The Rainbow Passage

"When sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Throughout the centuries men have explained the rainbow in various ways. Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation. To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more universal floods. The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain. The Norse men consider the rainbow as a bridge over which the gods passed from earth to their home in the sky.  Other men have tried to explain the phenomenon physically. Aristotle thought that the rainbow was caused by reflection of the sun’s rays by the rain. Since then physicists have found that it is not reflection, but refraction by the raindrops, which causes the rainbow.  Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed. The difference in the rainbow depends considerably on the size of the water drops, and the width of the colored band increases as the size of the drops increases the actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of superposition of a number of bows. If the red of the second bow falls upon the green of the first, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, since red and green lights when mixed form yellow. This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and yellow, with little or no green or blue."

My close reading of the text “the Rainbow Passage.”

 By Joy Brook Fairfield go back Brooke Burke Brooke Brooke Brooke Brooke Brooke Fairfield Fairfield enter the lack

What is the unconscious of the text? This is always the question for the interpreter of literature. While we like at times to believe that the possibility of text without the shadow of intent exists, we will find ourselves hard-pressed to find evidence for it. The words chosen from the narrow script of the waiter seem, perhaps, to have the kind of uniformity that one could imagine devoid of poetic or psychological content: “Can I get you something to drink with that?” But language is never in control of its own intent, the speaker never fully in charge of his language. Language exists in a constantly shifting flowing field of signification surrounding us full points we have no comprehension of and affects we don’t understand. This is its magic and its curse.

I have been given a computer program, a tool on loan from an institution invested in my process of learning and participating in a greater exchange of ideas. They have an entire fresh clean contemporarily furnished spacious and even hip building in which their office for accessible education exists. In this building I meet with a sweet educated white man who supplies me with codes to make my Dragon Voice Activated Software program legal and little telemarketer headset to make it more accurate. With an awareness of my time constraints, he gives me the information I need to begin experimenting on my own with the system. I am given a  single sheet of text entitled "The Rainbow Passage"and told that I should read it thrice into this program: “Apparently this passage has almost all of the sounds in the English language.”

I have heard this claim before, in regards to “the quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.” I have never personally taken a stab at tabulating the ratio of sounds in the English language represented in this phrase. Perhaps a linguistics major would know the answer. I imagine a table of linguists huddled over their IPA dictionaries crafting poetry within the strict confines of speech’s strange architecture.  “Should we make the text scientific? Or more cultural, so that it can appeal to those in the Humanities?” “If we invoke cultural references, which should we include?” The author references the Hebrews the Greeks and the Norse, indicative of knowledge systems formed within contemporary Western academia or its colonial spaces. There is no reference to what the ancient Egyptians, for example thought about the  phenomenon of the rainbow.  Well, I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and in ancient Egypt the rainbow was associated with the goddess Nut.  As the goddess of the sky, Nut was sometimes described as wearing a rainbow gown.  Her laugh was thunder and her tears were rain.  Every night she swallowed up her grandfather and every morning she gave birth to him again.

This passage forgot about Egypt. Or, perhaps more accurately, was never taught.  Suddenly the title of this document reminds me of “The Middle Passage,” the journey of enslaved Africans to the Western Hemisphere under inhumane conditions.   I look up the origin of this phrase on Wikipedia and learn that it was the terminology used by the European traders at the time for the second segment of the triangle trade.  Perhaps everyone could switch over to using the term “Maafa,” the Kiswahili  term for disaster.

I sure hope Wikipedia is accurate. I understand why the politics of the Internet are so significant given the way it becomes a funnel to what is known as “common knowledge.”  I fear as the Internet grows in power within profit-focused, war–dependent economies, its revolutionary potential will be increasingly evacuated. Every tool is a hammer if you use it right. Or as Performance Studies scholar Angela Farr Schiller points out, “ The system that pounds the dough is the same fist that pounds the face.” (That was an example of the unconscious of this machine, the Dragon voice program I’m using.  I said in fact, “the fist that pounds the dough is the same fist that pounds the face.”  The replacement of the word “fist” with the term “system” is quite elegant).

The Rainbow Hostage, ahem Passage (hello again machinic unconscious!) invokes both physics and art, legends and logic. It performs a kind of scholarly inquisitiveness, a curiosity about the natural world. It appeals to me as a document that purports to report, transforming a miracle to a series of almost comprehensible particulate interactions.

Someone found this text appropriate for this context. This person was likely not a feminist, as the repeated male pronouns resound in my ears as unconscious exclusivity: “ Throughout the centuries men have explained the rainbow in various ways.” The uninterrogated prejudice of the Enlightenment era hangs over this passage like a rain cloud.

And yet I feel like this text was intended as a kind of gift. Rainbows, the clearest of natural phenomenon,  I’m mean the theorist,   queer rest,  queries, queerest of natural  phenomenon. Usually bode well. From the light cue of hope after the Old Testament’s flood to Lisa Frank stickers on your 8^th grade notebook, rainbows are a pleasure to our eyes.

“Rainbow rainbow red and blue

Rainbow rainbow I love you

Yellow orange green and white

You give off such perfect light”

This is a song my mother sang me when I was a child. I remember thinking it funny that she included “white” in the colors of the rainbow. I didn’t use a white pen when I drew rainbows on the brown paper in my kindergarten class. I think she mentioned something about physics, maybe something like what the Rainbow Passage says: “the rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors.”

