Making Delinquent

	Making Delinquent Introduction Photo and Video Director's Statement Critical Essay Press Rachel Howard, SF Chronicle Rita Feliciano, Danceviewtimes.com Interview, In Dance Rehearsal Journal Intro 2009 Mar/Jun 2008 Aug/Sep 2008 Oct/Nov 2008 Postscript 2009: Theory Quotes Proposals First draft Grant applications Casting Call for performers Leadeship, Power, Contract Contract Research Research Sources Stop the killing White Priviledge The 2008 Election Free writes Ugly Facts Blog Meghan Constance Nestor Jorge Reflections Constance Omar Michael Kroll Audience responses Sam Aranke Critical Response Keith Personal Essay The Script Who we are Why? My name is Omar Turcios 24th St. is on fire Krupke Are you a man? The Beat People die In the Mission after rehearsal Shadows Final score Credits Artist Bios	CRITICAL ESSAY: Practice-As-Research Portfolio Delinquent Rhetoric Keith Hennessy (Developed from an essay written for a seminar in Rhetoric & Performance with Prof. Lynette Hunter, Winter 2009) Delinquent Rhetoric: The making of an argument in the guise of a poetic ritual called Delinquent And The making of a ritual performance in the guise of an argument called Delinquent Or more accurately, The conflation of ritual and argument, performance and presence, rhetoric and poetic, in the making of a theatrical event called Delinquent. On November 15, 2008, I completed the premier performances of Delinquent, a collaborative project with nine young performers of diverse talents and life histories in a poetic rhetorical response to juvenile justice. Delinquent used images and issues associated with the juvenile justice system as a portal to view their particular and collective lives right now. “How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation.” (Dyer, 1993). This statement speaks to the central project of Delinquent: challenging how particular youth are seen (as delinquent) in order to change how they are treated. Urban, immigrant, and/or poor youth of color are too often represented as criminals and potential criminals, as disturbances to order and civility, as social and cultural infections spreading the disease of chaos, violence, primitive and anti-social values. These representations justify an intensifying of security structures, at schools and in the streets, which participate in a prison industrial complex. Delinquent attempted to disturb the metanarrative of the bad kid: the delinquent, the youth of color, the dangerous or uncivilized brown or black male, the criminal other. One of the questions I asked, and encouraged the young artists to ask, is, “Who is delinquent?” I prompted them to recognize the label of delinquent as both projection and distraction. I encouraged them to turn the mirror on society, on adult culture, to expose its delinquency (our delinquency) with regards to protecting, teaching, and supporting young people. I directed the performers to consider how their own identity gets constructed in response to external forces and sources and I dared them to consider some of the ramifications of identity, whether static or fluid, projected, appropriated or assumed. For over 20 years I have made performances that respond to racism and the injustices perpetrated by the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). And for nearly 30 I have worked with disenfranchised youth in various institutions including high schools, youth detention centers, and art institutions. From a teen jail in Lexington KY to the SF Museum of Modern Art, my artistic work has evolved in collusion with an activist practice aligned with a lineage of prison activism that is most clearly articulated in the work of Critical Resistance. Prison Industrial Complex The prison industrial complex (PIC) refers to the structural network of government institutions and corporations that build, manage, and profit from prisons and jails. Similar to the term military industrial complex, PIC articulates the links between prisons, jails, courts, police associations, criminal law, prison labor, security technology, prison guard unions, and prisoners as capital. Many theorists of race and prison in the US recognize a direct lineage from slavery to the Prison Industrial Complex, i.e., they recognize that “accumulation and death of the black body” in PIC? Is integral to notions of US civil society and democracy. Critical Resistance Mission Statement Critical Resistance (CR) seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness. The success of the movement requires that it reflect communities most affected by the PIC. Because we seek to abolish the PIC, we cannot support any work that extends its life or scope. Referring to rhetorical practice and theory, I would like to document, articulate, explain and even justify how the performance Delinquent participates in the mission of CR. I noticed in writing this paper that it is easier to refer to the spoken and written parts of the performance. I am more challenged by a lack of vocabulary or analytical tools to discuss the dances, images and physical actions as rhetorical figures. How does Delinquent challenge the beliefs or ideologies that link our safety to an ever-growing network of prisons and profit? The artist team reflected and included people who are most affected by the PIC, i.e., over half the cast were young men, either Latino or African-American. The rest of the cast were linked to the PIC by personal and/or family history, the area where they grew up, and/or by shared demographics with people most likely to be found in a US prison, e.g., sex workers, non-white people, poor people, and activists. Curator Carolina Ponce de Leon states, “Paradoxically, in spite of the newly refurbished diversity of the mainstream, globalization has lead to the recolonization of the art world and has turned the multicultural landscape into a hip backdrop. The global art world is a colonizer captivated by the strategies of decolonization.” I was aware of the danger that by simply representing this politically correct cohort I would also reflect a liberal humanist tendency of reinscribing oppressive ideology, i.e., that I might be a hip colonizer captivated by decolonization. Throughout this paper I address the multiplicity of process and tactics that I/we used to confront this problematic of the ‘political’ white artist. Despite the many failures and neo-colonizations by artists who parachute into marginalized contexts, there are artists whose work inspired my project. John Malpede’s work with Los Angeles Poverty Department and Rhodessa Jones’ The Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women demonstrate a kind of community-based performance making that is motivated neither by social work charity nor by politically correct funding opportunity. These projects betray class boundaries by sharing mutual resources to make compelling art, without denying the looming and ever present potential to exploit the politically marked bodies of the artists. My frequent attempts to make an anti-racist theatre are guided by a practice of mutuality. Carlson describes a historical shift in political theater: “Instead of providing resistant political “messages” or ‘messages’ or representations, as did the political performances of the 1960s, postmodern performance provides resistance precisely by not offering “messages,” positive or negative, that fit comfortably into popular representations of political thought, but by challenging the processes of representation itself, even though it must carry out this project by means of representation.” Delinquent’s process operates simultaneously as, and between the strategies of, a 1970s-inspired political theatre of marginalized identity (we represent!) AND a poststructuralist project of deconstructing representation (fuck representation!). “It is of necessity, says Auslander, “an elusive and fragile discourse that is always forced to walk a tightrope between complicity and critique.” Delinquent also engaged the structures that support the PIC by challenging the concepts of safety, comfort and stability. These challenges were embodied within the work’s structure, texts and images. A text is delivered in the air. Someone caught underneath manipulates a wall. Tensions are exaggerated through physical risk and juxtaposition of images, or between dance and spoken language. A dancing youth is enclosed in a room or cell and then is ‘forgotten’ for the duration of the performance. Another climbs a rope until he as at the limit of his strength. The performers don wacky masks that ‘don’t make sense,’ plunging the audience into another genre or forcing a different gaze/perspective. I am inspired by circus arts and dramaturgy, using risk and danger, to spark visceral discomfort. Partly for the cheap thrill, partly to invite the audience off-balance, beyond norms. The process of making the work and the staging of that process, demonstrate an anti-hierarchical ensemble democracy. Our primary meeting form was an informal circle, where everyone was listened to. Echoing 1970s feminist theatre projects very performer was supported to make a central image, with no text or dance more important than another. Performers stayed on stage throughout the event, either as energetic witness or physical support to the central image. Inequality and powerlessness were investigated during the making and played with on stage. We talked often about power, about the structures of power between director, a middle aged white man with a $40,000 commission, and the cast of performers under 25, who didn’t previously know each other. We questioned power structures and relationships in the process, in our relationship to the theatre and their public relations, and in the systems of police, courts, and prisons. The performer’s contract stated not only the details of fee payment and hours of work (rehearsals, performances) but also stated that individual artists would retain ownership (intellectual property rights) to their solo creations and that despite my right to edit or shape their material, no one would be coerced or pressured to do anything in the performance that they didn’t want to do. Of course hierarchies are always already in formation and privileges outside the studio do not disappear just because we sat in a circle. I was always the eldest, the most in charge, the most responsible to the whole. The cast members with the most social and economic privileges were the ones who were most often at rehearsal and most willing to engage me in how I was directing. An attention to these hierarchies and a willingness to share power and creative production were integral to the project’s democratic experiment. Together we questioned the status of victim and used the performance to deconstruct and reframe victim to reveal its many parts: silent collaborator, potentials of resistance, ambivalence about relationship to institutionalized power, the benefits of irresponsibility, and the dynamics of pride and humiliation. As for food and shelter, the project helped a group of mostly disenfranchised young artists to see how art can and can’t feed them. Performing in a downtown venue for high art, and getting paid for it, nurtured their self-esteem and encouraged them of the possibility of participating in the economic power streams beyond their class or neighborhood locations. Again it’s a fine line “between complicity and critique.” Thanks to press and promotional activity, the performance began long before any audience arrived at the theatre. The title of Delinquent is a one-word poem intended to provoke questions and inspire images. The word is both adjective and noun, used to describe someone who is disobedient or non-compliant with laws and expectations. When connected to the word juvenile, delinquent suggests a type, a cliché of a youth prone to petty theft, violence, graffiti, missing school, and a general disregard for the alleged consensus of dominant society. Claiming the word as a kind of self-identification was a rhetorical game, a queer appropriation of the word to disrupt its identificatory power. The word is not as common or iconic today as it was in my youth, so my use of the word evokes also a sense of nostalgia and camp. It’s possible that the title game engaged an older audience, those in the age cohorts of society’s most powerful. Plastering the city with stickers, the internet with spam, and the newspapers with advertisements announcing Delinquent, I hoped to both seduce and provoke a potential audience. The invitation was to witness a performance that would poetically and irreverently confront the ugly facts that reveal our treatment of youth. 