Back to the...

"Back to the Commonwealth, Back to the Commonwealth, Back to the Commonwealth of Independent States!" - Wayne and Garth

In less than two weeks I'm headed back to Russia for another June of intense training and intense theatre... and I feel kind of unprepared.  Last year there was so much build up and anticipation, but this year there has been very little prep work.  I haven't been working on my Russian (yikes), we didn't have a pre-Moscow training session, we didn't have many meetings... so the fact that I'm jumping on an airplane in eleven days to begin the most intense month of my life - AGAIN - has been escaping my conscious understanding for the moment.  This weekend I bought a pair of comfy walking sandles.  I did go over some numbers and colors in Russian yesterday, hoping that might help jump start things.  In the next day or two I'll be putting together a shopping list for the trip - maybe buying all the blister band-aids, ibuprofen and cold meds, and sunscreen will knock me into gear.  Or maybe it just won't land until I do.  The fact is - everything about my life this summer is very different from where I was at this same time last summer, so maybe it's just all the change that seems to be defining me right now that makes the idea of going to Russia so unfamiliar.  I don't know what it is... but whatever it is, it's definitely time to start getting my ишак (ass) in gear.

Hey... maybe FEAR will get me motivated! 

Things that scare me about going to Russia this year:

1. I have not been working out this year like I was last year (plus, I'm a year older)... so the physical work is probably going to be even tougher 
2. I'm the group coordinator this year, which means I'll have some weird, undefined set of extra responsibilities on this year's trip
3. I've been on this trip before... so I'm supposed to know stuff or something
4. I came back from a five day trip to Denver and my kitten had grown.  I can't believe how different she's going to be after a month!
5. I am currently studying for my qualifying exams, which will take place in September.  This means reading everything that has ever been written ever... and I'm all kinds of nervous about it.  Russia will not help me with the studying.
6. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons to be scared... I'll go try to read and instead obsess about the things to be scared about.

Social Works

“What if performance challenges strict divisions about where the art ends and the rest of the world begins?” (15)

I always feel like something of a heel using a quote from so early in the book, but I felt like this idea merited some discussion.  According to the manifesto I’m writing for Blair’s class, art is inherently liminal, in that it is always negotiating that space between real and representational.  And, on the scale of liminality, theatre is the one that spends the most space in this in-between.  And, in the terms of this book, when theatre begins to interact not only with a real audience, but with the really real social world outside the theatre doors, this line becomes ever more delicate, ever more blurry.  Brecht wanted his theatre to remain distinctly unreal so that it could inspire real action in its audience.  Augusto Boal took his theatre to society, rather than expecting society to come to his theatre.  The Tectonic Theatre Project’s use of documentary techniques in building their theatre has real people’s words coming out of the mouths of actors, hoping to challenge the audience’s perceptions of real events and issues.  Paul Chan felt the pull of New Orleans from the comfort of his New York apartment and felt that the only way he could answer that pull was to put a 60-year-old piece of European art into direct conversation with the all too real landscape of devastation in the ninth ward.  What is the responsibility art takes on when it edges its way closer and closer to reality?  And not just any reality, but the sensitive realities that surround social issues.  Art can never be really real, or it simply becomes life instead of art, so where does this kind of “experimental” theatre practice fall on the continuum?  Certainly, as Jackson points out, this is a delicate distinction as well: “Experimental art performances use visual, embodied, collective, durational, and spatial systems, but a critical sense of their innovation will differ depending upon what medium they understand themselves to be disrupting, i.e. which medium is on the other end of whose ‘post.’” (2)  So while navigating theatre that participates in social discourse, we have to take not of its interaction with reality, its interaction with issues, and its interaction with the history of the art form itself in order to be aware of all the levels of codes present in any given performance.  And all of that may well prove to be the easy part.

