The Truth Fairy

The following is an excerpt from a short solo performance piece I did in my dramaturgy class. Sharing it here for fun.

...When I was a kid my parents and I had an agreement that we would never lie to each other. We could joke around and tease, but if someone asked “Is that true?” you had to fess up.

So at age five, when I asked my mom about the tooth fairy she had to confess there was no such thing. In fact, parents were the ones slipping dimes or dollars under pillows.

However, instead of clearing things up, this just made it more magical. I suddenly had an image of my mom dressed as a fairy slipping into my room and doing some magical alchemy that transformed teeth to dollar bills

Now this idea wasn’t completely crazy. My mother was also the school nurse, and I have a vivid memory of her in front of my kindergarten class with a giant toothbrush and an oversized set of teeth teaching us how to brush. My mom saying there was no such thing as the tooth fairy was like Clark Kent denying the existence of Superman.

The truth contract was established to make me an honest, trusting kid, but it had almost the opposite effect. I had the growing sense that truth itself was unstable and multivalent. Perhaps even malleable.

I experimented a lot with truth as a kid. One time I thought the hard candy I was sucking on looked a lot like a tooth. I cradled it in my hand and brought it into the kitchen where my mom was cooking dinner: “Look mom, I lost a tooth.”

She looked down at it skeptically and uttered the magic truth fairy spell: “Is that the truth?”

My face grew hot and tingly. I was immune to the spell of her power. “Yes.” I said, hoping the force of my words would make it true. “I’m going to go put it under my pillow.” Needless to say, the tooth fairy didn’t visit that night.

I continue to struggle with the truth fairy. While I no longer attempt random subterfuge like the hard candy incident, little lies still slip out of my mouth before I can catch them. The edges seem blurry sometimes between believing, wanting to believe, wanting someone else to believe, wanting someone else to believe that you believe, and wanting to call something new into being through the force of shared belief.

Most artists know that sometimes the truth is truer told slant than it is told straight-up. And as I learned hearing my mother disavow the existence of her magical alter ego, sometimes the reductive act of telling only the mundane truth (when in fact multiple levels of increasingly ecstatic truths always abound) seems falser than a lie...

Fuck Yeah, Awkwardness!

So I’m trying to start a movement. I think I’ll call it the awkwardness appreciation movement. In short, I believe that the emotional/affective/psychic experience that we often call awkwardness is beneficial, necessary for personal growth as well as social change, and should be courted rather than avoided.

In critical theory, much attention has been paid to the experience of shame. Shame, theorists say, is a moment of intense awareness of how you are different from other people, often accompanied by the fear that your difference is unacceptable. In this way, shame simultaneously creates the sense of differentiated individuality and the desire to re-aggregate with the whole. In shame’s hot intensity, you see yourself from a new angle. Your perspective on yourself expands to include the shared context of others.

The problem is that shame has a stopping force. It can freeze you like a wild animal sensing the rifle sights. It’s hard to let your perspective on your own significance shift when you’re afraid you’re going to be annihilated. In the face of shame, childhood defense mechanisms (however useless) rush in to protect you: fight, flight, freeze, play dead.

Awkwardness, however, is shame lite. If shame is the terrifying fall into the cavernous gap between self and other, awkwardness is the giggly, heart-racing fear you feel when peering over the edge. There is space to move and breathe inside awkwardness, but it is still a meditation on the sometimes-precarious experience of being a self surrounded by other selves that are constantly affecting you and being affected by you.

In awkward experiences, we sense the precariousness of our ego boundaries as well as the sheer randomness of the social conventions that regulate our interactions with each other. In that heightened sphere of awareness, you wonder how else you could be, other than the way you are right now, and how else we could be together within the grip of this strangely funny, embarrassing, uncomfortable moment.

Awkwardness is vulnerability with its fly unzipped.

Awkwardness is a prologue to transformation and invitation to grace.

Performance Notion: Malinowski’s Diary

I used to keep my ideas for future devised pieces hidden safe in a little black notebook, scrawled in big excited letters, waiting for the day when I had the time and resources to manifest them. Not sure where that book is today, and given that we live in an age of over-sharing, I’ll record them here. Feel free to steal them if they appeal to you.

An ensemble show using as source material the writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, the influential Polish anthropologist from the early 20th century who was well-respected for his thorough research on indigenous Melanesian culture. Malinowski was a major supporter of enduring, in-depth participant observation, and as such got very involved in the lives of the people he studied. While a contemporary reader may be suspicious of the colonialist tone and the firm belief in the possibility of objectivity, his work is still taught in anthropology courses today.

His personal record of his time doing fieldwork was recently published. Titled A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term, the text reveals the disturbing thoughts, feelings, and desires previously hidden under ostensibly-objective descriptions of the world around him. He lusted after indigenous women, insulted his closest native informants, and mocked the very cultures he was there to study. Overall, the diaries paint a picture of a narcissistic, judgmental westerner with a fetishistic fascination for people that he sees as different.

This piece would be about how hard it is to understand difference and how thrilling it is to try. It would be about the potentially annihilating gaze of the so-called-objective observer, and about how any time you attempt to describe something else, you always end up describing yourself. I have a hunch that taking the time to reflect, 100 years later, on the blind spots of early anthropological discourse would result in a timely, urgent and engaging piece of theatre for contemporary audiences.

Performance Notion: Beckett & Bion

I used to keep my ideas for future devised pieces hidden safe in a little black notebook, scrawled in big excited letters, waiting for the day when I had the time and resources to manifest them. Not sure where that book is today, and given that we live in an age of over-sharing, I’ll record them here. Feel free to steal them if they appeal to you.

A two-person piece about Samuel Beckett’s relationship with his psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. At age 27, Beckett was in a deep depression after the death of his father and had an uncomfortable relationship with his strict mother. As psychoanalysis was illegal in Ireland, he traveled to London where he became Bion’s second patient ever. There’s ample source material (Beckett wrote about Bion and Bion wrote several essays that some speculate were about Beckett), and as long as I could keep the Beckett estate out of it, it could be a really beautiful, strange piece – genius, melancholy, friendship, healing, and the murky workings of the unconscious mind.

