edited by
JEROME NADELHAFT U N I V E R S I T YO F M A I N E
Actors and Activists Politics, Performance, and Exchange Among Social Worlds
David A. Schlossman
Pubhshed in 2002 by Routledge 29 West 3 5th Street Nev York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 1 1 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright 0 2002 by David A. Schlossman All rights reserved. N o part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, no\v known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.
Libtsaty of Congt~essCataloging-in-Publication Data Schlossman, David h.,1966Actors and activists : politics, performance, and exchange among social worlds 1 David A. Schlossman. p. cm. - (American popular history and culturei Based on the author's thesis (doctorali-Northwestern University. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8153-3268-8 1. Theater-Political aspects. I. Title. 11. American popular history and culture (Routledge (Firm))
Printed on acid-free, 250 year-life paper hlanufactured in the United States of America
For Jeanette May, a partner in every sense of the word, and for Charles and Norma Schlossman, w h o raised me to think critically.
Contents
Acknowledginents Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1:
Exchange Between Art Worlds and Political Worlds I. Necessarily Cumbersome Terminology 11. Perennial Questions of Performance and Politics 111. Sociology, Critical Theory, Politics, and Representatioll IV. An Inclusive Model for the Intersection of Politics and Performance V. Methodology VI. Historical Examples of the Intersection of Activism and Institutional Performance Political Insiders and Art-Activist Performance in the 1990s Activism The Demonstration as Performance Activist Performance Activist Performance and Institutional Performance
Chapter 2: I. 11. III. IV.
Theatre Insiders and Politics-Miss Saigon, Commercial Theatre, Professional Actors, and Activism Commercial Theatre, Politics, and Representation The Politics of Miss Snigon A Tradition of Activism Activism Goes to the Theatre: The Miss Snigon Controversies Analyzed Negotiation of Political Activism by Professional Actors
Chapter 3:
I. 11. 111. IV. V.
Artist-Activists and Blurring BoundariesKaren Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller I. Performance Art, Institutional Performance, and Politics 11. The Activist Performance of the NEA Four 111. Artist-Activists and National Political Discourse: The NEA Controversies
Chapter 4:
Conclusion Appendix: Chronology of Major Events Pertaining to the Cases Bibliography
Acknowledgments
A challenge in writing about theatre and social change lies in giving credit where it is due. Activists often stage performances collectively, and one cannot always document writers and participants. Whenever possible, I have identified the creators of the performances I discuss. Nevertheless, I would like to begin by thanking all the actors and activists-named and anonymous-whose vibrant performance practice forms the subject of this book. This work began its life as a dissertation, and I wish to thank Sandra L. Richards, my coininittee director, and Bernard Beck and Margaret Thompson Drewal, my readers, for their insights and support while I conducted my doctoral work and as I revised my study. My thanks also to members of the faculty and staff at Northwestern University during the period of my doctoral studies, particularly Liz Luby, Alan Shefsky, Jane McDonald, Susan A. Manning, Kim Watkins, W. B. Worthen, Bruce McConachie, and Joseph Roach. The dissertation upon which this book is based was made possible, in part, by a fellowship from Northwestern University and by a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; I am grateful to both institutions. I'd also like to thank Jerome Nadelhaft and the editors at Garland and Routledge who have worked on this project, including: Farideh Kamali, Kristi Long, Mark Henderson, Richard Koss, Becca Murphy, Erin Herlihy, and Rebecca Wipfler. I'm also grateful to Bob Wells, who proofread this manuscript, Lydia Lennihan, who composed the index, and Anaheed Alani, who proofread the initial dissertation-consistency in this study was achieved with their aid; the mistakes are all mine. My thanks to a number of colleagues who took the time to read drafts or discuss issues with me, including Leslie R. Bloom, Peter Josephson, Carol Burbank, Anne-Elizabeth Murdy, Catherine Cole, Beth FriedinanRoinell, Gabriel Goinez, Elliot Jackson, Emily Kelly, Assunta Kent, Elspeth kydd, Elizabeth Montgomery, Tobin Nellhaus, Mary Trotter, Ben Fisler,
and Andy White. My work was enhanced by conversations with participants in the various cases, whose names appear in the bibliography, as well as with scholars studying related topics, particularly Joan Lipkin, Dorinne IZondo, and Karen Shimakawa. I am also grateful to David Cole of Georgetown Law School and the Center for Constitutional Rights for numerous telephone conversations regarding the NEA Four's suit and for providing me with articles and documents pertaining to that case. I am indebted to a number of other people who helped me obtain primary sources and other vital materials. Women Make Movies allowed me to preview the film Not Just Passing Through, which documents protests against Miss Saigon. John Fleck gave me a videorecording of his performance A Snowball's Chance in Hell. Carol Honda, Karen Lee, and Kim Miyori sent me materials regarding the Asian Pacific Alliance for Creative Equality. James Jaewhan Lee loaned me archival material belonging to The Heat is on Miss Saigon Coalition. Marc Thibodeau sent me a Miss Saigon press packet. Alan Eisenberg, executive secretary of Actors' Equity Association, and Betty L. Corwin, director of the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, made special arrangements for me to view a videorecording of a performance of Miss Saigon featuring Jonathan Pryce prior to the show's closing. Doreen Moore and Randy Wills of the New York City Commission on Human Rights helped me enormously as I researched that body's hearings. The staff of Asian Week graciously allowed me to sort through back issues stored in their office. I am very grateful to all these individuals for their time and effort. I also appreciate the help of the Boston Public Library, which gave me access to the Boston Library Consortium, thereby allowing me to conduct secondary research at a number of institutions in that area. In addition, I would like to thank all the people who granted permissions to reproduce images; their names may be found in the captions to illustrations. I was unable to locate the photographer for some of the images (though I received permission to reproduce them via Jeanette May, who owns the negatives)-if any mistakes in attribution were made, I will make every effort to rectify them in future editions. I also wish to acknowledge my friends and fellow activists from the Chicago chapter of the Pledge of Resistance and from the Coalition for Positive Sexuality for insights, companionship, and sympathetic ears. Finally, I could not have completed this work without the love and support of those closest to me. Jeanette May stuck with me while I wrote first the dissertation and then this book, offering both vital insights and endless understanding. My family, especially my parents, Charles and Norma Schlossman, and my siblings, Ann Schlossman-Robb and Robert Schlossman, have always expressed their belief in me and supported my work.
Illustrations
Figure 1.1.
Exchange Between the Social Worlds of Activism and Institutional Performance
Figure 2.1.
Flyer for a Pro-choice Rally (1991).
Figure 2.2.
Flyer Advertising a Pro-choice Benefit (1991).
Figure 2.3.
Freedom Bed Performance-Demonstration (1989).
Figure 2.4.
N o More Nice Girls Performing "Respect" (1991).
Figure 2.5.
N o More Nice Girls "Bogus Clinic" Performance-Demonstration (1994).
Figure 2.6.
TWAT TeamITheatre With Alienating Tendencies Performing Alien-Nation (1991).
Figure 2.7.
TWAT Team Performing at a Demonstration Denouncing Police Brutality (1991 ).
Figure 2.8.
A c u e Portrait of Christopher ColUmB Us Preparing the Way for the First s UBUrb. Franklin Rosemont, collage, 1992.
