We're All Mad Here: Keeping things a live through reenacting events

"Indeed, the sense that the past is a future direction in which one can travel--that it can stretch out before us like an unfamiliar landscape waiting to be (re)discovered--is familiar.  It is also one of the basic logics of psychoanalytic trauma theory that events can lie both before us and behind us--in the past where an event may have been missed, forgotten, or not fully witnessed, and in the future where an event might (re)occur as it is (re)encountered, (re)discovered, (re)told and/or (re)enacted, experienced for the first time only as second time.  The traumatized soldier, for instance, unwittingly prepares for and re-lives a battle in the future that, due to the shock of the event in the past, he or she could neither adequately experience nor account for at the time.  Whether reencountered via "acting out" or "working through," the past is given to lie ahead as well as behind--the stuff and substance limning a twisted and crosshatched footpath marked re-turn." (Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment.  London & New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. 22)

If then can be now and now can be then (past/future), reenactment challenges the notion of linear time and inaccessible lost past.  In my paper research, the issue of re-enactment comes up multiple times: In "My Name is Rachel Corrie" an actor re-enacts the emails and diary entries of a young woman named Rachel Corrie who ventured into a combat zone to work for peace--she was killed.  Instead of letting her "remain" in that single sense, Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner edited her words and now her last several months can be re-lived in live performance--which creates a space between then and now, here and there in which her (now) history is explored--acted out, worked through.  In Lee Blessing's "Two Rooms" a woman's civilian husband is kidnapped and, in her house, she recreates the room in which he is kept.  His experiences are relived in the here now and there then space of the single room--which negotiates the sense of re-creating her husband's days.

The question of reenacting war space and experience also comes up in Surrender, a theatre piece in which the audience reenacts the experience of the war in Iraq.  The "audience" is issued a uniform, trained, and put through a multi-room training test in which some "audience" members "die" and those surviving are flown "home to experience a soldier's reintegration into society."  The show is currently getting set to tour in Europe and the US.  They re-enact, re-create the experience of the Iraq war for civilians in order to "surprise you and challenge your assumptions.  This event hopes to create a conversation between people of different points of view.  Opinions are encouraged and welcomed in the theatre."  To be accurate, this production is not meant with enacting a specific event step for step (like Gettysburg reenactments), but it is meant to reenact a specific experience--rather like the second room in "Two Rooms."

I found Rebecca Schneider's interviews with Civil War re-enactors to be fascinating in light of these other productions.  She records and elucidates the idea that recreating the experience helped the war to not be forgotten and by extension meaning that performance is not a medium that "disappears" but rather exists both before and after now (Schneider 39).  I agree with her when she says this is a hard adjustment to make in the way that we think: but the questions are so valuable and interesting.  "Mutually disruptive energy," (15) for example, that when we reenact, there and here/then and now both disrupt each other, neither can stay the same.    "Where, then is the here? And when, now, is the then?" (25)

But her extrapolation to the American public: "whether one agrees with Judt and O'Sullivan that "Americans have had no true experience of loss," or whether one believes that Americans perpetuate a less-than-innocent post-traumatic stress disorder of some kind, we certainly seem today to chase the past as if memory were the most precious vanishing commodity on earth" (24).  This stood out to me because the more plays, articles, and books I read/skim/etc, the more I see an dramatic slant in post combat reintegration that reinforces the idea that the soldier's "past" experiences of combat (whether or not the combat continues in his/her absences) are past memories/experiences to be over-come/over-turned/un-experienced/forgotten in order to re-assimilate back into a society which has no corresponding traumatic experience; when, in fact, the very involvement of members of a society, of an economy, of a media, etc. in that war re-enacts and pulls up and involves the American society in the battlefields that John O'Sullivan wrote "It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battlefields" (qtd 21).

Again this connects to the plays that I am reading because by and large, the goal seems to re-present or re-enact past moments/events with some kind of Truth, even if realism isn't the medium  ("My Name is Rachel Corrie," "Two Rooms" and "The Language of Trees" --hostage events, "Gunfighter: A Gulf War Chronicle"--the true story of Lt. Col. Ralph Hayles, "The Pull of Negative Gravity" and "Oorah"--soldier's family's and soldier's returning, "Palestine, New Mexico"--the survivors guilt of returning soldiers, "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo"--the way that combat haunts soldiers and civilians).

Anyway, more thoughts on that later.  But the idea that re-enacting these experiences through fictional representations of real events becomes a similar gesture to keep history from repeating itself by keeping the experience alive in "staged" reenactment.

Embodying the Black Experience

Between books, events, and media, the last couple weeks has been an interesting vortex for me in terms of the American experience in regards to Black & White.  In the basic speech class that I teach, the textbook urges that we be careful and specific in the way that we address and discuss individuals.  At times this seems to indicate what some would write off as "politically correct address" or as some of my students have termed it "pacification, conflict avoidance, and bullshit".  In my classes and in the afore-mentioned comment discussion I had about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I tried to emphasize the effort that we need to make as Americans and human beings to interact with each other in an I-Thou interaction--as though meeting another Self instead of an Other.  During impromptu speeches, one of my students received the topic "What is one thing that you would like to see in your lifetime?" and he chose to speak on a vocabulary shift from "African-American, Asian-American, White-American" to "American"... he's a rather powerful speaker already and I get echoes of MLK's "all of God's children".  Another student responded to the question "what one person from history would you like to meet and why?" that he would like to meet Dr. King so that he could ask the civil rights leader if he felt that his death had been worth it.  The student referenced Trayvon Martin and said repeatedly "because I don't think it was.  I don't think it was."

Finally, I encountered this blog posting which discusses the recent popular series The Hunger Games and the just released movies.  Specifically at issue here is the presence of black bodies in the film and a particular audience response of young people tweeting their disappointment and disgust at the casting of black actors for characters that they did not read as "black bodies".  I choose that term, borrowing from Harvey Young, because the comments that this blog poster cites deliberately see and comment on the actors as "black bodies" instead of as individuals.  The blogger and several comments argue (having read the books, I can attest) that these readers failed to read the specificity of the book in writing them as characters with "dark skin."  But some of the readers did and substituted lighter readings of "dark"--not meaning lighter "black" but "not-black".

Having grown up and matriculated through very diverse schools, I identify with one young woman who commented on the above blog.  While aware of racism, I am not frequently the target of it and I have not been physically witness to it's more blatantly ugly forms.  My default is to perceive it as a thing for old curmudgeons or hicks--ignorant people, not people like me.  However, what I have come to believe with increasing strength is that passive response, pretending it does not exist, or innocently ignoring allows it to continue.

The solution is actively acknowledging, countering, and working to reclaim the dialogue.  By reclaim, I cite Harvey Young's definition of reclamation:
    "Re-claiming does not require that we erase the past and script a new one.  The prefix tells us this.  To reclaim is to take something back.  It is to possess something in the present while knowing that i has only recently been back in your possession.  It is to remain aware of its previous "claims" even as you articulate your own.  It is to know the past in the present as you work toward creating a future." (135)
In reclaiming, I included all of us who are defined by the gaze of another--whatever our skin tone, gender, clothing, sexuality, mannerisms, body shape and size, etc.  I also include all of us who are innocently unaware or exhaustedly ignoring, or injured and buying-in to try and relieve the pain.  It's difficult, I think, because the easy response is the angry one; the hard response is to deal with those who carelessly or maliciously utter/type the words.  Opening eyes is a lot harder than closing them.