Everyone's a Little Bit Anachronistic

“all bodily practice is, like language itself, always already composed in repetition and repetition is, paradoxically, both the vehicle for sameness and the vehicle for difference or change.”[1]

“Of course, when playing in the crossfire of time letting anachronism do its creative work, things can feel a little uncanny, or dislocated, or unsettling, or queer.  They can also feel like downright bad art…The first time was true.  The second time is false, etiolated, hollow, or infelicitous.  The second time, the third time, the nth times are not actual.  Thus: the second time is lesser.  But…the minor, forgotten, overlooked, disavowed, unsung second, double, and ‘lesser’ gain a kind of agency in the re-do.”[2]

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a Civil War reenactor for a documentary theatre piece I was working on for a class.  I was talking to her about being a Southern woman, but we couldn’t help, of course, discussing her passion for reenacting.  As the descendant of a confederate soldier, she took the whole thing very seriously.  She led me to the air conditioned shed out back where she built and stored all of her costumes – at least two racks worth.  She spoke with pride about the authenticity of the garments, the way a dress petticoat would become an everyday petticoat once it had been worn too many times.  When I performed as her in our documentary performance, the knowledge that I was performing a performer kept tickling the back of my mind. 

Judith Butler’s discussion of identity as “a stylized repetition of acts”[3] seems to be in conversation with a lot of what I observed in my own little anecdote, and what Schneider is talking about in navigating the murky waters of reenactment.  There is something dismissive about the way most of us would talk about the second time around.  It’s an interesting contradiction of our postmodern sensibilities, in that we are so comfortable with simulacrum in our daily, mass-produced life, but there seem to be places where we draw the line and say at those things that aren’t really real, that aren’t authentic or original.  But in Butler’s sense, nothing we ever do is truly original – our very identities are a sedimentation of simulacra built up through decades and centuries of repetition.  And then, when we in the theatre rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, all in an attempt to produce the illusion of the first time, we add a layer of sediment to our behavior.  Think about revivals.  Think about tours.  Think about cast members being replaced midway through a run.  Iterations of the “original” are almost infinite in a theatrical sense.  And then, these reenactors, have their own layers to add – whether they acknowledge their touristy allure, or dedicate themselves to serious authenticity.  Historical events happen for the first and only time, but then, as the truism goes, we are doomed to repeat them – either on a historical scale or in unending recounting and reenacting.  And even historical events make reference to past events, past speeches, past people.  One would be hard pressed to point to any event that could truly stand on its own. 

But does this constant referentiality devalue the reenactment?  Is it merely a precondition of existing in a world built out of performances?  Is there ever really an original?  How far back must historiography reach to find the roots of any given historical or theatrical impulse?  Is consciousness of our relationship to the “original” necessary to give the reenactment validity?  I found myself particularly interested in the protests Schneider discusses in her Afterword for this very reason.  The acknowledgement of their deliberate anachronism is a powerful tool in demonstrating the way in which we as a people have been reenacting our own flawed history, since the same fights from the past have so much to say to contemporary issues, so by foregrounding the out-of-time-ness of the argument, we can draw attention to the repetition that believes itself to be originality. "The ‘performance’ of history can create a rupture in the safe contemporary evaluations of the past and conceptions of the future"[4]  There is something important in the conscious reenacting impulse that forces the now into a dialogue with the what was and the could be.  So perhaps it is the level of consciousness on the part of both performer and observer, rather than the reenactment itself that becomes the most compelling and useful element in terms of the effect of reenactment on history itself.  This extends queering of identity into queering of place in history and place in time, which allows us to look at ourselves in non-linear terms, feeding on anachronism as a tool for understanding rather than as a mistake or an affront against the rigid forward motion of time.

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[1] Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011) 10.

[2] Schneider 180.

[3] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal(40:1988, 519-531) 519,

[4] Paige Sarlin quoted in Schneider 185.

Hey...Harvey!