Actors and Activists
Introduction
The relationship between politics and art constitutes one of the foremost contemporary issues-perhaps the central debate-regarding the humanities. This book argues that art is always, inevitably connected with politics. It combines critical and sociological thinking to offer a model of the relationship of performance and politics as an exchange between people working in different but overlapping social environments. Specifically, I examine the exchange between performers and political activists in three different situations covering the possible artlpolitics combinations. My participation in and observation of activist-produced performance in Chicago in the early 1990s allows me to demonstrate that activists-"political peoplexuse performance in their organizing and build relationships with "theatre people." Conversely, analysis of protests surrounding the casting and content of the musical Miss Snigon-particularly the public debates sparked by the objections of actors of color and Actors' Equity Association to the casting of the White actor Jonathan Pryce in an "ethnic" role in the New York production of the musical-shows that professional performers use activist techniques to engage issues in theatre worlds and that these actors establish links with activists.l Finally, the artistic and activist work of the performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller-known collectively as the NEA Four due to the denial of grants to the artist-activists by the National Endowment for the Arts during the first Bush administration-reveals that some individuals and groups engage activist and performance worlds simultaneously. My arguments hinge upon a social, rather than purely aesthetic, understanding of performance. I do not intend, however, to imply that one should neglect the content of a performance, but rather that one should consider a performance as part of a negotiation within culture and among various contending ideas and identities. This approach points to an interconnection between the politics of artistic representations and struggles surrounding social representation
2
Introduction
(i.e., how people appear in a work relates to who creates it). The model of activism and performance as an exchange also offers an inclusive view that accounts for radical performance produced both inside and outside theatre worlds. Arguing for a theoretical and empirical connection between political activism and performance is neither obvious nor widely accepted. Some commentators concerned with political organizing-even, or perhaps especially, those people also working in the arts-question the utility of performance in political action. Just prior to the 1996 midterm Congressional elections the left-wing magazine The Nation published a cartoon bearing the headline: "Why Congress Will Remain Republican." The body of the cartoon juxtaposes right-wing organizers planning conventional political strategies (e.g., phone banks and voter registration) and Leftists talking about their political art. One Leftist says, "My performance piece against welfare cuts is on . . . if I get my funding." The cartoon is clearly ironic and self-deprecating: another Leftist character says "I'm doing a cartoon for The Nation" (Wilkinson). Nevertheless, the cartoonist clearly expresses anxiety regarding the potency of performance in the political realm, a sense that performance isn't "real" political organizing. Is it reasonable, however, to blame the Right's ascendance on the Left's attention to the politics of culture? If one accepts such a proposition, where does that leave women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and people from other communities who have insisted that cultural politics matter as much as votes (see E. Willis 16-28)? The realm of activity I call institutional performance-groups of people organized specifically to create live performances, and including a diversity of genres from performance art to "mainstream" theatre-comes under particular ~ c r u t i n y In . ~ a vein similar to The Nation cartoon-in an otherwise compelling call in The Drama Review for professional performers to examine their performance practice and become more socially engagedBradley Boney cites the domination of public discourse by television and other forms of mass communication and asks, "So how much do people talk about the theatre? Not much, outside drama departments" (100).I discovered first-hand that, contrary to Boney's contention, people outside drama institutions not only discuss the theatre, they use theatre. In January of 1991 I became a participant in grassroots organizing in Chicago opposing the Persian Gulf War. I tended not to discuss my work as a theatre scholar with my fellow activists because, like Boney, I feared that this work could not contribute to an active political process. Much to my surprise, theatre began popping up everywhere. The Bread and Puppet Theatre appeared as a central feature of an anti-war march in Washington, DC. Fellow activists talked about serving as ushers at mainstream theatres in order to see the plays free of charge. A meeting called to address a topic unrelated to theatre turned into a discussion of political performance
Introduction
3
strategies. People without a professional connection to the worlds of institutional performance nevertheless attended performances that piqued their interest, discussed knowledgeably the concepts of political theatre, and created performances as a part of their political organizing. I suggest that Boney's rhetorical question targets the wrong group: the problem isn't that people outside institutional performance worlds don't value theatre, but that the theatre world isn't listening to outsiders' discussions about its activities. I do not intend, however, to lionize the institutional theatre. Indeed, Boney's article accurately identifies the parochialism of that world. This insularity becomes particularly clear when one reckons with conservatives' and even liberals' outright rejections of engagement between politics and art. The religious and political Right's attack upon politically engaged art, particularly art addressing issues of homosexuality, feminism, and other liberation struggles, constitutes the familiar example of attempts to isolate art (including performance) and politics. In addition, many liberal humanists and many others in the mainstream, when confronted with demands that the arts become more responsive to the experiences of women and minorities, view political activism and art as separate and even mutually exclusive pursuits. While they may claim a liberal identity with respect to government policies, many traditional humanists tend to view art as the product of individual genius and see politics as an intrusion upon art's universal and humanistic qualities. For instance, Robert Brustein argues, "The great artists and thinkers of every culture have always looked for what is individual in humanity rather than what is general. . . . We value such art as an antidote to politics . . . ," and drama critic Howard Kissel simply declares "politicization can only hurt the theatre" (Brustein, "Use and Abuse"; Kissel, "Color of Controversy").' Those who call for a separation between art and politics attempt to maintain an impervious barrier between categories of social life. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have critiqued the assumption that categories of human experience are "given" and stable, arguing instead that categories are constructed, negotiated, and permeable. I find particularly illuminating the ideas forwarded by a group of sociologists identifying themselves as "symbolic interactionists" and the theories articulated by scholars working in what Joseph Roach calls the "interdiscipline" of cultural studies. These critics reject the idea of static categories in favor of a concept of culture and social life as existing in constant tension. As scholar and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha states, "Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak" (qtd. in Conquergood, "Rethinking Ethnography" 184). This is not to say that categories of human experience automatically collapse or that they serve no useful function. Rather, this view argues that social boundaries are not prefabricated concrete walls but porous membranes created by human
4
Introduction
activity. Such work has created a space in theatre studies for the discussion of overtly political performance and of the ideological projects of mainstream t l ~ e a t r e . ~ As the work of these scholars provides the foundation for my study, I wish to characterize it briefly here, beginning with the work of sociologists. (I shall discuss these theories in greater depth in Chapter 1.) Symbolic interactionist sociologists articulate the concept of the "social world." In contrast to institutions (such as associations, businesses, and schools) that have formal boundaries, rules, and structures, social worlds consist of networks of individuals who share a common understanding of how to accomplish a certain activity (social worlds may encompass institutions; e.g., Lincoln Center is an institution within the theatre world). Symbolic interactionists argue that the character and structure of social worlds derives from the negotiations of conventions by participants, and they oppose models that view social structures as determining the behavior of people (Becker and McCall 1-15).' In particular, Howard Becker has examined the social aspects of artistic work, considering art not in terms of aesthetics but rather as an occupation (activity pursued as a type of work or due to a sense of vocation). Becker describes "art worlds" in which networks of people agree, consciously or implicitly, to follow certain conventions-shared understandings and methods-in order to proceed with a certain type of creative work (Becker, Art Worlds x, 34; note that Becker's term is more specialized than the vernacular "art world" that refers simply to activity in the arts generally). Members of a given social world are referred to as "participants" and as "insiders"; participants in an art world include those persons referred to by other insiders as "artists" (e.g., actors, playwrights, and directors), as well as support personnel (e.g., technicians and front office workers), consumers, and critics. Social worlds are not insular: insiders frequently negotiate relationships with "outsiders" (indeed, "insider" and "outsider" refer not to absolute categories but to degrees of experience and engagement in a social world). Art worlds, according to Becker and other interactionists, are inherently political precisely because their activities entail negotiations regarding power and resources, and because they always interact with other segments of society, including governments. The symbolic interactionist view of artistic activity as inevitably connected with the rest of society and with political activity coincides with the vast array of contemporary critical scholarship regarding the politics of representation (indeed, Becker and Michal McCall edited a collection addressing the links between symbolic interaction and one such discipline: cultural studies). Feminism, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, neoMarxism, scholarship by and about women and men of color, performance studies, and cultural studies all see performance as an inherently political activity." am indebted to all these fields, but rely primarily upon the literature of cultural studies (which intermingles with many of the other move-
Introduction
5
ments listed above), whose adherents view performance-inside and outside institutional theatre-as both a product of and a participant in social interaction. Contemporary critical theorists view representations, including those created through performance, as producing-not merely reflectingsocial reality through the contest of culture. "Culture" constitutes a notoriously difficult concept to define; I follow Raymond Williams's articulation (in Keywords 87-93) of culture as a dynamic relationship among creative activity (art), individual learning (erudition), and social maintenance of customs and mores ("culture" in the anthropological sense). According to theorists working in the field of cultural studies, those in power wield authority through representation, influencing what a society values and believes, a process Antonio Grainsci labeled "cultural hegemony." But representation is also available as a tool to those who challenge the social order (Gramsci 206-208).' Culture constitutes a matrix in which political struggles play out. As Edward Said puts it, evocatively using the metaphor of performance, culture "is a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another. Far from being a placid realm of Apollonian gentility, culture can even be a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another . . ." (Said, Culture and Imperialism xiii).' Representation also affects politics because it has the capacity to accomplish what critic Jane Tompkins calls "cultural work." Writing on nineteenth-century novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tompkins suggests that, within their historical situation, literary texts provided nineteenth-century society "with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts and recommending solutions" (Tompkins 200-201). As Said's assertion indicates, the same can be said of contemporary performance. Critics identifying themselves with the loose discipline of "cultural studies" account for the participation of artistic activity in the political process, arguing that both the powerful and the disenfranchised deploy representations in order to further political causes. Combining the approaches of critical theorists with the ideas of symbolic interaction sociologists accounts for performance both as a form of representation that constructs political discourse and as a social activity that interacts with other sectors of society. One might be inclined to view the assertions of the symbolic interactionists and cultural studies theorists (and other scholars of representation) that performance is inevitably engaged in politics as an end unto itself. Yet, as Richard Scharine notes, to say that all art is political "is both true and a discussion closure" (Scharine xii). It is important, therefore, to view these declarations as a starting point rather than a terminus. Indeed, these theories have opened new pathways for analysis of performance that demonstrate empirically and theoretically the complexity of the interaction of art and politics; they have contributed to the diverse literature on performance and politics.