To add to the discussion about the black body onstage: Here is a link to a Riverside production (in the Inland Empire, my home town really, it's pretty big) that premiered this year called "Dreamscape".  It centers on and reframes a shooting that happened 14 years ago in which a black teenage girl was shot 24 times by white police officers.  The play takes place in the moment of the shooting, punctuated by each bullet that connects with the girl's body.  The other character chronicles each hit, while the girl responds.  This article and production were shared with my by a friend in response to my posting of the above link about the Hunger Games.  She didn't know how particularly it would relate.  Both Young and George-Graves write about plays and performances that use the stage to highlight the metonymization of the "black body" and reclaim the pieces as parts of whole individuals rather than "both an externally applied projection blanketed across black bodies and an internalization of the projected image by black folk" (Young 13).  Young writes about Parks "Venus" and "In the Blood", McCauley's "Sally's Rape", and Orlandersmith's "Yellowman", while Georges-Graves writes about Urban Bush Women's productions like "Batty Moves", "Hair Stories", and "Hand Singing Song".  In all cases, the tension between the conceptual black body and the individual body is present.  Both authors discuss the productions, scripts, and performances work to re-individualize, re-contextualize, re-vitalize, and re-claim the body for whole individuals.

"Dreamscape"'s act of highlighting the violence done to individual body parts while allowing the actress to connect those parts back to her particular life is a powerful embodiment of precisely the reclamation that Young and Georges-Graves are describing.  Young writes that his premise is "that a remarkable similarity, a repetition with a difference, exists among embodied black experiences" (5) That the projection of a conceptual "black body" results in individuals, who are distinct and different selves, experiencing similar treatment, responses, behavior.

What I find ultimately hopeful about Young's writings, the above play, and the discourse that my postings have generated is the knowledge that "We are never entirely trapped by our habitus" (which Young defines as "the generative principle of regulated improvisation . . . [or] social expectations . . . incorporated into the individual" and the expectations that the individual projects back at society and individuals" 20).  But the questions and the issues brought up are complex and unsettling, requiring continued dialogue.

George-Graves, Nadine.  Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out.  Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Print.


Young, Harvey.  Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body.  Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Print.

Art as Art as Revolution!

A Response to Marcuse

“The radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from th given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence.  Thereby art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible . . . culminates in extreme situations (read emotions) which explode the given reality in the name of a truth normally denied or even unheard.” (6-7)

Marcuse redefines/re-expostulates a theory of Marxist aesthetics in which “art as art” is revolutionary not because it displays the proletariat or is propagandic in nature, but because the very formation of content into art highlights the senses which are universal—the result of which is that we can see how class systems are arbitrary and meaningless because all humans share these Truths.  This reminded me of Emilia’s monologue in Othello to Desdemona: “Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell,/ and have their palates for both sweet and sour/ as men have” (4.3.93-95), and Shylock in Merchant: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” (3.1).  Marcuse seems to take for granted that art communicates something (a la Tolstoy): “it communicates truths not communicable in any other language” (Marcuse 10).  But, for him, the specific strength of art is in it’s ability to do the double consciousness thing discussed by another writer (I can’t recall the name just now), that “Art stands under the law of the given, while transgressing this law” making it in fact the ultimate revolutionary, subversive act—This reminded me of the subversive actions of the main character of the recent, highly popular, YA series The Hunger Games.  All of her subversion is indirect through the will to live and to honor life in a Truthful way—which subverts her reality.  To be fair, her actions as a character are not art, but the book itself is.  There are some interesting parallels to modern society and, while popular, the books could still pack revolutionary punch—despite the fact that their popularity may have “weaken[ed] its emancipatory impact” (Marcuse 21).

I appreciated Marcuse’s discussion of the connection between Aesthetic Form, Autonomy, and Truth—“the truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality . . . to define what is real” (9).  To me, the definitive nature of art (in making and tearing down realities and ideas) is quite phenomenal.  Before Picasso, could we imagine the world in cubes?  While the multiplicity of views expands in the Information age, art can act like hand holds to perceptions.  Art makes tangible that which we can’t express (see above quote from p 10).  C.S. Lewis wrote a short essay called “Sometimes Fairy Tales Say Best What’s To Be Said”—I think art in general speaks louder and more accurately without words or in addition to words.  The embodiment and sensuousness of art expresses something beyond the solo capability of language.  Though then I am caught because what is literature and poetry if not language and where do you draw the line between artistic writing and non-artistic writing.  And this line (or the need to make that line) I think might be the problem entire. 

In any case, I do have some places where I feel a disconnect from Marcuse.  First, as he acknowledges, the pool of pieces that he works with in the middle sections of his piece is a small one and he may “operate with a self-validating hypothesis” (x) (though, as I have noted before, to define Art without a self-validating hypothesis might be impossible, since it a primarily retroactive process—kind of like exploding atoms in order to see what’s inside them).  Second, I have to ask about art that supports and upholds the negative/bourgeois status quo.  There is art that subverts and art that subverts subversiveness—like DISNEY FILMS! J that in their “Truth”/subverted world, actually promote oppressive ideals and scenario fulfillments.  It is an important question no doubt—and I rather think that Marcuse might respond by saying that the non-reality of the fairy-tales make them less true.  But then I would whip out some C.S. Lewis and throw his theorizing about the starkness and hyper-reality of the epic which more accurately expresses reality than realism ever can because it’s expressing those in-expressible things—that “reality” can’t quite express. 

On the other hand, some interesting pieces to analyze using Marcuse’s Marxist Neo-Aesthetic would be “Scott Pilgrim”, “Waltz with Bashir”, “Othello”, and, my own play for next year, “Time Stands Still.” 

“Art can be called revolutionary” (x)

“The truth of art lies in this: that the world really is as it appears in the work of art” (xii).  Totes—Truth versus truth

“It seems that art as art expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis, are nevertheless essential components of revolution”—Mmm.

“A work of art is authentic or true not by virtue of its content, nor by its “pure” form, but by the content having become form” (8) This makes me want to go back to my Christianity and Theatre paper from a couple years ago to add this in—a la Christian theatre is by this token not Christian because of its content, but by the content having become form—of course that would necessitate even more work on my part to define what I perceive as a Christian Theatre Aesthetic . . . A subset of my work for this class.

I’m sorry all, but I don’t have a specific citation for this Handout =\

Racism & the Negotiation of Embodied Performance

"Urban Bush Women's choreography is emblematic of how individuals and communities work through social anxieties using layers of performance. . . . Performing artists can speak politically or socially and culturally in a way that no others can." (3)  (George-Graves, Nadine.  Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out.  Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Print.)

