A Manifesto for Making Performance About Making Change Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw
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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 perfor- mance 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.