6
Introduction
A great deal has been written about politics and performance, and my work is indebted to this scholarship. A complete survey of this literature, if possible to compile at all, lies beyond the scope of this book; I summarize a few trends that both demonstrate the breadth of this scholarship and point to some gaps. One current in scholarship on politics aild performance examines overtly political plays produced within "mainstream" theatre (i.e., the presentation of plays with political content by playwrights and actors on stages before a theatre-going audience). This tradition studies historical phenomena such as the Federal Theatre Project and the work of playwrights such as Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, Langston Hughes, Odets, Arthur Miller, Baraka, Pinter, Shange, Fornes, Churchill, Kramer, and I<ushner (see Case and Reinelt; Holderness; C. Hughes; A. Kent; Scharine). Another branch of the study of politics and performance examines theatre produced outside established venues, encompassing specific movements, such as the Workers Theatre of the 1920s, as well as a wide variety of less historically specific and often overlapping genres and terms: alternative theatre, grassroots theatre, theatre for social change, radical theatre, radical performance, people's theatre, guerrilla theatre, theatre for development, experimental theatre, performance art, and-when considering work of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries-postmodern performance (e.g., Auslander, Presence and Resistance; Bigsby; Bjorkman; Boal; Burnhain and Durland; Cohen-Cruz; Elam; Goldberg; I<ershaw, Politics of Performance; Lesnick; McConachie and Friedman; Malpede Taylor; Sainer; Shank; Theatrework Magazine; van Erven; Weinberg; and Weisman). Some of the performances examined in this vein engage politics overtly, while other work is political mostly due to its rejection of conventional forms and venues (of course, there is some overlap between "mainstream" and "alternative" theatre-plays by women, women and men of color, and gays and lesbians could be placed in either category, since they were staged in conventional venues but represented perspectives marginalized by "mainstream" US culture.) Similarly, performance studies has sought to address performance activity as a mode of human behavior, whether it takes place within or beyond the walls of theatres. Another, though smaller, component of the study of politics and performance examines performance created by political activists (e.g., Burbank; Cohen-Cruz; Fuoss; Kistenberg; Schechner, Future of Ritual; and Urgo). Only a very few studies attend to both activism and institutional performance (e.g., I
Introduction
7
challenged the notion that performance ought to be considered only in terms of aesthetics and theatre history, and broadened conceptions of performance to include the full scope of human activity. There are, however, a number of issues that have fallen between the stools. The literature on politically engaged performance has tended to dwell upon "alternative" theatre, in which performers have taken up politics, and has given short shrift to cases in which activists have sought to engage performance."' In both theatre and performance studies, discrete theatrical events scripted and staged by activists often have been conflated with the far less formal performativity of political demonstrations. Conversely, with some exceptions (e.g., Auster; McConachie and Friedman), few studies have discussed the participation of actors in political organizing. Finally, histories of social change movements have tended to downplay the importance of performance strategies in organizing (as noted by Burbank in "Ladies . . . 1980s"). While it would be inaccurate to say that scholars have ignored issues of performance and activism, performance emanating from within directaction political organizations and the interaction between direct-action politics and institutional performance deserve further attention. A theoretical and empirical exploration of the connections between activism and institutional performance complements previous studies of politics and performance and contributes to contemporary critical and sociological theory that articulates a vital link between artistic activity, the representations it creates, and the political process. I offer a model of politics and performance as an exchange between insiders working in distinct but overlapping social worlds, and I illustrate this dynamic through analysis of a host of concrete connections between performance, activism, and political discourse. I follow an interdisciplinary approach, using methods including close readings of texts, performance analysis, historical inquiry, interview, and participant observation (I shall discuss my methodology in greater detail in Chapter 1).To better understand the connections I seek, consider this question: What would one expect to find if institutional performance did, in fact, interact with the realm of politics? One would expect "political people," such as grassroots activists, to use performance and, furthermore, to forge relationships with professional performers. Second, one would anticipate that professional performers would engage in political activity and, furthermore, that they would establish links with activists. Third, as cultural studies theorists suggest, one would find that, at times, the lines distinguishing categories would blur and that individuals would negotiate insider status in both worlds. Finally, one would find evidence that these relationships among performers and activists participated in political debates beyond the confines of their own social circles. By applying a multidisciplinary technique that elucidates the negotiation between activism and performance, I believe I can provide evidence fulfilling each of these expectations.
8
Introduction
This study and the model it articulates contributes to an understanding of performance and politics specifically and art and society generally in a variety of ways. It supplements the literature on performance and politics described above, providing an historical account of late-twentieth-century exchange between activists and performers and offering a theory accounting for that exchange. It calls for greater attention to the offstage roles of professional performers in public life (as when an actor becomes a union president), and promotes the view that scholars should consider the performance work of activists and others outside the "theatre world."ll The model this book offers, I hope, can be applied in other arenas, including other relationships between performance and society, and between other art forms and politics. It buttresses the view that art, including performance, cannot be separated from the rest of society because art constitutes a strand in the web of objects, actions, and ideas that make up a society's culture, and a tug on any strand affects all the others. In this view, artistic practice, including performance, can be deployed, intentionally or unconsciously, to reinforce or resist the social order. Finally, along with many other scholars, I address the perceived crisis in theatre practice and scholarship by advocating a broad view of performance and a reconceptualization of theatre studies.12Joseph Roach offers a particularly clear summary of this issue with respect to US theatre, examining the formation of American theatre and drama as a field within theatre studies, and arguing that the crisis in that field emanates from the exclusion of nonEuropean performance and the dismissal of the concept of "theatre-inlife." Roach calls for a "re-opening [of] that debate with three objectives: 1) to re-define the historical canon in line with current research in performance studies; 2) to expand the definition of performance beyond predominantly literate cultures and traditions; 3) to reinterpret American culture as a series of political boundaries both marked and contested by performances" (Roach, "Mardi Gras Indians" 462). I seek to contribute to just such a redefinition of performance, arguing that, in order to consider the interaction between theatre and society (and thereby justify theatre's value as more than entertainment or esoteric knowledge), one must adopt an understanding of theatre as not only an aesthetic endeavor but also an institutional practice inextricably tied to the rest of society. Linking activism and institutional performance raises thorny questions regarding the problems of mainstream theatre and its political potential. As mentioned earlier, I do not intend to celebrate mainstream theatre uncritically (nor, for that matter, do I seek to discount the challenges faced by progressive political activists in a postmodern culture featuring a resurgent Right, commercial mass media, and multinational capitalism). I share Boney's frustration with the parochialism of mainstream theatre, and agree with other scholars' warnings that live performance faces daunting obstacles in an era dominated by mass media and consumerism." Too often
Introduction
9
"theatre people" ignore the social implications of their work, privilege "classics," contemporary melodramas, and vapid spectacles over social engagement, and avoid political questions such as "What does the work say?" and "Whom is it for?" This obstinacy leads to isolation at best and crass commercialism and exploitation at worst. In addition, as Boney and Auslander (Liveness) have argued, the mainstream theatre finds itself increasingly forgotten in contemporary societies dominated by mass media. But do these problems preclude any radical potential in mainstream theatre? I seek to remain cognizant of the insularity of mainstream theatre throughout this book; yet, I suggest reactions against the hidebound condition of much mainstream performance can tend to describe walls between categories of human experience that might better be articulated as semi-permeable membranes. Baz Kershaw, for instance, sees continuing potential in what he terms "radical performance," but argues that mainstream theatre has become increasingly irrelevant and complicit in the contemporary commodity culture (Radical in Performance 6-70). However, Kershaw defines "theatre" in terms of established theatre buildings, the conventional plays performed in them, and the audiences who attend them, while "radical performance" encompasses both activist performance and experimental theatre. While I agree with I<ershaw7scritique of the commodification of mainstream theatre and applaud his celebration of radical performance practice, I find his theatrelradical performance dichotomy too strict to encompass a messy social reality. Does one regard Paul Zaloom, who worked in people's theatre in the 1970s, as a sell-out because he later hosted Beakman's World, a generally progressive network children's television show on science? And while I grant it is the exception rather than the rule, can one exclude Angels in America from the category of "radical" simply because it appeared on Broadway?" Moreover, constructing barriers between "radical performance" and the "mainstream" may simply serve to marginalize the radical: for instance, David Roman and Holly Hughes (Hughes and Roman; Roman, Acts of Intervention), while not responding directly to I<ershaw, argue that dividing "theatre" and "performance art" tends to marginalize the latter, creating a ghetto to contain radical impulses and minority artists. I perceive the need for a comprehensive term that can encompass a variety of live-art activities (and recognize interchange among these art worlds) while also accounting for differences among them. My broad term, institutional performance, seeks to include a diverse range of performance practices that sometimes are separate and sometimes overlap, and that are sometimes radical and sometimes reactionary. One can ignore neither theatre's (especially commercial theatre's) growing isolation nor its complicity with oppressive systems of power; yet, one also cannot ignore the radical potential of performance, even when staged in mainstream venues, just as one should not underestimate the value of performance beyond the "theatre world.""
