1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

sclai/The Song of an 36 Emigrant, created and 37 performed by Farm in 38 the Cave Studio 39 Festival of International Dance, New Haven, 2008. 40 Photo: Tomas Karas 41 42 43

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/theater/article-pdf/40/1/1/478368/THE401_01_Upfront_FF.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 1 2 Up Front 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Kinesis: The New Mimesis 11 12 Joseph Roach 13 14 From 2006 to 2009, the World Performance Project at Yale (wpp), which was funded 15 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the form of a Distinguished Achievement 16 Award given to me, asserted the primacy of research in the arts. In nitty-gritty prac- 17 tice, this meant putting my grant money where my mouth is: hiring an artistic direc- 18 tor, Emily Coates, a production supervisor, Kathryn Krier, and their assistants; col- 19 laborating with other departments in commissioning or booking scholarly and creative 20 work in theater, dance, and performance art; and joining forces with the Yale Reper- 21 tory Theatre to produce a series of culturally and stylistically diverse but thematically 22 linked performance events under the rubric “No Boundaries.” Never intended by wpp 23 as ends in themselves, the performances included Cuban American stand-up comedy, 24 installation art, slam poetry, readings of Arabic plays in translation, Afro-Peruvian 25 cabaret, Czech dance theater, Singaporean storytelling, Colombian multimedia with a 26 live culinary-arts demo, explicit sexual ethnographies of Muslim women, hip-hop, two 27 new musicals, and much else besides. We had hits, flops, and at least one stinker. We 28 had walkouts and walk-ups. But despite the mix of generally well-subscribed events, 29 the project repeatedly threatened to lapse into the dreary norm for the performing 30 arts in the self-hating American academy — all do and no talk. What did we want to 31 accomplish instead of just putting up shows and taking them down? 32 Stay with me on this, because it’s so easy to misunderstand. 33 We wanted to spark not only conversations (in talk backs, panel discussions, and 34 symposia), but also research outcomes. A research outcome means publication in a peer- 35 reviewed journal or book. A research outcome means making critical and theoretical 36 use of preselected performances, which are documented and archived for this purpose. 37 A research outcome means making the archive available to scholars and practitioners 38 everywhere. A research outcome means not only getting results but also communicat- 39 ing them — to other researchers, to students, and to the public. Simply putting up a 40 show and writing the program notes for it may be research, but it is not a research out- 41 come. Each research outcome in our field means one step forward in the oft-postponed 42 43 1

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movement of the performing arts from the peripheries of a great university’s intellectual 1 mission to its center. 2 Movement — across distances, across time, across boundaries — is the key to 3 everything we are trying to do with the World Performance Project, and because dance 4 is historically the least well established of the performing arts at Yale, it has also proved 5 to be the least resistant to being moved. Movement in this sense means a transition into 6 a research paradigm, where production is not the end point of effort but the provoca- 7 tion. This, we hope, is timely in world-historic terms as well as local ones. Our working 8 hypothesis about contemporary performance is that kinesis is the new mimesis — that 9 as the arts proliferate within the mediated and multicultural languages of transnational 10 space, expressive movement is becoming a lingua franca, the basis of a newly experi- 11 enced affective cognition and corporeal empathy. Mimesis, rooted in drama, imitates 12 action; kinesis embodies it. 13 The most complicated production we attempted was the Festival of International 14 Dance, done in collaboration with the Yale Repertory Theatre in November 2008. It 15 featured the work of three choreographers who brought us five new works, including 16 three North American and one world premiere. The complications were technical 17 and logistical, which the staff of the Yale Rep addressed with élan, but they were also 18 aesthetic and ethical. We had been working on performance in the context of global 19 diasporas since the beginning of our project, and our thinking began to coalesce in con- 20 nection with the visit of the Farm in the Cave Theatre Studio in April 2008. Based in 21 Prague, the company derives movement-and-music-theater scenarios from folk materi- 22 als. The piece they brought us, s c l a v i /The Song of an Emigrant, sets texts taken from 23 letters sent back home by Czech nationals displaced by conditions of globalized labor, 24 matching the haunted imagery of their words to old Ruthenian and Ukrainian songs 25 and adding a hyperkinetic corporeal score of sinuous movement, sometimes abstract, 26 sometimes pantomimic, always evocative and frequently pointed: “Sclavi” plays on 27 the etymological connection between the words slav and slave. But what does it mean 28 in this context to declare that there are no boundaries? We saw ourselves, guests as 29 well as hosts, as falling in among the agents of globalization as well as its discontents, 30 schlepping the folk material out of the Slovakian villages and onto the world stage. By 31 using the phrase postglobal dance, we acknowledge with mixed feelings how unsurpris- 32 ing it has become to us that something as locally particular and intimately hard-won 33 as a choreographic style can travel the planet with the celerity of luxury accessories or 34 cheap labor. So the very notion of an International Festival of Dance under the rubric of 35 “World Performance” intensified the urgency of the question of the limits of kinesthetic 36 empathy, one we have only begun to answer. 37 That is why we were both enthusiastic and skeptical when Tom Sellar proposed 38 that we share our preliminary data in a special issue of Theater. We write together as we 39 make dance-theater work together — collectively, collaboratively, and experimentally. 40 We seek to change the way in which performance scholarship is created, published, 41 and evaluated. To that end, we have already moved beyond the single-author model of 42 43 2

