Resistant Representations
A critical reading of Delinquent by Sam Aranke
Delinquent (2008)
In Circo Zero’s 2008 production of Delinquent in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, youth of color filtered their politics via movement, poetry, and dance. However, more complexly, this particular performance delivered an opening through which anxieties around racial ‘otherness’, sexual deviance, class difference, age, artistic production, and a rapidly shifting cultural geography manifested themselves within San Francisco as a localized contact zone of mediation. Here, the confluence and juxtaposition of giving and receiving, two modes of performative transaction, delivered a series of critical engagements.
Delinquent circulated a set of resistant representational strategies that worked to politically motivate an alternative to the totalizing force of the Prison Industrial Complex and its devastating effects on urban youth of color. The piece explored the role of negotiating everyday violence, racial tension, sexism, homophobia, the construction of masculinity, and the ongoing surveillance that youth in the city face. Among other contributions, the work specifically engaged with the role of youth within American imaginary; specifically, the ways in which the ongoing criminalization of youth produces versions of subjectivity that depend on the exclusion of youth, racialized and sexualized bodies, and queer subjectivities.
One clear moment in the work that interrogated and exercised resistance to representational strategy occurred during the re-translation of “Gee, Officer Krupke” from the 1961 production of West Side Story The original representational structure of the musical mandates a reading of the song as a narrative intended to qualify institutional mechanisms as an efficient means to adequately control youth. To make sense of their behavior, the song sets aside various social and famial pathologies (“my sister wears a moustache, my brother wears a dress, Goodness Gracious, that’s why I’m a mess” and “cause no one wants a fellow with a social disease”) that result in the young men themselves articulating, “we’re disturbed, we’re disturbed, we’re the most disturbed, like we’re psychologically disturbed!”
In Delinquent, the performers give “Gee, Officer Krupke” a new reading. By stripping it out of the original musical’s narrative and moving into a production about the criminalization of youth, the performers employ both Brechtian and feminist theory to this highly imbued song. A Brechtian reading of this specific performance calls attention to the labor being done by words in the song. On one level, the desired ideological meanings produced by the original music lends to the ongoing pathologization of youth, conflation of poverty with laziness, and the overdetermination of stereotype onto already marked bodies. To reveal these meanings, there must be an applied “distantiation” in order to defamiliarize meanings that represent naturalized ideology, thus marking the A-effect. What Brecht makes clear is that bourgeois ideology is sedimented into our everyday realities and theatre’s labor is to destabilize these traditions in order to engage the spectator in their own (political) process.
Like Brecht, Elin Diamond finds feminist practice deploys intersecting methods for revealing gendered relationalities. In Unmasking Mimesis, she argues that a feminist practice works to “reveal gender-as appearance” which then functions “by alienating (not simply rejecting) iconicity, by foregrounding the expectation of resemblance”. Like Brecht’s A-effect, this practice of defamiliarizing the familiar results in exposing the ideology of gender back to the spectator, enabling them to see what “ideology--and performativity--makes seem normal, acceptable, inescapable”.
In Delinquent’s Brechtian version, the cast of mostly youth of color read the lyrics of the song in the rhythm of the original version. There is no attempt to embody the characters, coordinate synchopated movements, or in any way preserve the song in its original mode. Part of the difference rested in voice. The performers read the song in a way that calculated their emotional distance from the message as detailed by the lyrics. As if completely unmotivated from the lyrics’ intended depiction, the collective voice remained at the level of rehearsal, memorization, monotone tonality, or apathetic repetition.
Second, the demonstration of the original musical’s characters modeled juxtaposition. In the original production, the Jets, a group of Anglo-Caucasian men, descendants from an ambiguously insinuated array of Eastern European immigrants, act as guard keepers against the “trespassing contamination” of Puerto Rican immigrants. A classic tale of urban territorialization and xenophobia, the Jets are constantly undermining and escaping the reign of jail time precisely because of their “claim to turf” and white-skin privilege. The performance of “Gee, Officer Krupke” is an instantiation of their ability to assert their social position as white young men against the ongoing “threat” of being jailed, institutionalized, or pathologized by the state. They are able to mock authority and institutional channels precisely because they will never really have to face the legal consequences, as would, perhaps the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks.
Staging the song among a particularly racialized and gendered cast, the performers enacted Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt or A-effect. The cast itself ranged from youth of color, queer folks, and women--already a marked distance from the white-young Jets. By representing difference, not homogeneity, as the lens through which each performer understood themselves, the cast effectively distanced the reality in West Side Story as having any bearing from the reality of their everyday lives. In other words, the American imaginary as depicted by the Jets in West Side Story can be seen as the dominant representational structure. The alienation worked to create a wedge between this ideal, and its unruly reality in everyday life, where representation is not so neat a system. Through this method of alienation, this particular strategy modeled a resistance to the desired totality of dominant representational structure.