Thinking Theater: The Conclusion: The Power of Theater

Final Blogpost

Actions are things that we must carry out every single day. Our survival depends on carrying out actions: to eat, to walk, to pee, etc. In our modern world: to work, to shop, to chat… There is, however, more than just the action itself, for every action is carried out in a specific way. With a certain style which is repeated over time. Due to the fact that humans are programmed to learn through imitation, we often copy these styles. The way we dance. The way we speak. The way we walk. The way we sit. The way we reach out for things and then pass them over to the next person. They are all carried out with a specific style. They can be energetic and lively, or they can be slow and elegant. When we find ourselves within a group that carries out actions in a style that is similar to ours, this is not something we often keep in mind; but when an outsider sees these actions, they tend to categorize the actions to the bodies performing them. This is how we begin to perceive certain races, certain biological sexes as behaving in a specific way, as having a specific style to the way they do things. Judith Butler mentions that these perceptions of particular races and sexes are performed in a “mode of belief.” In other words, the style has become so engrained into the minds of the people performing the actions that it is no longer an attempt at an imitation. It has become their reality, their belief.

The production of Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment is all about racial constructs, pointing them out for the audience and then acting them out. The production is divided in two distinct acts, both of which are separate in terms of the plot that they follow. Similar to Hell House, where the audience is taken through a variety of different plot-disjointed scenes which portray sin, the fact that the two acts of The Shipment are separate allows the play to address a certain narrative instead of just providing some sort of escape for the audience through a plot that provokes empathy. This Brechtian element of addressing a narrative, rather than a plot in the Aristotelian sense, allows the play to make the audience think about what it is they are seeing. It also allows them to perceive the actions they see as something that pertains to a more general condition, both on stage and in the outside world, rather than to a specific situation.

Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment’s cast is comprised of only black actors. 4 male, 1 female. The first act opens with a frantic dance performed by two of the male actors wearing a suit. In the dance they move freely, keeping the their limbs stretched out, free; liberated. There is no picture of sophistication in this dance. It is therefore something that would be commonly associated with the perception of a black person: vigorous and thoughtless. This is followed by a rap song – a genre of music commonly associated with black people – and then one of the male actors playing a comedian comes on stage and begins a routine in which he complains about white people and racism, clearly pointing this theme out for the audience, prompting them to be more conscious of race in the production. The actor blatantly points out that some people have accused him of playing on stereotypes, and then he says that it is true. The comedian makes many sexual jokes and swears constantly, both of which are ideas typically associated to black bodies. The skit that follows this moment in the comedy show is done in a way that is heavily Brechtian: there are jumps in the plot, the movement and voices of the actors is not aimed at being realistic, but it simply tells a plot in an energetic and effective way. It tells the story of a young black man who wants to be a rapper, who goes to prison for selling drugs, gets famous out of nowhere, and ends up depressed at the grave of his best friend saying that he hates his life. This is continued by a song that essentially summarizes what happened. All of this constructs an image of what it means to be black: vigorous movement, loud expressions, religious inclinations, sexual vigorosity, etc. Throughout the act and the rest of the play, the actors are dressed in formal attire, which is not closely linked to the scenarios being played, and thus keeps pointing out to the audience that what they are seeing is just a performance. One where all their expectations about what a black person should be like gets realized.

The first act is very interesting in the way that it condenses time. The temporality in it, created by the skipping from scene to scene and showing actions that are not necessarily linked to the plot being told at the time; it is more orature-like. Yet this is carried out in a frantic way. Time jumps and moves around crazily, which is mimetic of the way black people are often perceived: frantic and disorganized. This contrasts heavily with the second act, which follows an entirely continuous “plot.” In the second act all of the actors play the stereotype of white people: the care for diet, the worrying about being punctual, the formal movement, where limbs are held closer to the body, the worrying about being politically correct, arguing whether Berkley or Stanford is more prestigious, when both of them really are. On top of that, they change their accents to a more neutral one, which is more commonly associated with whiteness. And the concerns and “tragedy” that takes place is all due to the simple fact that none of them have their relationships in order. And all of this is done in a form that is similar to that of a sitcom, a form of entertainment that favors white people and is largely part of white culture. All of this highlights the way in which white people behave and puts it in direct contrast with the style of actions black people follow. On top of this, the temporality in the act is continuous, it follows a single scene. This gives a sensation of the act being performed in an orderly fashion; everything is controlled and well-planned, which is something that is also commonly associated to white people. The act itself is also hilarious, which keeps the audience form empathizing too much; which Boal argues makes the play more effective in creating change among the audience’s minds.