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1 traditional humanistic scholarship — ultimately all of us who participate in the project 2 sign the article and share in the credit as well as the labor of producing it (see Theater 3 Topics 19 [2009]: 1 – 14). But here the individual artists, speaking for themselves, have 4 set forth their ideas and reflections. Emily Coates, who curated the festival, introduces 5 them. Adam Horowitz, the oral historian of wpp, documents the background to their 6 work and ours over the life of the Mellon grant. We are making this material available 7 even as we continue to mine it ourselves for future publications, making an archive out 8 of our repertoire and vice versa. Yale University has agreed to continue the World Per- 9 formance Project after the grant runs out, so “No Boundaries” will be back next season, 10 even though many of the old boundaries still remain, and some of them probably ought 11 to. But which ones? Watch this space.

12 Theater 40:1 doi 10.1215/01610775-2009-012 13 © 2010 by Joseph Roach 14 15 16 17 Merce Cunningham (1919 – 2009) 18 Pina Bausch (1940 – 2009) 19 20 Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jacob Gallagher-Ross, and Tom Sellar 21 22 As this issue exploring new globalized dance forms went to press, two choreographers 23 who redrew the contemporary dance’s map and borders died in close succession. Merce 24 Cunningham and Pina Bausch spurred different phases of dance’s evolution, and the 25 aesthetics they deployed share few attributes. But both artists were visionaries who 26 brought dance into step with visual arts, music, and theater — indeed, they found a 27 place for dance in an enlarged Merce Cunningham 28 interplay of all those elements, in Antic Meet, 1958. 29 and by doing so they expanded Photo: Richard 30 its dimensions and possibilities. Rutledge 31 Cunningham started danc- 32 ing professionally in the 1930s in 33 Martha Graham’s company. He 34 soon began choreographing his 35 own works, and his first impor- 36 tant solo concert was in 1944. By 37 the early 1950s, he had founded 38 his company and was a teacher 39 in residence at Black Mountain 40 College, where he began his life- 41 long professional collaboration 42 and personal partnership with 43 3

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composer John Cage. Their experiments with abstraction — separating performance 1 elements such as music from movement and incorporating principles of chance into the 2 choreographic process — brought modernism into dance. No convention was immune 3 from reconsideration: Cunningham fragmented concert dance’s habitual one-point per- 4 spective, used random operations to unsettle choreographic patterns, and took a cubist 5 approach to the line of a dancer’s body, skewing familiar gestures and isolating body 6 parts from one another. 7 In recent decades Cunningham worked with computers to generate chance-deter- 8 mined movement patterns for his performers. This dismantling of dance’s traditional 9 unities extended to every element of performance: the music, frequently by Cage, and 10 costumes and settings, often created by artist Robert Rauschenberg, were kept from the 11 dancers until the last possible moment. Costumes would not be worn until the night of 12 dress rehearsal. 13 Cunningham performed until he was seventy and continued making dances — 14 onstage and in his mind — until the very end, creating the ninety-minute dance Nearly 15 Ninety to celebrate the beginning of his tenth decade in April 2009. The Cunningham 16 company will continue to perform repertoire for two years, then will disband, and the 17 Merce Cunningham Trust will archive, preserve, and license Cunningham works for 18 performance and research. 19 20 Bausch’s devised genre, tanztheater, fuses choreography with inventive stage pictures 21 and eccentric scenarios often derived from her memories and those of her dancers, 22 sometimes exploring feminist and gender themes. From her artistic home in industrial 23 northwestern Germany, Bausch created works that defied geography as well as conven- 24 tion, with an international corps of performers playing on stages all over the world, 25 sometimes musing on a spe- 26 cific city (Palermo, Istanbul, 27 Hong Kong) to access a state 28 of mind. She studied with the 29 German expressionist cho- 30 reographer Kurt Jooss and 31 later at New York’s Juilliard 32 School, and she was found- 33 ing artistic director of Tanz­ 34 theater Wuppertal in 1973. 35 One of the few Euro- 36 pean choreographers to re- 37 ceive consistent exposure in Pina Bausch. 38 Photo: the U.S., Bausch influenced 39 Atsushi Iijimal a generation of dance-theater 40 41 42 43 4

