A Manifesto for Making Performance About Making Change Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw

18 MAKE SOMETHING: A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw

The tasks

• Begin • Make a pact • Make something • Locate desire • Beg, borrow and steal • Embrace accident • Have faith in humour • Rely on your body • Imagine context • Make believe • Make it public

The conversation

Task: Write a manifesto for performing global feminisms Peggy: What is a manifesto? Lois: A public display of policy and aims. Peggy: Our policy is to ask questions and talk about things. Lois: We make public displays of policies by making public displays of ourselves. We perform a feminism of desire. We begin locally by talking personally and then travel to ﬁnd a global conversation. This document is an attempt to make public a policy of process and creative inspiration that has helped us meet the challenges of making performance that makes change and to encourage others to give it a try. Peggy: Do we reﬂect? Entertain? Fit into 4,000 words a lifetime’s worth of politics and performance? Can I rant? Can I say how arrogant it seems?

174 E. Aston et al. (eds.), Staging International Feminisms © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007 A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change 175

How didactic? Because it is not a search but a statement that makes your ideas seem permanent, correct … Lois: … and obvious, which makes them more accessible. Peggy: But it ﬁxes them, claims them. It seems that men are always claiming things making them theirs. Ideas. Land. Countries. Claiming and reclaiming. It is an ancient ﬁght, but you still have to deal with the newly dead. And once you’ve killed someone’s family or claimed somebody’s land it starts a never-ending cycle of violence and vengeance. Vengeance is not a pretty word. Lois: I think vengeance is a pretty word but a terrible incentive. Peggy: What can you do with that kind of contradiction?

Task: Begin Peggy: Start from zero every day. Fill your worry hole with whatever is at hand, even the simple, stupid things like owning a car in Manhattan and moving it to the other side of the street on a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or Friday. Lois: I wake up in the morning and think about how I am in the world. What world am I in? What country? What language? What kind of coffee will be served? Or is it tea? What will be my access to the news? What part of it will I believe? What control will I have over the hours of my day? Will I eat well? Will I remember to be grateful that I can eat at all? Will I fear for my life? Will I remember that sometime during my day I will be reminded that as a woman I am somehow secondary? Will my mind stay true? Will my heart heave? Will my fingers behave? Will my dreams come true? Will my cell phone ring? Will my cellmate remember my name? Will she return what is mine or covet the rest? Will I forget the blows of my childhood? Will I have a reprieve from the part I play in the re-enactment of that? Will my mother remember me or will she forget ever having let me go? Will the grass grow? Will it ever be Easter or Christmas or Ramadan or Diwali? Will it be necessary to cele- brate these days in order to remember that life passes in a rhythm that we no longer have to acknowledge because life is digital? The counting is done for us. There is no longer a little before or a little after 8. It is specific. It is 7:56. Will I be content in not having to ask? Will I ask? Will I finish and will I step forward without one moment of hesitation? Peggy: And then?

Task: Make a pact Lois: Wake up and find a collaborator. She might be lying in the bed next to you. She might be a character that fell from your hands as you 176 Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw drifted to sleep. She may no longer be a she. She may have always been a he. She might conduct an orchestra in a small town in Taiwan. She might have cheated an already bankrupt government out of enough money to pay for a facelift. She might have put the drugs in her pocket by mistake or maybe she was hungry or desperate or bored at her job as a social worker in the middle of Minnesota. She might be your own worn-out voice. But she is there, at your table, down the street, on the radio, in the horror, at the office. Peggy: Walk up to her. Slowly. Don’t assume too much or too little. Just ask a question. Always start with a question. Lois: It can be personal, professional, intimate, political, mundane, profound, local or global. Peggy: Look around you for the question. How do you feel? What time is it? What does it mean to perform? What is the light falling onto? What did you have for breakfast? Do you dye your hair? Have you ever received a speeding ticket? Do you dream? If you had a million dollars, what is the first thing you would do? Or if you had $10 million? What is family to you? Do you love passionately or practically? Lois: Any question. She’ll try to answer with the first thing that comes into her mind, on impulse right or wrong, true or false. Trust impulse. It is the thing you do or say without really thinking. It starts and finishes in the place between thought and action, between the inhale and the exhale. It is your origin and your original thought. Don’t second-guess it. Peggy: Don’t try to make her up. See what she has to say. Find out what’s in the room. Don’t try to make the room fit into your idea of what it should be. Lois: This is the beginning of your collaboration. Allow anything to happen once you walk into the room. Peggy: I never trust a room where everyone has on the same T-shirt like they are all trying to fit into a neat pattern of what they are expected to say. It’s like expecting prisoners to talk about how they want to be free or lesbians to talk about how all they want are the rights to get married and have children. Lois: Embrace the unknown. Don’t expect everyone to turn up. There might have been a fight last night and a lockdown this morning. She might have had to work overtime. Her father might have objected to the sexual content of her homework. The medication might have sent someone else in her place. She might just be too shy. And don’t forget the effect of the guards on her ability to tell the truth or the effect of a stranger on her willingness to disclose. But remind her that she doesn’t have to tell a story. She doesn’t even have to tell the truth. She can lie. A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change 177