Thin as Foil

“Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.” (Beckett, The Unnamables)

Erotophronesis

Like Shakespeare, I like to invent words. However, unlike his, I don’t think mine will catch on. Like this one:

EROTOPHRONESIS

Go ahead. Try to say it. Rolls right off the tongue.

The word “philosophy” as you probably know, comes from the roots philia and sophia and is usually translated as “love of wisdom.”

But those clever Greeks had other words for love and wisdom.

Eros, as you also probably know, is the kind of love that lies in the body. Unlike philia, which is an abstract, transcendental form of affection, eros is sexually-charged desire with the potential to incite change, growth, or chaos.

Related to the word for light, sophia is the kind of wisdom that you gain through looking; it’s the result of outside observation paired with thoughtful consideration. Phronesis, however, was used by ancient Greeks to describe knowledge that develops through first-hand experience. While sophia helps you contemplate the nature of the world, phronesis must be used to determine a course of action that will generate change. Phronesis is something that comes with age and practice and that can’t be explained through words or pictures.

Erotophronesis. Erotic love of embodied knowledge.

The term isn’t very catchy. But the concept is a virus that I’d like to spread.

Creation Myths

In theatre and performance studies, we have a story that we tell about the origins of drama. In the misty pre-history of humanity, rituals were performed to the gods incorporating song, dance, special apparel, manipulation of props, and the recitation of intentional language.

In this legend, these transpersonal, spiritual events eventually shifted to interpersonal, social events. While retaining ritual-like techniques, theatre became a forum in which citizens told stories to other citizens about issues of shared import. Speaking to one another instead of to the gods, we no longer expected our rituals to actually work, but instead to represent. Rather than attempting real-world transformation, theatre tried to show us what transformation looks like.

This origin myth is a necessary foundation for many revolutionaries in the theatre and performing arts. They say – sometimes in a hushed whisper – let’s return drama to its roots in ritual. Let’s forgo the gaudy illustrations of human suffering, joy, and healing. Instead, let’s actually experience suffering and joy onstage. Let’s actually enact healing rites inside the charmed circle of spectators.

With deep appreciation I welcome these innovations to the imagined community of Western Drama. Without them we’d remain mired in the fantasy of objective rationality inherited from the Greeks or obsessed with the irrefutable authority of the text as truth inherited from our Judeo-Christian traditions. Yet I am always skeptical about quests for origins. The reality you find is never as good as the dream you sought, and looking towards an idealized past is often just a rejection of the present.

What if we turned the myth around? What if rather than ritual begetting theatre, what if theatre begat ritual? Perhaps a pre-historic human got up on a rock and began to wail and flail the felt forms of her personal experience across the fire to her watching friend. Perhaps the friend understood, perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps the performer was changed by her attempt to share with an attentive other the infinity she felt within her.

Maybe the next night the friend was gone and the pre-historic performer repeated the wail and flail, looking up into the night sky and hoping that some distant, invisible friend might see her. Perhaps she did it the next night, and the next, or on every full moon or every time she saw a shooting star or just every time she felt alone. Performance is pleasurable. Pleasure wants to repeat itself. Repetition begats ritual.

If pre-historic performance art as the precursor to organized religion is too much of a stretch, at least let's consider ritual and theatre side by side rather than parent and child. Both give form to the baffling sensations that rattle around inside the human body and pierce its permeable border. Whether sharing those forms with close friends, the majesty of the empty night sky, or an obeisance-requesting deity, we enact the shapes of our striving and - in hushed whispers - hope that this enactment will yield transformation.

The Rosenberg Project

This quarter in my dramaturgy class we’re developing performance pieces based on the court transcripts from the Rosenberg Trial. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as you probably remember from high school history class, were executed in June 1953 for passing along nuclear information to Soviet Russia. Our source material for the project is two-thousand pages of stenographers notes released in 2008.

With this as inspiration, I now begin development of a one-act group performance piece that will include movement, dialogue, music and possibly projections. Rather than creating a full script, I’ll be building an aesthetic and thematic foundation for the piece, and sketching out a roadmap for the methods I could take into a collaborative rehearsal process.

In my prior experience with devised and ensemble-generated work I’ve entered the process with only preliminary ideas and relied on the creativity of the group to flesh everything out. While I love this mode of production, I’m not always lucky enough to have a throng of willing collaborators able to start a project from scratch. Developing a process through which I can get halfway down the road myself will be practically useful to my future work.

In addition to doing dramaturgical research for this project, I’ll also be doing embodied research as part of my weekly solo training practice. Working with song, movement, recorded and memorized texts, images and objects, I’ll begin building a world for this piece in the space of my body and the rehearsal studio.

I’ve just begun to sift through the stenographer’s notes, not to mention the bountiful secondary sources available, so I have no idea at this moment where this research will take me. But I keep thinking about Bradley Manning, the soldier who’s currently in solitary confinement for passing information Wikileaks. The Rosenbergs passed classified information to the Soviets, but Bradley placed it someplace even more dangerous – in the hands of the public.

Stalking the Dramaturg

Few people in the United States who are not directly involved with making theatre know what a dramaturg is, and many of us who are devoted to the craft still have a hard time understanding or describing what exactly the job entails.

It’s a confusing term! The awkward “turg” (or “turge” if you’re French) comes from the Greek word for “making.” But isn’t everyone who works on a show somehow responsible for its making? Why is the dramaturg etymologically saddled with such a heavy task?

As part of the beauty of the position lies in its flexibility, dramaturgs themselves are loathe to over-define their role. Generalizing grandly, dramaturgs are charged with the duty of thinking critically about the historical and aesthetic world of a performance (both before and throughout the rehearsal process) and collaborating with others to help integrate that information into what the audience experiences.