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1 makers with her use of individualized gesture and her bold application of mise-en- 2 scène – covering the stage with soil for her 1975 Rite of Spring or collapsing giant concrete 3 walls and dancing in the rubble (Palermo, Palermo, 1989). She died at the age of 68. 4 In successive generations, Cunningham and Bausch recharted modern dance. 5 Countless future artistic voyages will begin from their exacting and visionary craft.

6 Theater 40:1 doi 10.1215/01610775-2009-014 7 © 2010 by Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre 8 9 10 11 Augusto Boal (1931 – 2009) 12 13 Joanne Pottlitzer 14 At dinner one evening in 1968 when Augusto Boal and Sergio Vodanovic, the Chil- 15 ean playwright, were visiting New York, Boal began describing the many candomblé 16 ceremonies he had attended throughout . He thought it was uncanny that when 17 a saint “entered” the body of one of the participants — whether in Rio, São Paulo, or 18 Bahia — he or she always spoke with the same voice, in the voice of that particular 19 saint. It was very scary, he said, especially when the ceremony was held in a cemetery. 20 Sergio looked askance and asked, in his characteristically dry, direct manner, “Boal, 21 how can you say these things when you say you’re a Marxist?” Boal replied emphati- 22 cally, “I am a Marxist, but I still get scared when the saints come down.” 23 Augusto Boal was an exceptional man, whose passion for politics was matched 24 only by his passion for theater. His death on May 2, 2009, at the age of seventy-eight, 25 has been hard for me to absorb. We first met in São Paulo in 1968, when I invited his 26 production of Arena Conta Zumbi to perform in New York, and our professional lives 27 were intertwined until the early eighties. Boal never wavered from his belief in theater as 28 a way of communicating political and social ideas, yet he never lost sight of the impor- 29 tance of creating well crafted and entertaining shows. Though he had been dealing with 30 leukemia, he continued to work actively and to touch people’s lives around the world. 31 Boal is best known internationally for his book Theatre of the Oppressed, written 32 in 1971 and first published in 1974. Inspired by ’s renowned Pedagogy of the 33 Oppressed, Boal’s book has been hailed as groundbreaking in theater theory and has 34 created many followers in countries throughout the world. The book challenges the 35 Aristotelian model of drama as “designed to bridle the individual, to adjust him to what 36 pre-exists”; it also contends that “when Thespis invented the protagonist, he immedi- 37 ately ‘aristocratized’ the theatre.” 38 In contrast, the many exercises and techniques Boal developed are designed to 39 empower audiences, or “spect-actors,” calling on them to participate in improvisations — 40 41 42 43 5