750 people witnessed the performance but somewhere between ten and fifty thousand people read the title linked to a performance featuring young artists marked by jail, courts, police, and social stigma. Delinquent, a performance Delinquent, an argument Delinquent, a poem Delinquent, a ritual Delinquent, a live action series of rhetorical arguments, figures, schemes and tropes Strategy: With regard to the identity and representation of juvenile delinquent, persuade both cast and audience to: Re-frame Destabilize Complexify Provoke a reconsideration of Tactics: One. Complicate both the individual and the collective subject. Trinh T. Minh-ha says that identity is ideology. The collective subject is a group united by a shared identity. But who decides on the frames of representation, on the names and codes of identity? Judith Butler recommended “a move away from an attempt “to solve this crisis of identity politics,” by concentrating on who and what wields the power to define identity, “to proliferate and intensify this crisis” and “to affirm identity categories as a site of inevitable rifting.” Present the ‘I’ as a complex ‘we’ and simultaneously present the ‘we’ as a network of disunified I’s. Would it be possible to maintain the ensemble (the collective subject) while disturbing the shared identity with difference and ambivalence? I intended to disrupt audience attempts to get a whole picture of any particular artist. In the opening text (Who We Are), Constance was suspended ten feet off the ground, supported by the rest of the cast holding a pulley rope. She cited a series of facts about the cast, e.g., four of us are in high school, one of us missed the final year of high school because he was in jail, one of us started stripping at 16, one of us is lacto intolerant, one of us has twin girls, one of us is a twin. This text set up a pattern of teasing the audience with partial stories, suggesting that there is more to these people than might fit into one category and that there might be differences and similarities with their own stories. Avoid cliché by emphasizing the incomplete, the unsaid, and the general instability of identity, especially among youth. Let the audience be aware that they are trying to fit these individuals into categories of ethnicity, gender, and criminal record or behavior. Push the audience to fill gaps of knowledge with their own stories and perceptions, in the encouragement that they feel connected. I wanted the audience to feel in solidarity and to choose to be allies. A solidarity based on a shared, humanist identity as citizens with rights and humans with bodies, emotions, thoughts, and creativity. Choosing to be allies suggests a solidarity across lines, or gaps, of difference. In the context of identity politics an ally is generally a person of a privileged group who recognizes both personal and social values in supporting the struggles of an oppressed class, e.g., white ally or straight ally. Judit defines allies as those who “understand that we need each other to survive/ and that we have the courage/ to ask each other what that means.” With Delinquent I was performing as an ally to youth, to the incarcerated, to those unjustly marked by racial profiling, poverty, and the war on drugs. As if my own survival depended on it. Two. Stage the tension, friction or tensegrity between body and voice, between text and story telling. Increase the tension: the pulling away from each other. Increase the friction: the rubbing against each other, which also increases the heat. Increase the tensegrity, the Bucky Fuller term to name the structural integrity of the tension, and how this tension, in balance, is stronger and more efficient than gravity. Think honeycomb, skin cell, geodesic dome, yurt, camping tent, all held up and held together by choreographing individual parts in balanced tension with a shared center. Draw attention to these spaces between body and voice, between text and personal story. Locate the performance, the drama, in the gaps between bodies, within bodies. For example, when Meghan and Omar compare stories of after they leave rehearsal, a privilege gap is revealed and the representation of a universal citizen (which the diverse performance ensemble tends to reinforce) is disrupted. Highlighting the conflicted space between two people, a young gay man challenges a young straight man about macho masculinity. Racialized communities were also embodied and represented as a site of tension, gap, borderlands: Jorge in the skeleton hoodie dancing the perimeter, his steps sourced in Mexican folklorico, while Constance at centerstage speaks to a rash of neighborhood/barrio shootings. And earlier in the piece two black male dancers embody different dance training - hip-hop and modern/ballet - that reveals tensions of class, opportunity and identity within black identity. Three Deconstruct West Side Story. Use the 1950’s musical to show how ideas and images of the juvenile delinquent are embedded, structural, multi-generational. Reveal how poor and migrant are pathologized, how delinquent is a disease of otherness, deserving charity, but always containment and punishment, for their own good. West Side Story, the Broadway show and Hollywood film, is iconic in the American imaginary of gang youth and the juvenile delinquent. Pitting Puerto Rican immigrants against poor whites, the work asserts nationalist and hegemonic ideologies while, quoting Shakespeare, makes a tragedy out of color-blind romance. Naming West Side Story as an icon is to recognize its narrative and characters as fetishized symbols of mythic proportions. To deconstruct an icon, or canon, is to intervene on the perpetuation of a particular ideology, to weaken or break its structural links to hegemony. Four. Masks. Wear funny, wacky, bigheaded masks that hide the face to reveal more of the body, transform individuals into a mass, and distort some aspects of identity and recognition to clarify others. Masks also disrupt the power dynamic between looking and being looked at. Masks allow the wearer to look out but the audience can’t return the gaze. New information comes not from the static mask but from the relationship of the body and environment as it changes around or in relation to the mask. The gaze changes while the mask remains the same. In the masked 'sexy' dance, Jorge performs a series of stripper clichés: slowed down, gender switched clichés typical of female strippers. He's wearing street clothes and a mask that does not change, that does not meet the body with clichés of its own. Five Humanism. Associate the cast with the term juvenile delinquent and then reveal or assert how they are each humans, deserving of love and respect, a home and a hot meal, an education and an opportunity at least to make money, and preferably to contribute to the common good. Invite the audience to care about, and even to love, the actual performers. Hope that the theatrical frame gives this care or love a metaphoric power to extend beyond the performance. Here my rhetorical or activist project is most problematic. Isn’t humanism the defining factor of a liberalism that denies difference, sustains capitalism (and it’s symbiotic injustices), and deadens art? Do I want to be the good middle-class therapist that heals people of the disease of Other so that they can become productive members of a society whose identity is framed by the prison industrial complex? I think I take for granted a certain kind of solidarity and community in San Francisco that simultaneously, and to various degrees, consents to and resists hegemony. Is this possible? Or is this the worst illusion of middle-class liberal humanism? That we can enjoy the privileges and feel like we're cogs in the wheel? That we’re building a new society that slowly replaces the old as it defeats itself? Anyway I live part-time in this illusion and so I'm not thinking about reclaiming these youth back into a system of assimilation and surveillance. I think that their insistence on very limited notions of identity politics, their mostly lite forms of resistance. Criminality and victimhood are more supportive of the PIC than in figuring out how to become poets of their own lives, and reduce their chances of being cop magnets or bullet magnets (Wilderson). My intention with the project was to challenge representations of criminalized youth through various tactics of both identification and disidentification. I hoped that the cast might realize their potential to make some money while disrupting the expectations that society/hegemony imposes on their bodies, identities, and communities. Logos. Present the facts: prison details and life details Articulate the ways that the prison industrial complex is unjust, especially with regards to race and class. Use the examples of youth of color - the actual individual’s in the piece, and the communities they’re identified with - to show how the ‘system’ is particularly skewed against non-white and poor youth. Challenge a re-consideration of the inmate-classmate conflict. But facts in Delinquent, whether social or personal, are obscured as much as clarified, and suggested more than articulated. Does this shift the strategy from Logos to Pathos or Ethos? Or is it an extension of the logos appeal to instigate independent thinking, to provoke the audience/spectator to question the facts, to wonder about the information that’s omitted, inferred, withheld? Logos isn’t really facts so much as reason. And not rational only. In a way to articulate the ways the PIC is unjust won’t really do unless you also explain why you think it’s unjust. The facts are useful, but in themselves they are neither pro nor con, you have to do something with them and you did in the piece, you just need to write it here. Pathos. Tragic tales that appeal to emotion, tug the heart strings... Stage the struggle to speak, the struggle to be seen, and the struggle to be recognized and respected. The disruption of the story is the story. The interrogation of the poet is the poem. The sharing of the burden of silenced voices is the Voice we want to hear. The dedication to climbing the rope despite the lack of ability or training, metaphorically recalls a lineage of resistance, of refusing to give up, of keeping eyes on the prize, is the real circus act. But Delinquent frustrates expectations of emotional bonding and resolving the narrative. Many in the audience want to know more, about the performers personal lives, about the systems in which they’re caught. They want the story to be about the performers and not about themselves. Is this pathos, pathetic, and/or apathetic? I am played with ambiguity of genre, with how I wanted the audience to read the performance and with whom I wanted the audience to identify. I wanted to provoke a critical observation of systems of juvenile justice, and of the PIC in general, and I wanted that critique to include self-critique, a realization of each person’s role. It was also a goal to have the audience identify or affiliate with resistance to the PIC. To spark their curiosity in the personal experiences and social movements embodied by Critical Resistance. Ethos. Present young artists as responsible citizens. Demonstrate their intelligent and compassionate concerns. Show their development of ethical character, not only in spite of adversity but also due to adversity. Appeal to the audience’s desire to see the best of themselves, the self that they want to be, in the actions and words of the young performers. Flaunt the ensemble, the ethics of the mutual aid, the hard work of collaboration amidst diversity. The artists work together in ways that the larger society cannot seem to do. Demonstrate their