The entire play highlights the heavy contrast between the way in which we perceive white and black bodies, but also does something important, which is suggesting that it does not have to be that way. In the second act, the actors don’t explicitly reveal they are white until near the end when they say that there is no black person among them. The audience sees black bodies engaging in white performance. This can have the power to suggest to the audience the breaking of stereotypes. Especially when this is seen in the theater; a medium which is usually the one setting the standard for the way in which bodies should behave; yet also has the power to change the way in which we see this. Adrian Piper writes about how art that can involve an observer with the “other” in the indexical present causes us to see this “other” as something different, makes us think about it. The audience in this case does not only perceive what is happening on the stage, thus brought to think about their expectations on race, but they also perceive the other audience members; especially in such an energetic performance where the audience was so often cheering and laughing. As the comedian in the first act pointed out, there is white people in the audience; and it is very likely that there are also black people. Theater is a place where people can come together within a single space and see each other, think about each other. It is a medium that truly allows for change to be effected effectively, as the audience can directly make connections with the real world from what they are seeing. Just the way in which Ta’aziyeh can involve the audience with the community, bringing them together in the form of laughter; The Shipment brings the audience together in laughter and joy. The audience beholds itself enjoying the same thing, brings them closer together. And therein lies the true power of theater. But it is not only the ability to convey narratives that can make people come together under a common sensation. It is also it’s power to address a narrative as a whole, in a direct way. It is really the power of orature, in transmitting directly from oral to aural receptions. The fact that many black bodies with different genders can exist, in a suit, in a high-end theater, entertaining a mixed race audience from probably a high-end society means that the audience can really be changed to think differently; to think that bodies do not necessarily have to be in the way they always perform. 

Carlos reads Sarah

https://wp.nyu.edu/sarahdaherthinkingtheater/

Sarah,

I remember the first impressions that I had of you. I don’t remember when exactly it was, but I overheard some conversation where you said that you really liked to debate, and that was something that was very apparent to the way you intervened in class. It wasn’t because you incessantly pushed your opinion, but instead you used your ability to “embrace polarity” (as you said in your “Waiting” post, and which I’ve interpreted as your tendency to embrace an opinion and defend it. Sorry if that’s wrong) to seek some sort of truth. You constantly found ways to push arguments that went against the trajectory of the class, and through that we either managed to get a more solid conception of the topic we were discussing as a whole, and not just through the focus Deb had intended for us. I admired your bravery in just jumping in with arguments, not always entirely sure of where you would end up, but always valiantly making your way through the ideas, supporting what you said with the texts and recognizing when you were wrong.

Reading your blog from the oldest posts to the most recent ones I could see this attitude remained throughout. I could see your style of writing grew and changed as I progressed through your blog, but this amazing ability to mobilize ideas to support what you say so effectively remained constant throughout. But what stood out to me the most from your blog was the way it changed as I progressed through it. Your initial posts were tough for me to chew, despite your ideas being easy to swallow. Your writing style was dense and I went on google two or three times to find definitions of words you had used. To inexperienced freshman me, it all just sounded amazing. So amazing that I found it difficult to see where Deb was coming from with much of her criticism in your earlier posts.

But as I read more and more of your posts your style began to change. It first hit me when I read you Yellow Brick Road post. When you wrote about a scene being “d r a w n o u t” and I found myself smiling at the sight of the space in between each of the letters that made me in my head read the word in a drawn-out way. Then your post on Stew felt like it could have been written by a different person. I mean, just by looking at this paragraph:

James Baldwin. An American novelist and activist who, in his essay collection Notes of a Native Son, explored the all-important intricacies of the issue of racism. Stew. A black rocker-turned-theater-artist-stroke-playwright who, in his lifetime, has claimed to long be inspired by James Baldwin. Notes of a Native Song. A song cycle that is manifest of the intersection between Baldwin and Stew.

With all its pauses and proper nouns-turned-sentences, it contrasts so greatly from what you had written before. And that’s only one example from this extensive post which is definitely one of your best. I felt like from these two posts (YBR and Stew) onward I was no longer just reading insightful comments by a student trying to get a good grade, but I was reading the blog of a student who was really trying to come to terms with ideas not only in relation to the content of the class, but also in relation to herself. More of you and who you are started to become apparent in these further blogposts.

Like when you wrote about your typical bickering with Mira.