A famous dramaturg was asked once what exactly he did and his response was simply: “I question.”

On the first day of my dramaturgy class, we brainstormed alternative answers to this question. The list we made reminds me why I love dramaturgy.

I visualize
I gather
I make connections
I research
I probe
I challenge
I support
I provoke
I remind
I stimulate
I translate
I adapt
I inspire
I refocus
I synthesize
I chronicle
I witness
I record
I remember

All of these actions seem powerful, productive, and truly necessary for engaged art-making practice. Dramaturgs in the (blogospherical) house, do you have any additions that we forgot? Anything on this list you’d like to question?

Tiny Imaginary Play #8

A giant velvet curtain covers the stage.

A particularly fantastic portion of Handel's messiah plays and the curtain begins to rise.

A woman is revealed standing onstage atop a small pedestal.

She is wearing a corset cinched around her middle and a long petticoat and would look like a half-dressed Elizabethan but for the dark sunglasses.

CORSET: I am here to tell you something very important. Thank you for coming, I was afraid no one was going to make it on account of all the rain. The message I bring you is not just from myself, it's a gift from the beyond, no, not God, and not aliens either, though I'm sure there's more life out there somewhere, aren't you? I am talking about history -- all of those that have come before, whose flesh begat ours, who've strutted and fretted their lives upon this planet, they're still here, no, not ghosts, though I'm sure ghosts exist also -- but more like cellular memories that inhabit me and you and that chair and that curtain. We are all vessels for that which has been, and today I'm going to speak, because that chair cannot and today you're attending to me, for which, did I mention thanks? So. Anyway. Here I go.

She takes a deep breath.

CORSET: Hold on, I think I have to take this off. Hard to breathe.

With expert hands she unlaces the corset rapidly, creating satisfying whipping noises. She pulls the laces all the way out of the eyelets.

In the moment the corset drops off her body, the woman's image wavers, then, in an instant, dissolves completely, leaving only a few sparking atoms in the air where she once stood.

The curtain falls.

(Written 3/5/11, after Solo Training Session #8)

The Imaginary Spectator: Interior Scroll

(In this new series, "The Imaginary Spectator," I narrate from an imaginary first-person perspective certain famous performances across history that I wish I'd actually seen.)

August 29th, 1975 – Dispatch from the "Women Here and Now" Festival in East Hampton, Long Island.

This evening I had the privilege of witnessing a unique performance by artist Carolee Schneeman. About twenty of us, mostly female artists from New York City, convened in the large exhibition hall to see each other’s work - primarily paintings and sculptures. In the corner, there was an empty table dimly lit by two spotlights. Schneeman entered wrapped in white sheets, carrying a paperback book and a white paint bucket filled with an unknown substance.

She placed one sheet over the table then got up on top of it, announcing that she was going to read for us from her book. She then unwrapped herself from the second sheet, revealing her costume – a small white apron covering only her lap.

Schneeman reached into the bucket and began painting the contours of her body with a mud-like substance. As it dried, the markings changed colors and crackled, transforming her image into something simultaneously wretched and ritualistic. She then performed a series of gestural poses as though she were the model at a figure drawing class.

Her anatomy was both emphasized and abstracted by the paint marks on her skin and I kept thinking about the frustrating endurance of the notion of the woman-as-ideal-form. It’s embarrassing how attached we still are –in 1975!— to the image of woman as art object. Can we not, at this late date in history, apprehend the female body as more than just something to be looked at, desired and guarded?

Moving through the poses, she read to us from her book entitled Cezanne, She was a Great Painter. The book begins something like this: "At age twelve, I knew only a few names of the great artists of history...I chose a painter named Cézanne for my mascot; I assumed unquestionably that Cézanne was a woman."

Schneeman then put down the book, stood up, and removed her apron. While full frontal nudity has become increasingly common in performance art these days, what came next was a surprise to all of us. She reached between her legs and began to extract, from her vagina, a piece of long brown paper. Hunched forward in a wide stance, she looked like she was birthing the crinkled scroll with her hands alone as midwife, nurse and doctor. As she pulled it out, she read from the text typed on the paper. I’m recreating it solely from memory, but I believe it began like this:

I met a happy man - A Structuralist filmmaker
who said, you know we like you
We think you're lovely
But don't ask us to watch your films
We don’t want to see your personal clutter, your persistence of emotions,
your hand-touch sensibility, your journalistic indulgence,
your disgusting mess, your angry gestalt.

He said do it like me – just take one thing, and follow it through
Create a system, a set, like Pythagoras!

We can be friends, he said, equally
But we cannot be artists equally

He told me he had lived once with a sculptress
I asked, does that make me a “filmmakeress?”
He said no, we think of you as a dancer.

We all watched intently, small noises erupting from the mouths of other female artists in the room, many of whom can sympathize with this feeling. The women at this conference are tired of being cast always in the role of art muse and fighting to be seen as legitimate art makers. Are the aesthetic products of our bodies, minds, and life experiences never to be valued equally with the work of our male compatriots, who seem to deny that their work too emerges from the dense soil of their bodies?

Finally, Schneeman dropped the scroll, climbed off the table and walked out, covered only by the mud-like residue of her struggle. The audience applauded thoughtfully then stood in silence for a while, looking at the detritus of this intimate performance: the book, the sheets, the crumpled brown paper.

This short performance was one of the most affective I have ever witnessed. None of us in that room will ever forget it, and I hope that Schneeman will have the opportunity to present it again. I’d like her structuralist filmmaker to experience this piece. I wonder if he’d consider it a dance recital.

Tiny Imaginary Play #7

Two genderless beings are having tea. They drink out of delicate porcelain cups with matching saucers.

The teapot, which has a candle under it so it will stay warm all day, is almost out of hot water. Wet chrysanthemums crowd the tea strainer.

