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.

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.

The Tempest: Provocative but incomplete

Provocative but ultimately uninspiring, Julie Taymor's film The Tempest was full of "incomplete gestures."

If memory serves, I borrowed this expression from one of my mentors, Robert Woodruff, years ago. Sometimes in art-making practice, audiences accept aesthetic choices that seem unjustified or erratic if the piece itself experiments with form in such a way that generally ignores or transcends traditional causal relationships. Robert – a director with a truly unique vision and no love of traditionalism in the theatre – encouraged formal innovation in his classroom but would never let us get away with what Homer Simpson describes as "weird for the sake of weird."

A play doesn't necessarily have to have a story, he told us, but it does require the evolution of an idea. The cause and effect relationships within a play need bear no resemblance to those of the outside world, but they do need to work together to build a world with internal logic, stakes and circumstances.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest poses many rich questions about the nature of power. From whence does power flow, and does its earned or unearned derivation affect how it should be used? How should one wield the power one possesses, and under what circumstances should one exert power over another? How does feeling powerful, or powerless, change the shape of your world?

Taymor is clearly drawn to the magnetism of these questions and how they relate to active identity markers in our current era. Casting Helen Mirren, a woman of approximately her own age and popular acclaim, in the role of Prospero (a role often considered the aging Shakespeare’s self-portrait) is an invitation to consider the state of the female artist, scholar, and culture-shaper today. But to what end? Mirren’s performance is strong, but feels shoehorned into an idea of Prospero that Taymor doesn’t relate to the rest of her production.

Her Caliban, played by Djimon Hounsou, is similarly problematic. Clearly West African in appearance, consistently half-naked and sometimes in chains, his character evokes the Atlantic slave trade. Prospero’s castle strongly resembles Elmina Castle, a slave-holding fort in Ghana where dehumanizing conditions were forced upon prisoners before they crossed through the “door of no return” onto slave ships. To what end? How does this idea evolve over the course of the play? Where does Caliban go when he exits the castle dramatically at the play’s end? I just hope he doesn’t end up in the colonies tending tobacco fields.

Slightly more successful but still incomplete is Taymor’s vision of the airy spirit Ariel. Played by a pale-painted Ben Whishaw, Ariel is, in this production, a genderqueer shape-shifter whose pectoral muscles sometimes soften into small breasts. In Ariel’s strongest and most frightening scene, s/he takes the form of a huge harpy, the angriest of female monsters. Are we to read Ariel-as-Harpy as the dangerous familiar of our female Prospero, who stakes a strong claim on traditionally masculine forms of power? Are we being asked to imagine gender as the cloven pine from whence this genderless creature dreams of escape? Once again the connections are almost there, but the internal logic doesn’t hold.

All of these gestures are promising but partial. As the time ticks by and the imperative of plot must be obeyed, the ideas contained in the bodies and costumes of Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel are dropped like unreturned serves on a tennis court. Of course, the film is not required to answer all the questions about race, gender, and sexual expression posed by both Shakespeare’s script and Taymor’s vision. Answers are boring! However, the practice of posing deep questions with rigorous engagement is vital. The incomplete nature of the otherwise interesting gestures disappointed at least this viewer, who hoped for a richer, more internally coherent and productive world.

Juliet, short and muscular

When I was 17, I played Juliet in a community theatre version of Romeo and Juliet. This was nearing the end of the phase in which I considered myself an actress. The year before, I'd played Madge in William Inge's mediocre play Picnic, a young pageant-winner described as "the prettiest girl in town." I was not an unpretty teen, but it was dawning on me that with my broad shoulders and square jaw, I wasn't quite pretty enough to be a professional actress. I felt like a fraud playing Madge, a role that Gwyneth Paltrow had played a few years before, but felt slightly more comfortable in Juliet's skin. Juliet is, after all, a tomboy. The consummate ingenue, she's also a rule-thwarting, death-unfazed badass who really, really wants to get laid.