Peggy: Someone asked me, ‘What is your favourite music?’ And I said, ‘Snoop Doggy Dog’. I have never, to my knowledge, ever heard a Snoop Doggy Dog song. It was just the first thing that came into my head. Lois: She can dress her life in the costumes of her imagination and you will believe it. It will be true. You will translate, transpose the pro- nouns, understand a foreign language in her inability to meet your eye, see the true story grow behind the comfort of the lie, read the reasons why her hand covers her mouth when answering the phone. You will admit the darkness of her skin or accept her whiteness, understand it as you might understand the incessant snow, the flattening winters and hollowing sameness. Peggy: Don’t think, ‘This is not big enough to be heard’ or ‘This isn’t the full story’. Don’t try to go global or be universal. The world is in the detail. But don’t be afraid of telling stories. They are a way of answering questions or singing songs. Try singing songs in between stories. But don’t worry about plot or middle, beginning and end. Lois: The action is in the relation of people, places and things. It takes place in the of, the to, the from, the in between. That is where the action is. No need to change a law, start a war, report an earthquake, recount the full story of your rape, admit your crime. You can sit with a teacup, forage the remains of a fire, remember a departure, regret a kiss, describe a loss. Peggy: There must be a place of loss. It is the place where the other sock goes, or the contact lens, or the parking space, or the memory of something that you knew a moment ago. If everything is digital, there must exist a digital place of loss. If I could find it and name it, I’d name it after a singer-songwriter I met in New Zealand, Rapai. You could call Rapai and ask her where she is and then go there to find what you have lost. Your heart, your wallet, your glow. She would give it back. Lois: Now make a contract. It doesn’t matter what it says, just some kind of promise to show up tomorrow and keep going. Write it down in any language, two or three languages if you need to. Make it stick by making it silly. State that you will always tell a joke or learn to tap dance or braid her hair. The good thing about contracts is that you have something concrete to change, something to break besides her heart.

Task: Make something Peggy: Are you talking about a play or a movie? Will I see myself on TV? Will it make me famous or get me out of jail? 178 Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw

Lois: No, I am just talking about the act of making. Like making a cake, making a dress, making a mess, making house, making art, making love, making it all go away, making the men stop, making the mind open, making money the thing you make in order to make the things you need and the things you need to make, making something from scratch, making something from scraps, recycling for the sheer pleasure of seeing something become something else. Peggy: Making love stops time, but how do you make time? Lois: Time is raw material. It is one of your ingredients. It may not always be yours. It may belong to your sons or daughters or to the corporation who took over your village or the small business you inherited from your mother, or it may be all you have. You may be doing time for a crime, or left behind with nothing but time on your hands. Peggy: When I was in college I made baby booties, and rum cakes and hot cross buns in order to make drawings and paintings and photos. Lois: Start with time. Steal it if you have to and use it to collect your ingredients:

• some facts, • a lie, • a feeling, • a gesture, • an object, • an uncovered memory, • an incomplete story, • a song, • a dance.