vision, willingness, and ability to collaborate without insisting on a mass identity that strangles individual difference. Develop an ensemble solidarity that does not deny or forbid solidarities outside the ensemble, an ensemble solidarity that celebrates cultural and community bonds that link each artist to the world, to history, to family. Rhetorical Violence 1 In the paragraph on Rhetorical Violence, Lynette Hunter writes, “’Systematic abuse’ is just that: not only abuse of ‘the system’ but abuse that constructs a ‘system’.” Through storytelling in rehearsal I attempted a compilation and analysis of abuse. How is the system created? How do patterns and strategies of abuse construct the system that the cast members are victims of? What have they personally experienced? What have they witnessed in the lives of friends and relatives? What similarities, patterns, and contrasts can we recognize? Example: How many times can Tracy report on the crimes she’s committed without ever being caught before she, and the rest of the cast, realize that her whiteness is integral to her story, and to theirs? And how is the construction of whiteness integral to the abuses, the system, and the construction of the delinquent? In general I avoided the conventional dramatic cliché of using first-person confessions and manifestos to drive a work featuring the stories and bodies of disenfranchised youth, and youth of color. With particular attention to a weaving of I and we, in both text and image, I pointed at systematic abuse without losing the individual victims. Simultaneously I played with the emotional framing of abuse and victim, preferring to show empowered youth responding to abuse rather than of youth suffering from abuse. “Power is at once repulsive and intoxicating. Oppositional practices which thrive on binary thinking have always worked at preserving the old dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed even though it has become more and more difficult today to establish a safe line between the government and the people, or the institution and the individual… There are, in other words, no “innocent people,” no subjects untouched in the play of power.” (Trinh, 1991, p 92). Here the innocence of youth is challenged. How does abuse construct a system? How are the players in this performance, also players in the institutions that abuse them? I think we performed some tentative inquiry and revelation in this area. Hunter’s list of violence that “is not necessarily physical” articulates some of the particularities of the abusive system that most of the Delinquent cast experiences daily. The violence of denied access, the violence of ideological representation that insures the inadequacy of that representation, the violence of differential access to knowledge, the violence of obscuring one’s rights. They might not have this precise language to describe the violence, but they know this violence and can show you their scars. Scars indicate that some healing has happened, that the wound is no longer open. In most scenes, the performers are not metaphorically bleeding on stage. Their scars demonstrate an embodied wisdom, which influences their performed posture, stance, and presence. Scars indicate both healing and loss. They are not the same as wounds. They are reminders, archives, of wounds. Healing, in some cases, is recovery. The strained voice can now be heard. The lame legs can now stand. In other cases, healing is an integration of loss, a reconfiguring of self and identity as one who has lost and bears the scar to prove it. What is the consciousness, intelligence or presence that needs to be woven into the scab? Which scabs or scars can motivate a person to build solidarity with those who share a similar wound history, and a commitment to preventing future generations from the same? How can healing be also revolutionary? In other words, how can healing prevent being re-absorbed into the social norm, the interpellated subject? I will attempt to address this with a brief discussion of Delinquent as both rite of passage and cultural ritual. van Gennep’s model of rite of passage is easy to recognize in the making and performing of Delinquent. He noted three distinct phases/spaces of the rite: a separation from society and family, a liminal or in-between space, and a return to or re-absorption into society. The in-between space is a ritualized context where permanent shifts of identity and consciousness are possible. Although rites of passage are more likely to support traditions and social norms, it is possible for radical rites of passage to sufficiently impact the initiates so that their return to society triggers cultural shifts. Distanced from their familiar cultural contexts and communities, the cast came together to question values and behaviors, to embody and inscribe new values and behaviors, and to return to society (both generic and our particulars) with a changed self, a more developed voice, and fresh possibilities of perspective, transformation, knowledge production, violence prevention and community formation. Change happens. The comments of Omar and Constance, coming from distinct social situations, both attest to their changed perceptions of self and the possibilities of live performance. “I must admit that this show had a powerful reaction to me and to everyone. I learned a lot from other people that were on and off the show, and I learned a lot about myself. I told them that the show meant a lot to me because we got to give everyone a voice that normally don’t have a voice, to a crowd that are not use to hearing that voice.” Omar Turcios, published in The Beat Within “I'm so inspired by everything right now. I’ve never really felt like art could have power - I wanted to believe it and I did to an extent, but not until this show did I realize the potential art has to move. It’s amazing how powerful mediums are when they intersect with each other. Anyways I wish we could keep having rehearsal forever, it's kind of weird how once something becomes so beautiful it dies, kind of like when flowers bloom.” Constance Castillo, email to the ensemble These statements demonstrate the personal impact of the project but the question of structural social change is not addressed. How can personal change inspire or provoke social change? What can we expect from a single artist or a singular event? If I did not consider the work as part of a larger movement, I would not be so confident about the positive outcome of small-scale artist rituals. Despite a war by media and government, cops and courts, to criminalize particular populations while protecting others, the non-profit organization Books Not Bars was instrumental in getting two juvenile prisons shut down in the past two years. Symbolic and energetic actions by performance artists, including the artists making Delinquent, participate in this ongoing performance-struggle that involves a cast of thousands of activists, artists, family members, and non-profit workers. I do not know the most effective poetic or rhetoric to debate or combat this rhetorical violence. A common strategy of social justice performance is pathos, an emotional appeal to the audience. This is often done by demonstrating and claiming one’s humanity through sincere personal narrative. For some of the cast, especially the poets with a strong sense of ethnic or cultural identity, this is a rhetorical strategy that they know and that they’re good at. However, the college-trained dancers and acrobats, with more ambivalent or assimilated identities, were more open to disrupting personal narrative and resisting representations. The former tactic, focused on visibility, voice, and identity, is generally more popular. It aligns with activist framings that aim to counteract marginalization, silencing, and disappearance (both real and representational) of poor and non-white people and cultures. But deconstructing visibility, voice, and identity complicates the ground of difference, which destabilizes identity’s power as a clearly marked and bordered space. A refusal to identify, or an intentional complication of identity and difference, are often considered privileged tactics, inaccessible or ineffective for those whose identity/representation is under attack. It was difficult to explain my intentions, and the theories behind them, to the whole cast. Everything required translation to the multiple dialects spoken among the group. We did reach some consensus on resisting accepted representations of urban youth as victims needing salvation. From the beginning of the project I had intended a confusion of documentary and fiction, of real, surreal, and unreal. I proposed hybrid forms of communication to construct hybrid identities; honoring particulars (of identity, culture, artistic discipline, genre) but not afraid to complicate them through juxtaposition within a single body, poem, dance or image. For those experienced with postmodern challenges to essentialist identities, this might seem like an obvious tactic. However, identity politics, with distinct borders between ethnicities and genders, are always and already exploited by pop cultures, prison cultures, and leftist political cultures. The task of an artist, working in relation to social movements, is to articulate the power of working between binaries, in the more complicated, less stable, and transcultural borderlands. Work at the margins, in hybrid collaboration or generative friction, can expand the territories of identity and visibility, decentering dominant and oppressive representations. Rhetorical Figures A quick scan of figures of pathos from the site Silva Rhetorica reveals several rhetorical devices I’m used in Delinquent. 1. aposiopesis Breaking off suddenly in the middle of speaking, usually to portray being overcome with emotion. We worked on a series of scenes that involved Omar “trying to tell his story.” The story, i.e., the text of his story, is constructed as a list of 25 significant details that concludes with, “My name is Omar Turcios.” Four times during the performance he starts to speak the list but each time he is interrupted, unable to finish. He loses his words, or is called by the group to participate in a song, or is drowned out by a loud sound. This is not precisely aposiopesis but this figure helps to reveal the tactic we are playing with. The goal, I think, is to appeal to the audience’s desire to hear the story, their desire for Omar to succeed, to overcome all resistance and tell his story. How many people told me that they wished for more personal stories from the ensemble? Disrupting Omar’s story, the only holistic narrative in Delinquent, teases the audience who want to know more, who want a more traditional, empathy producing, storytelling theatre. Many people want, and expect from ‘social justice’ performance, an inspired tale of the disadvantaged victim who defeats injustice or transcends oppressive material conditions. When Omar does get to recite the entire text, there is a brief image of triumph, that he has survived the attempts to silence and humiliate him and has arrived to state his name and claim his place. But what has actually happened? His script is not a whole narrative but a list of moments, a fragmented narrative with many gaps. And when he’s firmly in his place we realize that the immigrant young man, on probation for weapon possession, with two kids, is really in no place at all. He has neither arrived nor triumphed. His struggles are plentiful and evident. In fact, the conclusion of his text is a tragedy. At least while struggling to speak, he had our attention, sympathy, and best wishes. We want him to make it. But once he does, what can we do for him? Who will stand with him when he leaves the theatre tonight? This ambivalence of struggle and triumph is staged specifically to disrupt expectations of smooth representation, of fixed and generalized identity projection. I wanted to disorient the audience, as an audience who paid for a theatrical experience, and by frustrating their expectations, make their expectations more evident. I am still ambivalent about the power of telling one’s story. Is this the most effective