HABUS: I've been wanting to talk to you about something delicate...
TABUS: Just spit it out.
HABUS: You smell.
TABUS: Fuck you!
HABUS: Not really you, actually, I think it's your deodorant.
TABUS: Of course my deodorant smells, that's what it's supposed to do, smell to keep me from smelling.
HABUS: But it smells worse than you do.
TABUS: Oh

They sip their tea for a moment in silence.

TABUS: Can you smell it now?
HABUS: Yup, can't you?

TABUS sniffs.

TABUS: Maybe. But I like it. It smells...safe.

The tea-shoppe proprietor, or perhaps her assistant, approaches them.

MARIE: More hot water?
TABUS: Can you smell me?
MARIE: All I can smell is chrysanthemums. Would you like more tea?
HABUS: Excuse me, I think you have something on your shirt.

Habus reaches out for what ze thinks is a small caterpillar that has attached itself to Marie's shirt, right below her sternum, but as ze pulls it, ze finds that it is attached, through a small aperture, to the inside of her body. Ze keeps pulling and the caterpillar unfurls itself out of Marie's chest until the table between them is covered in meters and meters of yellow and black caterpillar fur.

Finally, with a strange rush of wind, the far end emerges.

Marie's eyes roll around in her head and for a moment it looks like she is about to faint. Habus and Tabus stand up, preparing to help her. But then her vision clears and she picks up the teapot decisively.

MARIE: I'll go get you some more hot water. Sit down! Be comfortable! Oh, and just brush that off onto the floor okay? I'll come sweep it up later.

She exits. Habus and Tabus look down at the table with suspicion, then sit awkwardly down again. What will happen to the strange mass between them?

(Written after Solo Training Session #7, 2/25/11)

Eonnagata's Interpellation

A few weeks ago I saw Eonnagata, a collaborative theatre piece by a trio of acclaimed artists who also serve as its sole performers. Theatrical innovator Robert Lepage, ballerina-turned-contempory-dancer Sylvie Guillem and choreographer Russell Maliphant premiered Eonnagata in London in 2009 and recently brought it to the states on a brief and limited tour. They take as their storyline the history of the Chevalier d'Eon, an 18th century french diplomat and spy who lived the first part of his life as a man and the second half as a woman. Most accurately described as dance-theatre, it blends theatre, dance, martial arts, visual spectacle, and a Kabuki technique of cross-gender performance called onnagata.

I saw the piece at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Theatre, which was probably a few hundred short of its 2000 seat capacity, and found myself almost blissfully engaged throughout the entire performance. There was a great interpretive openness that allowed my mind to drift in and out of their visually stimulating world. The minimal text and frequently changing mis-en-scene invited me to assemble the pieces as I saw fit, which I deeply enjoy, and if I was ever lacking engagement, I had merely to turn my attention to the breathtaking grace of Sylvie Guillem, who moves like something out of a liquid dream.

The piece was certainly not flawless. The staging was frequently stuck centerstage, their reliance on expensive design elements was a little too easy, the dancers didn't handle spoken or sung language particularly well, and Lepage's limited dance abilities held the trio back.

And still I loved it. The piece called out to an audience that I don't quite believe exists yet in the United States. It interpellated us as viewers who embrace the non-linearity and characterlessness of post-dramatic performance art. It trusted that we too were interested in a world in which gender doesn't resolve itself to an entrapping binary, and where performances of self-expression are not merely in service of a constantly hardening and sedimenting individual ego. These are things that I frequently see in small fringe theatre and dance spaces in San Francisco and New York. Seeing them explored onstage in a large venue to a seemingly warm audience was exciting.

I believe we can say things in art that we don't yet have the words to say in critical and academic discourse. In Eonnagata, I felt Lepage, Guillem and Maliphant reaching towards new visions of gender and embodiment - visions that are as yet unarticulatable with language, but might be almost graspable through attending deeply to the materiality of bodies in motion onstage.

Tiny Imaginary Play #6

A crowd of people stand at the top of a hill on a sunny windy day.

Half have their hands jammed into their pockets to fend off the cold.

The other half have their arms stretched out into the air like they could take off at any moment.

The wind sounds like a symphony and the birds seem to cry welcome.

BIRD #1: Craven crawlers, crispy palms
BIRD #2: Sun snuggle noonday down the hard therefoot.
BIRD #1: Ceasing up? Down a long dawn side.
BIRD #2: Richer then fullsong louden alltune time
BIRD #1: Now ringthen?
BIRD #2: Ring to then.

One person with his hands in his pockets pulls out a harmonica and starts to play.

Barely audible over the whistling air, the tinny chords sound strangely noble.

Two of the ones with arms outstretched move closer and reach down to hold hands, their rigid limbs softening as they meet each other. Together, they run down the hill towards where they can hear each other more clearly.

Lover #1: It's warm if you lie right there, on the dark rocks where the sun bakes.
Lover #2: You first.

Lover #1 lies down in the dark rocks. Lover #2 lies down next to her. If they strain, they can still hear the harmonica.


(Written after viewing the video documentation of Solo Training Session #6, 2/23/11)

I'm Not Offended

I’m trying to stop using the phrase “offended” to describe my response to works of art. “Offended” is a cop-out word, a polite substitute for what I’m actually feeling, which is usually closer to hurt or anger.

Some art hurts me. Often it breaks my heart consensually, painfully cracking me open in that way that hurts but feels good at the same time. The pain is a sign that the intensity of the work’s vision is spreading to me, where it has the potential to change me. Change hurts.

Some art hurts me in a non-consensual way. Some ideas, like unchallenged expressions of bigotry, feel particularly poisonous or dangerous when nestled into a work of art. I don’t want them to get inside me and I’m scared of what they’ll do if they take root in other people.

In the wake of this fear travels anger. Anger at ideas that I think are cruel or unfair, at people who spread them, and at their power to access a pulpit.

All of these experiences – hurt, fear, anger – can generate energy. Rather than use that energy to shout “I’m offended!” I’d like to use it to make more art, “better” (in my opinion) art, that speaks more directly to the world I live in and the one I envision.

