Montclair State University Montclair State University Digital Commons Office of Arts + Cultural Programming, PEAK PEAK Journals Performances 2019 2019-2020 PEAK Journal Office of Arts + Cultural Programming PEAK Performances at Montclair State University Claudia La Rocco Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-journals Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Office of Arts + Cultural Programming; PEAK Performances at Montclair State University; and La Rocco, Claudia, "2019-2020 PEAK Journal" (2019). PEAK Journals. 3. https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/peak-journals/3 This Journal is brought to you for free and open access by the Office of Arts + Cultural Programming, PEAK Performances at Montclair State University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in PEAK Journals by an authorized administrator of Montclair State University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE 2019-2020 SEASON Pg. 3 | WHAT QUIET OFFERS WHEN REPRESENTATION ISN’T ENOUGH SARAH CARGILL on navigating colonial impulses and representation in classical music Pg. 6 | BREATHING THE LENS EMILY COATES on dance as endangered language, and one way of preserving it Pg. 11 | CIRCUS TRANSLATIONS COLIN GEE on moving beyond traditional circus and physical theater foundations Pg. 14 | TEACH ME TO SAY I LOVE YOU SASHA LAPOINTE on language and how it resists, survives, succumbs Pg. 16 | THE MAP OF FORM AUGUSTA READ THOMAS on the illuminated manuscripts she creates as part of her process Pg. 18 | INTERCESSION JESSICA LYNNE on prayer and Julius Eastman Pg. 20 | PUBLICATION, SOLITUDE, PERFORMANCE KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS on the two-way street between pages and stages Pg. 22 | GORGEOUSLY COMBATIVE SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD in conversation with ANNE BOGART, CHARLES MEE, and ELIZABETH STREB CLAUDIA LA ROCCO, editor http://floodesign.uberflip.com/i/1136506-2019-20-peak-brochure THE HEIGHTS OF IMAGINATION EDITOR CLAUDIA LA ROCCO MANAGING EDITOR DAVID DEWITT ART DIRECTOR PATRICK FLOOD CLAUDIA LA ROCCO PHOTO: JOSE CARLOS TEIXEIRA PROJECT MANAGER STEPHANIE HAGGERSTONE EDITOR’S NOTE CONTRIBUTORS n the three years that I’ve been editing the Peak Performances Journal, the most consistent feedback I’ve gotten from Executive Director Jed Wheeler has been to keep experimenting: SARAH CARGILL Ito not worry whether the work I’m commissioning for the page is adequately tethered to EMILY COATES the work he’s commissioning for the stage. COLIN GEE I’m grateful for his belief and encouragement, coupled as it is with meaningful support for SASHA LAPOINTE writers and editors. As Jed and I have discussed larger themes more than specific productions, JESSICA LYNNE the freedom to think expansively has led to writing that converses with live work in a variety of ways. One main theme of the 2019/2020 Peak season, for example, is language and how SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD it morphs over time, sometimes shifting as it encounters new influences. Sometimes KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS disappearing. And so you’ll find questions of translation throughout these pages. Meditations on the importance of giving voice, as well as the necessity of quiet. You’ll find writing that AUGUSTA READ THOMAS intersects with and departs from live work in ways both explicit and oblique. You’ll also find a belief in the importance of singular individuals expressing their ideas, in their ALEXANDER KASSER voices. In this, I think, an editor’s job is not so different from a curator’s: invite people in, and THEATER trust that they will make something worth paying attention to — even if, or perhaps especially if, it’s different from what you envisioned them doing. 1 Normal Ave, Montclair, NJ 07043 Claudia La Rocco EDITOR Jedediah Wheeler, Executive Director Dr. Susan Cole, President 2 | PEAKPERFS.ORG WHAT QUIET OFFERS WHEN REPRESENTATION ISN’T ENOUGH BY SARAH CARGILL THE ABSENCE OF SOUND IS A LANGUAGE OF ITS OWN. IN THE MUSICAL LINEAGE OF WESTERN EUROPEAN ART MUSIC, I WAS TAUGHT TO CALL SILENCES “RESTS.” A TIME TO WAIT FOR THE NEXT DIRECTIVE. THE NEXT ENTRANCE. A RIGID MOMENT OF “DO NOTHING” UNTIL IT’S TIME FOR YOUR NEXT SOMETHING. “REST POSITION” BECOMES ACTIVE PERFORMANCE. A WORDLESS, BREATHLESS, ANTICIPATORY SUBTEXT. am also familiar with booming silences. A ripe, weighty pause expectations of White supremacy in order to prove one’s just before a recapitulated theme, or the space between the inherent worth. Here, exceptionalism and the push to “beat the I last note and the first applause. The space in which meaning odds” become irrelevant to one’s humanity. Turning one’s attention is made and experienced all at once. Atmosphere-heavy, we keep inward, one begins to make meaning of the unremarkable, the ourselves buoyed above the density with a collectively held breath. everyday. Framed as an alternative to resistance narratives that often flatten Blackness and Black identity into a singular trope, But then there is quiet. In