way to find, achieve, develop, or reclaim one’s Voice? I am hoping that the ‘real’ story we tell is in the gap/meeting between body and voice, between individual and group. The staged text is a fusion of Omar’s story (Omar is a human citizen entitled to the respect and rights of citizens) and the physical struggle to tell Omar’s story, provoking a consideration of the systematic interference that defines marginalization. And the text is also a paradoxical narrative about Omar’s relationship to the group, to the ensemble. Are they actually disrupting, intervening, preventing him from speaking? Or are they supportively challenging him, as co-initiates in a rite of passage, in which he breaks his ties with the self and social perceptions that hold him back? 2. adynaton The expression of the inability of expression —almost always emotional in its nature. In much of my work I try to stage the struggle to speak. I am especially interested in a choreography of rupture and resistance, showing a speaking body that is neither mute nor paralyzed, but impeded, oppressed, wrestling, struggling. In Delinquent I focus particularly on the voice/body of youth and young adults. How is their voice constructed? How is it silenced, marginalized, reduced, distorted? How can a staging of this conflict, of this violent encounter, be so empowering that the artist’s voice actually emerges alive and articulate. Voice as a term that describes some kind of essential soul expression is problematic. I use it with a feminist accent, i.e., voice is embodied and poetic and opposes a hegemonic or socially obedient speech. Voice is cultural, not universal. It emerges from particular social conditions, identities, and positions. Nestor tries repeatedly to climb the rope but falls every time. Omar tries and fails three times to recite the list of key moments in his life. A moment of group silence becomes a measured minute of inarticulate noise, yelling, sounding – more emotional exposition than expression. 3. metaphor A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract. A prison is real. The solitary confinement cells where Mumia Abu Jamal has spent most of his adult life are real. The solitary cells for every the prisoner in the SHU, in the security housing units of max security prisons including Pelican Bay in Northern CA, are real. The juvenile justice system is abstract. The Prison Industrial Complex, of which juvenile justice is a key part, is also abstract. On stage there is a wall, eight feet high and eight feet wide. When the audience enters, the wall is held up by two black male teens on each side of the wall. They can’t see each other. For the next thirty minutes of the performance, someone is always holding up the wall. The wall is indeed a wall and later it will be bolted to three other walls to make a five by eight foot room; a room without windows or door that copies the size of many solitary confinement cells in the US prison system. The wall and the room are symbols. They suggest the weight, the cost, and the isolation of prison, confinement, enclosure and juvenile detention. The wall, and the building of the room around a dancer, are metaphors for the prison industrial complex, its fervor for building new prisons, and our complicity in that construction, both physical and conceptual. Dawon Davis is a performer. He is 17 years old, African American, and has lived his entire life in foster care. Due to complications and conflicts within the foster system he has also been to jail. A favorite song of his comes booming from the sound system. He steps into a rectangle of light, a five by eight foot rectangle, a failed symbol that tries yet fails to invoke a prison cell. Taken by the music, he dances, fiercely. The rest of the cast prepare all the walls, laying them out around him. We can see that a room will be built around him. And then it happens. The walls close in. Dawon continues to dance, a refusal to stop. His gestures, both facial and whole body, perform a dramatic display of emotion. The other performers are not emotionally demonstrative. They perform a task. Build the wall. Make Dawon disappear. Dawon’s invisibility is not abstract. When the music cuts abruptly we watch the cast watch the room they have built and together we all listen to Dawon flail against the walls and slide to the floor. We look for Dawon, for the dancer, for the vibrant young black man, but instead we see walls, raw construction, a prison, a system. Further conversation in class suggests that I am working perhaps with allegory or metonymy more than metaphor. The goal was to present the box as real enough. More than a visual image, the walls have weight and suggest some severity in closure. 4. syllogismus Rhetorical figures are so numerous and precise that most of my performance employs multiple figures, often simultaneously. Syllogismus is a figure of logos. The Silva Rhetorica describes it as, “The use of a remark or an image which calls upon the audience to draw an obvious conclusion.” After Aristotle, syllogism is defined as consisting of three parts: the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion. Example: Major premise: All humans are mortal. Minor premise: Socrates is a human. Conclusion: Socrates is mortal. My rhetorical intention with Omar’s scene fits this form. Major premise: Humans, citizens deserve respect and access to all the rights of civil society. Minor premise: Omar is a human citizen (as opposed to an abject alien, an alleged enemy of those who consider themselves citizens.) Conclusion: Omar deserves respect and rights. 5. catechrisis Intentionally using something in an incorrect way. While Dawon is in the box, the rest of the cast and the changes in sound and lighting suggest that the show is over. They bow. A bow should be the end of the play, the release of the imagery, and all the cast should be in the bow. To bow, to say it’s over while the image/action still continues is wrong. Each night there would be a visible conflict in the audience, those who jumped to their feet in standing ovation and those who were concerned that Dawon was still in the box. After each performance we heard from people who considered ‘freeing’ him. This catechrisis had numerous effects. Some were provoked into near-action. Others regretted their standing ovation when they realized that they had forgotten Dawon, and on further reflection, they recognized a metaphor of forgetting that there are people in prison. This was a move to provoke the recognition that most of us forget that people are locked up, that we are connected or related to those we have forgotten. 7. synoeciosis A coupling or bringing together of contraries, but not in order to oppose the to one another. Trae and Dawon’s opening dance presented two bodies, both young black male bodies, dancing in two irreconcilable styles. They have different approaches to the body, space, and audience. Dawon’s score was to claim a location and defend it. Trae’s score was to avoid being identified with any particular location. He was to keep moving, shifting positions and focus. Dawon tried to own the space, asserting a sharp and specific focus for his eyes, and dancing. I wanted to disrupt the white audience (society’s) tendency to type people, especially young black men, by presenting a sharp difference between the only two black male cast members. I also wanted to disrupt a reductionist approach to solidarity too typical of Bay Area non-white audiences. This scene was also an 8. oxymoron Placing two ordinarily opposing terms adjacent to one another, a compressed paradox. Central to the project of disrupting representation is destabilizing the totality of any one category or concept. When white artists, inspired to challenge racism by multicultural- or diversity-based casting, there is a tendency for each person to carry the weight of their ethnic or gender identity, especially if they are the only person in a particular category. It was important to me that there be more than one black male in Delinquent, not only because black males are disproportionately victimized by laws, courts and cops, but also because I wanted to interrupt a singular perception or assessment of black males. The simultaneous dancing by Trae and Dawon indicated a complexity of possible representations of black men. Their distinct presence, embodied and expressed through dancing, revealed them as both same and different, a paradox compressed into a single moment. 9. eutrepismus Numbering and ordering the parts under consideration. A figure of division, and of ordering. Omar’s life story is presented as a list, both ordered and divided. The question is what does this figure do? How does numbering and ordering a personal text influence the listener? By imitating objective or scientific reports, it suggests that memory is truth, fact. The jump to each new numbered statement disrupted narrative flow, indicating a historical gap between statements. I think that numbering a personal narrative is emotionally disruptive also, but I can’t say how. The scene’s emotionality, I think, comes more from the physicality of the scene, from Omar’s continuing or inability to continue, while being challenged by the group. Rhetorical Violence 2 Another section of Hunter’s Rhetorical Violence paper helped me to clarify the work I’m trying to do with Delinquent. “People don’t do violence to others unless they think it’s justified. All justification of violence is based on self-evident proof and reasoning. Therefore people doing violence think it’s self-evidently necessary. These systems are often self-justifyingly violent to other systems of groups or individuals. They violently rupture other sets of grounds.” I am both amazed and frustrated that so few people are willing to consider the self-evident proof of the Other. The current election (Nov 2008) gives daily proof of this lack of consideration. (I’m in a hotel suite with cable TV where I can switch between Fox, CNN, and MSNBC for repetitious and contrasting interpretations of the same actions.) Most victims of the juvenile justice system - a key site within the prison industrial complex - cannot articulate the self-evident justifications of police violence. And neither can most police articulate or recognize the self-evident justifications of the people they arrest, surveil, punish, or kill. Police violence is justified and supported by the mainstream media through journalism, reality TV, and fictional media. The actions of the PIC are presented as self-evidently necessary. Of course their self-evidently necessary is experienced as violence by those who get racially profiled, surveilled, beaten, arrested or incarcerated. Thus a social justice performance might have an intention to expose and challenge the violence by disrupting the logic of its necessity. I don’t have a clear path mapped out in response to this issue. Do we try to understand the self-evident necessaries of ‘both sides’? How tough is it simply to acknowledge that “People don’t do violence to others unless they think it’s justified”? It seems like the default sentiment is to consider the Other as cruel beasts whose violence is gratuitous, a sport, a pleasure. Can we combat this characterization by claiming or proving one’s humanity? Ionesco: I am not a rhinoceros! Morrissey: I am human and I need to be loved... ...Just like everybody else does. I am curious to find other ways to confront violence, to resist rhetorical violence, and to upset marginalization and denied access. Work cited: Bial, Henry (Ed.). (2004). The Performance Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Gomez Peña, Guillermo. “Culturas In Extremas.” 297-298. Dyer, Richard. (1993). The Matter of Images, Essays on Representations. London & New York: Routledge. Hunter, Lynette. Considering Issues of Rhetoric and Violence "Silva Rhetorica" (rhetoric.byu.edu) Gideon O. Burton, Brigham Young University. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. (1991).When the Moon Waxes Red, Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York & London: Routledge. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism Wilderson, Frank. “Gramsci’s Black Marx,”