Saying “I’m offended” carries the spectre of censorship. It’s an attempt to claim moral high ground without first acknowledging the vulnerable experiences of hurt, fear, and anger. Rather than hardening into feeling offended, I want to first feel what the work of art is conjuring inside me, then discuss why, then, if there is still energy left over from the exchange, create something new in response to my experience.

Being offended has the subtle air of privilege. When you’re offended you seem to say “Well I can handle the intensity of this art, but other people can’t. Women and children shouldn’t see this. Weak-minded or weak-willed individuals couldn’t understand its ambiguity. So it should change or go away entirely.” We don’t always watch with our own eyes alone, often our response to art is caught up with our fantasies and fears of how other people would respond to it. This kind of collective spectatorship can be a manifestation of empathy, but it can also point to a distrust of other people’s ability to process input, both pleasure and pain.

When a work of art hurts me (in that non-consensual way) sometimes I think “Dear God, don’t let others be hurt by this the way that I was.” The pain of representation and misrepresentation can hurt like sticks and stones. But if set into motion, the energy of that pain and anger can transform into new forces of expression.

Being offended is an (ultimately futile) attempt to stop the forceful exchange of expression and responsiveness. Instead let's express and respond even more fully, even more energetically, with deeper respect and greater endurance.

Tiny Imaginary Play #5

A pock-marked man in uniform looks out over the grey sea.

He can feel the salty wind on his face, its noise almost drowning out the clanging sound of some piece of equipment bouncing against the ship’s hull.

A second man approaches, also in uniform. He’s wearing sunglasses.

SHADES: Don’t do it.
POCKS: Hrm?
SHADES: Don’t look out over the grey sea and ponder the uselessness of it all.
POCKS: M’not.
SHADES: Can see it in your eyes.
POCKS: Just looking.
SHADES: You should look when no-one else is looking. At you looking.
POCKS: Shouldn’t you be somewhere?
SHADES: Got tired of playing World of Warcraft with teenagers in Tennessee.
POCKS: Tired of getting your ass kicked you mean.
SHADES: I don’t play because I’m good, I play because it’s fun.

They look out at the grey sea and ponder the uselessness of it all.

POCKS: I love her I miss her I don’t know if I love her or if I’m just lonely I don’t know how to talk to her I don’t know how to touch her she’s a foreign country without a consulate and I don’t know the local customs and I can’t stomach the food and I know she knows me but she also doesn’t know me and I can’t tell if the me she knows is me or not and if it isn’t do I want to become that me or is it a trap she’s luring me towards so that all the other me’s that may or may not be realer than her version end up vanishing into the ether and what happens to this me the one without limits the quiet one I feel moving in the nighttime and speeding with the sky the one that loves the rush of acceleration and the absent breathing stillness of no one watching I’m afraid that this one will die I’m afraid to lose the most abstract corners of myself I don’t want to map their contours I don’t want to plumb their depths and I’m afraid she won’t let me leave anything vague and sometimes I want more than anything to be left in peace in vagueness.

SHADES takes off his sunglasses and looks at POCKS for a moment.

SHADES: Wanna go play Crysis?
POCKS: Sure.

They exit.


(Written 2/16/11 after Solo Training Session #5)

entropy. redress.

My friend and collaborator Rhonda Soikowski, who works on the edge of performance practice, embodied research, and pedagogical innovation, recently asked me to participate in her current project titled entropy. redress.

Rhonda invited collaborators to create short video pieces incorporating a single red dress that criss-crossed the globe. Shortly before I got my hot little hands on it, the dress was ripped untimely from the land and disappeared into the Mediterranean. Our small constraint reduced to none, myself and my collaborators Joe Moore and Beth Hersh took to the beach to try to reach towards the lost object.

Click on the image below to see the results of our work. How Rhonda will incorporate it into her piece is still unknown, but it was a privilege and a pleasure to be a part of the journey.

Tiny Imaginary Play #4

Two people sit in a large bathtub, heads on opposite sides.

They are sorta blissed out, each in their own way.

PERSON #1: Can you turn on the jets?
PERSON #2: Shhhhhhhhhhhh
PERSON #1: What?
PERSON #2: I'm thinking
PERSON #1: Can't you think with the jets on?

Person #2 shakes head.

Time passes.

The ceiling dissolves and above the bathtub swirl constellations and meteors and new galaxies only recently discovered and captured by Hubble photographers. The moon rises through the astral dust til it's perching above them where it begins
to pulse and hum.

Person #1 turns on the jets.

The ceiling quickly returns.

PERSON #2: Goddamn it!
PERSON #1: Can you pass the loofa?

Person #1 throws the loofa at Person #2.

PERSON #2: You always gotta do that kinda shit.
PERSON #1 (loofa-ing): Can you run the hot? Water's getting cold.



(Written 2/3/11, after Solo Training Session #4)

Movin’ On Up: Clybourne Park at ACT

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play Raisin in the Sun looms large in the history of American theatre. As my playwriting teacher Cherrie Moraga described it, for a black female playwright to be produced on Broadway in that climate, she had to write the mother of all “well-made plays.” Indeed, the characters and plot are wrought so skillfully that not even that era’s heavy fog of racism and sexism could cloud the eyes of the Pulitzer committee. Over the past half-century, Raisin continues to be taught in high school classrooms and produced extensively, especially on college campuses.

I admire the boldness of playwright Bruce Norris, whose new play Clybourne Park is in direct conversation with Hansberry’s. At the end of Raisin, the Younger family moves out of their cramped apartment in the south side of Chicago to the fictional white neighborhood of Clybourne Park, willing to take on the potential racism of their new neighbors in pursuit of a better life for their family. Norris’s play takes place in the very house that the Younger family purchases: Act One is set in 1959, as the prior occupants, a husband and wife haunted by the death of their son, pack their final boxes. Act Two is set in 2009 in the now run-down house in the now black neighborhood that has been purchased and scheduled for heavy renovation by a middle-class white couple.

