REHEARSAL JOURNAL
POST-SCRIPT 2009: THEORY QUOTES
Antecedents to Delinquent in community-based performance or the artist going into a marginalized context that is not their own and finding ways to make art that is not only social work or politically correct funding opportunities and not only using Other bodies for their own in an age-old colonial exploitation but aware of these problematics and not denying their looming potential every day:
John Malpede works on skid row with LAPD, LA Poverty Department, 1985
Rhodessa Jones works in SF county jail with The Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women, 1992
Postmodern tendencies
Lyotard quoted by Carlson (p. 151): Postmodernism, “simplifying to the extreme” is an“incredulity toward metanarratives. Delinquent attempts a rupture with the metanarrative of the bad kid, the delinquent, the youth of color, the dangerous or uncivilized brown or black male, the criminal.
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.
Delinquent operates simultaneously as, and between the strategies of, a 60s inspired political theatre of subversive messages and dissident representations AND a postmodern/poststructuralist project of deconstructing representation and authoritative message, and challenging the process of representation itself.
QUOTES relevant to the working process of Delinquent – maybe best transferred to Rhetoric paper? or used as punctuation for journal?
“Paradoxically, in spite of the newly refurbished diversity of the mainstream, globalization has lead to the recolonization of the art world and ahs turned the multicultural landscape into a hip backdrop. The global art world is a colonizer captivated by the strategies of decolonization.” Carolina Ponce de LeÛn (quoted by GGP in Culturas-In-Extremis, Perf Stud Read, p. 295)
“Moral and political multiculturalism are the privilege of the powerful and the protected.” Johannes Fabian, 1999, Theater and Anthropology, Theatricality and Culture, Perf Stud Read, p. 181)
“I do theatre because I want to preserve my freedom to refuse certain rules and values of the world around me. But the opposite is also true: I am forced or encouraged to refuse them because I do theatre.” Eugenio Barba, 2000, The Deep Order Called Turbulence, in Perf Stud Read, p. 252, trans Judy Barba.)
“Extracting the difficult from the difficult is the attitude that defines artistic practice. On this depend the incisiveness, the complexity, the dense quality of the result, as well as the moments of difficult, suffering and illumination, disorientation and reorientation that make up the process.” Eugenio Barba, 2000, The Deep Order Called Turbulence, in Perf Stud Read, p. 253, trans Judy Barba.)
“The tensions between forces that are divergent, opposed to one another or simply contiguous, can lead to catastrophe. But if we succeed in keeping these forces at bay and discovering the kind of relationship that exists between them – then we will attain density instead of catastrophe.
Density disorientates the spectators, forcing them to extract the difficult from the difficult and shaking them out of the familiar trains of thought, which constitute a safe home for their ideas.” Eugenio Barba, 2000, The Deep Order Called Turbulence, in Perf Stud Read, p. 255, trans Judy Barba.)
“Work does not only tire, but sometimes it hurts.” Eugenio Barba, 2000, The Deep Order Called Turbulence, in Perf Stud Read, p. 260, trans Judy Barba.)
“Friends unfamiliar with Goat Island’s performances ask me what they do, and I tell them: they use text, but not to tell a standard theatrical narrative or story; and they use movement, though it’s not what you would expect by the term “dance.” And combining those texts and movements creates something beyond those individual components of text and movement, and the best word we have for this is “performance.” “
Goat Island, 2002, Letter to a Young Practitioner
“He sought instead to call attention to the audience’s moment-to-moment existence in the theatre, to seeing what is there, to seeing themselves seeing, and thus aiming to “ground us in what-it-is-to-be-living.””
Carlson on Richard Foreman, p 141
In Defense of live performance
“more than entertainment, more than didactic or persuasive formulations, and more than cathartic indulgences. They are occasions in which as a culture or society we reflect upon or define ourselves, dramatize our collective myths and histories, present ourselves with alternatives.”
MacAloon, John J. (ed) on cultural performances in, Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, Philadelphia, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984, p.1.
“Theatre provides an opportunity for a community to come together and reflect upon itself,” serving not only as a “mirror through which a society can reflect upon itself” but also as an aid to shaping “the perceptions of that culture through the power of its imaging.”
Carlson (214) quoting Margaret Wilkerson, “Demographics and the Academy”, in Reinelt & Roach (eds), Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992, p. 239.
“”theatrical” performance (is) a special (if not unique) laboratory for cultural negotiations”
Carlson (214)
“Theatre studies’ distinct contribution across disciplines can be a place to experiment with the production of cultural meanings, on bodies willing to try a range of different significations for spectators willing to read them. Theatre studies becomes a material location, organized by technologies of design and embodiment (through artisanry and actor training), a pedagogically inflected field of play at which culture is liminal or liminoid and available for intervention.
Dolan, Jill, “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the ‘Performative’, Theatre Journal, 1993, vol 45, p 432.
The activism of challenging representation
Carlson (154) discussing Philip Auslander’s 1994 book Presence and Resistance, which looks at contemporary performance artists and postmodern theorists to seek a potential for political work.
“…postmodernist art’s resistance is not to any specific political practices (the type of resistance represented by much of the political performance of the 1960s), but rather resistance to representation in general, a more abstract and difficult strategy.”
Carlson then quotes Auslander quoting Lyotard:
“To hang the meaning of the work of art upon its subsequent political effect is once again not to take it seriously, to take it for a an instrument useful for something, else, to take it as a representation of something to come; this is to remain with the order of representation, within a theological or teleological perspective. This is to place the work of art, even when one is dealing with non- or anti- representational works, within a (social, political) space of representation. This leaves politics as representation uncriticized.”
“Instead of providing resistant political “messages” or representations, as did the political performances of the 1960s, postmodern performance provides resistance precisely not by 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. It is of necessity, says Auslander, “an elusive and fragile discourse that is always forced to walk a tightrope between complicity and critique.”
Carlson, p. 155
Auslander, Philip, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics, in Contemporary American Performance, Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 31.
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.”
Carlson (198), quoting Butler “The Force of Fantasy” in Differences, 1990, vol 14, pp 148-9.