I was going to write about how much I love UBW's work to reclaim the body, but this afternoon I posted a link to facebook which provoked a discussion that was very emotional for me.  And it connects, so here we go.

This is the link I posted: it goes to an article by a young, white, male blogger who protests the lack of social outrage about the Trayvon Martin shooting.  For those of you unaware, here is a link to a source of information about the incident with links to the relevant news sources.  Martin was a 17-year-old unarmed teenager walking to his dad's house in a gated community who was followed by a neighborhood watchman, who continued following despite having informed the police and been discouraged from it.  George Zimmerman, who was carrying a handgun, shot and killed Martin, who was holding only candy and a drink.  Martin was black, Zimmerman is white, and there has been no arrest.  I posted the blog because I appreciated the sentiment of acknowledging that there is discrimination as the first step, and standing up for each other as the second step in ending racism.

A friend of mine who is white and has felt discriminated against for being white, responded claiming that we already have equal rights and people need to stop spreading reverse discrimination by making a big deal out of things.  I was so frustrated!  First because I felt that she hadn't read the blog just been offended by the title, and second, because I couldn't believe that my friend would support racism (in the sense that saying it doesn't exist allows it to continue happening) by saying we have equal rights.  I kept thinking about all these books that I read in my PhD studies, the articles and ideas and research and knowledge that I've gained in graduate studies.  I think about the Basic Speech class I am teaching in which I try to teach my students about the way that we build relationships/meaning/gender/society through our interactions and the choices we make and HOW do I help her see (without alienating her) that her experiences are valid but that there is also a HUGE problem with ignoring the racism still present in our society/zeitgeist etc.  That being white, we are part of the dominant cultural hegemony, even if people of color are breaking into the top echelon, the top echelon is cultured white, and that being part of that group makes it harder to see the things that happen to other people.  That being part of the hegemony, we aren't left out and when we feel like a non-white group is leaving us out we feel unjustly persecuted for the things we don't perceive that we did (ie slavery, or getting the colonial ball rolling back in the day).

In George-Grave's book, she discusses the way that UBW is perceived as a black lesbian group and when audience members see even a mixed race woman--who looks whiter--they respond with relief "Oh, I'm so glad you have a white woman" (27) as if without the white representative, we couldn't relate/wouldn't be allowed to participate with the performance.  This is despite the fact that Zollar is happy to have all kinds of performers in her group: male, female, white, black, native american.  But as part of the dominant hegemony, we rarely experience or understand what people of color do.  I am not trying to say that we aren't targets or that we don't experience racism, but rather that we cannot make a straight comparison without trying to understand the other side.  Specifically, in Martin Buber's terms an "I-Thou" relationship: "the subject (the "I") encounters a person (a "Thou") and sees her/him as a relationships rather than as an experience (or an object)" (Warren & Fasset 156). To me, this is what UBW's projects seem to do or aim for with their performance: "work through social anxieties using layers of performance" (3).

As I worked on typing up responses to my friend in the little comment boxes, I kept thinking of the UBW choreography and wondering if there was a way to use the performance to help explain what I needed to communicate.  Embodiment as a way to work through the social anxieties with layers of performance seems to me to be able to communicate more than my halting, stumbling, static words.  For instance, UBW's piece about hair as a way of understanding and expressing the itemization of the female black body through hair.  But as soon as I say that, I recall the ways all women are pushed to look in our culture.  There are differences and pointing out that you suffered too is a logical fallacy of some kind if you're trying to say that other suffering doesn't matter!! THAT is what I was trying to say!  That!

The acknowledgement that we all suffer in someway returns me to my aesthetic of blending and expressing and working through these anxieties between "Inter"culturally as well as "intra"culturally.  By bringing white bodies, brown bodies, yellow bodies, and all the color palates in between together, can we negotiate these things further?  Can we engage and refuse to take the easy way out of "can't we just all get along"--getting a long is the dream, but it is not something to take for granted, like any relationship it takes "work"--incidentally the theme of this book =)

The "alternate modalities" (George-Graves 6) that UBW explores through dance, singing, and story-telling were really inspirational to me.  So much so, that I actually turned my ipod on random and tried to work somethings out myself via dance.  I'm glad I did.  We live in our bodies, and the dominant culture--while promoting extreme exercise--does not consistently celebrate or reward or promote embodied living as a part of positive knowledge about self and other selves.  UBW's work is still important, still relevant, and, I think, could stand to be expanded further--if they can get the performers =)

Warren, John T. and Deanna L. Fassett.  Communication: A Critical/Cultural Introduction.  Los Angeles: Sage, 2011. Print. <--This is my Comm 1010 textbook, it's really good.

A Minor Complaint on Verbiage

“There clearly exists a dramaturgy of the director and a dramaturgy of the performer.  However surprisingly it may seem at first, we also can and should speak—not just metaphorically—of a dramaturgy of the spectator” (100) “an acceptance that theatrical pleasure arises and is maintained in an unbroken dialectic between the frustration and satisfaction of expectations.  This fragile balance is kept between the pleasure of discovery, the unexpected, and the unusual, on one hand, and the pleasure of recognition, déjà vu, and the anticipated on the other” (112).

            In reading, Marco De Marinis’ article on the “Dramaturgy of the Spectator,”  I noticed myself resisting his ideas.  I had to pull back from contemptuously writing him off several times after I wrote comments in the margins to that effect.  I did a little internet searching and found out that he is Italian and that his work has been translated—perhaps the translation is what has me all riled up.  As I re-read and tried to dig deeper, I decided several times that I don’t necessarily disagree with him.  On his basic premise that dramaturgy is “the techniques/theory governing the composition of the performance-as-text,” I am reluctant to adopt it entirely for myself—seeing as in his following discussion it seems to apply scientifically: structurally as those there were equations to discover.  Perhaps this is the root of my difficulty: De Marinis speaks as if all we need is to discover the correct balance (not that he says this is easy) of frustrating & satisfying the spectator/audience’s expectations.  While I do actually agree in some part with this idea, the wording, connotations specifically, really turn my stomach—“manipulation” for example, comes up many times.  The performance is meant to “manipulate” a specific response in the audience.  While De Marinis takes a whole section to explain that there are Closed performances (with a specific audience and interpretation in mind) and Open performances (which more or less leave interpretation and audience open), the language is seems reductive and cold to me.  To John Dewey (art and education theorist), part of the beauty of art is that is expresses things that are extra-verbal—visual & aural ideas that cannot be expressed verbally.  While I’m not sure that this is something that De Marinis would disagree with, I agree, and I feel that, while trying to verbalize helps us better understand (often by negation) what it is we are trying to do with art and whether or not we are succeeding, this article seemed to me to reduce art to the equation mentioned above—as though “that’s all folks!”

            Ok, enough of my frustrations (ha!), here are a couple things I felt better about upon reinspection:

“this dialectic between the constraints imposed by the work (the “aesthetic text”) and the possibilities left open to those who receive the work strikes a balance which is the essence of the aesthetic experience and source of its vitality” (101) I lied, this is simply another way of saying the above quote from page 112, with which I am still not sure I entirely agree—I recognize it as something that exists in art, but I don’t think I agree that it is the essence of the aesthetic experience or the source of its vitality. 

