagnancy and lulls even the most skeptical spectator into Warren’s enthusiastic revelations. As one woman, dressed as a California Raisin, trying to gather audience members put it, “That’s what it’s all about — any one can dance!”