I’ve had the privilege of seeing Clybourne Park twice – once at its New York premiere at Playwright’s Horizons, and last weekend at ACT in San Francisco – giving me ample opportunity to muse on its successes and limitations.

It’s great to see a play that takes on the urgent question of gentrification. We’re asked to consider the politics of who lives where, in proximity to whom, and what facilitates and limits freedom of movement within cities and between communities. Norris’s play acknowledges that the living-room drama is (and in fact has always been) synonymous with the drama of the local community and the larger society. In foregrounding the inter-articulation of family and society, this play attends to the truth that (in this country, at least) conversations about race are always conversations about class, capitalism, and the history of exploiting human beings for profit.

I’m a sucker for plays that use theatrical devices to put history into direct conversation with the present (see Stoppard’s Arcadia, Churchill’s Cloud Nine). They seem to make un-ignorable the truth that “the way things are” is a product of “the way things were,” rather than a natural, unalterable state of affairs. Both the SF and the NYC audiences seemed to “get” the connections the playwright was drawing between “then” and “now”– made clear by their timely laughter and thoughtful harrumphs.

However, despite finding content and form appealing, ultimately Clybourne Park doesn’t satisfy me. Here’s why.

The story of gentrification is the story of privilege. Privilege is getting what you want without too much work. We have terms like “silver spoon” and “silver platter” to help us talk about the materiality of privilege.

Ultimately, much of the drama and almost all of the comedy of Clybourne Park emerges from the difficulty white people have talking about race. The heat and confusion of this difficulty is very sympathetic to audiences at expensive theatres in New York and San Francisco, most of whom are white, middle-class or higher and progressive enough to truly care about issues of class and racial privilege in this country. It’s fine to make plays that speak specifically to this audience (and in fact Norris has said that he is trying to do exactly that). The only problem is that when a play presents issues to an audience from a perspective so similar to their own, they don’t have to work that hard to “get” it. There is no empathetic reach on the part of the viewers to understand what is transpiring onstage in front of them, the kind of reach made by the audience at the premiere of Raisin in the Sun in 1959. It is this reach, and the bravery of a playwright who compels her audience to make such a reach, that results in watershed moments in theatre history.

The other kind of playwriting is the artistic equivalent of the silver platter. The privileged audience sees privileged characters stumbling uncomfortably over their own privilege, and gets to laugh and cry at it from the safety of the velvet chair – thus releasing the pressure valve of that tension in their own lives. Rather than asking the audience to step forward towards the unknown realm of another person's reality, I worry that Clybourne Park holds the platter out too far, requiring too little from the viewers and thus participating in the same structures of inequality that it critiques.

Tiny Imaginary Play #3

Two women sit in an urban park throwing bread crumbs to pigeons.

One has hair so long it twirls around her body to the ground, where it blends in with the autumn leaves.

The second has fingernails so long that their curlicues dance with every gesture. She is visibly pregnant.

They look at the birds.

ONE WITH THE HAIR: The first time you really think you're going to die. Each contraction feels that much closer, and you keep thinking of all the women throughout history who've died in childbirth, and all the animals that die immediately after giving birth --

The woman with the fingernails gives her a look.

HAIR: Sorry.

They go back to feeding the birds.

HAIR: When my second was born, though, it felt like an orgasm.

FINGERNAILS: They say death feels like that too.

HAIR: Men get erections, right?

FINGERNAILS: I think that's just in Beckett

HAIR: No, really, I think it's rigor mortis or something.

FINGERNAILS: I mean better, like the release.

HAIR: Who says?

FINGERNAILS: I guess it's a hypothesis.

Suddenly a pigeon falls out of the sky with a splat, landing in front of them. It stands up, tries to take a few steps, and then falls over dead.

The women look at each other.

FINGERNAILS: I wish I could just skip to the second time.

(Written 02/02/11, after Solo Training Session #3)

Feminist Methods

So I considered taking a class this quarter called "Feminist Methods." My plate was too full for the additional course, but the title keeps ringing in my head. I know it's basically a class examining how feminist methodologies are used in research practices across the academic disciplines: history, literature, sociology, psychology, etc. But I keep thinking of all the other things this course could offer.

I sometimes feel completely baffled about how to live in a world that remains unrelentingly sexist, racist, classist, homophobic and xenophobic. Despite progress (and lip-service to progress) I feel like I run up against institutionalized inequalities every day. And I live in San Francisco! And I spend most of my time at a university! How do other people even manage?

I know I'm highly sensitive to the suffering caused by sex and gender prejudices; I always have been. And it feels like the more I learn about the world, the more sensitive I become to identity-based injustices.

I have taken many a course on how to see and analyze these injustices, but not a single one that teaches me how to deal with the difficulty of integrating this knowledge into my daily life. It's painful to walk through the world perceiving these half-visible hegemonic structures holding us all trapped in places we don't want to be. I need guidance on how to deal with the information I've gained.

If I were teaching a class called Feminist Methods, my syllabus would include these topics:

- Feminist methods for approaching the study of history without breaking down into tears when you realize that women are systematically left out of most of the juicy parts.

- Feminist methods for appreciating Western art even though 90% of the time women are stuck being the looked-at subject, not the creator.

- Feminist methods for dealing with street harassment from men, especially across cultural lines and in countries that are not your own.

- Feminist methods for thinking about and interacting with pornography in a way that celebrates sexuality, resists censorship and opposes exploitation.

- Feminist methods for getting over jealousy and competitiveness towards other women over who's prettier, sexier, smarter, more capable, more put together, etc...

- Feminist methods for not getting angry when people call you an angry feminist.

- Feminist methods for holding faith that a highly sensitive, responsive, emotional, intuitive, receptive, accepting mode of human interaction is just as valuable as an assertive, rational mode.

- Feminist methods for approaching the monumental task of motherhood with respect even though it's devalued and sentimentalized by Western culture, and usually entails sacrificing hard-won power and privileges in your professional life.