The Script
  Who we are
  Why?
  My name is Omar Turcios
  24th St. is on fire
  Krupke
  Are you a man?
  The Beat
  People die
  In the Mission after rehearsal
  Shadows

Final score

Credits

Artist Bios

CRITICAL ESSAY: Practice-As-Research Portfolio

Delinquent Rhetoric
Keith Hennessy

(Developed from an essay written for a seminar in Rhetoric & Performance with Prof. Lynette Hunter, Winter 2009)

Delinquent Rhetoric:
The making of an argument in the guise of a poetic ritual called Delinquent And The making of a ritual performance in the guise of an argument called Delinquent Or more accurately, The conflation of ritual and argument, performance and presence, rhetoric and poetic, in the making of a theatrical event called Delinquent.

On November 15, 2008, I completed the premier performances of Delinquent, a collaborative project with nine young performers of diverse talents and life histories in a poetic rhetorical response to juvenile justice. Delinquent used images and issues associated with the juvenile justice system as a portal to view their particular and collective lives right now.

“How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation.” (Dyer, 1993).

This statement speaks to the central project of Delinquent: challenging how particular youth are seen (as delinquent) in order to change how they are treated. Urban, immigrant, and/or poor youth of color are too often represented as criminals and potential criminals, as disturbances to order and civility, as social and cultural infections spreading the disease of chaos, violence, primitive and anti-social values. These representations justify an intensifying of security structures, at schools and in the streets, which participate in a prison industrial complex. Delinquent attempted to disturb the metanarrative of the bad kid: the delinquent, the youth of color, the dangerous or uncivilized brown or black male, the criminal other.
One of the questions I asked, and encouraged the young artists to ask, is, “Who is delinquent?” I prompted them to recognize the label of delinquent as both projection and distraction. I encouraged them to turn the mirror on society, on adult culture, to expose its delinquency (our delinquency) with regards to protecting, teaching, and supporting young people. I directed the performers to consider how their own identity gets constructed in response to external forces and sources and I dared them to consider some of the ramifications of identity, whether static or fluid, projected, appropriated or assumed.
For over 20 years I have made performances that respond to racism and the injustices perpetrated by the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). And for nearly 30 I have worked with disenfranchised youth in various institutions including high schools, youth detention centers, and art institutions. From a teen jail in Lexington KY to the SF Museum of Modern Art, my artistic work has evolved in collusion with an activist practice aligned with a lineage of prison activism that is most clearly articulated in the work of Critical Resistance.

Prison Industrial Complex
The prison industrial complex (PIC) refers to the structural network of government institutions and corporations that build, manage, and profit from prisons and jails. Similar to the term military industrial complex, PIC articulates the links between prisons, jails, courts, police associations, criminal law, prison labor, security technology, prison guard unions, and prisoners as capital. Many theorists of race and prison in the US recognize a direct lineage from slavery to the Prison Industrial Complex, i.e., they recognize that “accumulation and death of the black body” in PIC? Is integral to notions of US civil society and democracy.

Critical Resistance Mission Statement
Critical Resistance (CR) seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness. The success of the movement requires that it reflect communities most affected by the PIC. Because we seek to abolish the PIC, we cannot support any work that extends its life or scope.

Referring to rhetorical practice and theory, I would like to document, articulate, explain and even justify how the performance Delinquent participates in the mission of CR. I noticed in writing this paper that it is easier to refer to the spoken and written parts of the performance. I am more challenged by a lack of vocabulary or analytical tools to discuss the dances, images and physical actions as rhetorical figures.
How does Delinquent challenge the beliefs or ideologies that link our safety to an ever-growing network of prisons and profit?
The artist team reflected and included people who are most affected by the PIC, i.e., over half the cast were young men, either Latino or African-American. The rest of the cast were linked to the PIC by personal and/or family history, the area where they grew up, and/or by shared demographics with people most likely to be found in a US prison, e.g., sex workers, non-white people, poor people, and activists. Curator Carolina Ponce de Leon states, “Paradoxically, in spite of the newly refurbished diversity of the mainstream, globalization has lead to the recolonization of the art world and has turned the multicultural landscape into a hip backdrop. The global art world is a colonizer captivated by the strategies of decolonization.” I was aware of the danger that by simply representing this politically correct cohort I would also reflect a liberal humanist tendency of reinscribing oppressive ideology, i.e., that I might be a hip colonizer captivated by decolonization. Throughout this paper I address the multiplicity of process and tactics that I/we used to confront this problematic of the ‘political’ white artist. Despite the many failures and neo-colonizations by artists who parachute into marginalized contexts, there are artists whose work inspired my project. John Malpede’s work with Los Angeles Poverty Department and Rhodessa Jones’ The Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women demonstrate a kind of community-based performance making that is motivated neither by social work charity nor by politically correct funding opportunity. These projects betray class boundaries by sharing mutual resources to make compelling art, without denying the looming and ever present potential to exploit the politically marked bodies of the artists. My frequent attempts to make an anti-racist theatre are guided by a practice of mutuality. Carlson describes a historical shift in political theater: “Instead of providing resistant political “messages” or ‘messages’ or representations, as did the political performances of the 1960s, postmodern performance provides resistance precisely by not offering “messages,” positive or negative, that fit comfortably into popular representations of political thought, but by challenging the processes of representation itself, even though it must carry out this project by means of representation.” Delinquent’s process operates simultaneously as, and between the strategies of, a 1970s-inspired political theatre of marginalized identity (we represent!) AND a poststructuralist project of deconstructing representation (fuck representation!). “It is of necessity, says Auslander, “an elusive and fragile discourse that is always forced to walk a tightrope between complicity and critique.”
Delinquent also engaged the structures that support the PIC by challenging the concepts of safety, comfort and stability. These challenges were embodied within the work’s structure, texts and images. A text is delivered in the air. Someone caught underneath manipulates a wall. Tensions are exaggerated through physical risk and juxtaposition of images, or between dance and spoken language. A dancing youth is enclosed in a room or cell and then is ‘forgotten’ for the duration of the performance. Another climbs a rope until he as at the limit of his strength. The performers don wacky masks that ‘don’t make sense,’ plunging the audience into another genre or forcing a different gaze/perspective. I am inspired by circus arts and dramaturgy, using risk and danger, to spark visceral discomfort. Partly for the cheap thrill, partly to invite the audience off-balance, beyond norms.
The process of making the work and the staging of that process, demonstrate an anti-hierarchical ensemble democracy. Our primary meeting form was an informal circle, where everyone was listened to. Echoing 1970s feminist theatre projects very performer was supported to make a central image, with no text or dance more important than another. Performers stayed on stage throughout the event, either as energetic witness or physical support to the central image. Inequality and powerlessness were investigated during the making and played with on stage. We talked often about power, about the structures of power between director, a middle aged white man with a $40,000 commission, and the cast of performers under 25, who didn’t previously know each other. We questioned power structures and relationships in the process, in our relationship to the theatre and their public relations, and in the systems of police, courts, and prisons. The performer’s contract stated not only the details of fee payment and hours of work (rehearsals, performances) but also stated that individual artists would retain ownership (intellectual property rights) to their solo creations and that despite my right to edit or shape their material, no one would be coerced or pressured to do anything in the performance that they didn’t want to do. Of course hierarchies are always already in formation and privileges outside the studio do not disappear just because we sat in a circle. I was always the eldest, the most in charge, the most responsible to the whole. The cast members with the most social and economic privileges were the ones who were most often at rehearsal and most willing to engage me in how I was directing. An attention to these hierarchies and a willingness to share power and creative production were integral to the project’s democratic experiment.
Together we questioned the status of victim and used the performance to deconstruct and reframe victim to reveal its many parts: silent collaborator, potentials of resistance, ambivalence about relationship to institutionalized power, the benefits of irresponsibility, and the dynamics of pride and humiliation. As for food and shelter, the project helped a group of mostly disenfranchised young artists to see how art can and can’t feed them. Performing in a downtown venue for high art, and getting paid for it, nurtured their self-esteem and encouraged them of the possibility of participating in the economic power streams beyond their class or neighborhood locations. Again it’s a fine line “between complicity and critique.”
Thanks to press and promotional activity, the performance began long before any audience arrived at the theatre. The title of Delinquent is a one-word poem intended to provoke questions and inspire images. The word is both adjective and noun, used to describe someone who is disobedient or non-compliant with laws and expectations. When connected to the word juvenile, delinquent suggests a type, a cliché of a youth prone to petty theft, violence, graffiti, missing school, and a general disregard for the alleged consensus of dominant society. Claiming the word as a kind of self-identification was a rhetorical game, a queer appropriation of the word to disrupt its identificatory power. The word is not as common or iconic today as it was in my youth, so my use of the word evokes also a sense of nostalgia and camp. It’s possible that the title game engaged an older audience, those in the age cohorts of society’s most powerful. Plastering the city with stickers, the internet with spam, and the newspapers with advertisements announcing Delinquent, I hoped to both seduce and provoke a potential audience. The invitation was to witness a performance that would poetically and irreverently confront the ugly facts that reveal our treatment of youth. 750 people witnessed the performance but somewhere between ten and fifty thousand people read the title linked to a performance featuring young artists marked by jail, courts, police, and social stigma.

