ALIEN COMMENTARY: POSTERS

When I started performing I would always make a poster to advertise my show.
I always tell my Performance students that the first thing you do is: get the gig, and the second thing is: do the advertising, and then you can worry about the show. Putting up a poster commits you to that show. It also gets your name out there. Even if the show is over, if the poster is still up, it’s doing its job. Maybe the person who sees it will want to come to your next show.

Back then all of the Rock bands put up flyers as an inexpensive method of P.R. and by doing so contributed a plethora of underground imagery to neighborhoods. Many people in the ’80’s, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, knew about “Alien Comic”, but had never seen one of my shows. Because I would paper the neighborhood before every performance. Playwright/director John Jesurun says that Ethyl Eichelberger and I were the champs of the downtown poster plasterers.

I enjoyed making the graphic, then running off a couple hundred copies, and then I’d get a bucket, and some wheat paste and a brush, and go out late at night, and slap ’em up. I was usually accompanied by a friend, who could help and also be a lookout since I wouldn’t want to get stopped by the cops. It was a thrill to walk around the next day and see my flyers hanging. More often, they would only last a couple of days, because someone else would cover them up with their poster.