Or when you wrote about your experience in Little Mexico and how it had stuck with you for so long and had brought you closer to your identity as a Lebanese.

You began to loosen up with what you would include in your blog. You began to trust that departing from strict academic style of writing could have its advantages, like when you went ahead and quoted yourself. That really made me smile and be more engaged in what I was reading. And I feel like it all came to a strong conclusion with the Judith Butler piece. You incorporated both sides of the “you” that I had seen in your blog: the cold and calculating academic Sarah from the first posts and the more risk taking and trusting Sarah from the later posts. While those images on my screen were hard to read, I could feel the writing on the paper flowing, as you transitioned from using capital letters, to writing in your own handwriting, to showing annotations of the paragraphs Butler wrote.

I get the impression from your blog that it was all a journey, with a very distinct starting and ending point. I then find it interesting to consider your blog as a “selfie,” since we always perceive selfies to be a single image. It’s as if a whole semester of struggle and success is condensed into a single image. An image that is literally worth thousands of words. You’ve performed yourself firstly as a dedicated student who was trying her best to (and succeeding in) present(ing) well-argued essays, then as a girl exploring her relationship to the work in the class, which concluded in this image of you as a sort of elevated master of a craft. At least to me it seems that way. But at the same time you also come across as a peer to me, as someone I can identify with. Your blog really is a performance of this journey that the class took you through, where you have grown and found a new part of yourself. 

What is Performativity

Judith Butler says that identity is constructed over time, through repeated acts which follow a particular “script.” Furthermore, it is the stylization of the body itself, and so an identity such as gender must be understood through the simplest of their actions, or just in the way they do their actions, within a specific social and historical context. It is also something that the actors carry out in what Butler calls a “mode of belief;” in other words the people who carry out these actions, these “performances,” are not intentionally creating any sort of façade. But then, it is possible for an identity such as that of gender to not simply be a binary relationship, but rather that it is defined in a much more lose spectrum by the acts that people carry out.

Butler makes reference to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that bodies are “an historical situation,” rather than “a natural species.” This is seen, for example, in the clear difference between sex and gender. Sex is simply what our biology dictates, while gender is much more nuanced. Gender is the thing that is performative; our acts within the context are what defines it, rather than any preconceived elements.

Merleau-Ponty’s idea has to do with the fact that bodies create their identity by constantly fulfilling expectations – what Butler calls a “set of possibilities” – that the society has ascribed to a certain role. The idea of the body as a “set of possibilities” stems from the existentialist idea that goes agains the Aristotelian concept of every object having an “essence.” Existentialism claims instead that it is our actions which define who we are. But there is also the element of the “set of possibilities” being defined by the historical period where the body exists. The body is not just an object, but it is the realization of possibilities – of a “set of expectations” for the body.

Thus, Butler states that it is the subject of a sentence, the “I,” that represents the body, and the verb, the “what,” that represents the expectations that are constantly being told to us to be the correct thing by the historical situation we find ourselves in. Forming one’s identity is all a matter of performing and reproducing – over a prolonged period of time – the expectations of that specific identity within the historical context.

Then we can talk more about the “mode of belief” mentioned earlier. The historical situation conditions a person to become what they are expected to be. Thus one becomes a sustained and prolonged “corporeal project,” or simply a body that has a “purpose” that was ascribed by the society. For example, Butler argues that heterosexual relationships are only a social construct made to favor reproduction; it is not something that is natural. Thus, society puts in place various systems to ensure that people will remain within this scope of heterosexuality, such as bullying those who do not fit in it and rewarding those who do. This is how the belief gets instilled into people to perform a certain set of expectations.

It is important to understand that the body does not ever exist by itself, so it is always something that is built in relation to the context it is in, but neither is it just some empty mold where society shoves all of its expectations into it so that it becomes a certain way. The individual does have agency over the body, and society does affect the body, and these two are not mutually exclusive. They do happen at the same time.

Then there is the situation of the specific space that the body is located in. Butler mentions that in the theater, bodies can be dismissed as just putting up an act. But outside of that, in a common space that any individual could occupy without any need for a particular perception of them, such as, say, a bus seat, the performance starts to be taken as a reality. So it is important to make that distinction. Performativity can indeed be what we perceive as the reality. It can be what we assume is true, and for all practical purposes, is true. When we perform to either conform to, or break from a certain historical context, and when we do so repeatedly, and without any mind of the space, then we are, from Butler’s perspective, the very thing that the context our bodies are in defines those actions to belong to. So those are the mechanisms that give performativity its pedestal to stand above a “theatrical performance”: being performed consistently over long periods of time and regardless of location, and the fact that within the historical context the actions the body takes are given a specific label.