Delinquent, a performance
Delinquent, an argument
Delinquent, a poem
Delinquent, a ritual
Delinquent, a live action series of rhetorical arguments, figures, schemes and tropes
Strategy:
With regard to the identity and representation of juvenile delinquent, persuade both cast and audience to:
Re-frame
Destabilize
Complexify
Provoke a reconsideration of

Tactics:
One.
Complicate both the individual and the collective subject. Trinh T. Minh-ha says that identity is ideology. The collective subject is a group united by a shared identity. But who decides on the frames of representation, on the names and codes of identity? Judith Butler recommended “a move away from an attempt “to solve this crisis of identity politics,” by concentrating on who and what wields the power to define identity, “to proliferate and intensify this crisis” and “to affirm identity categories as a site of inevitable rifting.”
Present the ‘I’ as a complex ‘we’ and simultaneously present the ‘we’ as a network of disunified I’s. Would it be possible to maintain the ensemble (the collective subject) while disturbing the shared identity with difference and ambivalence? I intended to disrupt audience attempts to get a whole picture of any particular artist.
In the opening text (Who We Are), Constance was suspended ten feet off the ground, supported by the rest of the cast holding a pulley rope. She cited a series of facts about the cast, e.g., four of us are in high school, one of us missed the final year of high school because he was in jail, one of us started stripping at 16, one of us is lacto intolerant, one of us has twin girls, one of us is a twin. This text set up a pattern of teasing the audience with partial stories, suggesting that there is more to these people than might fit into one category and that there might be differences and similarities with their own stories.
Avoid cliché by emphasizing the incomplete, the unsaid, and the general instability of identity, especially among youth. Let the audience be aware that they are trying to fit these individuals into categories of ethnicity, gender, and criminal record or behavior. Push the audience to fill gaps of knowledge with their own stories and perceptions, in the encouragement that they feel connected. I wanted the audience to feel in solidarity and to choose to be allies. A solidarity based on a shared, humanist identity as citizens with rights and humans with bodies, emotions, thoughts, and creativity. Choosing to be allies suggests a solidarity across lines, or gaps, of difference. In the context of identity politics an ally is generally a person of a privileged group who recognizes both personal and social values in supporting the struggles of an oppressed class, e.g., white ally or straight ally. Judit defines allies as those who “understand that we need each other to survive/ and that we have the courage/ to ask each other what that means.” With Delinquent I was performing as an ally to youth, to the incarcerated, to those unjustly marked by racial profiling, poverty, and the war on drugs. As if my own survival depended on it.

Two.
Stage the tension, friction or tensegrity between body and voice, between text and story telling. Increase the tension: the pulling away from each other. Increase the friction: the rubbing against each other, which also increases the heat. Increase the tensegrity, the Bucky Fuller term to name the structural integrity of the tension, and how this tension, in balance, is stronger and more efficient than gravity. Think honeycomb, skin cell, geodesic dome, yurt, camping tent, all held up and held together by choreographing individual parts in balanced tension with a shared center. Draw attention to these spaces between body and voice, between text and personal story. Locate the performance, the drama, in the gaps between bodies, within bodies.
For example, when Meghan and Omar compare stories of after they leave rehearsal, a privilege gap is revealed and the representation of a universal citizen (which the diverse performance ensemble tends to reinforce) is disrupted. Highlighting the conflicted space between two people, a young gay man challenges a young straight man about macho masculinity. Racialized communities were also embodied and represented as a site of tension, gap, borderlands: Jorge in the skeleton hoodie dancing the perimeter, his steps sourced in Mexican folklorico, while Constance at centerstage speaks to a rash of neighborhood/barrio shootings. And earlier in the piece two black male dancers embody different dance training - hip-hop and modern/ballet - that reveals tensions of class, opportunity and identity within black identity.

Three
Deconstruct West Side Story. Use the 1950’s musical to show how ideas and images of the juvenile delinquent are embedded, structural, multi-generational. Reveal how poor and migrant are pathologized, how delinquent is a disease of otherness, deserving charity, but always containment and punishment, for their own good. West Side Story, the Broadway show and Hollywood film, is iconic in the American imaginary of gang youth and the juvenile delinquent. Pitting Puerto Rican immigrants against poor whites, the work asserts nationalist and hegemonic ideologies while, quoting Shakespeare, makes a tragedy out of color-blind romance. Naming West Side Story as an icon is to recognize its narrative and characters as fetishized symbols of mythic proportions. To deconstruct an icon, or canon, is to intervene on the perpetuation of a particular ideology, to weaken or break its structural links to hegemony.

Four.
Masks. Wear funny, wacky, bigheaded masks that hide the face to reveal more of the body, transform individuals into a mass, and distort some aspects of identity and recognition to clarify others. Masks also disrupt the power dynamic between looking and being looked at. Masks allow the wearer to look out but the audience can’t return the gaze. New information comes not from the static mask but from the relationship of the body and environment as it changes around or in relation to the mask. The gaze changes while the mask remains the same. In the masked 'sexy' dance, Jorge performs a series of stripper clichés: slowed down, gender switched clichés typical of female strippers. He's wearing street clothes and a mask that does not change, that does not meet the body with clichés of its own.

Five
Humanism. Associate the cast with the term juvenile delinquent and then reveal or assert how they are each humans, deserving of love and respect, a home and a hot meal, an education and an opportunity at least to make money, and preferably to contribute to the common good. Invite the audience to care about, and even to love, the actual performers. Hope that the theatrical frame gives this care or love a metaphoric power to extend beyond the performance.
Here my rhetorical or activist project is most problematic. Isn’t humanism the defining factor of a liberalism that denies difference, sustains capitalism (and it’s symbiotic injustices), and deadens art? Do I want to be the good middle-class therapist that heals people of the disease of Other so that they can become productive members of a society whose identity is framed by the prison industrial complex? I think I take for granted a certain kind of solidarity and community in San Francisco that simultaneously, and to various degrees, consents to and resists hegemony. Is this possible? Or is this the worst illusion of middle-class liberal humanism? That we can enjoy the privileges and feel like we're cogs in the wheel? That we’re building a new society that slowly replaces the old as it defeats itself? Anyway I live part-time in this illusion and so I'm not thinking about reclaiming these youth back into a system of assimilation and surveillance. I think that their insistence on very limited notions of identity politics, their mostly lite forms of resistance. Criminality and victimhood are more supportive of the PIC than in figuring out how to become poets of their own lives, and reduce their chances of being cop magnets or bullet magnets (Wilderson). My intention with the project was to challenge representations of criminalized youth through various tactics of both identification and disidentification. I hoped that the cast might realize their potential to make some money while disrupting the expectations that society/hegemony imposes on their bodies, identities, and communities.

Logos.
Present the facts: prison details and life details
Articulate the ways that the prison industrial complex is unjust, especially with regards to race and class. Use the examples of youth of color - the actual individual’s in the piece, and the communities they’re identified with - to show how the ‘system’ is particularly skewed against non-white and poor youth. Challenge a re-consideration of the inmate-classmate conflict.
But facts in Delinquent, whether social or personal, are obscured as much as clarified, and suggested more than articulated. Does this shift the strategy from Logos to Pathos or Ethos? Or is it an extension of the logos appeal to instigate independent thinking, to provoke the audience/spectator to question the facts, to wonder about the information that’s omitted, inferred, withheld?
Logos isn’t really facts so much as reason. And not rational only. In a way to articulate the ways the PIC is unjust won’t really do unless you also explain why you think it’s unjust. The facts are useful, but in themselves they are neither pro nor con, you have to do something with them and you did in the piece, you just need to write it here.

Pathos.
Tragic tales that appeal to emotion, tug the heart strings... Stage the struggle to speak, the struggle to be seen, and the struggle to be recognized and respected. The disruption of the story is the story. The interrogation of the poet is the poem. The sharing of the burden of silenced voices is the Voice we want to hear. The dedication to climbing the rope despite the lack of ability or training, metaphorically recalls a lineage of resistance, of refusing to give up, of keeping eyes on the prize, is the real circus act.
But Delinquent frustrates expectations of emotional bonding and resolving the narrative. Many in the audience want to know more, about the performers personal lives, about the systems in which they’re caught. They want the story to be about the performers and not about themselves. Is this pathos, pathetic, and/or apathetic? I am played with ambiguity of genre, with how I wanted the audience to read the performance and with whom I wanted the audience to identify. I wanted to provoke a critical observation of systems of juvenile justice, and of the PIC in general, and I wanted that critique to include self-critique, a realization of each person’s role. It was also a goal to have the audience identify or affiliate with resistance to the PIC. To spark their curiosity in the personal experiences and social movements embodied by Critical Resistance.

Ethos.
Present young artists as responsible citizens. Demonstrate their intelligent and compassionate concerns. Show their development of ethical character, not only in spite of adversity but also due to adversity. Appeal to the audience’s desire to see the best of themselves, the self that they want to be, in the actions and words of the young performers. Flaunt the ensemble, the ethics of the mutual aid, the hard work of collaboration amidst diversity. The artists work together in ways that the larger society cannot seem to do. Demonstrate their vision, willingness, and ability to collaborate without insisting on a mass identity that strangles individual difference. Develop an ensemble solidarity that does not deny or forbid solidarities outside the ensemble, an ensemble solidarity that celebrates cultural and community bonds that link each artist to the world, to history, to family.