10
Introduction
To support the arguments outlined above, I examine the exchange between institutional performance and political activism through analysis of events from late-twentieth-century cultural history. Pro-choice and antiGulf War activism, the Miss Saigon controversies, and the NEA Four's work and lawsuit constituted elements of the political and cultural ferment of the era. The late 1980s and 1990s constitute a fruitful period in which to discover connections between activism and performance. During this moment in history, the inherent political nature of culture became clear in debates that raged around issues including: affirmative action; arts funding; reproductive freedom; the rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transsexuals; the representations of ethnic minorities in live performance and mass media; the AIDS crisis; sexual harassment; "political correctness," and the use of the US flag in protest and art, to name only a few of the elements of the so-called "culture wars."'" number of social movements were active at the time, having arisen in the mid-1980s in response to new social problems, notably the AIDS crisis, and in order to counter the reactionary politics of political and religious conservatives (epitomized in military adventures in Central America and Grenada, domestic campaigns such as the "war on drugs" and the concomitant expansion of the "prisonindustrial complex," and a flurry of laws restricting abortion rights). Significantly, as my study shall show, professional performers played a central role in some of the major political groups of the era, notably ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) and WAC (Women's Action Coalition). Politics and performance, always related, intersected overtly in this period in a myriad of social settings ranging from street theatre performed at demonstrations, to the covert actions of the Guerrilla Girls, to performances by gay performance artists in church basements, to mainstream plays such as The Norrnnl Heart and Angels in America. Activist-produced performance, the Miss Snigon controversies, and the NEA Four's work and suit not only exemplify the exchange between politics and performance in an era of activism and cultural contest, they also related to one another and remain relevant to contemporary politics within and outside art worlds. The events I analyze played out during roughly the same period (beginning in 1990-1991), participated in many of the cultural contests detailed above, and, in some cases, influenced one another (for example, objections to the casting of Miss Saigon came to the fore at the same time as the defunding of the NEA Four, and defenders of the musical evoked arguments for artistic freedom raised by the NEA debates).'' The chronology in the Appendix offers a sense of the temporal proximity and interplay among these cases. While the cases have more or less concluded, each case also has clear connotations for politics and performance in the twenty-first century." The progressive activist movements that ebbed in the mid-1990s due to the end of the Reagan-Bush era reasserted themselves at the close of the century, and performance remained a key element in
Introduction
11
this organizing; examples of resurgent activism include demonstrations following the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard and protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the inauguration of George W. Bush. Touring productions of Miss Saigon continued to meet with protests (though they have not received the press that greeted the 1990-1991 controversies); moreover, the New York protests continue to represent a watershed event and a symbol of resistance for Asian Americans both inside and outside the theatre world. Finally, the NEA Four's lawsuit was not concluded until 1998; the performers continue to use their work to confront political issues generally and the NEA controversies specifically; the crisis in funding for the arts persists (the NEA's budget fell below $100 million in 1996-the first budget year affected by the 1994 Republican Congressional victoryand at this writing has yet to rise); and new arts controversies erupt periodically, often mirroring the rhetoric of the 1990s debates, as exemplified in the case of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's (thus far) failed attempt to oust the Brooklyn Museum of Art from its building and remove its funding due to the museum's hosting the Sensation exhibition and other works the Mayor found controver~ial.~' In addition to offering insights into contemporary politics and performance, the cases I examine constitute a set of events from the same period in late-twentieth-century history that represent the possible interactions between actors and activists: insiders to activism, insiders to professional performance, and insiders to both worlds. Considered together, the cases reveal that the social worlds of institutional performance and political activism have the potential to intersect, and that such intersections participate in the political process on a national scale. My discussion of exchange among actors and activists proceeds through four steps: 1)a theoretical model for the exchange; 2) evidence that "political people" value performance and forge links with institutional performance worlds; 3) demonstration of the converse-that "theatre people" engage activism and activists; and 4 ) consideration of the experience of those who work in both worlds simultaneously. Each phase of this argument also reveals negotiations between participants in social worlds and the blurring of boundaries between worlds. Considering politics and performance as an exchange among insiders in social worlds offers new perspectives on performance's relationship with society and the political process, and offers an alternative to questions of efficacy and audience that dog conventional articulations of "political theatre." Chapter 1 takes up these issues, first analyzing perennial questions regarding theater politics, such as: Can a play change people's minds? Does a political performance preach to the converted? I respond to these and related questions regarding the value of politically engaged performance by pointing to empirical evidence and diverse scholarship that answers these questions directly (studies that argue, for instance, that plays
12
Introduction
do change minds), but I also contend that these sorts of questions inisconceptualize the politics/performance relationship. If one views the text, production process, and audience reception of an overtly political perforinance as an isolated event, one will become obsessed with questions of iinpact and, in so doing, ignore a vibrant, diverse, and sometimes obscure and ambivalent social reality. If, on the other hand, one conceptualizes the creation and reception of overtly political performance as one star in a firmament of social activities, organized by people into recognizable and often overlapping constellations, questions of immediate iinpact become less pressing than issues of how performers interact with insiders in other worlds; moreover, when adopting this view one perceives such questions themselves as part of a social process. Moving beyond questions of impact, then, depends upon theories of social interaction and cultural contest sketched in this Introduction and rendered more fully in Chapter 1. Symbolic interaction sociology and cultural studies and related critical theory coinpleinent each other, offering a view of art functioning politically not as a preacher but as a participant in society. Using these theories as a foundation, I build a model of politics and performance as an exchange between insiders in social worlds whose boundaries may overlap and, at times, blur. I suggest further that performances staged at the intersection of political and performance worlds create meaning for audience members by offering them "pieces" in a social jigsaw puzzle that individual audience members link with other experiences as part of an ongoing engagement of political issues. Chapter 1 also contains a description of methodology, explaining that I perceive exchange between politics and perforinance in three types of situations: the adoption of the conventions of one social world by insiders to another world, direct cooperation among insiders to different worlds, and the blurring of boundaries between worlds. Subsequent chapters use this model to analyze cases that epitomize the exchange between performance and political activity. Chapter 2 demonstrates that insiders to the worlds of activism-people who seek to provoke political change and who are not usually professional performers-value theatrical conventions and negotiate relationships with professional performers. I draw upon my participation in anti-war and pro-choice activist groups in Chicago to argue that political activists use the conventions of institutional performance as an organizing tool. I use the terms "activism" and "political activists" to refer to groups of people who organize through direct agitation, such as public demonstrations, in order to strive for social change, and who often, though not always, see themselves as part of national movements for social change. I begin Chapter 2 with a discussion of the history and characteristics of activist social world^.'^ Next, I seek to articulate distinctions between events, such as marches or meetings, that may be "theatrical" or "performative" but are not recognized as such by
Introduction
13
activists, versus the creation of performance by activists that the activists themselves call "theatre" or "performance." I refer to such self-consciously theatrical activism as "activist performance," a category that includes a variety of performances activities, from the staging of one-time events to the creation of activist theatre troupes. I seek to explain how and why activists turn to performance as an organizing tool, arguing that they devote time, attention, and resources to the creation of performances because they find that the conventions of performance help them achieve a variety of goals, from communicating their message to enlivening events. One could object that, even though activists often perform, this does not mean that they seek to forge links with participants in institutional performance. In the final segments of Chapter 2, I describe connections between activist performance and institutional theatre. The mere fact that activists call their drainatizatioils "theatre," I argue, constitutes a reference to institutional performance. In addition, activists employ explicitly the conventions of institutional performance and build connections with professional performers and performance institutions. Chapter 3 considers the converse of activists' engagement of performance worlds, examining instances of exchange between activism and performance initiated by insiders in commercial theatre, a world that epitomizes iilstitutioilal performance. As in the preceding chapter, I begin Chapter 3 with an analysis of the social world in question-the cominercia1 Broadway musical-describing briefly its character as an art world and its relation to politics. I then examine the politics of representation evident in Miss Saigon's text and production process, arguing that, prior to the controversies, the producers appropriated political rhetoric and reproduced oppressive stereotypes. Activism surrounding Miss Snigon also hinged on issues of representation: the controversies that greeted the musical's New York production confronted the lack of representation of minorities in lead roles on Broadway and the portrayal of "ethnic" characters. The protests against the casting of Miss Snigon, I argue in Chapter 3, constituted part of a history of such employment discrimination and a corresponding history of actors of color adopting activist conventions to fight discrimination. Having placed the Miss Snigon controversies in this historical context, I then analyze the debates surrounding the challenges to the casting of the musical from Equity and Asian American actors, disputes that reveal a vibrant exchange between activist and theatrical worlds. I next move to protests against the musical's content: after Asian American actors drew attention to Miss Snigon, people in Asian American communities protested the stereotypes of Asians perpetuated by the play. During these protests professioilal actors and community activists cooperated with one another, forging alliances and negotiated differences. I conclude Chapter 3 with a consideration of the negotiations of personal
14
Introduction
identity and social activity professional actors undertook as they encountered the conveiltioils of the world of activism and had to mediate professional and political concerns. In Chapter 4, I present the case of people who negotiate insider status in both the worlds of performance and activism and whose art-activism often blurs the boundaries between the worlds. I begin the chapter with a characterization of performance art as a social world and a discussion of the ties between this world and politics. I then discuss the work of Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. I discuss the activist performances created by these artists, arguing that their creation of political meaning through performance may best be considered as the crafting of puzzle pieces for an audience through the use of a "toolbox" of strategies, and I detail their use of four such tools: overt commentary, transgression, resistance, and performances of community. I also describe the connections these professional performers maintain with activist social worlds, arguing that the artist-activists blur boundaries between activism and performance. The four performers also clearly exemplify the intersection of politics and performance because they became public figures in a national debate when they were denied grants by the National Endowment for the Arts. The final portion of Chapter 4 discuss the defunding of the four and their suit against the NEA. This suit succeeded in reclaiming the artists' grants (which, they alleged, had been denied due to political pressure from the first Bush administration) but failed to overturn a "decency" provision imposed on the NEA by Congress. During the NEA debates, the performance artists encountered a variety of conservative discourses, but also created discourses of resistance through their activist performances. In addition, the NEA Four suit was a component of national struggles surrounding gay rights, a woman's right to choose abortion, affirmative action, the validity of "new knowledges" such as feminism and multiculturalism, and the very idea of "the public." The four artists' activist-performance practice and their suit constituted a portion of an ongoing cultural contest concerning the future of the public sphere.'' I conclude by arguing that the artlpolitics exchange modeled in this book has much to offer both institutional performance worlds and society. Renewed attention to the public lives of performers and the performance work of people from outside of performance institutions is necessary if theatre practitioners and scholars are to bridge the growing chasmrecognized by Roach, Boney, and others-between institutional performance (understood as including both mainstream theatre and theatre studies) and postmodern US society. An engagement of the intersection of politics and performance, however, also presents the daunting task of changing ideas about what constitutes theatre, how it is to be created, and whom it should serve. In addition, a sense of isolation and crisis is not unique to theatre, but pervades postmodern society; the perennial questions that
Introduction
15
embroil overtly political performance (e.g., what constitutes effective communication beyond the "converted"?) haunt all contemporary political action. A reinvigorated sense of the connection between cultural practices, such as performance, and political activities, such as activism, offers a means to cope with this widespread disaffection. Combinations of art and politics offer a vibrant set of tools for resistance and change that may shore up a public sphere contracting under pressure from conservative activists and multinational corporatioi~s.~'
l ~ h terms e "White" and "ethnic" require explanation. I use the term "White" with considerable trepidation. It conjures up a history of elaborate attempts to distinguish ethnic "purity," and also presents an inconsistency when used alongside the geographic designations currently employed to refer to other groups (African Americans, Asian Americans, and so on). "White" is nevertheless preferable to the outnloded word "Caucasian" (as noted by the Chicago Mnnunl oiStyle, 14th ed., sec. 7.36); nor would it be accurate to refer to Whites as "European Americans," since Europe has considerable ethnic diversity. ., both currentlv and historicallv. I have therefore used the terrn "White." but hasten to noint out that it refers to a social construction of ethnicitv. I also note that several contemporary critical thinkers argue that one may retain terms referring to classes of people (in order to analyze a group's power or to rally people into groups that work for calling attention to these categories as evolving and social change) while sim~~ltaneously constructed subject positions (see the discussion of Fuss et al. in Bloom 142-143). Also, when discussing Miss Sdigon, I sonletirnes refer to actors of color as "ethnic actors." This is a tern1 used by several of the participants I interviewed and appears to be an "industry term" in the com~llercialtheatre world; I have retained it at times in order to represent properly the character of the debate, rather than impose my own (and perhaps equally inadequate) words upon others. I do note, however, that 1111 actors have an ethnicit!; so referring to actors of color as "ethnic" constitutes something of a misnomer. 2 ~ h r o u g h o u t this book, I use the terms "mainstream theatre" and "established theatre" synonymously to describe the production of scripted plays by commercial or non-profit organizations in buildings called "theatres." In fact, no adequate terrn exists to describe this realm of performance. Conlrnon expressions such as "traditional" or "conventional" theatre imply that other performance forms somehow depart from the normal. "Mainstream" at least inlplies a social relationship (where "traditional" and "conventional" imply historical and aesthetic comparison); it is more familiar than "established"; and performers and activists alike use it to mark performances that support (or simply fail to question) the status quo. It too, however, implies that other forms are undercurrents, tributaries, or "alternatives" to the norm, and I therefore frequently place it in quotation marks to indicate its problematic qualities. It is also important to note that Philip Auslander (Liveness) has analyzed the ways in which the rhetoric of live performance fosters assunlotions about the snecialness of liveness versus mediation. I do not aim to mythologize the "magic" of the live, but rather to distinguish between the organizational practices of those who define their work in terms of live performance versus those who work in the often-overlapping but distinct worlds of what might be called "mediated" or "broadcast" performance.