Mix them together and make something the way you would make dinner, a cake, a mess or a dress. Peggy: To make is when there is something there that wasn’t there before. It ﬁlls space, it occupies a page, it is thoughts projected onto the air, it is making a space in a prison where women can project dreams on bare walls and no one can take them down or grafﬁti over them. It is renting an 8–24 foot space so that girls of all ages can write bad poems and dress up in all the wrong clothes. It is laughing until the tears come and the stories about sex touch the reason why for these last 20 years she has never wanted to be touched. A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change 179

Task: Locate desire Peggy: Once I realised that my main desire was to make shows and to create new things, I realised what a burden it must be to want to be successful in the mainstream – like wanting to have a show on Broadway or a painting in a fancy gallery. At one time I thought I just wanted to do anything I had to in order to make queers and women visible. Now that there are women’s archives, and queer history and other people telling stories, I have to locate different desires. Lois: Ask yourself, what do I want? What have I always wanted to do? Wanted to be? Look for the desires that feed your dreams. If dreams have been broken or if they have been taken from you in a night-raid that mistook you for an insurgent or a soldier or a plaything, then look in the storeroom of need. ‘I need shoes’ can lead to the making of a story about a walk between war and peace. But if need, like desire, is too painful and reminds you of times you had or never had or if it overpowers you because you are hungry or your hormones are shifting or if you ask yourself, ‘How can you have the desire to make something when the world seems bent on destroying it’, then rely on will. Just do something. Write something down. Make a list of ingredients. Then mix, tear, fold that list into something else. And when the time is right, ask yourself and your collaborator. ‘What would I do if I was free, if I was a millionaire, if I had all I needed to make the things I wanted to make?’ Peggy: My father always said he didn’t trust millionaires because there aren’t enough hours in the week to make that much. He worked by the hour. He also said that if you have a crease in your pants and a haircut, you can get any job. Lois: This is not minimum wage. It is your biggest, richest, most pow- erful, most daring fantasy. Peggy: When I was in upstate New York making a performance with women who were survivors of domestic abuse, they requested that I stop using the word fantasy. To them, fantasy meant meeting men’s sexual demands. They asked if I could use the word imagination. Lois: If you live the nightmare of men’s violent sexual fantasy, then you might have to cultivate and reclaim. Take your imagination shop- ping. Let fantasy be the dressing-up box, the walk-in closet of your life desires. Go on. Dress up as movie star, a talk-show princess, a rock goddess or rock climber, a prime minister or the pope. Then imagine how you would move, what you would say, what story you would tell, what letters you would write, what dance you would do. Peggy: And if your mind goes blank and you can’t think of anything? 180 Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw

Task: Beg, borrow and steal Lois: There’s plenty to choose from. Most of us are bombarded with images of Hollywood celebrities and sports heroes, we know the move- ments and idiosyncrasies of world politicians, we hear music made in cyberspace and recycled in adverts and super malls, we have seen stories unfold then retold on wide screen and in high definition. We have every cooking, fashion and decorating tip at our repetitively stressed fingertips. Steal from the richness of popular culture. Take it, use it, twist and subvert it, then return it upside-down. Peggy: The things I use to make work have changed over time. I find I am not so interested in popular culture anymore. I have much more confidence in the unknown, in my queer, female self, in my illogical logic. I don’t have to refer to mass culture so much anymore to make sense of anything. Lois: But it is there if you need it, alongside great art, literature and philosophy. And beneath the media billboards and on basement floors of the libraries and museums lie the traditions, myths, superstitions and wives’ tales that whisper in our ears and hold us up or drive us down. Turn around and look them in the eye. Ask them to help.

Task: Embrace accident Lois: Pay attention to the things that get in your way, items that fall onto the sidewalk as you walk to work, old ideas you uncover when you are cooking the noodles, phrases or faces that will not leave your mind alone. Don’t disregard the ‘I didn’t mean to say that’, the ﬁght before breakfast, the music that tormented your mother about how things were before the occupation, the fur coat you almost threw out but couldn’t because it reminded you of the glamour she left behind. Look the accident in the face. If only two of you show up while the other 13 are waiting for their meds, turn the chorus into a duet.

Task: Have faith in humour Peggy: So many times I have heard white straight theatre critics at a performance created by women or people of colour say, ‘I don’t know what everyone was laughing at’ or ‘The performance was full of “in jokes”’. They didn’t get the jokes because they don’t recognise us. They don’t have to study us the way we study them. They don’t have to laugh so they don’t cry. We see ourselves and we laugh and we don’t always know why and when we laugh, we don’t feel so alone. A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change 181

Lois: Use humour. Tell a joke, even a dirty joke. Find funny people and imitate them. Copy their rhythm and gestures and change their words to yours. Peggy: I tried to be funny when I was working with Bloolips, a gay men’s theatre company from London. I found that the only way for me to be funny, or to be the clown, was to totally make myself vulner- able. Some things just aren’t funny. But if you cut to the pain you might ﬁnd a funny bone. And that kind of humour can pull you up short. It can heal you. It can make friends with your enemies.