Rhetorical Violence 1
In the paragraph on Rhetorical Violence, Lynette Hunter writes, “’Systematic abuse’ is just that: not only abuse of ‘the system’ but abuse that constructs a ‘system’.” Through storytelling in rehearsal I attempted a compilation and analysis of abuse. How is the system created? How do patterns and strategies of abuse construct the system that the cast members are victims of? What have they personally experienced? What have they witnessed in the lives of friends and relatives? What similarities, patterns, and contrasts can we recognize? Example: How many times can Tracy report on the crimes she’s committed without ever being caught before she, and the rest of the cast, realize that her whiteness is integral to her story, and to theirs? And how is the construction of whiteness integral to the abuses, the system, and the construction of the delinquent? In general I avoided the conventional dramatic cliché of using first-person confessions and manifestos to drive a work featuring the stories and bodies of disenfranchised youth, and youth of color. With particular attention to a weaving of I and we, in both text and image, I pointed at systematic abuse without losing the individual victims. Simultaneously I played with the emotional framing of abuse and victim, preferring to show empowered youth responding to abuse rather than of youth suffering from abuse.
“Power is at once repulsive and intoxicating. Oppositional practices which thrive on binary thinking have always worked at preserving the old dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed even though it has become more and more difficult today to establish a safe line between the government and the people, or the institution and the individual… There are, in other words, no “innocent people,” no subjects untouched in the play of power.” (Trinh, 1991, p 92). Here the innocence of youth is challenged. How does abuse construct a system? How are the players in this performance, also players in the institutions that abuse them? I think we performed some tentative inquiry and revelation in this area.
Hunter’s list of violence that “is not necessarily physical” articulates some of the particularities of the abusive system that most of the Delinquent cast experiences daily. The violence of denied access, the violence of ideological representation that insures the inadequacy of that representation, the violence of differential access to knowledge, the violence of obscuring one’s rights. They might not have this precise language to describe the violence, but they know this violence and can show you their scars. Scars indicate that some healing has happened, that the wound is no longer open. In most scenes, the performers are not metaphorically bleeding on stage. Their scars demonstrate an embodied wisdom, which influences their performed posture, stance, and presence. Scars indicate both healing and loss. They are not the same as wounds. They are reminders, archives, of wounds. Healing, in some cases, is recovery. The strained voice can now be heard. The lame legs can now stand. In other cases, healing is an integration of loss, a reconfiguring of self and identity as one who has lost and bears the scar to prove it. What is the consciousness, intelligence or presence that needs to be woven into the scab? Which scabs or scars can motivate a person to build solidarity with those who share a similar wound history, and a commitment to preventing future generations from the same? How can healing be also revolutionary? In other words, how can healing prevent being re-absorbed into the social norm, the interpellated subject? I will attempt to address this with a brief discussion of Delinquent as both rite of passage and cultural ritual.
van Gennep’s model of rite of passage is easy to recognize in the making and performing of Delinquent. He noted three distinct phases/spaces of the rite: a separation from society and family, a liminal or in-between space, and a return to or re-absorption into society. The in-between space is a ritualized context where permanent shifts of identity and consciousness are possible. Although rites of passage are more likely to support traditions and social norms, it is possible for radical rites of passage to sufficiently impact the initiates so that their return to society triggers cultural shifts.
Distanced from their familiar cultural contexts and communities, the cast came together to question values and behaviors, to embody and inscribe new values and behaviors, and to return to society (both generic and our particulars) with a changed self, a more developed voice, and fresh possibilities of perspective, transformation, knowledge production, violence prevention and community formation. Change happens. The comments of Omar and Constance, coming from distinct social situations, both attest to their changed perceptions of self and the possibilities of live performance.

“I must admit that this show had a powerful reaction to me and to everyone. I learned a lot from other people that were on and off the show, and I learned a lot about myself. I told them that the show meant a lot to me because we got to give everyone a voice that normally don’t have a voice, to a crowd that are not use to hearing that voice.”
Omar Turcios, published in The Beat Within

“I'm so inspired by everything right now. I’ve never really felt like art could have power - I wanted to believe it and I did to an extent, but not until this show did I realize the potential art has to move. It’s amazing how powerful mediums are when they intersect with each other. Anyways I wish we could keep having rehearsal forever, it's kind of weird how once something becomes so beautiful it dies, kind of like when flowers bloom.”
Constance Castillo, email to the ensemble

These statements demonstrate the personal impact of the project but the question of structural social change is not addressed. How can personal change inspire or provoke social change? What can we expect from a single artist or a singular event? If I did not consider the work as part of a larger movement, I would not be so confident about the positive outcome of small-scale artist rituals. Despite a war by media and government, cops and courts, to criminalize particular populations while protecting others, the non-profit organization Books Not Bars was instrumental in getting two juvenile prisons shut down in the past two years. Symbolic and energetic actions by performance artists, including the artists making Delinquent, participate in this ongoing performance-struggle that involves a cast of thousands of activists, artists, family members, and non-profit workers.
I do not know the most effective poetic or rhetoric to debate or combat this rhetorical violence. A common strategy of social justice performance is pathos, an emotional appeal to the audience. This is often done by demonstrating and claiming one’s humanity through sincere personal narrative. For some of the cast, especially the poets with a strong sense of ethnic or cultural identity, this is a rhetorical strategy that they know and that they’re good at. However, the college-trained dancers and acrobats, with more ambivalent or assimilated identities, were more open to disrupting personal narrative and resisting representations. The former tactic, focused on visibility, voice, and identity, is generally more popular. It aligns with activist framings that aim to counteract marginalization, silencing, and disappearance (both real and representational) of poor and non-white people and cultures. But deconstructing visibility, voice, and identity complicates the ground of difference, which destabilizes identity’s power as a clearly marked and bordered space. A refusal to identify, or an intentional complication of identity and difference, are often considered privileged tactics, inaccessible or ineffective for those whose identity/representation is under attack. It was difficult to explain my intentions, and the theories behind them, to the whole cast. Everything required translation to the multiple dialects spoken among the group. We did reach some consensus on resisting accepted representations of urban youth as victims needing salvation.
From the beginning of the project I had intended a confusion of documentary and fiction, of real, surreal, and unreal. I proposed hybrid forms of communication to construct hybrid identities; honoring particulars (of identity, culture, artistic discipline, genre) but not afraid to complicate them through juxtaposition within a single body, poem, dance or image. For those experienced with postmodern challenges to essentialist identities, this might seem like an obvious tactic. However, identity politics, with distinct borders between ethnicities and genders, are always and already exploited by pop cultures, prison cultures, and leftist political cultures. The task of an artist, working in relation to social movements, is to articulate the power of working between binaries, in the more complicated, less stable, and transcultural borderlands. Work at the margins, in hybrid collaboration or generative friction, can expand the territories of identity and visibility, decentering dominant and oppressive representations.

Rhetorical Figures
A quick scan of figures of pathos from the site Silva Rhetorica reveals several rhetorical devices I’m used in Delinquent.

1. aposiopesis
Breaking off suddenly in the middle of speaking, usually to portray being overcome with emotion.
We worked on a series of scenes that involved Omar “trying to tell his story.” The story, i.e., the text of his story, is constructed as a list of 25 significant details that concludes with, “My name is Omar Turcios.” Four times during the performance he starts to speak the list but each time he is interrupted, unable to finish. He loses his words, or is called by the group to participate in a song, or is drowned out by a loud sound. This is not precisely aposiopesis but this figure helps to reveal the tactic we are playing with. The goal, I think, is to appeal to the audience’s desire to hear the story, their desire for Omar to succeed, to overcome all resistance and tell his story.
How many people told me that they wished for more personal stories from the ensemble? Disrupting Omar’s story, the only holistic narrative in Delinquent, teases the audience who want to know more, who want a more traditional, empathy producing, storytelling theatre. Many people want, and expect from ‘social justice’ performance, an inspired tale of the disadvantaged victim who defeats injustice or transcends oppressive material conditions. When Omar does get to recite the entire text, there is a brief image of triumph, that he has survived the attempts to silence and humiliate him and has arrived to state his name and claim his place. But what has actually happened? His script is not a whole narrative but a list of moments, a fragmented narrative with many gaps. And when he’s firmly in his place we realize that the immigrant young man, on probation for weapon possession, with two kids, is really in no place at all. He has neither arrived nor triumphed. His struggles are plentiful and evident. In fact, the conclusion of his text is a tragedy. At least while struggling to speak, he had our attention, sympathy, and best wishes. We want him to make it. But once he does, what can we do for him? Who will stand with him when he leaves the theatre tonight? This ambivalence of struggle and triumph is staged specifically to disrupt expectations of smooth representation, of fixed and generalized identity projection. I wanted to disorient the audience, as an audience who paid for a theatrical experience, and by frustrating their expectations, make their expectations more evident.
I am still ambivalent about the power of telling one’s story. Is this the most effective way to find, achieve, develop, or reclaim one’s Voice? I am hoping that the ‘real’ story we tell is in the gap/meeting between body and voice, between individual and group. The staged text is a fusion of Omar’s story (Omar is a human citizen entitled to the respect and rights of citizens) and the physical struggle to tell Omar’s story, provoking a consideration of the systematic interference that defines marginalization. And the text is also a paradoxical narrative about Omar’s relationship to the group, to the ensemble. Are they actually disrupting, intervening, preventing him from speaking? Or are they supportively challenging him, as co-initiates in a rite of passage, in which he breaks his ties with the self and social perceptions that hold him back?

