What Can I Say?

I grew up in an affluent, very white suburb in Kansas. My experience with the black body could be condensed down to this:



I'd like to think that we were a bit more soulful in our day, but those are the same robes, the same shells and the same 120 white kids conducted by a white guy singing a song written for a very different choir.

I'd had history and read To Kill A Mockingbird, but I still didn't really get it. Then I moved to Boston and my understanding broadened. I met Robbie McCauley and worked on a production of Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs

I learned about the Scottsboro Boys and I started to understand just what has been done to these people.

Now I know my understanding can only go so far, that I will always be distanced from this place of identity, and yet I can still be a voice, still use my voice to stop the continuing racism that occurs in this country.

Embodying Black Experience is yet another source of my understanding and education. The types of objectification and it's acceptance by the subject are not new to me, I have enough feminist history to recognize subjugation when I read about it. And yet, this experience took me away from Kimberle Crenshaw and into the corner of bell hooks. I cannot claim that, as a white woman, my oppression just as corrosive as that of Saartjie Baartman, or Sally, Robbie's grandmother. Or even Joe Louis.

I can be an ally and an advocate. I can be hurt when I hear of Trayvon Martin and wear a hoodie in solidarity with the cause. But can I really be part of it? I'm still not sure. We learn about things and think we understand and debate about who is allowed to become an authority about what. But deep down, I feel I have no right to insert myself into race theory or nonwhite culture, just as it infuriates me that only men deciding my reproductive rights.

I can empathize but I cannot sympathize, and so at times I just don't know what to say. So I'll let someone else say it for me:

"Let America Be America Again" Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!


O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Dance Dance Revolution

I should have been a dancer.  

I didn't have the discipline to keep up my ballet as a child and now I don't have the body, but I really should have been a dancer.  There's just something incomparable about the experience of watching and, better yet, doing dance.  This semester has provided many opportunities to remind me of how much I love dance and need to dance.  Either from listing the most influential performances I've seen (yup, mostly all dance) or experiencing Fela!, an Afro-beat memorial to the great Fela Kuti.  Nadine George-Graves' Urban Bush Women reminds me once again how important I find dance.  George-Graves describes the process choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar undergoes through to work out a dance, how she lets the mood, the spirit of the music overtake her and direct her.  She makes mistakes, edits herself, but really she is working out an impulse, channeling something greater than herself, a story.  Immediately, this passage reminds me of a group I was lucky enough to be involved with called InterPlay.  This California-based method seeks to unlock the wisdom of the body by utilizing "forms" of  movement, story, silence, song, ease and amusement.  It is an experiment in movement-based play that frees you from seriousness so that you can be more in tune with your body and experience the world from a freer place.  It seeks to reconnect the mind, body, heart and spirit in a world that has become too fragmented and regimented.  Apart from my own selfish pleasure in this experience, I have continually used exercises from my time there in classrooms, helping to reconnect students with themselves.   For this reason, the passage, "Spirituality means different things to different people, and in many respects it defies definition, which is, of course, part of its power.  Too, spirituality has long been considered a path to healing and liberation" (138) resonated with me and my relationship to dance and movement in general.  To me, dance is a spiritual experience.  InterPlay taps into that connection for me.  The passage also brings to mind one of my most moving experiences as an audience to a piece of dance:  Alvin Ailey's Revelations.  I included a link to a YouTube clip of the piece in case you don't have any experience with it.  The work sets dance to traditional spirituals and gospel songs, and experiences the songs on stage in a way I have never connected with music.  The joy, thought and essence incorporated into the work took me to a place that I have not experienced on my own, it brought me into Alvin's world.  In this way, George-Graves' book attempts to take the reader into the world of Zollar and to experience it through her relationship with dance. The chapter The Body: Divided and Conquered examines how Zollar addresses stereotypes and assumptions of the body by focusing on that part and dancing with it.  What I will take from this reading and all these experiences is that dance has such a powerful ability to impact its participants, those who engage with and those who observe dance.  This reading also reminds me of the power that dance has in narrative.  It has lit a flame in me to incorporate dance into the theatre I create and to work dance more into the classes that I teach.  Just as we learn with multiple intelligences, why can't we art with multiple mediums? 