This post is going to be a little unusual for me, because I think I’m going to argue with Young a bit more than I tend to…then I’m going to jump around a bit.  I do enjoy a lot of this book, don’t get me wrong.  And I think his exploration of the active nature of stillness is compelling (Muhammed Ali’s refusal to take a step at the induction, for example, was a really powerful example of the extreme activeness of stillness), but there were a couple of moments that have really gotten stuck in my craw, and I have to get them out.

When he talks about the daguerreotypes in the second chapter, he mentions “the allure of the off-frame space in photography” (48) as he imagines what the studio might have been like for the subjects of these images.  How many people were there?  Were the subjects watching each other?  Where had they placed their clothes?  All of these are fascinating questions, and it’s true that we can’t help but want to fill in the world outside the frame of the photo, but he seems to forget this piece of the experience when he’s discussing the “Love it or Leave it” photo, wherein he points out the crowd of black folks in the background all looking away from the main car as some sort of act of rebellion against the message of white superiority implied by the car.  But, if we take a moment to think about what logically might be off-frame in a picture of a parade… wouldn’t it be logical that there is something following after this car?  If not, this is the worst parade ever.  Can we really put so much historical and emotional weight on a group of people who are probably just looking at what’s coming next?  Young seems to be stretching a little too far on this one, leaving behind his own earlier ideas in favor of locating what he hoped he would.

My second issue with him came in his discussion of Yellowman.  As he introduces the piece he tells us: “Dael Orlandersmith, despite viewing her play as nonhistorical and not autobiographical, tells a story that reflects the treatment of her own body.” (121)  It is certainly his prerogative to see what he sees in this piece of theatre, but it seems a little odd coming from a man who has spent 120 pages explaining how meaning has been placed on the black body against its will and how people have worked hard to reclaim the right to define their own bodies.  So doesn’t it seem a little presumptuous of him to say, “She might say it’s not about her body, but she’s wrong – I say it is.”  The way he is discussing his observations is not merely an attempt to communicate what he sees, but a deliberate contradiction of what she has proclaimed about herself.  There is something snide in his tone when he says, “It is difficult to imagine Orlandersmith not identifying with her own protagonist’s racial anxieties.” (155)  And she may or may not, but, based on his arguments throughout the book, it is not his place to decide whether or not she does.  He’s inscribing his own desired meaning onto her body in performance and that really rubs me the wrong way.

So now that I’ve gotten those two little complaints off my chest…

I think he does a nice job of discussing the physicality of Suzan-Lori Parks’s language: “The focus here rests not on the utterance itself but the process by which that utterance manifests itself, the position of the body at the moment of enunciation, and the reverberations of the sound having been spoken.” (130)

This makes me think back to one of the old truisms I learned in working on Shakespeare – that everything comes from the head, the gut or the groin.  Language is not something that belongs to the head alone – it comes from humans and is deeply connected to what the body needs.  Language has a taste and a tactile quality that is too often overlooked, but in people like Shakespeare or Parks, whose understanding of language is so fully embodied, ignoring what language, sounds and words can do for and to the body just sort of ends up missing the point.  I love reading Parks – she has the ability to shake me out of my heady, intellectual, “I’m reading something and thinking deep thoughts” space with her playful use of spelling and rhythm.  She demands that I let go of “the way it’s supposed to be” and go with the flow of something else that generally ends up leading me to someplace way deeper than just sitting and thinking could.  In the ever-present mind/body binary, Parks and her characters refuse to choose sides, and her plays are the better for it.  The “spells” she casts are those sweet spots where the mind and the body are so intertwined that language isn’t possible or isn’t necessary.