“the performance seeks to induce in each spectator a range of definite transformations, both intellectual (cognitive) and affective (ideas, beliefs, emotions, fantasies, values, etc).” (101)—this upon rereading, I do agree with.  Performance does seek transformation—even if it’s just a reaffirmation of something already existing.

“The partial or relative autonomy of each of the different dramaturgies (the director’s, the writer’s, the performer’s, the spectator’s) all work together in the composition of the performance and must be seen as mutually setting and occasionally adjusting each other’s boundaries” (101)—there is a group tension involved in the collaborative process of drama, and I do believe that the audience is part of that creation

Wrighting through Theatre

In his study, Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (Carbondale, Illinois; Southern Illinois UP, 2008), Jon D. Rossini discusses the three part task of theatre to write, right, and wright ethnicity.  Specifically, he discusses contemporary Latina/o theatre artists and plays that take on the third task: wrighting ethnicity.

I appreciated the structure of this piece.  I wrote in the margins "take note of structure for dissertating."  But what was most fascinating and interesting to me was the structure in the web of argument, information, definition, and analysis that Rossini wove to set up his further analysis and and exploration of theatre.  The model of wrighting--which calls up the idea of making--through theatre is submitted as the process of creating "a new framework that enables an audience to recognize not only the creation of aesthetic and emotional pleasure through theatrical art but also the creation of theoretical alternatives for thinking of and through ethnicity" (Rossini 20).  In my personal aesthetic/artistic point of view, this is the most valuable of art forms--something that not only creates emotional pleasure but also intellectual pleasure--through learning and exploring ideas.

Rossini wrote "The intersection of identity politics and theater has made increasingly clear that the stage is an ideal space in which to explore a multiplicity of cultural identities, to understand new possibilities for cultural formation, and to draw attention to the continued tension in the embodiment of any given identity" (18-19).  This is particularly helpful to me in formulating ideas with my dissertation:  As I have previously laid out, I am interested in the transition between deployed and home.  For military personnel, there is a home identity--civilian, and a war identity--soldier.  Nancy Sherman writes about it in her book The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), "becoming a soldier is not just a social or sociological phenomenon.  It is a psychological phenomenon, a deep psychological phenomenon . . . The idea of uniform, and a role, simply does not convey that weight" (20).  The idea that Sherman is refuting is that being a soldier is an on/off switch, that like the uniform it comes off after work.  The nature of the work is such that it affects the soldier's identity.  There is a culture at war and a culture at home.  Whether or not a soldier is injured (physically or mentally) while on active duty, he or she must contend with deeply contrasting identities and cultural systems--before and after, home and war.  But the soldier is not the only one who must contend with this culture & identity clash.  Just as Diana Taylor writes of the way most citizens were "not recognized as participants" in 9/11, even though we really were (243), Major John L. Todd points out in his article  "The Meaning of Rehabilitation," that "the term rehabilitation should be used in a broader sense; rehabilitation includes not only sailors and soldiers but the whole community" (1).  Just as Rossini notes about theatre's ability to explore multiple identities, models for cultural formation, and embodied identity in regards to wrighting ethnicity, I see a parallel for theatre's ability to do this for wrighting the homecoming soldier scenario.  Current plays, like "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" (Rajiv Joseph, 2009) and "Oorah" (Bekah Brunstetter, 2010), and movies, like "Return" (2011) tend to highlight the failure of soldiers and community to readjust to each other positively.  The implied outcome of the scenario is pain, misunderstanding, negative sexual relations, and ultimately failure to reintegrate positively.  Significantly, none of these pieces place the blame on the soldier or the community.  Rather, in the interest of what Sherman describes as not writing "a political tract for or against a war" (1), anti-war sentiment seems to be expressed through a presentation of failed reintegration.

So a forward looking challenge, one that I'm currently hoping to tackle eventually (!!), is how to use theatre to wright the returning soldier scenario in order to facilitate and explore positive outcomes for this scenario by "explor[ing] a multiplicity of cultural identities"--soldier, civilian, waiting wife, etc--"understand[ing] new possibilities for cultural formation"--specifically in understanding how soldiers/civilians, war culture/home culture etc fit together or might be "200 ft tall and made of foam" (divergent thinking)-- and "draw[ing] attention to the continued tension in the embodiment of" soldier/civilian identities.

<Insert celebratory "Yay!! Productive Blog!!" here>

Taylor, Diana.  The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. London; Duke UP, 2003.
Todd, John L. "The Meaning of Rehabilitation."  Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.  Vol. 80; Rehabilitation of the Wounded (Nov., 1918), pp. 1-10.  Web.  3 Jan 2012.   http://www.jstor.org/stable/1013901 

Aesthetic Distance

“It might be objected that . . . distance [is] another term for the imagination, or for a particular species of imagination.  That latter may indeed be an accurate description of distance . . . distance is not equivalent to all forms of imagination . . . clearly distance would be concerned with [responsive imaginations].  In a sense self-consciousness, knowing that one is “seeing as,” is the single unique feature of distance . . . distance is neither simply and on/off condition nor exclusively one of degrees but both: self-awareness, for instance, either exists or does not, but the self-awareness may be induced to a greater or lesser degree” (76)

Daphna Ben Chaim has brought together the work of several influential theater artists and pointed out the way that their theories related to the specific and essential aesthetic distance that good artwork uses to activate and affect self-consciousness towards a view of the “larger perspective” (72).  While I found the reading a little dense and difficult to follow—having not read the portions of the book that deal with the referenced artist’s individually, I found the idea very much an “of course, now there’s a word for that.”  The idea of aesthetic distance is similar to an idea I have about art.  In my sense, art is a protected way of telling the truth—communication, like Tolstoy—because it is at once personal and separate.  The fact that it is art gives it a tangible distance, especially theatre.  I appreciated the reference to Artaud, “For Artaud the theatre is a protected environment where one can permit himself [or herself] to be vulnerable only because one knows he is safe” (70).  I agree.  I think that viewing theatrical performance is both vulnerable and safe for an audience—this is part of what Chaim discusses with the distance.  For me, theatre is a tangible distance—just like Chaim talks about the productive tensions “between two extremes, total empathy on the one hand and its complete elimination on the other” (78)—because theatre/performance is live and happening right in front of the audience it is tangible and visceral in a way that film and other mediums aren’t, but it is also fiction/a deliberate performance, which makes it safe for the audience to participate in the ideas/feelings/truths being manipulated, displayed, and challenged (what Chaim would call the “larger perspective”).

