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.

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.

Fire in my Belly: Watch Now!

Take four minutes out of your day.

Give them to the painful and soulful vision of artist/activist David Wojnarowicz, who recently ascended to renewed prominence after the Smithsonian pulled his super-8 film Fire in my Belly from their exhibit entitled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Apparently Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1992, was showing too much of his difference, and not hiding his desire well enough for some tastes.

The film was made in 1986/87 in honor of a friend and fellow artist who had recently died of AIDS. For those of us who don't remember that time, this was before AZT and cocktail drugs, when a diagnosis was a death sentence. The government was ignoring the plight of thousands living with HIV, viewing them as more of a threat to be managed than a populace to be cared for. Death was close by, and Wojnarowicz's haunting film captures the urgency and intimacy of this very recent time in history that some would prefer to forget.

Go all out. Full-screen it. Give yourself the experience.

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" - Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery Edit from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

Note that the original film was silent, and 13 minutes in length. The above version, which was pulled from the Smithsonian, has been edited and supplemented with a soundtrack of original recordings from ACT UP! protests in the 1980s.

Also, lets all take a moment to remember that the HIV/AIDS crisis is not over. Worldwide, 2 million people die every year from AIDS-related illnesses and each year 3 million more acquire the disease. While many of these new cases are far removed from New York's West Village, the call to action is still as important as it was in 1986. ACT UP! FIGHT AIDS!

Akin to Death: Mary Stuart

I recently saw a fantastic production of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart at Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Adapted and directed by Mark Jackson, the language was clear and direct without losing the dense, poetic force of the 19th century original. It was blessed with a slick contemporary design and actors to die for, and so expertly paced that the two hours traffic never lost its urgency.

This play chronicles the last few days in the life of Mary Queen of Scots before she's put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. The confrontation between two immensely powerful queens in a deeply patriarchal world is fascinating, and the one scene in which they share the stage is the keystone of any production of this play. Lucky to even get an audience with Elizabeth in the first place, the imprisoned Mary's passionate nature gets the better of her. Instead of begging for mercy, she calls her cousin the Queen a bastard and reiterates her claim for the English throne saying, in Jackson's powerful translation: "I am your king!"

Ooops. Not the way to avoid a beheading.

From that moment on, while our sympathies lie with Mary and we hope for her rescue, we know she's doomed. Death, like the presence of the actress who never leaves stage, looms.

Playwright Jean Genet, in his letters to his director Robert Blin, says, "If we maintain that life and the stage are opposites, it is because we strongly suspect that the stage is a site closely akin to death, a place where all liberties are possible."

Schiller's play is about bondage and freedom. The chains that bind us sometimes take the form of politics, sometimes of patriarchal systems, sometimes of the will of the public, and sometimes they're just the outcome of the tangled mess we've made of our life. Death is sometimes a gateway to freedom, to a place where "all liberties are possible."

In Schiller's version, Mary is given her last rites in secret from her Lord Chamberlain, who has been ordained as a priest, before she mounts the scaffold. In Jackson's production however, all of Mary's attendants have been cut, leaving her desperately alone in Elizabeth's world. The last rites scene is done solo: this passionate, beautiful force that is about to be extinguished plays her own father confessor.

The hope for absolution - the dream of utter grace - lies somewhere at the border of death. At this boundary between the freedom offered by the void and the meaning that only exists in the land of life's living interpreters, forgiveness is possible.

I'm not a Catholic, so no personal mystic associations arise for me as I watch the actress playing Mary take the imaginary host into her mouth. But I feel the dream of transubstantiation as I'm held spellbound by her performance. In the mouth of the stage, the host of the actress's body becomes Mary Stuart, becomes Christ, resonates with every person facing the imminent truth of their own death, overcome with longing to return to communion with the dark quiet everything that grows closer and closer with each breath.

Genet called for a theatre that was "so strong and dense that it will, by its implications and ramifications, illuminate the world of the dead." He called on his artistic collaborators to "break down whatever separates us from the dead." I believe he'd be proud of how this beautiful production reaches a quivering hand out across that boundary.