Introduction
16
-?~tatementsby political, religious, and cultural conservatives-as well as views supporting overtly political art-may be found in Bolton. For an example of a commentator who identifies hirnself with liberal social policies but denounces an active engagement between activism and art, see Copeland, "Don't Call." The Wilson-Brustein debates constitute another obvious example of a liberal humanist's confrontation with demands for change in theatre practice. First carried out in print, August Wilson and Robert Brustein debated face-to-face in January of 1997 (August Wilson; Brustein, "Subsidized"; Nunns). Wilson advocated the development of theatre for, by, and near black people, while Brustein defended the idea that individuals come first in art. Though the debate raised controversial issues-including equity in casting, the value of conventional vs. experimental plays, and the meanintr of essential categories of race-some commentators saw the debate as diffusing the tension between the very issues it raised (Munk; for other responses to the debates, see "Beyond the Wilson-Brustein Debate"; "Plowing i\ugust Wilson's 'Ground"'; and Ambush).
-
4 ~ x a m p l e sof scholarship using the cultural studies approach to perfornlance appear in Reinelt and Roach; see in particular Roach's introductory discussion (7-1.5). For a discussion of symbolic interactionist sociology see Becker and Michal. The term "synlbolic interaction" was coined in 1937 by one of the field's founders, Herbert Blumer, who admits that it is a "somewhat barbaric neologism" (Blumer I ) . The idea of "blurred genres," described in the text, also appears in the work of Clifford Geertz (Reinelt and Roach 2 ) . One should also note that the concept of categories of experience as permeable can be destabilizing, especially for marginalized groups (see 5. L. Richards "Caught in the Act of Social Definition . . ." 45-46; and Roach, "Mardi Gras Indians"). > M y use of "negotiation" stems from the work of symbolic interactionist sociologists and neither derives from nor necessarily relates to Stephen Greenblatt's use of the tern1 in Shakespemean Negotiation. 6 ~ would t be impossible to list all the contributions to the fields listed in the text, or to catalogue all the movements in contemporary critical theory. A more thorough discussion of these movements, however, appears in Chapter I .
he idea that texts produce real consequences in society has been argued by scholars as diverse as Foucault and Raymond Williams. For a particularly direct discussion of the "production of meaning" by texts, see Eagleton 64. For a discussion of Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony as applied to theatre studies, see McConachie, "Using the Concept of Cultural Hegemony to Write Theatre History." $1 am aware of the charges-particularly those leveled by Justus Reid Weiner-that Said fabricated details of his own biography Two things need be said about this controversy: first, it is not at all clear that Said is guilty of fabrication (see Hitchens's impassioned defense of Said); second, even if the charges are partially correct, they do not relate directly to or detract from the importance and relevance of his scholarship to this study and cultural studies generally.
9~ cannot claim, of course, to have "discovered" interchange among activists and performers, but previous studies have not tended to recognize these interconnections as a process of social exchange. Schechner, for instance, notes briefly that "there has been free trade of techniques, persons, and ideas between the avant-garde and political theatre from the days of Meyerhold, Brecht, and dada" (Futwe o i R i t t t d 9), but he offers this passing reference to exchange in order to relate the avant-garde and political demonstration not, as I do, to connect activism and performance institutions. Similarly, IZershaw considers the
Introduction
17
influence of avant-garde performance on 1960s activism, but he explicitly argues for a distinction between "radical performance" and "theatre" (see "Fighting" and Radicdl in Pe~fo~nzmce). 1 ° ~ h erelative lack of attention to activist perfomlance in the literature on alternative theatre is exemplified by the fact that three of the most famous radical troupes in the USBread and Puppet Theatre, San Francisco Mime Troupe, and El Teatro Campesino-were all founded by trained artists and have worked, for the most part, independent of political organizations. Of these three famous troupes, only El Teatro Canlpesino was founded within a specific political campaign-the United Farm Workers' (UFW) grape boycott and strike, begun in 1965 and centered in Delano, California. El Teatro Campesino's connection with the UFW, however, changed as the company moved: it was most activist while centered in Delano, still connected to the union while in Del Rey and Fresno (1967-1971), but became much less activist upon its move to San Juan Bautista (Elam, T~lkingI t 116, 141112, 1431110). Moreover, El Teatro Carnpesino founder Luis Valdez earned a degree in theatre at San Jose State University before joining the boycott (Shank 7.5; Elam, Taking I t 2-7). Likewise, although Bread and Puppet Theatre has participated in numerous actions for oeace and iustice since its creation in 1962. its founder Peter Schunlann denies conlmitment to a specific issue or campaign but instead protests the general lack of humanity in contemporary industrial societies (Shank 104; Schechter, DZITOZJ'S Pig 185-187). The San Francisco Mime Troupe has not, as far as I know, worked with direct-action groups with any consistency. I a m not arguing that these practitioners or the scholars who study then1 ignore activism-obviously they do not. Nor do I mean to suggest that these famous conlpanies "fail" or that they are "too artistic" to function politically. Rather, the theatrical (as opposed to "performative") activity of activists has tended to fall between the stools of scholarship on politics and performance. Note that Burbank ("Ladies . . . 1980s") also notes this omission in theatre studies. l l ~ l ~ e rine conventional theatre history does one place the public service of Mary Sham; early producer of Ibsen plays in the US and an active suffragist, or Frederick O'Neal, co-founder of the American Negro Theatre, president of Actors' Equity, ilnd vice-president of the XFL-CIO? Obviously, such figures have been kept at the margins of conventional theatre studies because of their gender or race, but they have also been ignored because their agitation and offstage service have not been honored. For information on Mary Shaw see huster; on Frederick O'Neal's service see O'Neal entries in the bibliography. 1 2 ~ o n e ysummarizes a pervasive sense of crisis in the practice and study of mainstream theatre, writing, "Every other article on the theatre talks about the theatrical 'crossroads' or 'crisis' . . . , but our institutions are so entrenched that the theatre ends up resisting the crisis and avoiding the crossroads" (Boney 103). For other discussions of the crisis in theatre practice and scholarship see Roach, "Mardi Gras Indians"; Case and Reinelt; Toll, Ente~tainnzentMachine; and IZersham; Radicdl in Pe~fbwnmce. 13Liuslander, Liveness, and Dolan, P~esenceand D e s i ~ e14-15, both consider the obstacles faced by live performance in contenlporary society Note, however, that these scholars do value live performance. 14Several points made in the text deserve further explanation. IZershaw is not alone in suggesting "radical performance" as a category; see also Cohen-Cruz. O n Zaloom's peon e .that Bedknzdn'S LVo~ldwas "generalple's theatre work, see T h e ~ ~ t ~ e wMo~~~kg ~ ~ zI isay ly progressive" because, unlike many television shows that masquerade as educational fare, this program featured intensive science education; moreover, though the show rarely if ever featured actors of color, a strong, intelligent, scientifically savvy young wornan con-
18
Introduction
stituted a regular character. Zaloom appeared to be somewhat cynical about his own participation in the program, however. In his 2001 performance art work Velvetville, he staged a scene in which he goes to Hell and runs into Barne!; public television's purple dinosaur; when Zaloom asks what he's doing there, Barney replies, "Didn't you know that all children's television hosts go to Hell?" Regarding Angels in Alne~icn,perfornlance artist Tin1 Miller articulated the mixture of surprise and delight many progressives expressed upon the Broadway drama's success, an instance of overtly political commercial theatre; Miller told iournalist Tan Breslauer. "If sonleone had told [AIDS activists and uerforrnance artists] five years ago that the most sought-after work in the American theater today would be an eight-hour epic with Blakean visions of AIDS, we would have thought they were nuts. Clearly, something juicy has happened" (Breslauer, "Theatre Fights Back," 1 0 ) . l j ~ o t that e I don't reject the phrase "radical performance," but when I use it, I refer to a practice, not a categor!; of performance. Also, note that other scholars express a mix of frustration with theatre's parochialisnl and hope for its potential. Dolan (Pwsence 2nd Deszre 13-1.5) questions the power of performance in the age of global mass media and capitalism, but also argues that productions can appear in mainstream venues without losing their political insight. Similarly, IZondo (About Fdce) recognizes that times are "bleak" and that performance may enable stereotype, but also sees a radical potential in the pleasure of performance. 161 prefer the term "cultural contests" to the bellicose rhetoric of "culture wars." Though used in conmlentaries from across the political spectrum, I believe the expression has conservative connotations. In an article entitled "The Culture War," Congressperson Henry Hyde (R-IL)explains in detail his conception of what he labels a Kzrlturkilmpf, stating that "by 'culture war' I mean the struggle between those who believe that the norms of 'bourgeois morality' (which is drawn in the main from classic Jewish and Christian moralitvi , , should form the ethical basis of our common life. and those who are determined that those norms will be replaced with a radical and thoroughgoing moral relativism" (Bolton 190). The obvious problem with the metaphor of the "culture war" (one that betrays the prejudices in the Right's thinking) is that it implies that the US has a single culture. and that that culture is something that rnav be foupht for and won-hun~an relations as a giant game of capture the flag (Patrick Buchanan, for instance, declared that "those who believe in existential humanism have wptumd the czrlture" [Bolton 33, emphasis added] ). 17~11 both the Miss Saigon and the N E h debates, the rhetoric of "artistic freedom" or "free expression" tended to diffuse rather than illuminate crucial issues. Holly Hughes and others involved in the NEX case asserted that mainstrean1 arts advocates sought to concentrate on artistic freedom rather than confront the homophobia and sexism promulgated by those who attacked "controversial" art. In the Miss S ~ ~ i g ocase, n minority actors asked how they could express t h e i ~artistic freedom if powerful producers refused to cast them. These issue are discussed in more depth in the chapters on these controversies.