I appreciated that Chaim discussed distance as an active response for the audience/viewers of a work of art (“An awareness of fiction is the most basic principle of distance in which there appears to be three distinguishable but interrelated components: 1) tacit knowing; 2) volition; and 3) perception as unreal.” (73).  Specifically that the audience believes and responds to the world of the play through volition, following Sartre “not freedom in imagination . . . but his discussion of the freedom to imagine: that it is an inherently free act of will” (74), which to me indicates that part of what makes art is the choice to participate with it as art.  And I’m back to subjectivity.  While we might get as much out of a particular page of manga as out of a Rembrandt, it is the agreement of large groups of people, or the right people, to participate with the Rembrandt (in museums & checkbooks) that leads to a group delineation of Art (vs art).  But then the distinction is also the responsibility of the artist, since the preservation of just the right amount of distance is accomplished not through any one particular technique but through the artist’s application of “a general stylistic context” (72).  This multi-sided equation, which is subjective (to social-actors in the art process, the particular stylistic choices, the subject, etc), leaves a lot of room for a cornucopia of works of Art, and gives a measuring stick for determining how a work of Art is one.  I would argue that this particular method works better on understanding pieces already delineated Art vs discovering them. 

It occurs to me that most of the methods for defining Art (whether what it is or when it is) are all best used retroactively—meaning to understand why a piece already (the Spanish word ya would fit here: porque ya arté) is Art not to identify it as Art before it becomes Art.  This reminds me of Blink, a book about correct snap decisions made by the subconscious mind.  Connecting that to Ira Glass’s comments about artistic taste, I couldn’t begin to say how it works cognitively, but—subjectively—as artists it happens for us.  We can feel/sense/subconsciously recognize art and not art as our senses, emotions & intellect come together around certain works.  Appreciation comes from understanding a work; Aesthetic response comes from this subconscious recognition. 

Now, I’ve wandered away from distance—or gained the appropriate distance from it to see the larger perspective . . . haha.

“Distance permits the involvement in the first instance and then is the condition for its development” (71).

“It is also probably true that there is no such thing as a “distancing technique” isolated from a general stylistic context” (72)

Distance in the Theatre: The Aesthetics of Audience Response.  Ann Arbor, MI; UMI Research Press.

Aesthetics--Koestler

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler weaves together a bunch of different ingredients around the idea of a "bisociative process"--the knowing that the art (which is imitative) is both not real and also real.  He compares it to living in two universes at once. The power of living in two universes is that we, as primarily self-interested individuals, are able to sympathize with a character(s) and ultimately experience self-transcendence.  The self-transcendence is the emotional portion of the aesthetic experience, which Koestler later equates to the "experience of beauty" (328).  By combining that "emotional catharsis" to the intellectual one, called the "moment of truth" or "intellectual illumination", an artist and a viewer can create and participate in an aesthetic experience, which Koestler styles and "'earthing' of emotion, on the analogy of earthing (or 'grounding') an electrically charged body" (328).

I liked the particular division that Koestler works with: intellectual + emotional = aesthetic.  For myself, I find that my highest aesthetic experiences are those in which both my senses and my thoughts are interacting and catalyzing each other.  I also appreciated that he included the compounding of "calory value"; it reminded me of Goodman's assertion that good art tends to be rich in number, relation, and reflexivity of signs.  But Koestler added that the "matrices" that produce the "emotive potential" in a work of art rely "partly on individual factors, partly on the collective attitudes of different cultures, but also on objective factors" (321).  The acknowledgement that objective and subjective both influence the artist and viewer rounds out towards Goodman's question of "When is art?" (emphasis mine) in emphasizing the temporality and ultimate instability of Art as opposed to art, which, I believe like Tolstoy says, is an act of sensory communication.

Koestler skirts the issue of "taste and distaste" by pointing out, essentially a la Nixon, that “If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together".  I admit I read an abreviated section of this book for class and so he may have delved deeper into the individual, cultural, and objective matrices at some other point in the book--but personal taste was just elided into "hey, good art uses pleasing and displeasing things to make unity".  This hits my New Criticism button and makes me raise an eyebrow.  While contrast is important, I would put taste and distaste into the section in which he discusses how "emotions are complex mixtures" (305).

Other things I appreciated: Koestler writes "Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle" (328).  While, I may not agree with his word choice (side-riff below*), I agree that art is an expander of individual awareness and that it is like religion.  In describing Christianity and Theatre, Asian American artist Joanna Wan-Ying Chan says, "When the curtain goes up on opening night, it has to be a common vision that we can own while in the meantime, each individual has made a contribution.  I think that's the most Christian process" furthermore that both religion and theater hit on "the sacredness of each individual while forging a community in a common project" (qtd in Kim 109).  This is important to me because I decided several years ago that theatre, art essentially, is for me an act of worship and of faith.  More on that in my manifesto.

I didn't agree with everything from Koestler, but there are several tools that struck a chord with me and called up particular beliefs and assumptions of mine.  Here are a couple quick quips/quotes:

"The two together--intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis--are the essence of the aesthetic experience." (328)
*"When it comes to putting aesthetical experiences into words, nothing short of a caesarian will help.  The surgical tool that I proposed was 'bisociation'; and the operation consisted in disentangling the various bisociative, or bifocal, processes which combine in the experience" (383) "the 'earthing' of emotion . . . an electrically charged body, so that its tensions are drained by the immense current-absorbing capacity of 'mother earth'." (328)  He hints around the feminine birth creation but can't quite bring himself to be so feminist.  So I laugh.
"The imbalance of the part is redeemed by the balance of the whole, by the triangle which lends unity to diversity" (386)
"Neither the artist, nor the beholder of his [or her] work, can slice his mind into sections, separate sensation from perception, perception from meaning, sign from symbol" (391)
"the intrinsic value of illusion itself.  It derives from the transfer of attention form the 'Now and Here' to the "Then and There'" (303)--the value of illusion is our ability to experience and sympathize with the "Other" essentially--what is not us becomes familiar and we sympathize, empathize with it.  This is fabulously valuable.

trans-inter-liminal-cultural

"Is this kind of interculturalism a sophisticated disguise for another installment of Orientalism or worse, of cultural rape?" Una Chaudhuri (qtd in Kim 102) re: Western directors appropriating and incorporating Asian and Asian-American non-realistic theatrical devices.

"I am a white girl."  Those words are difficult to write to see.  The first time I wrote the sentence it looked like this: "I am a middle-class white girl in the United States."  The sentence made me uncomfortable and so I stripped it down to the part that seems most alien to me: "white" 

My skin is very, very pale--but it's undertones are olive, not pink, suggesting my eastern European, Ukrainian ethnic heritage.  Of course, I am only a quarter Ukrainian, the rest is German, Polish, Scandanavian, English, Danish, Irish.  When I was a child, my doctors discovered that I had a blood disorder called Thalassemia Minor.  They were very confused and ended up testing my entire family.  The disorder is mild and requires no treatment, but it is usually found in people of Middle Eastern, Asian, and African decent.  My family jokes about the ancestor I have.  I grew up with adopted Hawaiian relatives, Fillipino friends, Korean, Japanese, and Kenyan friends.  On class heritage day in Fifth grade, I made perogies and pretended to go through Ellis Island as a Slavic ancestor.  I speak intermediate Spanish, broken but working French and Italian (I can find a bathroom), and niceties (hello, thank you, please, you're welcome) in Korean and Arabic.  I have traveled to many countries.  I attended East West Players and the Stanislavski summer school for my actor training.  I love theatre and I love how it makes cultural interactions and traditions and changes tangible.  My favorite plays are transcultural plays that show the interactions and blendings and liminal spaces where people live that feel part of and not a part of so many things.