A clip of 'Wade in the Water' from 'Revelations'

Revised Directions

I'm taking a bit of a a break from my normal call and response from academic texts to discuss an article handed to me by my professor instead.  The article is D. Soyini Madison's "Performing Theory/ Embodied Writing" from Text and Performance Quarterly (April 1999) if anybody wants to find it.  In it, Madison writes about the interrelation of theory and performance, how theory enhances performance when the performer knows where theories begin.  She describes her "performance romanticism" and calls herself a "performance essentialist."  Though it has been a while since I have formally  performed--almost a year that seem a lifetime ago-- it occurs to me that I never really stopped.  In the aforementioned instance, I was Marie, the maid to a murderous and sadistic professor a la Ionesco, but now, I am Ph.D. student.  It is a new role and one that I am navigating roughly, though somehow managing a decently straight line.  Madison warns of those who claim performance is everyday life, but for this role, this instance, I am going to assert this fallacy.  I am not being me, but 'student me'.  It takes a while to remember that these two are different.  At this point, I am a professional student and necessarily very good at it, I really don't feel that anyone who is not good at school could survive this long in it, it's just too hard.  But my student self has taken over a bit.  Granted, most of my time is devoted to school work and student obligations, but am I missing the forest of personhood for the trees of studentdom?  That is a very prosaic statement that I'm not sure if I like, however I'll continue.  This post is really coming out of a stress-induced, sleep-deprived, poorly timed event that happened last week.  I was crying in front of my peers for the first time and, upon trying to put into words why it was I was crying, I could only respond "I don't need this right now."  But the event to which I was responding was par for the course in student me's life.  It was the real me, the non-performance me, that stood up and took over.  I had to stop performing because I just couldn't keep up the act anymore.  It's distressing and unsettling for anyone who isn't expecting it, but perhaps even more so for a person who is so keenly aware of performance but fails to recognize their own. 

My point is this:  who has the responsibility to control performance?  As a director, I feel unsettled when someone is not in control of the general shape of a performance.  As a person, I am unsettled when I realize that not even I am in control of my own performance.  First of all, should there be a person/being/entity in charge of performance?  I am inclined to think that at least society should.  We have so many regulations in place to protect us from the evils of Freud's Id, those crazed barbarians who drink and smoke and rob and pillage and plunder.  Human consensus tells us that these people are wrong, that they are out of control, that they are not performing 'human' correctly, and so we remove them from the playing field.  But I have spent this entire semester reading that social codes are not correct and should be amended if not annihilated.  So what then?  Madison suggests theory.  "Theory comes from everywhere and you decide go back...to recognize again and more" (110).  Judith Butler also alludes to this idea of theory as a guide post.  We cannot rely on social norms, for they are merely stylized repetitions turned into fact.  But if we examine where the behaviors started, we can recall the impulse and the belief in them that started the behavior to begin with.  I remember being in the 7th grade, the first year we were allowed to write in print again, and disliking how I made my 'a's--just an 'o' with a tail really.  I felt they were pedantic and beneath the dignity to which I held myself.  So I decided to change them to the more formal 'a's that are conveniently represented in this font.  I truly believed that my teachers would think I was more sophisticated if I made this change.  It took a while, but eventually I made it a habit and still make them in this manner.  As I write this I recall a moment in the second grade when I decided to revert to my legal name Julia instead of the nickname Julie as it represented the maturity I felt I had at the ripe age of eight and also my conversion of traditional '7's to ones with horizontal marks through them, again for the same reason.  These are all instances of performance, where I am willingly modifying my behavior in the hope of altering my perception, but they are all rooted in the belief that these adjustments would be successful.  There is a very fine difference there, but it is one I think Madison would recognize.  These instances of performed theory, albeit my own sophomoric theory, are rooted in moments of recognition, that I was first inadequate in my current state, and that there was a change I could implement to correct my inadequacy. 

I believe I had yet another one of those moments last week, crying in my office.  There is something wrong either in my performance of a Ph.D. student because I am not operating either successfully--thus not needing to cry--or in my performance of a person--thus not noticing that the Ph.D. performance had run amok with myself.  I need to reexamine.  I need to determine if an adjustment should be made and how it should be implemented.  But most helpfully, I need to go back to my theory to look for guidance and wisdom.