Godot?! Where?!?!

February 2^nd 1999: Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías becomes President of Venezuela

People are happy. At last someone can bring about change and help the country move forward.

The country splits in half.

Half sees the corruption.

Half does not.

5^th of March 2013: Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías dies from cancer in Cuba.

Nicolás Maduro assumes his position as the designated successor to the presidency.

The economy crashes

The violence rises

The people are protesting

There’s no food in markets

Healthcare is rough

Everything is too expensive

People die

People leave

But most of all

People wait.

In the recent “times of crisis” the Venezuelan people have been doing more waiting than they are used to. They wait in lines for hours before the sun rises just to get their basic needs from the supermarket. They wait to see the day when everything will improve. They wait for the day they will be able to go back. “They are waiting for a miracle,” some people say.

It seems that right now, more than ever, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot would resonate more than ever with a Venezuelan audience. But Venezuela is a big country; so where to stage the play?

I would propose staging it in one of the “favela” areas in Caracas, the capital city. These places have high concentrations of low income people in them; the demographic from which most of the supporters of the current government came from. But now they are no longer the privileged “pueblo mismo!” (“town/people itself,” an expression unique to Chávez that does not really make much sense grammatically) that Chávez would grant most of his attention to. They too are now stuck in the limbo under a regime that does not know how to deal with the current situation. They too are waiting.

The performance would be free, a price that would not impede anyone from attending. A common space where everyone would feel welcome, something like a plaza, a park, maybe even a person’s house; but the play has to take place in one of the favelas so that the local community will feel more as if the play is about them; meant for them.

The performers would ideally be people from the same favela where it is being performed. This allows the audience to feel more easily connected to the performance and avoids the cynicism that the government has implanted in people’s minds when they see anything comes from the “bourgeoisie” (even if they are only bourgeois by comparison).

They would wear normal clothes instead of the costumes Beckett suggested; something like jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps. This is because it will allow them to see themselves in the play, rather than having to grasp a foreign story that does not seem to be so related to their home.

The play would be translated into Spanish and would include Venezuelan vernacular vocabulary in order to better connect with the audience.

There is still a question of what exactly would this play say to the Venezuelan people. They would observe this play about waiting and then think about what? My objective is not to get the lower income people from Venezuela to turn against the government, but I simply want them to understand the situation they find themselves in. I want to break the barrier of stubbornness that a lot of people still cling onto. Instead of just ignoring the situation that is happening, they should become self-aware of the condition that they are in; because it is not that different from that of the rest of the people in the country. When people wait in lines to buy food, they do so together. The next step beyond the realization of their condition is the inquiry of what to do about that condition. Will the people be compelled to go to the streets and protest? Or will they simply keep waiting? 

Time Changes. Time is Eternal.

                  Time.             What it is?                 What it does?                   What it means?

            How it governs us?                                   How it transforms us?

                                                                                                    How we capture it?

                 How we deal with it?                                         How we perceive it?

Why is it there?                     Is it more than just a construct?                   Is it out of our grasp?

                        What can we do to capture something like time?

They said this was a hard prompt to address.

                                                                                   And so far, it is.

Time just happens to be one of the most complex things probably any human being can understand, yet not really understand. As an intuitive concept we can all grasp it. An action does not only take place, it also takes time. One can’t be there without the other. And this is a notion that almost everyone has, and yet trying to define time is something that always eludes us.

            But asking what time is might just be the wrong question.

                        It is likely something that lies beyond our grasp.

                                    Or rather, beyond the grasp of words.

We all know what time is, even if we can’t put it into words. And that might just be enough to get by.

But if asking “what is time?” is beyond us, how can we show that we all understand time?

We can all understand the effect that time brings about.

                                    Change.                                  Things change over time.

Now take Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980-1981. A man with a clock in a room who would punch the clock every hour for an entire year, which would cause a picture of him to be taken.  

He always wore the same suit.

He was always positioned on the same side of the clock.

He always kept the same facial expression.

He was always in the same room.

But he started his performance with his head clean shaven, and let his hair grow out as the year passed by. And when one looks at the images that he took of himself in a rapid slideshow it is impossible not to notice the spinning handles of the clock, a motion that has come to symbolize the passage of time for any individual that knows how to read a clock with handles, as well as to many others who don’t.

