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.

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.

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.

Conscious Spectatorship

Yesterday I woke before the sun to attend the Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Ceremony on Alcatraz Island, an annual sunrise gathering that honors the traditions of Native American tribes as well as indigenous people the world over. Blessed with a gorgeously clear morning, the event, which included guest speakers, musicians, drumming, and dancing, was a powerful way to celebrate an ever-problematic national holiday.

The event made me very aware of my own spectatorship. Descended quite literally from settlers who appropriated land from indigenous people, my participation in the ceremony is colored by a sad awareness of my own implication in our current cultural scenario. As an ally to oppressed cultures, I watch and listen with reverence, bearing witness to the traditions that remain vibrant in Native communities. My gaze is attentive, appreciative, and also, I hope, ultimately generative. Rather than watching with the hungry eyes of a tourist or the analytic eyes of an anthropologist, I try to watch in a way that is simultaneously aware of the past yet looking imaginatively towards the future. How can my work as an artist and scholar contribute to the flourishing of intercultural dialogue? Can I, through conscious spectatorship, learn from and help further the vibratory movements of embodied knowledges of cultures that are not my own?

As the sunlight hits the crumbling barracks on the top of Alcatraz, I can't help but think of the rise and fall of cultures. Despite the attempts of the dominant power to control and subordinate any elements that threaten that power, nothing that is built by human hands lasts forever. Sometimes I feel comforted remembering that everything, given enough time, crumbles.

Theatre Marathon: The Great Game

I recently saw Tricycle Theatre's production of The Great Game: Afganistan at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Depending on how you classify it, The Great Game is a single day-long play, three full-length plays, or nineteen short pieces on the topic of Afghanistan's history and politics. I attended one of the "marathon performances," in which a full day - 11:00 AM to 10:30 PM - was surrendered to the act of audiencing.

Submitting to a full-day play requires great trust: in the company, the director, the playwright, and the actors. You hope they'll take good care of you, both artistically and physically, and that your investment in this illusory world will be worthwhile. The Great Game definitely was. While I try to stay engaged in global politics, it's hard to understand the present without the historical context, and CNN rarely takes the time to explain the myriad effects of the last 150 years of colonialism in Central Asia. The production educated me in that alchemical way that only art can, and raised as many questions as it answered, putting the responsibility in my hands to deepen my own understanding of this country about which I know only little.

The theatre marathon format is growing increasingly common. Elevator Repair Service's 7-hr Gatz is at the Public right now, and a marathon version of Tarell Alvin MacCraney's Brother/Sister Plays was produced there last year. I saw Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres last summer at Lincoln Center, and Signature Theatre is reviving Kushner's Angels in America in marathon-format next spring.

Personally, I love the experience of giving myself over to a day of near-passive observation. My intense critical eye usually gets tired after the first few hours and my way of viewing changes. It's not so much that I get wrapped up in the action of the play, but I begin to feel like this life in the darkened theatre, surrounded by a temporary community of quiet, watchful viewers, is my new reality. In the shared space of the audience, my ego boundaries start to soften like food over the heat of a fire.

The meditative time signature of the theatre marathon allows me the luxuries of observation, contemplation, and openness to difference that seem impossible in the active rumble of life itself. My obsession with my own small dramas is subsumed into the grand, shared pageant passing before me, and in that shifting experience of time, self, and community, I can't help but sense, at the corners of my tired vision, the overwhelming beauty of the enormous, ultimately unknowable world.