I identify with Diana Taylor when she writes: "I overflowed with identifications, white and brown, English- and Spanish-speaking, Anglican and Catholic, us and them.  Mine felt like an entangled surplus subjectivity, full of tugs, pressures, and pleasures.  I continue to embody these tugs through a series of conflicting practices and tensions" (xv).  I'm with Ping Chong when he says "I began to think of the entire world as my culture.  I've developed a commitment to the sense that we are all together on this one little planet.  It's more and more important for us not to feel so foreign with one another" (qtd Kim 114). 

But when I say this, if I tried to run a multicultural play, I am afraid I will be judged by my skin color: "white girl."  I am afraid people will believe that I am appropriating with an underlying, unconscious agenda.  One that I cannot get away from because I am part of the privileged, dominant hegemony. But I do not identify completely with that title, it is only a part of who I am and far from definitive.

I find hope and and exciting possibilities for work in the chapter on Diversification of Asian American Theatre in Esther Lee Kim's A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 2006.).  I am relieved to find that I am not the only one who feels a part of many cultures.  I am relieved that others are blending and showing how the different groups interact and inform and relate and become and differentiate and grow one another.

I hope to join their ranks as I continue to produce, direct, act, and work in the art of Theatre.

An Act of Embodied Hope

“Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated . . . behavior” (Taylor 2-3)  “I believe it is imperative to keep reexamining the relationships between embodied performance and the production of knowledge” (Taylor xviii-xix) “What I am proposing is an active engagement and dialogue, however complicated” (Taylor 12).

Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (London: Duke UP, 2003).

I am still unsure what to write in response to this book.  I have written all over it.  I feel I want to perform something in response; to somehow reify the knowledge and expansion through which my brain has wandered by embodying it. 

I have many new words in my vocabulary—or signifiers whose pool of signifieds have productively expanded: scenarios, hauntology, indecipherability.  Even the episodic and tragic structures now have new meaning—a limit event or one that is related to others. 

The new knowledge at times exploded my ideas—which had to be reigned back in for focus (save if for another time).  For example, I need to go back to my paper about the roles performed by Princess Lissla Lissar in Robin McKinley’s retold fairy tale.  My initial paper permutations did not have the words to describe what I was talking about—the scenarios played with and changed by the author.  The embodied psyche performed by Lissar’s dog.  In point of fact, rape as an archival act of writing versus the embodied experience which cannot be accurately archived, only understood through embodied performance.  Trauma.  Another example, Faith as performative.  In church, the mantra “faith without works is dead” is used is so many ways.  But to write about it and understand it as a performed activity that reifies and embodies the archival knowledge of church doctrine.  The archive and the repertoire of spirituality work together.  Moving beyond Christianity, how does this understanding of religious action as performance and reinforcement of spiritual identity help us to have conversations and gain knowledge from the religious Other?  Again, Distracted, I was ready to recognize and discover the examples (contemporary and past) of the hegemony creating Aristotelian stories/tragedies and compare/contrast them to the multiple episodic narratives surrounding them.  Where is this happening? What effect is it having?

There was so much in this book that was generative for me.  It is difficult to pick any one thing.  But I will say this.  The book is about understanding performance in a world where cultures are colliding.  Some goals that stood out to me were: to be aware of the scenarios that reappear and (one might say) act as mini/maxi behavioral vortices, to understand the Americas as being united and full of commingled cultures—rather than falling prey to misleading endings implicated by scenarios, to understand the power and proliferatory facets of surrogation (I might say in the biophysical sense: the surrogate of children does not replace the mother but multiplies the position, and often, since the fertilization is achieved by artificial insemination, a surrogate will have twins or triplets—multiplying the family rather than replacing pieces of it), to remind us that beginning from a place of ignorance “we don’t know”—but we can learn—often leads us to richer more expansive discoveries and productive transculturation, and to know that thinking in terms of limit events cuts out experiences that we need to internalize and perform in conjunction with other events, performances and people—an active witness can make connections and meaning, while a spectator is dismissed as non-participatory. 

I still struggle to understand at times—meaning not that I don’t understand at all, but that I recognize that I am only on the surface of understanding many of these things.  I am sure that with more experience, more learning, more encounters (intense ones for all the Rollo May scholars in the house), I will understand more. 

Taylor’s discussion of the episodic, Denise Stoklos’ intense effort to communicate, and the repeated act called to mind “Einstein on the Beach,” but not analogously.  I’m not sure.  This thought did not quite finish.

Overall, there was a freedom and a joy to the knowledge and language I received from “This book . . . destined for the archive” (52).  Taylor’s celebration of the multiplicity and her faith that despite the terrible things “The peasants die, but not before they have found the seeds of life.” (190)  There are multiple seeds of life and the possibilities continue to expand and recreate/rebirth.  People create and perform new memes and meanings, new endings for the scenarios that haunt our transcultural performances.  It’s not the end.  I find tremendous hope and courage in this book.  The archival language that is articulated breaks down limits that keep the dialogue from moving toward healthy permutations of performance.  It’s something that I am passionate about and only now am seeing the words, the language to describe what I could sense but not see. 

Why Theatre?

“The “secret” of theatre’s power is dependent upon the “truth” of the illusion.  Enfolded within fiction, theatre seeks to display the line between visible and invisible power” –Peggy Phelan, Unmarked qtd in Shimakawa 57

Why theatre?  “The spontaneous and confrontational aspects of live theatre presented themselves as an antidote to the forced invisibility of Asian Americanness produced through abjection, counter it with not mere inclusion of Asian Americanness in the spectrum of the visible but with a spotlit focus on it. Additionally, traditional Western theatre’s presentational layering of body/actor/character lends itself to a political agenda of Asian American theatre artists like Gotanda”—Karen Shimakawa 67 (National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage.  Duke UP: London, 2002. Print)

Karen Shimakawa spends a good amount of time explaining why theatre is a particularly apt social space to examine, expose, counter, and critically mime the national abjection that characterizes the anti-Asian Americanc racism that has been prevalent in White American culture.  The answer is important to me.  To say that the purpose of theater is merely to entertain or instruct oversimplifies what happens through the process of study, rehearsal, and performance.  The variety and amount of people involved in and necessary to the process—each one and group bringing something to the cauldron. 

I had the privilege of studying with East West Players in the summer of 2006; right after seeing the first production of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face—a play about the Miss Saigon scandal and specifically Hwang’s part in it, but he issue at stake was the question of being Asian American and what that means in the social and theatrical realms.  At the time, I knew little more about the Miss Saigon incident than what I learned in the play, but I had grown up with a lot of Asian American students.  In my school, white was the minority.  When I studied at East West, I was the only student without at least one Asian-American parent—I was the only white girl.  While I was conscious of my race at the beginning, my classmates adopted me. I was already familiar with Asian and Asian-American culture, topics, cuisine, as well as the general American background we shared as a core group (5 of us in every class).  In one of our acting classes (with other students), once or twice a week there was about an hour of time spent on what I came to see as Asian-American Theatre therapy.  Theatre was not a popular or accepted choice for many of the students, and their communities and families often provided pressure.  As an Asian-American theatre company, this was an issue that was important for the teachers to address.  I found myself trying to assimilate and listening a lot.