his book “The Sovereignty of Quiet,” Kevin quiet is, per Quashie, an affect “akin to hunger, memory, forgetting, Quashie examines how the ethic and aesthetic of quiet continue to the edges of all the humanness one has.” Quiet complicates the shape Black culture and history, offering an alternative lens through subject, offering opportunities to define oneself by the range of which to understand Blackness beyond narratives of resistance. In one’s internal reality, versus the demands of publicness, describing the difference between silence and quiet, Quashie writes: hypervisibility and the limited projections of the White imagination. It is a porous yet protective refuge. Silence often denotes something that is suppressed or repressed, and is an interiority that is about withholding, absence, and stillness. The demand to keep my practice contained to “the music itself” (a Quiet, on the other hand, is presence (one can, for example, describe phrase often used to silence musicians who have something to say prose or a sound as quiet) and can encompass fantastic motion ... about the conditions of their working environment) is a cruel and Indeed the expressiveness of silence is often aware of an audience, a impossible task, for neutrality is both a symptom and expression watcher or listener whose presence is the reason for the withholding of a deep privilege I do not have. Countless White instructors and ... This is the key difference between the two terms because in its colleagues have offered their sweepingly paternalistic two cents on inwardness, the aesthetic of quiet is watcherless. why I should consider playing the saxophone or jazz flute; to study music by “my people.” Hidden behind a thin veil of White innocence, Quiet offers an internally generated context, an alternative set of this passive-aggressive condescension was frequently employed to guiding principles that alleviates the pressure to reach beyond the diminish my sense of belonging. 3 | PEAKPERFS.ORG QUIET OFFERS AN INTERNALLY GENERATED CONTEXT, AN ALTERNATIVE SET OF GUIDING PRINCIPLES THAT ALLEVIATES THE PRESSURE TO REACH BEYOND THE EXPECTATIONS OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN ORDER TO PROVE ONE’S PHOTO: KIMI MOJICA INHERENT WORTH. During my graduate studies, I spent two instructional quarters approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or staring at a 12-inch skeleton hanging from a noose over my music compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel stand during private lessons. I inquired about the purpose of the toy to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; skeleton and was told that it was “leftover Halloween decor.” I later or... Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? learned it had been up for the last eight years. I recall the relief of spring break that soon followed, during which I spent most of my I recall an instructor from my late teens who once revealed, with days baking pies in silence, rereading Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses a great sense of altruistic pride, that she wished she had the of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Cocooned within the aroma of opportunity to teach more Black students. When asked why, she roasted sweet potatoes and warm nutmeg, staining my hands with replied in earnest that “Black people have better rhythm than anyone blackberries and lemon juice, I cultivated a familiar quiet that led me else!” I replied with silence, then scales, though I suspect that what back to myself. Here, quiet became the alchemical space where I she really wanted to hear was gratitude. transmuted haunting memories, personal and ancestral, into insight. Soon after, I chose to abruptly end those studies. Representation alone will never adequately address my longing to be defined outside of narratives of resistance (or submission) to White In his still-relevant text “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. Du Bois supremacy. While representation has the potential to abate some of describes his experience navigating conversations with well-meaning my loneliness, it does little to address how I can define myself for myself White people: or dissolve cultural and institutional structures that protect White innocence. It cannot hold the full complexity of and accountability Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: to past and present, and it cannot be the only means through which Unasked by some through feelings of delicacy, others through the we imagine — let alone live into — futures that reach beyond White difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it. They standards of polite tolerance and respectability. Here, the options are 4 | PEAKPERFS.ORG slim: be grateful for what is offered or spend your life in resistance. This ultimatum serves as a reminder that representation won’t protect me from the crushing weight of White fantasy. With this in mind, I cultivate quiet to animate the radical imagination needed to ground my sense of self in something other than the White gaze.