181 deal with case studies of events that have more or less concluded: many of the activist organizations with which I worked have ceased operation; Mzss Silzgon has closed in London and New York, and the NEA Four lawsuit ended with a Supreme Court decision in 1998. As I argue in the text, however, all the cases continue to influence contemporary politics and culture. 19several of the events listed in the text merit brief explanations: Matthew Shepard was killed in a homophobic hate crime in October of 1998, leading to protests across the country. Mass protests greeted meetings of the World Trade Organization ( W T O ) in
Introduction
19
Seattle in November of 1999 and of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, DC, in April 2000. An eclectic group of protesters, including union members, environmentalists, and students, decried the secretive nature of these global trade organizations and used the occasions to question the equity of transnational capitalism. (The protests unfortunately also entailed property damage caused by a small fraction of demonstrators, and right-wing organizers supporting free trade and isolationism, such as the Buchanan Campaign, constituted a fringe element in the protests.) The use of perfomlance by contemporary activists has been widely remarked upon; for example see Gay's discussions of W T O and IMF protests. Protests opposing Miss Sdigon outside New York City and the protests' enduring significance for Asian Americans are documented in the chapter on Miss Sdigon. Events related to the NEX debates are documented in the chapter on the NEA Four, with the exception of the Sensation controversy: Giuliani and other conservatives attacked the Brooklyn Museum of Art for hosting the show of contemporary British art organized by the collection's owner, Charles Saatchi. The Mayor and other conservatives charged that several pieces in the show were offensive, while others defended the work and asserted that the Mayor was persecuting artists in order to further his political career (see Barstow). 2 0 ~ h i l eI don't seek to celebrate activism uncritically, I note that many politicians, businesspeople, and members of the media maligned the public image of the left-wing political activist during the yuppie 1980s and entrepreneurial 1990s. Always viewed as outside the mainstream of US history, activists today are portrayed as malcontents, deviants, or censors (consider, for instance, the conservative paradox that brands as both perverts and prudes those feminists and gay-and-lesbian rights activists who argue for curbs on hate speech). In my experience, those who work in left-wing political activist worlds fight sincerely and non-violently for their rights and the rights of others. In all but the rarest cases, they find their motivation in dedication to social justice, not in nostalgia or juvenile anti-authoritarianism. Also note that I usually refer to social worlds in the plural (e.g., the worlds of activisnl) in order to recognize the multiple groups and interactions that conlprise an activity In some cases, however, I refer to social worlds in the singular. I hasten to point out that the confusion arises out of social reality; for example, perfornlance professionals speak both of a single "theatre world" and of nlultiple networks, such as Broadwa!; Off-Broadway, and regional theatre. 2 1 ~derive the tern1 "new knowledges" from Edward Said (Pernberton et al.). O n the various debates surrounding freedom of expression that arose in the late 1980s and continued into the 1990s see Dubin, Awesting Images. 22~ was revie~\,ingproofs of this study when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. In light of these acts of brutality it seems necessary (I hope it will not appear self-indulgent) to note that the activists with whom I have worked abhor terrorism. Moreover, key words used in this work-radical, resistance, struggle, contest, and revolution-do not, in my usage, connote violence. Rather, they refer to ongoing movements to make the world less violent and more just.
CHAPTER 1
Exchange Between Art Worlds and Political Worlds
Certainly theatrical productions need not always be performed in huildings or even on a defined area such as a coilventional stage. Nor need they he performed by professional actors or be h e a d y financed or elaborately produced. Since time immemorial, outdoor theatrical performances, often performed by amateurs, h a x played an important part in the entertainment and the education of the people of the world.
This defense of amateur performance, written in 1970, is remarkable not only for its demand that actors outside the "theatre world" receive the respect accorded to professionals, but also due to its source. This statement is not part of a scholarly article, a journalist's commentary, or a theatrical manifesto; it is a finding in Justice Hugo L. Black's opinion for the Supreme Court in the case Schacht v. United States. In this case, the Court unanimously supported a political activist's claim to the privileges usually associated with professional performers and declared unconstitutional a statute prohibiting any actor wearing a military uniform as costume from discrediting the US Armed Forces. This little-known case offers an entree into a discussion of activism and institutional performance, illustrating as it does the complexity and the potential of exchange between political activism and mainstream perf0rmance.l O n December 4, 1967, a group of protesters staged a vignette in front of an armed forces induction center in Houston, Texas, as part of a demonstration opposing the war in Vietnam. Two characters, dressed as US soldiers, shot red liquid from water pistols at a figure costumed as an apparent member of the Viet Cong, creating the effect of a bloody shooting. The soldiers then approached the body and exclaimed, "My God, this is a pregnant woman," an action intended to portray the brutality occasioned by the US presence in Vietnam.' After the skit had been repeated several times, one of the activists, an electronics consultant named
22
Actors and Activists
Daniel Jay Schacht, was arrested and charged with violating a Federal law (18 U.S.C. 702) that prohibited civilian use of military uniforms, presumably to prevent civilians from impersonating military personnel. (The other activist performer playing a soldier was not indicted because his costume consisted of coveralls, whereas Schacht wore elements of an authentic uniform.) Schacht claimed to be protected under another law (18 U.S.C. 772 [f]) that allowed performers in theatrical and motion picture productions to wear military uniforms. A jury refused to acknowledge that Schacht's performance was a "theatrical production," and he was sentenced to a fine of $250 and six months in jail. An appellate court upheld the lower court's decision, but on May 25, 1970, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with Schacht and overturned his conviction. The importance of this aspect of the case lies in the definitions advanced by Schacht and his lawyers and the links they forged between activism and theatre. Schacht defined himself as amateur actor, that is, a person performing outside the world of professional performance. Nevertheless, Schacht asserted that his adoption of the status of "actor" while engaged in activism entitled him to the same rights accorded to theatre world insiders, and the highest court in the land agreed. That an activist first chose to use performance as a means of organizing and then successfully protected his political activity by claiming the rights accorded to actors shows that the mainstream theatre world can offer resources to social movements.; To what extent does the legal maneuvering in Schacht v. United States represent a negotiation between the worlds of activism and performance? One might argue that Schacht's defense was merely a byproduct of the charge issued by the arresting officers and of his lawyers' expertise in defending against that charge. One might also ask whether asserting that an outsider actor has the right to wear a costume constitutes a connection with the institutional theatre. While it is true that Schacht's lawyers no doubt shared in his articulation of actors' rights, the genesis of the entire case lay in the activists' decision to perform. Likewise, Schacht and his cohorts' performance process does appear to have relied upon conventions of the theatre world. Schacht was arrested because he costumed himself in articles of authentic military apparel, thereby adopting the institutional theatre's convention of wearing a realistic costume. The Schacht v. United States opinion contains further evidence of the activists' engagement of institutional theatre's conventions. The record shows that Schacht and his fellow players scripted and even previewed their work prior to their protest debut when they "actually rehearsed their roles at least once prior to the appointed day before a student organization called the 'Humanists."' Costumes, scripts, and dress rehearsals are not solely the province of the institutional theatre, but they certainly do constitute strong conventions of US theatre practice. Indeed, the Supreme Court associated activism with institutional performance, viewing Schacht's use of performance
s
s
Exchange Between A r t Worlds and Political Worlds
23
conventions as evidence that he deserved the protections accorded to professional actors. The case clearly pertains to b o t h outsider theatricals and institutional performance, and, indeed, reveals a gray area occupied by insider and outsider alike. Schacht v. United States did more than establish an outsider actor's right to wear authentic military garb in political actions; it also broadened the rights of the institutional theatre. The exception to the ban on the use of military regalia upon which Schacht based his defense stated that actors could wear the uniform of a branch of the military only if "the portrayal does not tend to discredit that armed force." Schacht challenged the constitutionality of this clause, and the Supreme Court agreed that the law exerted an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.' In essence, a political activist's adoption of the status of actor not only led to the overturn of his conviction but also changed the laws governing the institutional theatre. But was this an important case that has had demonstrable consequences for the institutional theatre world? While not a landmark case, Schacht v. United States constitutes one of the precedents underpinning the First Amendment rights of the US performance industries, and as such it has had a material effect upon those industries' fortunes. For example, in March of 1972 the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled on the case of Southeastern Promotions, Ltd. v. City of West Palm Beach. The city official in charge of running West Palm Beach's civic auditorium had refused to rent the venue to Southeastern Promotion's production of the musical Hair on the grounds that "the musical does not constitute 'family entertainment."' The court ruled in favor of the musical's producers, viewing the city official's standards as arbitrary and an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. In the body of the ruling, Circuit Judge Goldberg stated that "It is settled law that theatrical productions can be staged under the protective cupola of the First Amendment," and offered Schacht v. United States as the sole citation underpinning this point of law.' So, an activist, a participant in a clearly political social world, succeeded in defending his blurring of the conventions of political and performance worlds. In so doing, he did not merely protect himself; the activist and his lawyers helped change the rules governing the institutional theatre. At the risk of digression, it must also be noted that the point of this example is to illustrate the exchange between performance and activism, not to celebrate the US legal system or even to claim that this particular case offers perfect protection to the theatre. Supreme Court decisions such as N E A . v. Finley show that artists cannot look to the legal system to protect their freedom, cases from the Dred Scott case to Bush v. Gore call into question the Court's claim to apolitical objectivity, and lawenforcement controversies point to a deep, systemic crisis in the US law enforcement system in general."