To me, the elements of the piece are in conflict.

Firstly, we can “see” time passing by (or at least a quasi-universal symbol of it). Secondly, we can see it’s effect in Hsieh: his hair growing out. Thirdly, his position is not always perfectly the same; when watching the slideshow in rapid succession we can see that he shifts position, which is a reassuring sign that the pictures are real. Fourthly, he actually missed punching the clock 133 times. (http://www.tehchinghsieh.com/)                     All these elements reassure us of the passing of time. We see change, the principal effect of time on us. And we can see that Hsieh the human is still unable to really keep up with time. His piece is not perfectly clean. He missed punches. He isn’t always in the same exact place. This is because he too gets tired. 94 out of the 133 times he missed punching the clock were because he was asleep. (http://www.tehchinghsieh.com/) Just how I’ve been late to class because I oversleep, Hsieh was late to punch his clock because he overslept. He is human too! He too is unable to fully capture time!...

In a sense, the piece is about Hsieh’s struggle against time. A struggle that we all feel, against this “thing” that we cannot see, feel, hear, or fully comprehend. And yet it binds our life. We cannot keep it from moving forward. And if we don’t keep up, it’ll leave us behind. Only that you cannot be behind, because time is always sweeping you along. Only that because you haven’t kept up, you are in an uncomfortable position. Sort of like losing your balance on the metro because you aren’t able to hold onto anything. Or like falling asleep in the metro and missing your station, and being in a worse position because of it. No matter how hard Hsieh tried to keep up with punching the clock every single hour, no matter the fact that “to [him] […] art is not like a career, it’s [his] life” (https://vimeo.com/16280427) he still did not succeed in fully avoiding the fundamental challenge that time poses to us: that we must always keep moving.

But then there’s the conflict.

Things in Hsieh’s piece do not always change.

His costume. His face. His orientation from the clock. The room.

Time does not change these things.

He has succeeded in taming time, even if just a little bit.

I said that Hsieh did not succeed in avoiding the fundamental challenge of time, but maybe that was not his main objective.

Many things in Hsieh’s piece represent change, time in motion.

Many things in Hsieh’s piece also represent permanency, time in stillness.

The permanency is just as important as the change. They are both things that affect the way we see time. While nothing is permanent and neither Hsieh nor I are trying to state that, there is a certain element of the eternal that exists in the way we capture time. “La pasión eterna que duró unos días.” (Las Rosas de Ayer, Astor Piazzolla)

As soon as we experience a moment it has entered our memory, and that too is an important part of how we perceive time. The permanency of things gives us a sense that bodies are more than still images of a given instant. They remain through time. And so things that remain for a long time feel as if they will remain forever. “Nothing lasts forever” I heard somebody say somewhere. But that doesn’t mean we can’t believe it will. It isn’t conflicting with our observations, even if it is conflicting with logic, to assume that something may last forever.

            And so, the fact that several elements of Hsieh’s performance remain constant gives us a sense that that is the way things had always been. It can be easy to imagine that Hsieh – or at least the Hsieh in the images from the performance – had always existed in that room and will always remain there. It does not change with time. Maybe for the universe it will. Maybe we know it eventually did change. But in the moment, some things simply seem permanent, and it is not until we decide to consciously think about their end that we realize that nothing is eternal.

            Except for time.

                        Whose handles just keep looping and looping.

                                    Promising that the next day will come.

                                               That the next hour will come.

                                                           That there’s a future.

                                               That the handles will keep looping around the clock.

                                    And that we will keep moving through time.

                        For even if we change.

            Our existance remains.

Maps. Performances. Abu Dhabi. NYUAD.

2pm Sunday, November 14, 2016.

If you read Atoka’s blog you know the story.

If you haven’t then go read that (https://wp.nyu.edu/atokajothinkingtheater/), there’s no point in repeating what’s already been said.

One thing I would like to add, is that we do acknowledge that the “official” performances typically take place in the Arts Center or right outside the Arts Center, but as Atoka has already said, there were no public official performances that we could have noticed at the time we walked around the campus.