Urban Blog Women

“She acts like a scientist, putting a part under a microscope for examination and experimentation.  She unpacks the history of coding and the connections between the body part and the process of identification, subjection, and objectification… Ultimately, Urban Bush Women moves toward putting the black female body back together, healing the old wounds and creating more complete positive images of black women.” (37-38)

·         Laura Mulvey talks about how the male gaze breaks down the female form into its desirable parts, taking a fully formed individual and turning her into a collection of eroticized body parts based on the sexual desires of the male audience.  So I found it interesting how George-Graves turned this vivisection on its ear, using fixation on individual body parts as a process of empowerment, rather than objectification.  It occurred to me that dance is a logical art form in which to counter the male gaze, as it is the art form most essentially intertwined with the body.  The dances described put the spotlight on the processes of objectification, and hopefully begin a dialogue among the dancers and the audience about the effects thereof, but they don’t always present a neat and tidy solution.  I loved the discussion of high heeled shoes and lipstick – how they were used as illustrations of the shaping and marking of the female body – in particular the black female body: “The markers of femininity are commodities, according to this piece, to be bought and sold.  These girls buy and wear desire.  Soon, however, reality confronts fantasy, and the women are left with a confused sense of themselves.  Violence has been done.” (116)  In her essay “Selling Hot Pussy,’ bell hooks points out the eroticization and animalization of the black female body by the white male hegemony, noting how completely the black woman is othered, but also how she is expected to find ways to conform with ideals of white beauty in order to keep her animal sexuality from running wild.  But she also notes how someone like Tina Turner was able to find power in this sexuality.  I thought about bell hooks’s work a lot as I was reading about the Urban Bush Women.  Their celebration of the black female body feels like a reclamation and a declaration – confronting the forces that would rob them of their individuality and identity.  Since the black female body has been so intensely written upon by history, the dance theatre of the Urban Bush Women seems a logical place for wrighting (to use Rossini’s term) their place in the world.  In particular, I was moved by the discussion of hands – how the terminology of hands was so much a part of the language of slavery, and how those same hands have the power to take back history and tell a different story.  “I argue that by creating characters who exist in alternate realities and characters who represent entire populations, the company is attempting to rewrite master narratives.  The characters push against the gaps of history and narrative and challenge us to move beyond stereotypical and limiting images of black women.  These dances are exercises of agency over the stories of black women and the languages with which they are communicated.” (72)  So piece by piece, limb by limb, body by body, the Urban Bush Women come together to tell stories in a way that makes their dance something more than dance.  The incorporation of language and song; personal expression and technique; memory and history all come together in something less literary than theatre and more narrative than dance.

Hearing Aids and Community

Rossini says that Moraga was “searching for her own people, for a group that shares both her political beliefs and cultural position, crucially recognizing that her people need a space in which to manifest themselves.” (177)  Isn’t this sort of true of most artists?  I guess this takes us back to community – that every artistic endeavor is looking for some way to communicate with like-minded people, or to convert non-like-minded people into like-minded people.  We want to work with people who understand us and we want to perform for people who can hear what we have to say.  I’ve spent the last eight years working with a company in South Carolina with similar passions and goals and politics and aesthetics, and it’s an extremely rewarding experience to have a community of artists who speak the same language.  Of course, this idea becomes more literal when we’re talking about Latina American theatre, where the intersection of language is so much a part of the aesthetic.  The ways in which Spanish and English intertwine throughout the book create a whole new language that communicates with different audiences in different ways.  I have to admit – the tangent I think I’m about to take is a little off the beaten track, but it’s sort of where I’m living right now, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with that.  On the language front – I spent the weekend in Brampton, ON – a suburb of Toronto.  I was visiting my grandparents in the hospital.  They’re both in there for different reasons, but they’ve managed to be put in the same room.  So they’re there in their hospital beds facing each other – and neither one is wearing his or her hearing aid.  So my aunt and I spent the weekend repeating ourselves loudly and slowly, watching them interpret us and each other, seeing the hilarious and frustrating and adorable patterns that are still so present after 64 years of marriage.  It struck me – the common history and vocabulary and knowledge that was shared by the people in that room.  My grandparents are from tiny towns on the east coast of Canada, my aunt in Canadian-American, my cousin is Lebanese-Canadian, her husband is Chinese-Canadian, I’m on my way to American-Canadian status… we live all over the world, but this common communal thread of family gave us the ability to understand each other and share the experience in a way that would have been so different with an outsider in the room.  The nurses commented on the dynamic – it’s a tangible thing to be among a group of people who understand each other in such a fundamental way – even when we’re not as able to communicate.  I sat in the surprisingly comfortable visitor’s chair reading Rossini’s book and thinking about the ways in which people perform with and for their respective communities.  We assume or are assigned roles that will hopefully serve the entire community in some meaningful way.  And we do what we have to to be understood.  And we accept that sometimes we won’t be understood or we won’t understand, but lack of understanding doesn’t preclude participation – especially in the theatre we read about this week.  Sometimes the source of confusion becomes a source of inquiry: an invitation to take a different point of view or to ask new questions or to phrase things differently.  Certainly the implications of Moraga’s theatre – and the work of all the artists mentioned in the book – are far greater than the implications of my grandfather yelling into the phone to his deaf sister in Halifax or my grandmother believing my cousin’s husband had called her “Phoenician” instead of “a comedian,” but at the heart of all of this is a common experience fueling a common language and a common sensibility with some hope of connecting with our little concentric circles of community.