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Schacht v. United States offers empirical evidence that politics and performance-including mainstream, institutional performance worldscan and do influence one another. Yet, one need not look only to such dramatic events as a Supreme Court case to discover the interconnection of politics and performance. N o matter how much conservative aestheticians protest, performance institutions constantly interact with the rest of society. Even the most esoteric artists must engage in the struggles of public life-the search for employment, contests for resources, and so onmerely to practice their craft. Moreover, performers often enter public life, bringing to their service skills acquired through their occupation (while performers often constitute public figures by virtue of celebrity, I use the term "public life" to denote service and active engagement of politics, as when one serves as the head of a union, organizes a demonstration, or provokes a national debate). Those who would separate art and politics, however, tend to ignore these evident connections between politics and the artistic process, focusing instead solely upon the content of "political art." In this study, I seek to contribute to the burgeoning array of scholarship that sees art and politics as inextricably connected. I argue that dynamic and inevitable relationships connect politics and social life with artistic processes and the representations they create. I draw upon contemporary critical and sociological thinking to build a model of the relationship of performance and politics as an exchange between insiders in distinct but overlapping social worlds. I then apply that model to cases that epitomize the intersection of politics and art: the interaction between political activists and professional live performers. I argue that activists and "theatre people" engage one another, and that these exchanges precipitate negotiations of the boundaries between social worlds and of personal and professional identities. This chapter considers long-standing questions relating to explicitly political art, offering a model of politics and performance as a process of social exchange and presenting the theoretical and historical foundations upon which this study rests. I begin by defining some terms, then analyze a variety of perennial debates that embroil discussions of politics and performance (e.g., is theatre politically efficacious?; does politically engaged performance necessarily preach to the converted?). I argue that such questions-while one cannot ignore them entirely-tend to perpetuate false distinctions between performance and politics as separate realms of experience. Contemporary sociological and critical thinking connects rather than separates politics and art; I review several such perspectives, and build upon them to offer a model of exchange between the worlds of politics and performance. I then explain the methodology used in subsequent chapters to consider case studies from the 1990s that exemplify the exchange delineated in my model. I conclude this chapter with a brief historical discussion that demonstrates that my model may be used to analyze political and performance history, as well as contemporary culture.
Exchange Between A r t Worlds and Political Worlds
I begin by offering a number of admittedly unwieldy terms to define the relationship between politics and performance. Even when considered individually, the words "politics" and "performance" elude easy definition. At the risk of appearing to rationalize a leaden prose style, I argue that cumbersome terminology is necessary if one wishes to avoid semantic quandaries. Another prefatory note on terminology: Contemporary scholars are frequently accused of resorting to jargon when they use terms such as "ideology" and "hegemony," a charge leveled especially by those hostile to attention to politics in scholarship (James Bowman, for example, goes so far as to ridicule as jargon terms including "status quo"). These words do not automatically constitute jargon; rather, they are elements of the English language and relatively straightforward definitions may be found in any college-level dictionary. Nevertheless, scholars have built up specific and sometimes conflicting uses of these words; in my discussion, therefore, I seek to offer explanations of the concepts that serve as the foundation for my analysis.' Performance constitutes a concept that is at once familiar and difficult to pin down. In order to clarify the focus of my inquiry without dismissing the value of the diverse definitions of performance, I refer to the practices I examine as the social worlds of institutional performance, a term I discuss later in this chapter, but that requires brief definition here. Performance studies scholar Margaret Drewal notes that the concept of performance spans a number of disciplines and therefore "has no precisely agreed upon definition" (Drewal 1; see also Goldberg, Performance: Live Art Since 1960 12). She continues, however, by arguing that in "the broadest sense, performance is the praxis of everyday social life; indeed, it is the practical application of embodied skill and knowledge to the task of taking action." This definition emphasizes the idea of performance as a cultural process involving training put into physical action. This broad definition of performance can be used as an analytic tool when discussing a n y human interaction, including "anything from individual agents' negotiations of everyday life, to the stories people tell each other, popular entertainments, political oratory, guerrilla warfare, to bounded events such as theatre, ritual, festivals, parades, and more" (Drewal 1 ) . While I employ this broad definition of performance, in this study I am concerned almost exclusively with events Drewal refers to as "bounded events." Further, while I will pay some attention to the performative aspects of bounded events such as political demonstrations, I focus my argument upon the events labeled "performance" by the people creating and observing them. That is, this study discusses the circumstances surrounding performances identified as performance by those involved. Finally, in addition to existing as a cultural practice manifest in performance-in-life and in performance during "bounded events," performance exists as a set of institutional practices.
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Actors and Activists
That is, people create special categories within social life dedicated to the production of performances. It is such realms of social activity-including forms as diverse as commercial theatre, not-for-profit theatre, community theatre, educational theatre, and performance art-that I call the social worlds of institutional performance (I derive the term "social world" from sociologists identifying themselves as "symbolic interactionists," whose specific ideas occupy a later section of this chapter). I recognize that the term "institutional performance" is ponderous, but prefer it to the alternatives. The term "professional performance," for example, implies a group of persons sharing a set of common practices, but limits that vocation to people who make their living performing, excluding forms as diverse as university theatre and free street theatre that clearly share a sense of dedication to performance conventions. I also intend the term "institutional performance" to refer to worlds of live performance. Philip Auslander (Liveness)has shown that the rhetoric of live performance is fraught with assumptions about the specialness of liveness versus mediation. My term is not intended to privilege the "magic" of the live, but rather to distinguish between the institutional practices of those who define their work in terms of live performance versus those who work in the often-overlapping but distinct worlds of what might be called "mediated" or "broadcast" performance. "Politics," like performance, constitutes a term that seems obvious yet defies easy definition. This study operates on a broad definition of politics as encompassing cultural politics as well as debates surrounding specific issues or resources. That is, politics consists not only of the contests for the management of resources and the campaigns to control government, but also of the struggles of people to gain respect and autonomy for themselves and their beliefs. When viewed in light of this broad definition, artistic activity influences and is influenced by politics. N o work of art, however rarefied, can be said to be solely aesthetic, because it still exists in relationship to other social activities. People experiencing art always create some kind of meaning and therefore any art work articulates an ideological position, if only support for the status quo. Furthermore, performance enters into public life, that is, into the contests within state and civil institutions that govern society, both explicitly and covertly. This point may seem obvious, since one can readily point to examples of public figures, such as Ronald Reagan or Charlton Heston, who are also theatre personnel. I suggest, however, that the specific relationships between such persons' theatrical careers and political lives have not received adequate study. Moreover, acknowledging these examples doesn't explain how performance institutions participate in a segment of public life that might be called "resistant" politics-political action aimed at challenging government and conventional ideas in order to achieve social change.
Exchange Between A r t Worlds and Political Worlds
27
Activism offers a benchmark for an understanding of the interaction of art and society discussed above, since activists are, by definition, people who seek to change the social order. I use the term "political activists" to refer to groups of people organized in order to strive for social change through direct agitation, such as public demonstration (the breadth of the issue addressed by an activist organization, of course, may be either quite broad or very specific; for instance, a group may conceive itself as addressing an issue as abstract as "imperialism" or as precise as advocating or opposing a particular piece of legislation). Activists usually concentrate on an issue or group of issues and see themselves as operating outside of the "mainstream" of public policy. For instance, while some individual activists do pursue mainstream political careers, most activists do not regard seeking elected office as "direct action" (see Rubin 47-53). Obviously, political activists appear across the political spectrum; indeed, right- and left-wing activists may confront one another, as when pro-choice activists counter-demonstrate at abortion clinics harassed by anti-choice activists from the religious Right.'Within the Left or Right there are also, of course, a wide variety of communities, each with its own mores. By both belief and experience, I am most familiar with the activity of activists who consider themselves to be "progressive" or "Left."' The exact meaning of these terms is subject to debate within activist circles themselves. Rather than attempt a static definition, one may more readily identify the contemporary progressive Left with the causes its activists espouse, which include: economic justice, particularly for people of color; opposition to US interventions in Third World affairs; women's rights; gay, lesbian, and transgender rights; opposition to the growing power of corporations; protection of the environment; and opposition to police brutality (note, however, that not all activists claiming the mantle of the progressive Left adhere to all the causes listed, a fact that is a source of tension and debate within activist worlds). Unless otherwise indicated, I use the term "activists" to refer specifically to non-violent, progressive political activism. What, then, does one call performance that addresses political issues? I shall refer to performance that consciously seeks to provoke specific changes in policies or social conditions as politically engaged performance or as overtly political performance. The most familiar term used to discuss the conjunction of politics and performance is "political theatre," but this term has met with a variety of objections. It implies that other theatrical genres somehow lie outside the realm of the political, whereas many scholars argue that all performance is political, since it exists within human society and culture and because it always communicates an ideological position, if only support of the status quo (see Scharine xii; Holderness 2; and Malpede 67).1° In addition, as I<ershaw ("Fighting" 255ff) argues, the term tends to be associated with analysis of the political content and strategies of stage plays, thereby excluding the vast array of overtly
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political performance that occurs beyond the walls of theatre buildings. Kershaw (Radical in Performance) suggests "radical performance" as an alternative to "political theatre," but, as explained in the Introduction, Kershaw excludes mainstream theatre from the realm of the radical, abandoning an entire field of representation. Moreover, other scholars (e.g., Hughes and Roman) argue that the contemporary distinction between performance and theatre actually tends to perpetuate inequities in theatre worlds. I sometimes use the phrase "radical performance," but in a sense that differs from I<ershaw7s.I refer to a practice that spans genres, not to a theatrical category (as such terms as "political theatre" imply). My terminology aims to acknowledge the diversity of performance worlds without dismissing the mainstream, and to recognize the inherent ties between performance and politics while also attending to performances that foreground efforts to provoke debate and social change. In short, I suggest that overtly political performance constitutes a mode of performance that may potentially be employed in any social environment. Moreover, those who create overtly political performance and analyze the politics of performance may be insiders to the worlds of activism, participants in institutional performance worlds, or insiders to both worlds.
