Hawks, Christopher

NAME: Christopher Hawks

Biography:

Ya Gotta Have Pluck (October 12th, 1995 City Paper)

A fearsome foursome is about to debut at the Arts Bank.

By [Warner]

A darn fine word, pluck. Reminds me of spunk. As in Lou Grant's immortal lines to Mary Richards: "You know what you've got, Mary? You've got spunk. I hate spunk."

Robin Patchefsky, Niall Rea, Karl Schappell and Jon Stark all have pluck. In fact, they arePLUCK, a new performance collaborative that's debuting Oct. 13-15 at the Philadelphia Arts Bank (sharing a double bill with choreographer Kaitlyn Granda).

The name's an acronym. The group may choose to assign different meanings to it in the future, but at the moment it stands for People Like Us Could Kill — which makes sense because the company's first show, We, is, among other things, about violence.

But PLUCK is more than just a handy assortment of letters. "It's a very, very personal word for us," company members Schappell, Rea and Stark told me in a visit to City Paper offices this week. "Someone we knew used to use it."

That someone was local dancer Christopher Hawks, who died in April of 1994.

"Robin and I and Chris were the wild ones in the dance field in Philadelphia," said Schappell. In the '80s and early '90s, while working with companies like Terry Beck, ZeroMoving and Melanie Stewart, the three of them partied furiously together. "We were Revival and [Black] Banana kids, the smokers and the drinkers. We were different from the granola crunchers."

Pluck "was something [Christopher] admired and something we admired in him — because he had a lot of it. It's when someone has the gall to wear something or do something out of the norm."

The red "c" in the PLUCK logo represents Hawks, they said, because there's no doubt in the company's minds that he would have been their fifth member.

I should mention here that the group was kind of reluctant to talk about the Hawks subtext at first, worrying that it was maybe too "maudlin" to talk about. The name PLUCK also refers to the "cheek and anger coursing through us," said Stark, and they didn't want to give the impression that their show would be sentimental.

We// certainly doesn't //sound sentimental. Stark, 33, an award-winning performer from Edinburgh who's best known locally as an arts photographer, says that the showis "designed for the MTV generation: loud pumping music and the scenes are short. We don't want people to sit stiff in their seats." The music, composed by ex-Bronski Beat member Larry Steinbachek, accompanies 19 vignettes mixing dance and theater, all of which deal with the performers' own experiences. And, says Schappell, it's "sarcastic as shit."

But don't worry, says Niall Rea: "We're careful to weed out anything that seems self-indulgent... We don't take ourselves seriously at all."

Rea, a boyish 29-year-old Belfast native who often directs for Melanie Stewart Dance, recently staged Killing Charity for her at the Arts Bank. In fact, that piece (though a little too long) did manage to tread a fine line between the confessional and the comic.

PLUCK's international perspective ought to place a fresh spin on the subject of violence in America. "I'm much more frightened here than in Belfast," said Rea. "In Ireland people are killed because of a religious war, but they're not killed for any other reason. Here you see women pulling knives, men with baseball bats — in Belfast you'd just see kind of a bomb in the distance."

Stark said, "Everybody I know [here] has been mugged more than once. I can't think of anyone being mugged in 30 years of living in Edinburgh."

Schappell now lives in Amsterdam with Rea, but remembers seeing gang fights outside his window in S. Philly. "You realize in a way you sort of miss it."

How did the Americans first meet up with the Brits? (Watch out — this part is sentimental.)

Four years ago, the Terry Beck Troupe (including Patchefsky and Schappell) traveled to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to perform at the Theater Workshop, whose photographer at the time was Jon Stark. "When Edinburgh's flooded with all these foreigners," he said, "you start looking for the best party group," and both he and Rea, also a Fringe habitue, found themselves drawn to the Beck crowd.

One day, with his then-girlfriend at his side, Stark was introduced to Patchefsky. He said to himself, "'If I start talking to this woman I'm never going to stop talking to her.'"

He started talking.

A year later they were married in Philadelphia City Hall.

And Schappell and Rea, whose first meeting in Edinburgh had also blossomed into a romance, stood up as "best man and bridesmaid." (There's some argument as to who was who, though Rea caught the bouquet.)

The foursome first collaborated artistically in Philadelphia in 1992, when Schappell choreographed a solo for Patchefsky called Big Dog Dance (Rea designed it, and Stark took photos). Schappell and Rea moved to London right after that, and then on to Amsterdam. A meeting in Berlin with Philadelphia-based dancer/ choreographer Kaitlyn Granda, who was in Germany with Karen Bamonte's troupe, led to the opportunity for a reunion: Granda said she was doing a concert at the Arts Bank this season but wouldn't have enough material for a full evening, Schappell contacted the others, and "it snowballed" — into a transcontinental collaboration and the first performance of PLUCK.

"It grew into this huge project which won't stop here," said Stark.

Are we talking a lifetime commitment?

"Or till the anger outweighs the cheek."

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