I just searched these lyrics on Google and found nothing. It’s so nice to know there are some things that only one person has said. Of course, I have no idea if someone taught it to her.

The first hit I get provides me with this text:

I    a m    t h e    R a i n b o w

On the days when it doesn't seem worth it. When you think that maybe they were right. That "queer" and "freak" and "abomination" seem to have your name on the list. When "outsider" and "other" or "faggot" or "dyke" want to claim your autograph, remember. We are the rainbow.

When never seems bigger than always, and always seems like a terrible place to be, remember. We are the rainbow.

It is a tacky site and the font is hard to read.  A few clicks and I find that this site is maintained by a transgender activist named Deborah Davis. She worked as a high school Media specialist in Minnesota  and has maintained this site for over a decade.  I am grateful for her labor.    She references of course the rainbow flag, adopted by the gay community in the 1970s.  Wikipedia tells me it was designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker.  It initially included pink and turquoise too, but apparently fabric dyed in those colors was harder to find. Makes me sad, they seem like particularly queer colors.

The second hit is the Wikipedia page for rainbows, which reads a lot like “The Rainbow Passage.” I am grateful for my mother and her nursery song.  Like Deborah Davis, her message was that the world was full of a kind of beauty called difference.

I remember now that the last line doesn’t say “You give off such perfect light,” but “you give off such pretty light.”  I should try to remember that perfect and pretty are not the same thing.  

I am in this hip and spacious office because I can no longer type, a problem when one is attempting to write a dissertation. I can’t type because I’ve broken my right wrist in a skateboarding accident only a month after my first day as a skateboarder.   I was not very good but it was the pleasure of every day. My increasingly–impossible schedule has made every second precious, so cutting my cross-campus commute in half was practical at the same time as pleasurable.   Dropped into the moment in a combination of glee and terror, it was keeping me sane.  Now I have a cast, a disability counselor, and the friendly adaptive technology guy who handed me “The Rainbow Passage” and opened the door for me on the way out. 

My exposure to and thus understanding of the knowledges formed by people with significantly different abilities has been limited. Only recently, thanks to the work of scholars like Petra Kuppers and dance companies like AXIS Dance, have I been introduced to the exciting aesthetic and philosophical possibilities engendered through the differences often known as disabilities.  I’m particularly grateful for generosity of artist Isaak Tait, a performer with  “A Different Light” of Christchurch, New Zealand.  Our intimate correspondence has been meaningful, heartfelt and mind-blowingly creative.  Our differences have aligned in a beautiful way, perhaps similarly to the ways that “[t]he actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of superposition of a number of bows.”  A scholar, I forgot who right now, described all of human culture as adaptive technology (or a prosthetic) for the mathematical mean of society.  Left-handed people hurt themselves on devices created for right-handed people. Chairs in public spaces are uncomfortable for the significantly shorter or taller than average. When did “average” become so ideologically linked with “good”?

In his book Security, Territory, Population, Michel Foucault suggests that the current dominant mechanism of social control is no longer threat of punishment or simple brain-washing. Instead, order is maintained through the construction and measurement of norms.  Those outside of norms are afforded less socially–legible power by those highly implicated in the maintenance of those norms.  We can understand this in terms of representation in government, representation in media, and participation in economic markets. A population is an imaginary entity vulnerable to non-consentual marketing and management through its compliance with norms.

There is nothing wrong with the fantasy of average. Average is convenient. Average means you can always find the right bra or pair of shoes.   Average can be quite beautiful. The only danger is in creating a hierarchy in which averages become tyrannical, in which the only thing better than average is above average, in which one’s performance is constantly being measured in comparison  to radically different entities.  The fantasy of the average creates failure, creates shame, and forgets, in its attempt to quantify, the unquantifiable thrills of the unknown unknowns.

The text of “The Rainbow Passage,” like my mother’s song, reassures me.   As I repeat its exhaustive set of English syllables I remember that there are always more interpretations than I can imagine.  Queerness and disability seem to me linked in the way that they gesture towards the beauty and potential intimacy possible in the vastness of difference.

My wrist will heal, and this headset is only mine on loan until the end of June.  It’s so easy to feel sorry for yourself even when you have so much.  Yesterday in the orthopedic trauma center, a septuagenarian sitting next to me said offhandedly that she’d broken both wrists: “When I broke the left one they just put in a titanium plate and sent me home, no cast or anything.”  I am in awe of her toughness and her genuine concern for a stranger. How can I become stronger and more sensitive all at once?   How can I stop thinking of these two as opposites?

After reading through the exhaustive syllables of The Rainbow Passage, I am to practice speaking into the headset so that it can learn my voice. I am to teach it the words it doesn’t know yet that I frequently use:  performativity, queerness, radicality (not “rat ecology”), hierarchicalization (not “hierarchical as Asian”),   intersectionality (not “intersection island”). “Maybe try writing some e-mails,” he says. I  remember my long–dormant blog.

Later that day, I am told by one of my advisors that philosopher Henri Lefebvre dictated all of his critical theory texts: “You can really tell where he starts to wander.” I feel the pull of the wander.  I must think of my breath as a valuable resource.  I must think before I speak and seek out more precise and genuine ways to share my small but reverberating personal truths because we are all contributing to the knowledge that is known as "common." 

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.