Now as for the two paragraphs about my contribution (Atoka was amazing at saying things that I did, but nonetheless):

While making observations on campus, I think my main contribution had to do with coming up with potential definitions for performance. Thanks to a meeting I had had with professor Debra Levine the previous week, I had already considered some ideas for defining this term. One of them can be found in Richard Schechner’s “Performance Studies An introduction.” He says: “’doing’ is the activity of all that exists […]. ‘Showing doing’ is performing: pointing to, underlining, and displaying doing.” (page 28) I felt a little hesitant while sharing the definition, because in a sense it’s an unfair advantage that I casually happened to have… or perhaps it is a disadvantage to not be able to frame one’s own definition out of nowhere. Regardless, when I told Atoka about the definition, I said something like “It’s to bring attention to action” and Atoka misunderstood the word “attention” for “tension,” which is how another definition came about, which Atoka wrote as “Action with tension,” where the tension is simply energy consciously put into doing the action. By this rule, we discarded the possibility of something as banal as walking (unless one walks in a particular way to draw attention) as being a performance. Lastly, the definition that Atoka mentions as “Debra Levine’s definition” was something that she loosely stated while I met with her: that “all expressive behavior is performance.”

When marking important locations in Abu Dhabi, what I mostly provided was my knowledge of the city’s layout, having lived here for 4 years. I pointed out the where the National Theater (the one near Abu Dhabi media) is and how close it is to the Ministry of Culture and Knowledge development and how there is a branch annex to the theater itself. I also mentioned how the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) lies between the center of the city (what is often called the “Hamdan street area”) and the Khalifa City area, which allows it to be close to the high concentration of schools in both Khalifa City and the actual city. This, as well as the fact that the ministry of presidential affairs is very close to the presidential palace, seems to indicate that the government institutions that regulate other institutions usually lie close to something relevant to their job (which is not always strictly the case, since the ministry of culture is far from, for example, the National Theater of Abu Dhabi (also known as the “Breakwater Theater,” to avoid confusing with the National Theater) is quite far from where it is, despite being one of the most active “official” performance venues in the emirate). I mentioned how isolated areas like Khalifa City, Masdar City and Yas Island – which are all typically spaces for high-income residents – are far from the Hamdan street area where a lot of lower income immigrants live. I also mentioned how even further apart (towards the Khalifa City area, but a bit more south) is Mussafah, Abu Dhabi’s industrial area and a neighborhood of even lower income people.

Now that the contributions are there, just something I wanted to comment on:

About Saadiyat: this island almost exists in a different dimension from the rest of Abu Dhabi. The island is not only physically separated from the city, but ideologically as well. While criticism of the UAE’s highly successful government is still something that is not mentioned, the fact that NYUAD is an American institution seems to allow for the engagement of topics of study that involve topics which are usually banned in most official institutions (sex, transgenderism, swearing, etc), which in spaces like my school would be heavily scrutinized until it is made sure nothing that could be offensive to the UAE’s culture was being stated. I rule out the possibility of this being due to the fact that NYUAD is a higher education institution, because for instance ACS (the American Community School) also often goes “unfiltered” with things such as performances, as I’ve heard there are performances that have been shown there involving swearing and kissing (which in my school would be completely banned; we would have to resort to simply alluding to these things). There is an unspoken rule about spaces like NYUAD and ACS, but especially NYUAD as being places with their own set of rules that do not conform fully to the general rules of Abu Dhabi. It is interesting that such a place would exist in Saadiyat, a man-made island; a land that was not supposed to be there. It will be interesting to see how the development of the cultural district of Saadiyat takes shape: whether it will look more like NYUAD or like the rest of the city.

Rock Stew

Honestly speaking, I could not enjoy Stew’s Notes of a Native Song. I was exhausted from a long week of sleepless nights and a PE class that always leaves me with sore legs. So yeah, I was dozing off during the first half of the performance. Although I think one of the biggest reasons why I could not enjoy the performance is because I was expecting so much more. Something more like Passing Strange, of which I absolutely adored every single bit of. The witty writing. The melody and rock-style melody that weaved everything together. The engaging narrative. The expressions of the actors. All of it was just much more engaging for me than Notes of a Native Song, and I honestly don’t really understand why, because I’ve always been a fan of rock.

Although that might be a big part of the reason why, because while I have always been a fan of rock music, I was never the type to immediately pay attention to lyrics in music. As a matter of fact, a lot of the “rock” music that I listen to are purely instrumental. For me the melody comes first, and listening to, and understanding, lyrics on the first try requires an extreme amount of effort from me. The worst part (for me) is Stew actually made the songs in a way that emphasizes the importance of the lyrics. Especially in the first ones, the melody was not anything specific that was easy to get absorbed into. It was more of a musicalized speech than a song itself. In the later songs this was less the case, which I think is part of the reason why I became more engaged towards that part of the performance.