- Feminist methods for forgiving your father, since he's stuck in the system as much as you are.

- Feminist methods for not confusing your boyfriend/husband/lover/friend with the patriarchy just because he's grown up with subtle privileges of having a penis.

- Feminist methods for avoiding the psychic burnout of remaining a feminist.

If you know of any place that offers coursework like this, would you let me know? I could really use it.

And I'm sure there are topics missing from this hypothetical syllabus. What would you add?

Tiny Imaginary Play #2

A bright world full of light and sand.
A young woman in white, veiled, spins slowly.
She looks like an angel or a prophet or a nun or the virgin Mary or the sacred whore Magdalene or a particularly poised belly-dancer or the Western fantasy of a mystic Hindu saint.

She starts to sing, at first so quietly you can barely hear her. No words, just wails and warbles.

Her song grows louder, filling with strange resonances and dissonant overtones. Soon you realize that it isn't her singing after all. It's a recording, you can feel the amplified reverberations in your bones.

She stops abruptly. Suddenly the world is dark and silent and the woman is on her knees. Her muscles clench, her body heaves, and from her throat, past her lips, into her hand emerges a crystal-clear jewel, dazzlingly brilliant.

She heaves again and, like a cosmic hairball, coughs up another jewel.

Holding one in each hand, she rises quickly, as though she's heard something coming. (Do you hear something?) She turns around in the space, listening intently.

The music begins again and the woman begins a slow-motion battle with an invisible enemy. She wields the jewels like weapons and they seem to glow in her palms.

Shadowboxing.
Sciomachia.

She fights for so long that the audience eventually gets up and wanders off.

She keeps fighting. It's beautiful and sad. And boring.

(Written 1/21/11, after Solo Training Session #2)

Syncopated Censorship

The rhythm of self-censorship is syncopated. Like coming in on the upbeat instead of the downbeat, self-censorship is premature; you restrict your own self-expression in advance, so as to not risk being silenced by someone else.

Expectations about what we do or don’t express are the unwritten rules of social groups, and ignoring them is tantamount to challenging the authority of existing power structures. The “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy of the U.S Military was an extreme, legislated form of expected self-censorship. Gay men and women were required to remain invisible or be rendered invisible through discharge from the service. Paradoxically, self-censorship both precedes and is a result of external censorship. Syncopation.

When expectations about self-censorship are outright flaunted, things get interesting. These moments force into the public eye the ongoing negotiations between internal and external censorship. Breaking a taboo always serves to bring that taboo to light, thus exposing the machinery of social order.

One example of flaunting expectations of self-censorship is the “Too Soon” joke.

The “Too Soon” joke is a joke of variable offensiveness that is made unbearably offensive because it’s told “too soon” after the tragic event to which it refers. The more traumatic the event, the more likely the cry “too soon” will arise from the audience. The “too soon” joke also operates on the syncopated rhythm of prematurity. Self-censorship is covering your mouth before someone else can do it, and the “too soon” joke is uncovering your mouth before the collective decision that it’s acceptable to do so.

One of the most famous examples of the "too soon" joke was comedian Gilbert Gottfried's performance at the Hugh Hefner Roast at the Friar's Club on Nov 4th, 2001, three weeks after 9/11. The atmosphere of this event was unique - the traditionally raucous, offensive nature of a roast was at odds with the emotional sensitivity of New Yorkers in the wake of the attacks. And then Gottfried, known for pushing boundaries of appropriateness, cracks a joke about his flight from LA to NY making an unexpected connection at the Empire State Building.

The audience turns on him, booing and shouting "too soon!" What was not even a very good joke in the first place threatens to ruin the whole party.

In response, Gottfried immediately launches into the dirtiest joke of all time – "The Aristocrats." Suddenly the image of planes hitting buildings is replaced by images of sex, violence, excrement, incest and beastiality.

The joke goes on for almost ten minutes, and Gottfried's aggressive delivery seems like comedic retribution against his audience - "You didn't like that joke? FINE! Have this one!"

Oddly enough, this horrible, disgusting joke eventually wins them back.

I wasn't there so I can't claim authority, but it seems Gottfried did a bit of a magic trick. The 9/11 joke conjured uncomfortable emotions that the audience wasn't yet ready to process. However, that discomfort was quickly re-purposed as disgust at the X-rated "Aristocrats". And through the elaborate, increasingly ridiculous telling of that joke, the disgust was transformed and released as laughter.

Not only did Gottfried bring into public awareness the ever-present tension between external and internal censorship, but he also reminded his audience that sometimes too soon is right on time.

The rhythm of the artist-activist is necessarily syncopated. We must risk speaking too soon for comfort. Sometimes the art lies in finding roundabout ways to address those questions that beat urgently inside us like so many winged creatures, wanting to get out.

Tiny Imaginary Play #1

Empty stage.
Upstage right, a drumset.

A drummer enters, sits down, starts fooling around on the drums, amusing himself.

Three women enter, wearing black coats of various styles (leather, overcoat, ski jacket, etc) over dance-training apparel. They are barefoot and look vulnerable, protected only by their bulky jackets.

They dance. It involves lots of elbows and angles. Their coats simultaneously inhibit their movements and make their dance more interesting.

The drummer continues playing. He's not accompanying the dancers. Rather they seem to accompany him.

A large, beautiful woman in a red sequined dress enters downstage left. She and the drummer greet each other. She gets into his groove, she begins to sing

WOMAN:
What do ya say to the hole?
What do ya say to the hole?
What do ya say, tell me what do ya say
to the hole in the bottom of the well?

We start to hear the dancers as they move. Not words just sounds, animalian and breathing.

They begin to remove their coats, each in her own way. It's a struggle.

Playful struggle?
Frustrating struggle?
Hopeless struggle?

As each coat is removed, something is revealed on each woman's body. A hidden prop, a jagged scar, a bleeding wound, a fresh tattoo?

They look at the audience for a long beat, then exit. The woman in red sings the final verse of the song, and lights dim.