The reviews were generally complimentary, but I couldn't get over the first few words of one critic's response: "Fairfield's Juliet, short and muscular..." What the reviewer was wrestling with wasn't my height (I'm not that short) or my unjustifiably sculpted deltoids, but the subtle genderqueerness of my teen persona. It was latent over a decade ago, but, like Juliet's lupine sexuality, was ready to pounce given the least provocation.

The lack of variety in gender expression of female actors in mainstream theatre is appalling. Blame for this can be scattered widely (and accurately) on agents, graduate schools, playwrights, heteronorm audiences, wary producers, and more. As a director, I'd like to personally call out directors for their painfully limited creativity when it comes to what versions of womanhood take center stage.

We need more dykes onstage. More tomboys and tough girls. More bois and butches and trannyboys and andros and genderfuckers. We need more subtly non-normative girls with square features and strong frames. We need tall women and deep-voiced women and short-haired women. And not just in ensemble-generated dance-theatre pieces in NYC and SF! We need butch Juliets, boyish Cozettes and dyky Blanche DuBois' on stages across the country. And we need brave directors - who trust audiences to welcome nature's spectrum of gender variance - to cast them.

Here's the deal. Under-representation of lesbian characters onstage is a serious matter, but a different one. We definitely need more stories of women loving women (playwrights: get on it, and directors: cross-gender casting, STAT!). But until the classical canon is toppled and filled with queer characters, let's remember that gender expression and sexual object-choice are not inherently linked. You can have a broad-shouldered, genderqueer female-identified ingenue pair beautifully with a leading man of any shape and size without sacrificing chemistry or believability. This short muscular Juliet was certainly in love with her sweet-faced, long-haired Romeo, but that's another story...

Bakhtin and Santarchy

So every year I await, with glee, this event.

Since winter of 2005, I have thrown in my lot with ho-ho-hoardes of manic Santas who pick a Saturday in December to gallivant though bars, clubs, and public spaces in the cities of their choice, spreading holiday cheer and purging late-winter angst. Clad in my homemade in-your-face-sexual-gender-queer-faux-cowgirl-fuzzy-raver Santa Suit (google image search "Santa Chaps" for proof), I hit the streets with my friends, feeling as though we're taking part in a contemporary version of the Bakhtinian "Carnival" - the secular social festivals of the European Middle Ages in which traditional class structures were temporarily inverted:

"One might say carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order. It marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed" (Bahktin, Rabelais and his World).

During Santarchy, everyone dressed as Santa is kin. Names dissolve into the sea of intersubjective Saint Nicks, and a strange secular sense of collective power is felt. A red mass united sans political program, Santas hug and make small talk, share spiked cocoa and discuss the intricacies of unique suit-construction. Santas fuck gently with the "muggles" (citizens and bar-goers that generally resemble them on any other day of the week), but have clear policies against fucking with kids or the police.

The trap of counter-cultural rituals like these is that the inversions are only temporary. As every Master's Thesis on the Burning Man Festival must contend with, Santarchy makes us wonder whether impermanent upswellings of culture-jamming collectivity actually challenge the authority of prevailing powers or ultimately reinforce them. Santarchy is of course guilty of most of the charges of contemporary pop culture events: reliance on internet access, unapologetic commercialism, racial-homogeneity, and latent sexism (while fiesty female Santaclowns abound, there are still a few exploitative gropey Santas).

Bahktin maintained faith that the wicked mirth generated by Carnival could ripple outwards and help to expose the "gay relativity" of all human cultural products. My Santarchy apologia relies similarly on my belief that sometimes we are what we pretend to be. Or rather, we have the potential to become more like those versions of ourselves that we strategically assume. My red-suited avatar is a sexually-liberated, gender-queer, loud-mouthed social muse that believes in the power of singing together, drinking together, and momentarily releasing the given name that binds me inside a claustrophobically singular identity. My Santa isn't afraid of death or final papers or Gropey McDrunkenClaus or the surprisingly aggressive SFPD because she has her bearded tribe at her back and peppermint schnapps in her flask.

Unsuited now, I return to my law-abiding, sobriety-favoring, responsibility-bearing graduate student life. Till next year, Santa.