One thing that I think made it really hard for me in the beginning had to do with the assumption that the audience would immediately grasp the concept of the performance through the songs. I did not realize the performance was about James Baldwin at the beginning, even though I had actually heard about that beforehand. In the later songs, when Stew started to introduce each new song, I started to become more engaged in the whole show. I felt like I was actually getting something, some ideas, other than listening to rock music that, for some reason, did not really appeal to me. Because as Stew said, “ideas matter.”

But speaking about the music, it was not all just unappealing sounds. I was absolutely amazed by the skill and energy of the drummer, and it’s the moment I remember most vividly from the performance. His solo, I mean. Which came in at a moment that I cannot really recall right now. Because the rest of it was hard to focus on. I also adored the violin, but that is probably because I really like listening to violins in general. People always seek to find comfort in familiarity, and I think the fact that the parts of the performance that I found more enjoyable were the more instrumental ones is a clear example of that.

Other than that, visual aesthetic elements in Notes of a Native Song did not ever seem to be very meaningful. There was a moment in which Stew changed the hat he was wearing, but I had no idea why he was doing that and what he did afterwards did not tell me anything about that. There was also a moment when Stew changed the part of the stage he was positioned in, but that also did not strike me as very interesting. Possibly, it is only because of the space he performed in. Maybe in a more intimate setting, these changes in position would have been more impactful. But with the distance from the stage that was in place in the black box at NYUAD, this did not come across very effectively.

But then something that really threw me off was the whole idea of dealing with the “indexical present” (as Adrian Piper defines it, “the concrete, immediate here-and-now”). I had heard already twice (both in Stew’s playwrighting workshop and when he came to talk to our class) about the way that he would perform. He always spoke about his rock concerts being something that feeds off the way the audience reacts to it. He spoke about changing his performance according to the general mood of the audience. And I had heard twice about the frikkin Kanye allusion to explain the relationship between Wright and Baldwin. And of course, I found it amazing how he said he one day decided to stop the show mid-way and just explain the whole thing to his teenage audience and the teenagers’ response of awe.

But then when that happened in the performance at NYUAD I was severely underwhelmed by the way it was done. The halt in the middle of the performance seemed to well rehearsed. All of the musicians stopped almost at the same time right when Stew was telling them to just stop the music. And then he proceeded to tell the story, but it did not feel as impactful as he had told before.

Although there was a moment where I could notice that he was almost just speaking as he pleased. He was explaining a song and was about to put on his glasses to start playing a song, but he arrested the gesture and went back to speaking to the audience for a few more minutes. That moment caught my attention. It seemed like a genuine attempt at following his own gut. Maybe it is just because I had already heard him speak twice about his performance style, but when Stew did that I really felt like he was living in the “moment,” in the “indexical present.”

I think that this performance was an attempt at being something it did not accomplish. Not for me at least. The performance was trying to be something that would bring together an audience and that would at the same time tell some stories about James Baldwin. In the state I was in when I saw it, the latter did not connect very effectively, and it didn’t feel as if the performance really managed to accomplish the former. There is a divide that takes place as soon as the performers are separated from the audience through the use of a specific staging form, like the proscenium arch-like setup in the black box. I remember how back in high school, me and some classmates would sometimes sit in a classroom, someone would start playing a tune on the guitar, and somebody else would start to sing or tell a story. That was engaging. That was something that flowed with the reactions of the audience then present. The safe environment that is created when you know the people who are performing is something indispensable. Something that Stew did not have under his belt when performing here. And something that was difficult for me to give him, because I, like many others, simply want to watch a performance for afar sometimes. Sometimes don’t have the energy to fully and emotionally engage with a person we don’t fully know. And of course, simply because how are you going to meet over 100 people right before the start of a show? This is why making full use of the “indexical present” is difficult: it’s not practical for commercial performances. At least not in the case of music (because I have seen improvised shows that are created on the spot with only some input from the audience, and stand-up comedy is something that always must keep the “indexical present” present). But then again, maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe a lot of the music that took place on that stage was improvised and actually was reacting to the audience. I would never know though, since I only saw the show once. And even if that was the case, perhaps I was simply not in the same mood as the rest of the audience. It’s tough to be a spectator in a sea of many.

Accepting Queerness and Musical

I don’t quite remember how the conversation came about.

I don’t even quite remember if it was in one of those long empty main streets in Khalifa City, surrounded by dirty sandlots and residential compounds, or in that one long empty avenue in Margarita Island, surrounded by trees and sculptures which adorned the space between the two ways of the road. I remember the sky was a calm after-school blue.