Asian-American Laughter

[Jessica Hagedorn] “wanted to explore what humor was and how it related to racism.  For Hagedorn, ‘humor has to be tied with truth’: ‘[Truth] is what makes you laugh because it hurts…Humor is about telling the truth.’” (121)

“Hwang knew how to let mainstream audiences laugh at Asian American topics: ‘One of the things I found very early on at the [Public Theater] was that with predominantly non-Asian audience, you had to give them the permission to laugh because they weren’t sure whether or not they were being offensive by laughing, and so after The New York Times came out and said that it was funny, then everyone thought it was OK to laugh.’” (134)

There were a few things I found particularly interesting in reading this book.  First was the preponderance of women who were at the forefront of the Asian-American theatre movement.  Jessica Hagedorn, Joanna Wan-Ying Chan, Roberta Uno, Nobuko Mitamato and many others were among the most exciting, active and incendiary people in the history of this group about which we generally know so little.  If we tend to be ignorant of Asian American theatre in general, then we are certainly ignorant of the specific role women have played within it. 

I also took note of the many mentions of humor within this book.  The quotes cited above make note of the ways Asian-American artists were able to use humor to test and even blast beyond boundaries, inviting or dragging people into their world.  This appropriation of humor is important for these artists, since the roots of Asian and Asian-American characters in American theatre were also often comical, but in those days they were the butt of the joke.  They were the geishas, the drunks, the fools, the criminals, and they were to be feared, laughed at, or both.  So it’s interesting to see the ways in which they changed the discourse, took control of the laughter, and made it into something that could propel them into the mainstream.  Hwang’s understanding of the intricacies of letting the audience in on the joke is the very reason he became the pioneer he did.  He worked within the rules of the mainstream to open doors into the world of the Asian-American experience, humanizing it and allowing audiences of all stripes to find the kind of connections and parallels with their own lives that are the bedrock of so much comedy.  He was, in a sense, “using the master’s tools” to dig out a place for the Asian-American voice in the American theatre context.

And while Hwang was digging with fairly delicate tools, it sounds like Hagerdon may have been working with dynamite.  I have to admit, I love that Hagedorn was so known for her particularly in-your-face brand of humor.  Seeing a woman challenge society in such a straightforward, unabashed way is often (not to be trite) empowering to me.  She reached out across racial and societal barriers to point out the injustice and absurdity of stereotypes and judgments, and she did it in a way that refused to go unnoticed.  I’m not a proponent of shock for the sake of shock, or coarseness for the sake of coarseness, but when humor and extremity are applied in a carefully thought out, intelligently crafted, intentional manner with a social purpose, I can really dig it!  And the fact that she was playing with Samuel L. Jackson… well… that’s just bonus cool points, let’s be honest.