Task: Rely on your body Lois: The only thing to remember, the best piece of advice, your best friend and, when all else fails, the best starting place of all is your body. The body remembers and will reveal its own set of details. The mind is the keeper of the voices that say, ‘This is not art, this is not important, this is women’s work.’ But the body holds a fuller knowledge, a global memory, a connection to all you have seen and wanted to forget and to all you have forgotten. Let the body speak. Let the gesture tell your fortune. Move if you can’t think and record the feeling of the movement, the memory of the muscle, the insight of your bones.

Task: Imagine context Peggy: Start with your worst assumptions about yourself. I am a racist, sexist. I am homophobic, classist. It may feel hurtful and hateful and, of course, it may contradict everything you are trying to say. But you need to see and feel the source of the wrong you are trying to right. Be the enemy. It will create an atmosphere that allows for mistakes and change rather than the politically correct assumptions that disable our creativity. Lois: And go on, call yourself a feminist. If a work allows those involved and those who witness and those who come across it to imagine they can be all that they desire, if a work makes you think ‘I could do that’, if it is not just about, for or with women but takes the presence and power of woman as a given, then it is feminist. Peggy: I remember – or maybe I dreamt – that there was a movement, a very short one indeed and not all that successful, in the 1970s where all feminists decided they should call themselves lesbians. Calling yourself something isn’t a pigeonhole, it is a context. Calling yourself a liar can make you suspect, but it can also give you freedom. And if what we do is ‘women’s theatre’ why not call the last 2,000 years of 182 Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw theatrical history ‘men’s theatre’? When I was in the gay cabaret group Hot Peaches, we charged heterosexual people $10 for admission to a show, and queers $5. Do you know that the straight people paid the $10? It never occurred to them that simply saying they were queer would save them money. Lois: But don’t try to make work about things you know very little about. If you want to talk about homelessness, work with homeless people or make work about the risks of choosing to be an artist in the current economic climate. Don’t pretend to know the pain of oppres- sion or even the pain of having the same address as the oppressor. Peggy: Look, listen and ask questions about the big subjects that sur- round you: breast cancer, Islamophobia, gender dysphoria. Then focus on the details: a woman’s desire to go topless, a Muslim lesbian’s fasci- nation with the burkah, the use of the masculine pronoun in Brazilian Portuguese. Lois: Start with the local. Mention the war or make something about hope or try to relieve the disaster with your humble making, but start with the personal. Make a work about war by considering the conﬂict between you and your collaborator. Think about mud before you try to stop the ﬂood. And if you are talking about mud, ask yourself ‘what I really want to talk about is …’ and don’t worry if your thoughts turn to the colour red. Follow red. Peggy: It is like walking quickly down a stream, not having time to plan out your journey, just alighting quickly on the next available rock. Lois: It is a local walk that feeds global thinking about injustice, social responsibility, human rights and all the other words we use for doing the right thing.

Task: Make believe Lois: If you can’t say what you believe in, think about what you rely on. Peggy: I rely on mistakes. The point is to do the best you can every day, stop worrying about getting it right. Give up. Just give up. That’s when there is room for inﬁltration and divine grace. Once you realise you want to be an artist, not a successful artist, but an artist, what do you have to lose? Lois: I believe in alignment. When you can sit in the one minute of time that is truly yours, just sit in it, things line up and come your way and you can see them coming and sometimes you can ask them to stay for lunch or ask them to sunbathe with you in the prison yard. A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change 183

Peggy: I believe everyone is an artist. I believe you learn from everything and everybody. You take up space, you have a shadow, light falls on you, you make a sound, time passes, you die. You watch others die. You watch others live. Watch where you are going. Look into the light and the shadows. Question everything. Write it all down every day. Every single detail of your life is important. Lois: I believe in the imagination. If you can imagine something different, it might start to change. It is like molecules in motion. One molecule wakes up, puts on a costume, does a dance and the other molecules have to stand up, move over, pay attention or maybe even join the dance. If we can imagine something, we can make it; if we can make something, we can make it change.

Task: Make it public Don’t stop. Keep going. This is the only chance you have. You have to ﬁnish this now. Set a date and perform, show, try. Do it before you don’t.