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even in productions — along with the actors. His “Newspaper Theatre” is adapted from 1 agitprop and the Living Newspapers of the 1930s; “Forum Theatre” invites members 2 of the audience onstage to suggest a better solution to an improvised scene; in “Invis- 3 ible Theatre,” a group of actors enter a public space like a subway or a mall and begin 4 improvising without people realizing they are actors, incorporating the “audience” into 5 the piece. A Chilean actress recently told me that she used Boal’s “Invisible Theatre” 6 techniques in supermarkets during the Pinochet military dictatorship. 7 These methods reflected Boal’s intense belief in the underdog, the disenfran- 8 chised, the underprivileged, and in the case of theater, the audience. He liked writ- 9 ing plays from the minor characters’ point of view, as he did with The Tempest, where 10 he made Caliban the protagonist. (“I try to show that native is beautiful and that the 11 invaders are the repugnant ones,” he told the Latin American Theatre Review’s inter- 12 viewer, Charles B. Driskell, in 1975.) 13 His 1999 version of Carmen set Bizet’s music to a samba beat and replaced the 14 toreador with a soccer player; the New York Times quoted Boal’s definition of it as a 15 “samb-opera, neither samba nor opera but something that attempts to incorporate the 16 best elements of both.” The production’s musical director and arranger Marcos Leite 17 viewed the project as a great homage to Bizet. 18 Born in Rio in 1931, Boal first came to New York in 1953 to continue his studies 19 in chemical engineering at Columbia University, but found himself more interested in 20 attending John Gassner’s theater courses and observing classes at the Actors Studio. 21 When he returned to Brazil in 1955, he joined the Arena Theatre of São Paulo, which 22 he codirected with José Renato from 1956 to 1962, continuing as its sole director until 23 1971. Boal is credited with turning the Arena Theatre into one of the most important 24 Brazilian theater companies, first by “nationalizing” the classics, then by producing 25 national playwrights in the writing workshops he initiated. 26 Soon after Brazil’s 1964 military coup, Boal directed a musical show in Rio called 27 Opinião (Opinion) that focused on political resistance through art. With its success, he 28 initiated a cycle of musical plays at the Arena Theatre with playwright Gianfrancesco 29 Guarnieri and composer . The first, Arena Conta Zumbi (The Arena Tells the 30 Story of Zumbi), produced in 1965, is a parody of the Brazilian political situation at the 31 time it was written, using as surrogate seventeenth-century Brazilian history, when 32 runaway slaves led by Zumbi built a community in the interior of Brazil’s Northeast 33 called Palmares, which flourished for almost one hundred years until it began compet- 34 ing successfully with the established coastal white merchants. The parody was not so 35 subtle, with quotes from politicians regularly clipped from the daily newspapers and 36 inserted into the performances. 37 Zumbi was Boal’s first experiment with the “joker” system, described in detail 38 in Theatre of the Oppressed, in which the eight cast members alternated playing all the 39 characters, each represented by an easily identifiable gesture. The following year Arena 40 41 42 43 6

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1 Augusto Boal at 2 Riverside Church, , 3 2009. Photo: 4 Jonathan MacIntosh 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Conta Bahia introduced the now world-famous singers , , 19 and Maria Bethânia to São Paulo audiences. Such accomplishments accumulated until 20 Boal was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature in the final years of his life. 21 When I met him in 1968, it was four years after the coup, and a harsher, more 22 oppressive military crackdown had just taken place. In São Paulo, I attended a musi- 23 cal play produced by José Celso’s . The previous evening a bomb had 24 exploded after the performance, damaging the premises and the lighting and sound 25 equipment. Nonetheless the group decided to continue performing using salvaged and 26 borrowed equipment. When I had lunch with Boal and his wife Cecilia, an Argentine 27 actress in his company, the next day at their apartment, I discovered that Boal was con- 28 genial and talkative. He was interested in learning about the possibilities of his group’s 29 performing in New York. Cecilia had to be coaxed to join us and didn’t say a word the 30 entire time we were there. She was forthright about her feelings toward Americans. 31 Zumbi proved to be a popular and critical success in New York in 1969. The pro- 32 duction dramatized a serious situation, but like Boal himself, it was also humorous and 33 captivating. Edu Lobo’s bossa nova music, interpreted by three musicians onstage, filled 34 the space and drew full houses for its ten-day run at St. Clement’s Church. 35 I presented Arena Conta Bolivar at the Public Theater in 1970 and began making 36 plans with Boal to direct A Latin American Fair of Opinion in 1971, inspired by his 1968 37 program of short political plays by Brazilian playwrights. But our project was inter- 38 rupted when I received a letter from Cecilia on February 16. It was dated February 11 39 and said that Boal had been arrested in São Paulo the day before as he was walking 40 home from a rehearsal. She didn’t know where he was and asked for help. On March 41 42 43 7

