This year's Performance Open was a wild ride, bringing formidable performances with artists spilling over from L.A. to Amsterdam. Our city's response to this cultural tour de force was gratifying as the Performance Art Festival experienced an overflow of our city's best supporting patrons of the arts; the lineup read like a veritable list of who's who in Cleveland with cultural artistas Lisa Fedor, Lyz Bly of the BK Smith Gallery and The Free Press, Xan Underhill (Circe de Soleil), Len Steinbach of the CMA, Grant Marquit, of Enterprise Development, and multi-media fanatic Kenn Louis, as well as Cool Cleveland's art mafia mixed it up with performers and power-networkers alike. Memorable presentations were generated by women: Marisa Sullivan from NYC delivered the educational Bigger, Better Orgasm, with useful insights praising the clitoris, "a decorative flourish of erectile tissue that can sink a ship like an iceburg" and "G-spot; the G stands for gush" left us girls wondering if we could somehow channel or wire said energy of orgasm into our brains; the possibilities of what it could accomplish. More unsettling were the symbolic enactments and facile ouevre of Cleveland's Aaron Rapljenovich and Amy Notley's intimate, if not funerary, shrouded interplay; delineating man as fugitive of his own emotions (draped, blindfolded and tied) while the emotive, sensual female figure symbolically "feels" his blindness, his limitations; she removes its ties only to have him struggle to remain "chained" to his limitations. Their struggling ends; subduing her, he cruelly transfers his own limitations on her (via blindfolding, wrists bound & covering her in shrouds) effectively disabling her as she unwillingly and struggling becomes him; their roles twist to reverse...and he cries at what he has done. Easily the best performance of the entire festival, making us want to re-live its experiential accomplishments over and over. From Cool Cleveland senior editor Tisha Nemeth

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