WOMAN:
What do ya see in the hole?
What do ya see in the hole?
What do ya see, tell me what do ya see
in the hole in the middle of the sky?

(Written 1/14/11, after Solo Training Session #1)

Embodied Practice as Research

Current theatre scholarship, especially in this country, is beginning to adjust to the notion of embodied practice as a form of legitimate research into questions of performance, philosophy, psychology, subjectivity, relationality and community.

The academic study of theatre and performance has historically relied on observation and analysis as primary knowledge-generating processes. Practice as research confounds this process because observer and observed are collapsed into one. How can I write objectively about my own experiences? How can I remain distanced enough to reflect upon performance and training when the heightened states they evoke seem to eliminate the very distance between the self-that-acts and the self-that-watches?

Of course, in a post-structuralist paradigm, the authority of the outside observer's objectivity is already in question. What do we lose in privileging this perspective over the inside, internal, intimate, view?

I've begun a solo training practice that I am using as part of my research into performance and philosophy. My goal is to court the void and my own fears, and to bring the questions I wrestle with in my mind into the medium of my moving body.

Writing about this kind of research is difficult. How does one transfer the information garnered from subjective experiences (many of which are non-discursive, technical, or just boring) to a larger audience? And to what end?

My current solution to this problem is twofold. I've created a separate blog which you can find here that will serve as a journal-style record of my studio experiences.

Secondly, after each session I am going to write a short text for performance (aka a "Tiny Imaginary Play") which I will share on this blog. In the spirit of Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays, I'll write these brief pieces immediately after my training practice. I find transforming experiences from one form to another quite generative. Translating the non-verbal, non-linear "text" of my improvised training practice into the highly structured medium of the performance text is a form of auto-remix that I hope will bring out aspects of the research that might not be captured by video or journal-style writing.

We Are Living in a Material World...

Relational Aesthetics is a term coined by art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to describe the kind of art wherein the medium of creativity is not marble or paint or sound or even words, but the interaction between human beings. It's not a completely new idea; Duchamp was talking about it in the 1950s: "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world."

But Bourriaud takes it a step further, questioning even the importance of a legible "work" at all. What if all that is made is a convivial, participatory experience? The notion of Relational Aesthetics makes even blurrier the line we sometimes draw between life and art, and is ultimately aligned with the project of collectively sculpting culture itself: "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist" (Bourriaud).

Responses to this provocative idea are manifold. Jacques Ranciere, a French philosopher, believes Bourriaud sells short the importance of the audience's act of viewing. In his book The Emancipated Spectator, Ranciere asks whether or not complete entanglement of audience, artist, and artwork is necessary for a real engagement to take place. Isn't watching, thinking, and considering a work of art also a shared experience? Are we ignoring the very real, if subtle, labor performed by the attentive spectator by demanding that she jump into the active space of convivial relationship? What would we lose in giving up the quiet receptivity of watching?

I find both of these positions compelling. I can't choose between them. I want a world filled with art that does both. I want art that demands I engage completely with it (like this, this and this) and I also want works that invite me to surrender to the experience of viewing, where I can fall into the sea of perception - not just the sea they've crafted for me, but the deeper waters of my own experiences, ideas, beliefs, and feelings to which I compare the world that they present to me.

I offer to you a snippet of a performance piece I made with some of my favorite collaborators in response to my readings on Relational Aesthetics and its discontents. This is only a portion of our piece, which involved fishing good-luck coins from a fountain, financial negotiations with our audience over rental of their footwear, and ritualistic foot-washing in preparation for performance. Playful and presentational, our silly dance number was a prefabricated gift to the audience as well as an attempt to collaborate on the continuous project of coexistence.

Dreams of Invisible Sycorax

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the witch Sycorax dies several years before the play begins, enduring only as memory. Banished from Algiers and abandoned on the island to fend for herself and the child in her womb, Sycorax represents not just the Northern African subject, but would have also been seen (in Shakespeare’s time) as a stand-in for the variety of indigenous people that Elizabethan England was encountering more and more due to the expansion of their colonial project abroad.

Sycorax is described as inhumanly powerful, with control over the moon and tides. Her fecundity and connection to lunar cycles link her with archetypal female sources of power. But her version of femininity is far from the dainty European femininity embodied in the young Miranda. Described as a hag "bent into a hoop," her gender identity is illegible and monstrous. This illegibility is present in her race as well. A Northern African with “blue eyes,” she is an exile and a mixed subject who ascends to ruler of her own small realm.

The prefix “syco” is related to the Greek word for “fig,” which was slang for vagina. “Ax” relates to the term “axis” or “axial,” invoking a center around which something turns. Before the arrival of Prospero and his daughter, the island of Sycorax and her son did, in fact, revolve around the axis of female power. Prospero, an embodiment of masculine European rationality whose magical powers derive from his books and spells alone, was only able to "prosper" on the isle in the vacuum of her absence.

Yet at the end of the play, Prospero and the rest of the Italians depart, leaving only the monstrous Caliban, the now-freed Ariel, and Sycorax's invisible but enduring presence. Around what axis will the world of the island now turn?

It's true that Sycorax’s invisibility in this play can be read simply as the forceful eviction of the powerful, racially-marked female from the patriarchal narrative. Old story. However, perhaps there is some grace to be found in the negative space of this hoveringly absent character. Both race and gender only hold sway as identification markers in the realm of the visible. What power can they have over an invisible witch?

An aporia upon which the entirety of the play depends, the legacy of Sycorax is handed down from Shakespeare to us to consider and elegize. What can post-colonialist, feminist artists and thinkers do with her legacy? “As long as we are on the trajectory of the visible, we are more or less innocent or guilty,” says theorist Helene Cixous. Perhaps we can consider Sycorax as blessed, rather than cursed, with invisibility. In any case, her spells are still active, drawing us towards her now-vacant island with an inverse sorcery that resists the verdict of either guilt or innocence.