I remember one exercise that two of my classmates worked on in a scene in which two sisters were fighting: they were both Korean American and so were the characters.  The actress playing the older sister in the scene was asked if she spoke Korean—she did.  Our instructor asked her to say her lines in Korean in the scene.  The actress playing the younger sister did not speak Korean as fluently, but she understood it—her lines remained in English.  The scene exploded.  Using the other language deeply connected both actresses to what was happening.  It was one of many times that I wished I had been part of a more multicultural family—though I have learned since that I am multicultural, if not in a visible way. 

Up until my experience there, I had been very nervous about theatre as a career choice; the general view of actors and theatre practitioners is not a particularly positive one where I grew up.  Learning and working at East West players was the first place that I felt the answer to “Why Theatre,” beyond knowing that I loved it.  The company treated theater as not only an entertaining performance, but also a way to understand, explore, challenge, and correct different baggage that those involved had as individuals and as a community.  The immediacy and tangibility of theater was actively engaged to understand not just characters but actors, directors, audience, and others.  American society/People society is full of problems (I use the word broadly, deliberately), and theatre is able to both instruct and entertain while going deeper than that.  Shimakawa mentioned different ways to use theater to counter abjection, including: presenting more realistic characters and critical mimesis.  What other methods exist?  How else do we use theatre’s fiction to tell the Truth? How do different plays and performances, styles and groups use the medium to explore, contradict, grow, change? 

It’s a puzzle that I enjoy being a part of, in any way I can.

And the Parade Rumbles On =)

I have just read/encountered a brilliant, brain stretcher of a book.  Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Roach uses the metaphor of a parade as a way into understanding the forward progression and backward study of cultural memory and identification through performances in liminal spaces—specifically the circum-Atlantic trade triangle of the early modern period.  He specifically is interested in kinesthetic imagination (cultural memory through physical performance), behavioral vortices (locations that exist on the interactive borders of several cultures, thereby drawing the performances in), and displaced transmission (practices of cultural memory and identity that are transplanted, adapted and adopted).  His method is to compare historical texts (of all sorts) with contemporary texts (of all sorts) in order to see how that parade—in which surrogates must arise to take the place of the things that pass away (thereby remembering and reinventing identity)—restores behaviors from their “scripted records” (11).  Roach’s work reads like a parade itself, wandering down the street of the pages as people, themes, and events weave in and out in the interactions. 

I found this book particularly interesting because it is a period that I have studied in terms of literature, criticism, historical research, and dramatic literature—it is the research topic of my favorite Professor from my masters.  It was a challenging read in the best possible way, and I responded to it on many different topics.  As a result, I’m going to go in a couple different directions with this, so bear with me.

1.) Theater & Performance as a Creation of Cultural Memory

As both a performer and a director—as well as someone who is often painfully aware of perceived authenticity or inauthenticity of social performance, Roach struck me with his observations of performers both as caretakers/makers of memory and as effigies/mediums of that cultural definer (77-78).  The majority of theater companies and productions that I have worked with/on resurrected plays from the past because there was something within the play that they wanted to remember or recreate in the memory of society/community.  It might have just been the “greatness” of that play or a respect for Shakespeare (but then what is that greatness but cultural performance that for one reason or another deserves to be remembered as part of a cultural identity) or perhaps it was the perspective the play could shed on current events (and then it is both a restored and surrogated script).    Still, theater is being used to transmit cultural memories and ideas.  For example, The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh just closed at the Hilberry (our Wayne State graduate theater) this weekend.  It is a play about an Irish community on an Irish Island.  While the play is considered a “comic masterpiece” (http://www.druid.ie/productions/the-cripple-of-inishmaan-2011) by the Druid Theatre in Ireland, one of the important professional theater companies in Ireland, the Hilberry production played up the magical and heartrending elements of the story in an Americanized view of the magic of Ireland and a young man’s struggle for life (more than in Ireland), liberty (from his communal place as cripple), and the pursuit of happiness (the girl).  While these elements are to some degree present, the Hilberry production highlighted them, bringing a unique performance of American memory and culture out of the Irish play. 

2.) Celebrity as effigy (76)

Theater and Movies (a new permutation) still formalize the structural performances and signs of society.  While our theater actors rarely find such celebrity as Thomas Betterton, our movie actors occupy roles of celebrity as effigy.  They occupy that liminal space where they are of us but not of us—we speak of them in conversation by their first names and gossip about the intimate details of their lives, but are just as willing to enact performances of waste on them in the form of verbal and textual violence.  Newsweek magazine published an article in 2010 redefining celebrity as the 21^st century art form—life as story.  Life as performance art. 

3.)  Internet Ghost Dancing

The internet multiplies points of contact and intersection between cultures and ideas—the ludic spaces, the behavioral vortices. And everyday performances are filmed and uploaded at a blistering degree, while the cultural process of remembering/forgetting rapidly pushes forward.  Myspace (which has given way to facebook) has a fascinating permutation in the webspace selvage between life and death—it’s called mydeathspace. Mydeathspace is an archive of those pages including a short obituary stating how and when the user died and a link to the deceased’s myspace page.  Reading the pages is a fascinating connection point between the living and the dead, who seem to live on in cyberspace. When a myspace user dies, their profile page remains in place; their friends and relatives continue to post periodically on the page like a ritual—like a cyber ghost dance.  Like the Native American religious ritual that Roach describes, the interactions function as “a rite of memory” between the living and the dead (208). 

4.) Community and Displaced Transmission

When discussing groups, Roach observes that as communities create/recreate/remember/forget their identities, they do not function like bodies—which need all their different pieces to survive—rather they function like a quilt which can patch together and lose lots of things, the goal being a cohesive quilt instead of a functioning organism (191).  In my mind this observation is in conversation with Miranda Joseph’s book.  Both Joseph and Roach agree that the idea of community is one that reifies identities based on exclusion and inclusion—which can (a la Mardi-gras and the non-profit), in the guise of challenging the oppressive system, actually support/supplement/reinforce that very system.  Roach also seems to be pointing out the problem that while “community resides in shared conceptions of legitimate performances . . . these conceptions are not fixed and immutable; they are subject to fluctuations and negotiations” (86).  The fluctuation and negotiation are precisely where Roach situations his research and ideas, which are at once fascinating, disturbing, and generative.  

Well, in place of a conclusion, I will say that the parade goes on.  My brain continues to percolate and my homework continues to pile up.  Until next time, I heartily recommend the book.

