Poetics of Protest: a Fluxed History of the 1968 DNC (A Dialogue for Six Academic Voices)
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 8, No. 4, September 2012 Poetics of Protest: A Fluxed History of the 1968 DNC (A Dialogue for Six Academic Voices) Tom Lavazzi Commentator/Over Voice (CO; as described below)/Conductor (“Panel Chair”) Documents (“objective”) Fluxedout (Fluxed; Fluxus attitude) New Historical Left (NHL; based on “old” and “new” New Left and New Historicist voices) The Institute for Cultural Studies (TICS; an institutionalized postmodern academic voice) Yippedout (Yipped; Yippie! Doubling occasionally as “Lecturer”) Poetics of Protest is staged as a typical (atypical) academic conference panel presentation. At the front of the room are two long tables, one for the panelists and another for props. Props overflowing the table may also be ranged around the room, redeploying chalkboard ledges, windowsills, and floor margins, marking the space’s boundaries. Redeployed, theoretically fortified cereals (i.e., empty boxes)—Zizek 0sTM, Blau PopsTM, Lucky Deleuze, Baudrillard PuffsTM, Foucault Flakes, etc.—are suspended from the ceiling. There is also a podium, a data projector and projection screen1 displaying an interactive image map of Chicago, circa 1968, highlighting the Amphitheatre and key riot and protest sites, and, optionally, a video monitor on which the audience may view muted interviews with Yippies. Projected on the podium and the floor directly in front of the podium—slow motion and stop-action scenes from Brett Morgen’s animated documentary of the Chicago 8 trial, Chicago 102; the panelists pause, at intervals, to act out—or rather, act with, re-act (to), comment on via serial tableau vivant--fragments of these scenes, Tom Lavazzi is Professor of English at KBCC-CUNY.
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