2. adynaton
The expression of the inability of expression —almost always emotional in its nature.
In much of my work I try to stage the struggle to speak. I am especially interested in a choreography of rupture and resistance, showing a speaking body that is neither mute nor paralyzed, but impeded, oppressed, wrestling, struggling. In Delinquent I focus particularly on the voice/body of youth and young adults. How is their voice constructed? How is it silenced, marginalized, reduced, distorted? How can a staging of this conflict, of this violent encounter, be so empowering that the artist’s voice actually emerges alive and articulate.
Voice as a term that describes some kind of essential soul expression is problematic. I use it with a feminist accent, i.e., voice is embodied and poetic and opposes a hegemonic or socially obedient speech. Voice is cultural, not universal. It emerges from particular social conditions, identities, and positions. Nestor tries repeatedly to climb the rope but falls every time. Omar tries and fails three times to recite the list of key moments in his life. A moment of group silence becomes a measured minute of inarticulate noise, yelling, sounding – more emotional exposition than expression.

3. metaphor
A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.
A prison is real. The solitary confinement cells where Mumia Abu Jamal has spent most of his adult life are real. The solitary cells for every the prisoner in the SHU, in the security housing units of max security prisons including Pelican Bay in Northern CA, are real. The juvenile justice system is abstract. The Prison Industrial Complex, of which juvenile justice is a key part, is also abstract. On stage there is a wall, eight feet high and eight feet wide. When the audience enters, the wall is held up by two black male teens on each side of the wall. They can’t see each other. For the next thirty minutes of the performance, someone is always holding up the wall. The wall is indeed a wall and later it will be bolted to three other walls to make a five by eight foot room; a room without windows or door that copies the size of many solitary confinement cells in the US prison system. The wall and the room are symbols. They suggest the weight, the cost, and the isolation of prison, confinement, enclosure and juvenile detention. The wall, and the building of the room around a dancer, are metaphors for the prison industrial complex, its fervor for building new prisons, and our complicity in that construction, both physical and conceptual.
Dawon Davis is a performer. He is 17 years old, African American, and has lived his entire life in foster care. Due to complications and conflicts within the foster system he has also been to jail. A favorite song of his comes booming from the sound system. He steps into a rectangle of light, a five by eight foot rectangle, a failed symbol that tries yet fails to invoke a prison cell. Taken by the music, he dances, fiercely. The rest of the cast prepare all the walls, laying them out around him. We can see that a room will be built around him. And then it happens. The walls close in. Dawon continues to dance, a refusal to stop. His gestures, both facial and whole body, perform a dramatic display of emotion. The other performers are not emotionally demonstrative. They perform a task. Build the wall. Make Dawon disappear. Dawon’s invisibility is not abstract. When the music cuts abruptly we watch the cast watch the room they have built and together we all listen to Dawon flail against the walls and slide to the floor. We look for Dawon, for the dancer, for the vibrant young black man, but instead we see walls, raw construction, a prison, a system.
Further conversation in class suggests that I am working perhaps with allegory or metonymy more than metaphor. The goal was to present the box as real enough. More than a visual image, the walls have weight and suggest some severity in closure.

4. syllogismus
Rhetorical figures are so numerous and precise that most of my performance employs multiple figures, often simultaneously. Syllogismus is a figure of logos. The Silva Rhetorica describes it as, “The use of a remark or an image which calls upon the audience to draw an obvious conclusion.” After Aristotle, syllogism is defined as consisting of three parts: the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion.
Example:
Major premise: All humans are mortal.
Minor premise: Socrates is a human.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
My rhetorical intention with Omar’s scene fits this form.
Major premise: Humans, citizens deserve respect and access to all the rights of civil society.
Minor premise: Omar is a human citizen (as opposed to an abject alien, an alleged enemy of those who consider themselves citizens.)
Conclusion: Omar deserves respect and rights.

5. catechrisis
Intentionally using something in an incorrect way.
While Dawon is in the box, the rest of the cast and the changes in sound and lighting suggest that the show is over. They bow. A bow should be the end of the play, the release of the imagery, and all the cast should be in the bow. To bow, to say it’s over while the image/action still continues is wrong. Each night there would be a visible conflict in the audience, those who jumped to their feet in standing ovation and those who were concerned that Dawon was still in the box. After each performance we heard from people who considered ‘freeing’ him. This catechrisis had numerous effects. Some were provoked into near-action. Others regretted their standing ovation when they realized that they had forgotten Dawon, and on further reflection, they recognized a metaphor of forgetting that there are people in prison. This was a move to provoke the recognition that most of us forget that people are locked up, that we are connected or related to those we have forgotten.

7. synoeciosis
A coupling or bringing together of contraries, but not in order to oppose the to one another.
Trae and Dawon’s opening dance presented two bodies, both young black male bodies, dancing in two irreconcilable styles. They have different approaches to the body, space, and audience. Dawon’s score was to claim a location and defend it. Trae’s score was to avoid being identified with any particular location. He was to keep moving, shifting positions and focus. Dawon tried to own the space, asserting a sharp and specific focus for his eyes, and dancing. I wanted to disrupt the white audience (society’s) tendency to type people, especially young black men, by presenting a sharp difference between the only two black male cast members. I also wanted to disrupt a reductionist approach to solidarity too typical of Bay Area non-white audiences. This scene was also an
8. oxymoron
Placing two ordinarily opposing terms adjacent to one another, a compressed paradox.
Central to the project of disrupting representation is destabilizing the totality of any one category or concept. When white artists, inspired to challenge racism by multicultural- or diversity-based casting, there is a tendency for each person to carry the weight of their ethnic or gender identity, especially if they are the only person in a particular category. It was important to me that there be more than one black male in Delinquent, not only because black males are disproportionately victimized by laws, courts and cops, but also because I wanted to interrupt a singular perception or assessment of black males. The simultaneous dancing by Trae and Dawon indicated a complexity of possible representations of black men. Their distinct presence, embodied and expressed through dancing, revealed them as both same and different, a paradox compressed into a single moment.

9. eutrepismus
Numbering and ordering the parts under consideration. A figure of division, and of ordering.
Omar’s life story is presented as a list, both ordered and divided. The question is what does this figure do? How does numbering and ordering a personal text influence the listener? By imitating objective or scientific reports, it suggests that memory is truth, fact. The jump to each new numbered statement disrupted narrative flow, indicating a historical gap between statements. I think that numbering a personal narrative is emotionally disruptive also, but I can’t say how. The scene’s emotionality, I think, comes more from the physicality of the scene, from Omar’s continuing or inability to continue, while being challenged by the group.

Rhetorical Violence 2
Another section of Hunter’s Rhetorical Violence paper helped me to clarify the work I’m trying to do with Delinquent.
“People don’t do violence to others unless they think it’s justified.
All justification of violence is based on self-evident proof and reasoning.
Therefore people doing violence think it’s self-evidently necessary.
These systems are often self-justifyingly violent to other systems of groups or individuals.
They violently rupture other sets of grounds.”

I am both amazed and frustrated that so few people are willing to consider the self-evident proof of the Other. The current election (Nov 2008) gives daily proof of this lack of consideration. (I’m in a hotel suite with cable TV where I can switch between Fox, CNN, and MSNBC for repetitious and contrasting interpretations of the same actions.) Most victims of the juvenile justice system - a key site within the prison industrial complex - cannot articulate the self-evident justifications of police violence. And neither can most police articulate or recognize the self-evident justifications of the people they arrest, surveil, punish, or kill.
Police violence is justified and supported by the mainstream media through journalism, reality TV, and fictional media. The actions of the PIC are presented as self-evidently necessary. Of course their self-evidently necessary is experienced as violence by those who get racially profiled, surveilled, beaten, arrested or incarcerated. Thus a social justice performance might have an intention to expose and challenge the violence by disrupting the logic of its necessity.
I don’t have a clear path mapped out in response to this issue. Do we try to understand the self-evident necessaries of ‘both sides’? How tough is it simply to acknowledge that “People don’t do violence to others unless they think it’s justified”? It seems like the default sentiment is to consider the Other as cruel beasts whose violence is gratuitous, a sport, a pleasure.
Can we combat this characterization by claiming or proving one’s humanity? Ionesco: I am not a rhinoceros! Morrissey: I am human and I need to be loved... ...Just like everybody else does.
I am curious to find other ways to confront violence, to resist rhetorical violence, and to upset marginalization and denied access.

Work cited:
Bial, Henry (Ed.). (2004). The Performance Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
Gomez Peña, Guillermo. “Culturas In Extremas.” 297-298.
Dyer, Richard. (1993). The Matter of Images, Essays on Representations. London & New
York: Routledge.

Hunter, Lynette. Considering Issues of Rhetoric and Violence
"Silva Rhetorica" (rhetoric.byu.edu) Gideon O. Burton, Brigham Young University.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. (1991).When the Moon Waxes Red, Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York & London: Routledge.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism
Wilderson, Frank. “Gramsci’s Black Marx,”