The Value of What I Don't Know

“A new generation of would-be scholars, raised on the shifting sands of the Internet and global media culture, reads history from a fundamentally different perspective than prior generations.  The hard-won understanding that history is not and cannot be an impartial record of facts and events is, for such students, a commonplace.  They understand that history is a complex and contested act of cultural memory.  What they don’t know is what to do about it.” (Bial and Magelssen 2 from Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions)

This particular statement hits home for me.  I was born in 1987.  As a member of Generation Y—a Millennial—I grew up in the waves of post modernism, structuralism, post structuralism, the relativity of truth and the recognition that history was not a single error-proof story waiting to be discovered.  When I encountered the idea that history was flexible, written by the victors, incomplete etc, I did not balk.  Of course! I responded.  And the question then arose, as articulated above, “What do we do about it?” 

How do I respond and make assertions about something that is just as tricky and multidimensional as contemporary life?  The question seems to me to be reflected in the title of my blog. 

In regards to the uncertainty of meaning in writing, Della Pollack recommends to keep writing.  For her it almost seems to function as a rallying call.  My academic and written discourses have been a study in continuing to write—not as a statement but as a matter of course because I could not stop.  Writing and having opinions, continuing to voice them does not seem to be as pressing an issue as how to be accepted into the conversation. 

Bial & Magelssen’s quote brings up an interesting dynamic: that of the established to the up-and-coming, the experienced to the youthful, the ivory tower and the young novice. That relationship inspires an amount of fear.  I have a fear that someone has already said what I have thought.  I have a fear that the relativity that I take for granted will be used to discredit my own ideas.  Some scholars have represented the academy to me as an unforgiving and stringent group of people.  I am afraid that the only way to join the discussion is to be the best—but the set of rules are unknown.  The discoveries about the shifting, constructed nature of worldview seem to be easily weaponized to keep out riff-raff (by whatever definition of riff-raff happens to have at present). 

However, I also recognize that my experience has been quite the opposite in many ways.  I have presented papers—thus entering the conversation—I have contributed to discussions about ideas and been responded to and received by professors, thinkers, writers, and classmates. 

To answer: “What do we do about it?” I will side with Della Pollock and say that we keep writing.  Though the examples in Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, are open ended with more questions than statements.  While the questions they asked and proliferated where helpful questions and the articles were very interesting, I couldn’t help but feel that the emphasis on more and more questions left the articles feeling breezy and light.  I have to ask myself if it’s a hang-over from the old ivory tower club.  If I am on the train to keep writing, I feel that I have to recognize that no amount of knowledge will ever be complete and then write what I have discovered.  With a proliferation of questions in the articles, I feel that the authors aren’t comfortable with the fact that their texts will always be incomplete.  They seem to be including the questions to prove to the new ivory tower that they recognize the questions.  That idea brings me back to the Bial and Magelssen quote: because, yes, I do understand that the questions can and should proliferate, but I also recognize that if I only ask questions, it will not be enough.  I have to have faith that my observations and ideas will be enough.  That someone else will come along and correct me or fill in the empty places.  That my hypothesis are valuable as hypothesis—not thesis.  They are valuable as suggestions/theories.  That those incompletions are not only weaknesses but also strengths because they are breathing room for exploration and ideas. 

Perhaps that is the change that should be made in regards to the historiographic and historical essay: no longer thesis, but hypothesis. 

And so I continue, writing about the more I don’t know.

Questions

I have a question: Why should there be a cohesive school of Historiography?

I ask in response to Peter Burke's frustrations with “the New History.” He writes, “in this expanding and fragmenting universe, there is an increasing need for orientation” (2), and so spends the piece trying to understand the new movement of attitudes and style of researching and writing History.  As I ask the question, immediately, I see the value of one united school—easily followed, easily learned, universally understood.  Additionally, just because there is one method, does not mean that there’s only one opinion.  However, I also become uncomfortable.  I agree with Thomas Postlewait, historical events exist in “a complex and dynamic interrelationship among… historical locations of meaning.  History happens and rehappens, as we continue to reconstitute the past every time we comprehend it.  We are always rewriting and rereading history” (178).  Understanding history is a shifting, complex, recursive process.  If we were to have only one way—one unified way to understand it—we would lose the wealth of ideas and understanding that conflicting and complimentary methods can produce. 

So I ask again: Why should there be a cohesive school of Historiography? 

I think I may be asking the wrong question.

It seems that each of the readings for this week—Thomas Postlewait, Peter Burke, and Bruce McConachie—are caught in between two sides somehow.  New History and Traditional History, Narrative and Essay, Objective History and Subjective History.  While none of the authors actually say that one of the ways is wrong/right, each author is concerned that their fellow historians think carefully about which technique they use.  Each article contains a warning about how to proceed: do not forget how complex and interrelated history is, do not forget that the new history is incomplete, do not forget that the essay loses something without narrative. 

So I change my question: Why are these authors so concerned about matters of form, process, and orientation?

Robert Scholes’ observation about producing texts comes to mind: “The ability to be “creative,” whether in the discourse of criticism or in the discourse of poetry, is not given to the novice but is earned by mastering the conventions to the point where improvisation becomes possible and power finally is exchangeable for freedom once again” (6).

While there have been/and are geniuses that seem to create without knowing the conventions, there is a cultural sense that one should know the rules in order to break them.  The ten thousand hours research supports this idea.  Learning the conventions or the rules is what makes improvisation and creativity meaningful.  Breaking the rules works, essentially because when someone is a master of the rules, they know why the rules work/what need the rules are addressing.

So both rules and creativity are important: they function together with a (product)ive, process tension.  It seems to me that the value that these writers are afraid to lose is respect for the techniques that balance out and generate creativity. 

At the moderated discussion re: Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass both talked about how much work they did on the project before they came to rehearsals or even started putting things together—but when they began rehearsals, Wilson said he came in without a plan, ready to react and work with what was there—rather than what he expected.  Glass mentioned that if he “knew” what he was trying to do, it was an indication that it wasn’t going to work.  The technique, they said, was what allowed them to be creative in the moment.

To answer the question: Why are these authors so concerned with form, process, and orientation?  I believe that they are afraid that their colleagues will forget what is important about certain forms/processes/orientations, thereby allowing the reasons for those forms to be lost and losing valuable tools—thereby inhibiting the (product)ivity of their historical research and conclusions. 

While my view of history is not exactly in line with anyone of these authors, I think that understanding the structures/forms/orientations/techniques that come before, mastering them, spending the 10,000 hours is how we create, how we learn to do something new and meaningful, how we study history—as they knew it, as we know it, and then as it might be.  

Works Cited

"Historiography and the Theatrical Event: A Primer with Twelve Cruxes" Thomas Postlewait (1991)

"Overture: the New History, its Past and its Future" Peter Burke (1992)

"Narrative Possibilities for U.S. Theatre Histories" Bruce McConachie (2004)

Semiotics and Interpretation "Chapter 1" Robert Scholes.  New Haven: Yale UP (1983)

Moderated Conversation Re: Einstein on the Beach. Ann Bogart, Phillip Glass, Robert Wilson. 15 Jan 2012. Ann Arbor