Diary of a Gym Queen and Other Dances
Scott Heron at P.S. 122
The Village Voice, October 19, 1993

In a more benign and probably boring world, Scott Heron might be a standard Ballet Boy. With his lean and linear physique, sharply detailed face, and willfully neat feet, the dark-haired performer cuts a figure both aristocratic and disciplined. But Heron keeps careful pace with the sometimes gross imperfections of his world, presenting an elegantly rendered suite of indelicate points.

“This Is How My Garden Grows” superimposed images by Jan Vermeer and Robert Mapplethorpe. Decked out in a trailing white skirt and a crisp turban, Heron punch-lined a scene artfully set with a checkerboard floor by revealing a leafy carrot right where Mapplethorpe indelibly put a bullwhip.

From there, the five-part show skimmed along, motored for the most part by Heron’s prancy, footsy dancing. A couple of videos (from 1985 and 1989)provided interludes. They showed Heron’s more cutting voice, counterbalancing the zany with thre tragic, most vividly in the frenzied masturbations scenes of “Laff at the Fags.”

A green-haired, squat person called Heleri spelled Heron during a costume change by playing a wonderfully sly leprechaun. The 83-year old Englishwoman slipped from one perfectly ineffectual stunt to another with sure timing and unbeatable confidence.

“Fat Boy Small Room,” the suites closer, was also its most protracted and inconclusive segment. Clinically curtained on three sides, it presents Heron as an asylum inmate. His insistently springy footwork here stopped being giddy and became driven, hopeless. (A crunchy collage score by Leslie Ross added a little salt to the indicated wounds.)

—ROBERT GRESKOVIC