But the banality of the setting is irrelevant. What’s really relevant is that I was talking to my mom in the car. I’ve always seen my mom and I still see her as a very progressive person. She always speaks of not being able to identify with the things that other Venezuelans usually talk about and not being able to identify with it all. I always saw her as somebody who was progressive and accepting. Because of that what she said on that day actually shocked me. The conversation that afternoon drifted towards sexuality and I was mentioning the case of somebody that I knew who was bisexual. She snapped. She said “that’s not natural.” The way biology works, is to support heterosexual couples. That’s how we reproduce. That’s how the human race survives. I then mentioned how at one point I thought I was homosexual. She murmured and kept looking at the road. “That’s not natural.”

Every time a conversation about how Latin American societies are not very open to the idea of non-heterosexual couples I think back to this incident. I still think my mother is a really progressive and open-minded person, and in fact, if I asked her about this topic now, after the rise in LGBTQ movements that have happened over the last two-to-three years, and in a setting different drive in a lazy afternoon, she might say something different. But it shows how ingrained heteronormative relationships are in the collective mind of the society I’m from. While in Venezuela I don’t remember meeting a single person who was not heterosexual, and to this day the idea of someone who isn’t is something that strikes me as hard to deal with. Not because I reject the idea of a non-heterosexual orientation, but simply because I’ve never had to deal with it and it’s just different. Unusual. Queer.

In Stacy Wolf’s book A Problem Like Maria about the possibility of interpreting the famous musical The Sound of Music from a lesbian or feminist point of view, she first provides an overview of how throughout history, musical theater has mainly focused on heteronormative narratives. “The musical appears to reflect the dominant values of the culture: conservative, sexist, and homophobic.”¹ “In most cases, the message of musicals is that heterosexuality is both natural and mandatory and that women should know their place.”¹ (p9) This is the common interpretation of the narratives of many popular American musicals, including The Sound of Music. But as Stacy Wolf says, it is possible to interpret things in a different way. “There is no ‘natural’ way to read a text”^2­ (p25) People will always find different meanings in things, according to their culture, their personal history, and the ideas they have been exposed to; and Stacy Wolf wrote a 200+ page book about how it is possible to interpret The Sound of Music as a lesbian/feminist narrative, as opposed to the traditional heteronormative interpretation most viewers would associate with it.

In her book, Stacy Wolf discusses more than just the way in which The Sound of Music can be interpreted as a queer narrative through the strength of the main character Maria. I found it really interesting that Wolf quotes Alexander Doty and Corey Creekmur saying that “queerness is ‘at the core of mainstream culture even though that that culture tirelessly insists that its images ideologies and readings [are] always only about heterosexuality.’”³ (p31-32) She mentions that “many men in musicals are constructed as feminine, if not gay.”⁴ (p41) These ideas lead to the idea that musicals provide a stage for performing queerness. Song is not something that is limited to a stage. Song is something that invades our everyday life, something that any human being with a voice can engage in if they wish to. And this allows us to impersonate things that we would normally not. This does not necessarily make much difference; I remember singing the song “I Feel Pretty” from Bernstein’s West Side Story and clearly enunciating the line “I feel pretty and witty and gay,” literally saying “I feel gay” when I was still 15 and me and my friends from school would obviously laugh at that stuff. But the song was catchy, and so we would sing that. We would impersonate Maria (from West Side Story), a female character singing about how she is in love with a guy. It does not necessarily affect us; me and my friends still remain heterosexual (as far as I know), but that does not remove the fact that we did that. In a sense, one starts to become more accepting of things like queerness, by doing in a performance that allows you to engage with it. Wolf has convinced me that musicals are really a central part of queer expression and culture.

Except that according to Wolf it isn’t. As she said, it’s mainly heteronormative narratives. But the point is that one can see it differently. Regardless of whether or not being heterosexual is truly the “natural” thing to do, non-heterosexual orientations exist, and it is a fact that we can no longer deny. Because of that, it is important that we become more accepting of these perspectives. We cannot force such a large group of people (LGBTQ) to hide away their desires. Becoming more accepting of LGBTQ people is a well-marked step towards global acceptance of people. Towards world peace. Ok, maybe not that far. But it certainly allows for the creation of a more open-minded world to live in. This is why it is important to be able to view certain narratives as being from a group that is less represented. We learn more about the group, and eventually become more accepting of the group.