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9, I received a letter from the Arena’s general manager written on the company’s sta- 1 tionery confirming the news and issuing a second plea. Then, on March 18, I received 2 another envelope from São Paulo with no return address. 3 It arrived at my office with the morning mail. Inside was a tiny piece of paper that 4 had been torn from a larger sheet with a note scrawled in pencil in hurried handwriting, 5 “Dear Joanne, I’m in jail. Please tell Schechner, E. Stewart, iti, O’Neill Foundation, 6 Dramatists Guild, etc. Send formal invitation for me to direct Fair. Tape with music 7 apprehended. Help! Love Boal” My heart leapt into my throat. I didn’t know what to 8 do. I smoothed out the little piece of paper and began making a list of people to call. 9 We waged a large campaign on Boal’s behalf: theater people, academics, con- 10 gressmen and women, the World Council of Churches, and Amnesty International all 11 took part. Eugene Monick, the vicar at St. Clement’s, suggested we write a letter to the 12 New York Times defending the artist’s right to free expression, protesting Boal’s arrest, 13 and demanding his release. I asked fifteen well-known theater people to sign it, begin- 14 ning with Richard Schechner, then Arthur Miller. All agreed. They, and others who 15 had learned of Boal’s arrest, also wrote letters directly to the Arena Theater, which in 16 turn passed their letters and cables on to the relevant authorities. Only five of the fif- 17 teen signatures appeared when the Times published the letter on April 24, almost three 18 weeks after we submitted it: Robert Anderson, Arthur Miller, Joseph Papp, Harold 19 Prince, and Richard Schechner. The following day, a paraphrased version of the let- 20 ter appeared in Rio’s leading newspaper, O Jornal do Brasil, with the headline Arthur 21 Miller Protests for Augusto Boal. As fate would have it, it was the day before 22 Boal’s hearing. He was released two days later on “conditional liberty” but pending a 23 trial at a later date. (Eventually Boal and five other prisoners were acquitted.) 24 When I next saw Boal in New York, shortly after his release, he told me that 25 a prison guard had put his scrawled note into an envelope and mailed it to me. He 26 described his horrendous torture sessions, chronicled in detail in the prologue to his 27 play Torquemada, which he wrote in prison. He explained that the torture is done dur- 28 ing the time you disappear, when no one knows where you are. That way, if you die 29 from the torture, no one will know. Boal was “disappeared” for ten days, then placed 30 in solitary confinement for a month, before being transferred to a state prison where he 31 shared a cell with about twenty-five other political prisoners. 32 He told me that when the prisoners in the cellblock next to his learned that he 33 was there, they would sing to him — at night, after lights out — popular songs from his 34 musicals. 35 We celebrated Boal’s fortieth birthday on that brief visit to New York. He lit a 36 match to forty tiny U.S. flags, which occupied the cake instead of candles, and blew 37 them out. We laughed heartily. 38 He also met Arthur Miller, who woke him up one morning with a call to his 39 hotel at 8 a.m. It was a friendly encounter with many exchanges of experiences. Boal 40 41 42 43 8

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1 told him that as the judge came across Arthur Miller’s name in his voluminous dos- 2 sier he said, “Isn’t he the one who was married to Marilyn Monroe?” Miller said that a 3 similar thing had happened at Wole Soyinka’s trial in Nigeria. 4 Boal lived in exile, first in Portugal and then for eight years in Paris, where he 5 established the first Theatre of the Oppressed Center. He did not return to Brazil until 6 1986, after the country returned to civilian rule. Ultimately Boal did direct A Latin 7 American Fair of Opinion (in New York in March 1972), a month-long series of theater, 8 music, poetry, visual arts, and panel discussions, for which my producing organization, 9 tola (Theatre of Latin America), won an Obie Award. Later that year I introduced 10 him to Luis Valdez at El Teatro Campesino’s home base in San Juan Bautista, Califor- 11 nia, and arranged lectures and workshops for him at U.S. universities, where he began 12 to try out his ideas for the book he was writing, his now famous Theatre of the Oppressed. 13 (A Theatre of the Oppressed Conference was held in in July 2009.) 14 I will remember Augusto for his immense intellect and charm, his sense of fun 15 and discipline. I will not forget his persistence, hard work, humor, and good nature, 16 nor the twinkle in his eye or his strong belief in people’s ability to inspire change. His 17 journey was not always smooth: he once told me that the only time his company had 18 received regular salaries was during the four years he served as an elected city council­ 19 man in Rio de Janeiro (1993 – 96). While he was in office, the director invented a tech- 20 nique he called “Legislative Theatre” and, with his company, actually helped pass laws 21 using theater pieces. Above all I will remember Boal as a most collaborative, most 22 inventive, and most optimistic colleague and friend. 23 On March 25, 2009, just a month before he died, Boal delivered the World The- 24 ater Day Message at the International Theatre Institute’s headquarters in Paris. 25 He instructed his listeners to “participate in the ‘spectacle’ which is about to begin and 26 once you are back home with your friends, act your own plays and look at what you were 27 never able to see: that which is obvious. Theater is not just an event; it is a way of life!” 28 He added: “We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.” 29 Theater 40:1 doi 10.1215/01610775-2009-013 30 © 2010 by Joanne Pottlitzer 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 9

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