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.