Why consider politics and performance as a social dynamic, rather than a discrete phenomenon or genre? Too often, the bar for measuring the success of an overtly political performance is set impossibly high (often in order to dismiss the value of recognizing connections between politics and art). Single performances are expected to achieve measurable, often revolutionary results. These unreasonable expectations may be dispelled if one sees a single overtly political performance as a component within a larger social process. The propensity to pose unreasonable standards for overtly political performance manifests itself in the host of perennial questions that sprout up during nearly every discussion of politics and art, sapping energy that otherwise might connect aesthetics, artistic process, and public life. As Sandra L. Richards notes of the issue of how playwrights measure the success of their political performances, "that's a question that plagues political theatre" (Kinzer et al. 194).As Richards's comment suggests, a good question regarding an individual work becomes a burden when it entwines and gnarls an entire discourse. Typical questions that crop up in discussions of politics and performance include: Can a performance affect society? Can a play change people's minds, and even if it can, will it move an audience to action? Do political performances preach to the converted? Doesn't the introduction of overt political content render a play "mere" propaganda, and isn't theatre a feeble form of propaganda in the age of broadcast
Exchange Between A r t Worlds and Political Worlds
29
communications? Doesn't overt political performance privilege its "message" over aesthetic "quality"? Aren't overtly political performances so topical that they fail to withstand the test of time? Are performers really interested in political change, or simply in shocking their audience?'' One may respond to this host of interrogatives in a variety of ways. First, one responds with a question of one's own, asking if the problems are presented in a sincere spirit of inquiry, or as a rhetorical dismissal of the very possibility of a vibrant and valid interaction between politics and art. Second, one can offer empirical demonstrations and explanations, such as the Schacht case discussed at the beginning of this chapter, showing that performances can affect change and that politics and performance inevitably intertwine, often symbiotically. A growing body of scholarshipincluding the works of Elam, I<ershaw, IGstenberg, McConachie and Friedman, Weinberg, and Cohen-Cruz-attests to the diversity and impact of politically engaged performance. Third, one must consider whether the questions aimed at the politics/performance intersection actually pertain to more general problems for either all performances or all politic acts. For example, my experience as a political activist leads me to assert that the question of what constitutes effective political communication in the age of broadcast media vexes all contemporary political action, and that the problems of overtly political performance and the media constitute a subset of this larger issue. Indeed, as I discuss later, activists value performance precisely because they view it as a "low tech" alternative to mass media. Finally, one must take on perennial questions regarding politics and performance by examining the assumptions that underlie the questions themselves. Consider perhaps the quintessential question of politics and performance: do such performances preach to the converted? Is a religious metaphor that reduces the world to the converted and the unwashed appropriate to the complex dynamics of politics? Empirical examples such as the Schacht case demonstrate the impact of performances beyond their immediate audience. Tony Kushner (207) argues that the impact of a performance on an audience member is far more subtle than an instant conversion. Elam ("Ritual Theory") demonstrates that, even if one accepts that the audience for political performance tends to already share the views of the performer, overly political performance plays a crucial role in forging commitment within that community. Conversely, Miller and Roman, among others, have asked who the converted are, questioning the assumption that those who attend political performances constitute a homogenous group that, moreover, is stable and permanently "converte d . ~ Finally, ~' Holly Hughes offered a rejoinder to this irksome question, titling a performance, Preaching t o the Perverted. My purpose here is not to respond to all the perennial questions that haunt overtly political performance; indeed, I suggest that, while one cannot dismiss the importance of these questions and the vibrant scholarship they
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have provoked, they tend to overshadow an understanding of politics and performance as a social interaction. Two issues, however, deserve extended treatment, as they demonstrate the value of a social approach to politics and performance: the debates about the "efficacy" of politically engaged performance, and the related argument that politics is detrimental to the arts. Practitioners and scholars of politically engaged performance have long dealt with the "efficacy debatex-the issue of whether any performance can have tangible political effects; as Kershaw notes, issues of theatre's political efficacy "will always be open to debate" (Politics of Performance 252). There are several ways to tackle the efficacy question. One can question the truth of such claims, looking along with Jane Tompkins to the vast influence of fictions such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (as a book and a play) or pointing out, as does Joel Schechter, that Brecht's plays caused riots and were perceived by governments, at least, as provocative enough to warrant censorship (Schechter, Durov's Pig 47ff; Tompkins, Sensational Designs). Or one may justify the efficacy of politically engaged performance through theoretical analysis, as exemplified by Baz I<ershaw7s The Politics of Performance, which uses ideas from contemporary critical theory to build a convincing argument for theatre's ability to bring a political point to people who would not otherwise be receptive to it. Such studies offer invaluable explanations of the power and diversity of overly political performance. I do not, however, intend that this study join in the struggle surrounding the efficacy debate (although I may at times discuss the effectiveness of a particular performance relative to others). Rather, I wish to call into question, once again, the assumptions behind the idea that art cannot directly effect political change.li First, the "efficacy" debate tends to center upon the propaganda value of performance-a performance's direct influence over potential adherents to a cause. I argue that propagandizing constitutes only a small portion of the intersection between politics and performance. Second, the efficacy debate asks those who support overtly political performance to somehow prove a direct link between a given performance and a specific, and usually vast, change in the social order. To make this demand is to apply a standard of cause and effect to arenas (politics and social change) that inherently involve numerous effects that may be attributed to a multitude of causes. The realm of cultural practice is so diffuse and is composed of so many interdependent elements that the immediate impact of actions-even those as explicitly political as a presidential debate-are difficult to ascertain." In other words, though one can find empirical evidence of efficacious performance, it is wiser simply to note that the question of efficacy plagues all political activity, not just politically engaged performance. Witness the continuing debate surrounding the meaning and effect of the movement opposing the war in Vietnam."
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31
The efficacy debate epitomizes, I believe, a central problem for those who study politics and performance. The perennial questions listed above constitute sound avenues for investigation that have produced important documentary and theoretical work; yet, their very frequency suggests that they are often posed by those who object to any attention to the connection of politics and art. Such objections, while varied and complex, boil down to two basic assertions: art makes for bad politics, and politics yields bad art. Challenges to the "efficacy" of theatre as a tool for social change exemplify the first notion: that art is a poor vessel for the potent brew of politics. The converse of this idea maintains that politics is an acid that corrodes the fibers of art's aesthetic quality. Both concepts ultimately aim to place art above the fray of quotidian events-dealing with but transcending everyday life. Ironically, such statements themselves betray a deeply political view, seeking to divorce art from its social context, as analysis of the assumptions underlying this point of view demonstrates. The accusation that political engagement leads to bad art has found numerous proponents ainoilg scholars and practitioners of theatre.'Tritics who argue against overtly political content in art (and discussions of the political circumstances surrounding any work of art's production and interpretation) uphold instead a tradition that defines art as the product of lone genius. Politics, in this view, automatically diminishes aesthetic quality of a performance and renders it too topical to endure. Overtly political plays that continue to claim critical attention, such as those of Ibsen and Brecht, become the exceptions that prove the rule. Catherine Hughes (xi), for instance, claims that only a "genius" such as Ibsen is able to "in a sense rise above his convictions." As numerous scholars have argued, this process of simultaneously canonizing and belittling overtly political work not only does a disservice to famous "political" playwrights but, more importantly, tends to either exclude or appropriate other voices central to political action and social change. It is important to note, for example, that Brecht formulated his theory of Verfremdungseffekt after studying Chinese theatre techniques. And, as Sandra L. Richards argues in her essay, "Wasn't Brecht an African Writer?", Brecht was readily accepted as part of the struggle for political and cultural liberation in African countries not because his work and theory imparted the inspiration of his lone genius to the struggle, but rather because his ideas resonated with traditions that acknowledged performance as an element of public life in African societies (Richards, "Wasn't Brecht"). As I shall argue throughout this study, art constitutes an occupation and artists depend upon people from other parts of society to support their creative endeavors. Likewise, even the most elite piece of aesthetic art exists in a social context, influenced by and influencing other parts of society and propagating a political point of view. Those who portray the porous and multi-layered membranes through which performance and politics interact as absolute, static, and impermeable not only cordon
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Actors and Activists
off rich avenues for research, thereby impoverishing the theoretical coffers of theatre studies, they also, in Roach's words, "make relationships that are culturally constructed and historically contingent appear universal and timeless" (Roach, "Normal Heartlands" 381). Such reductions constitute profound and sweeping political acts. In the 1980s and 1990s, prominent, politically engaged art, such as that responding to the Reagan and Bush administrations and the AIDS crisis, occasioned new variants on the old theme that art and politics ought not mix. Theatre scholar Roger Copeland's article, "Don't Call the Post-Mod Squad," exemplifies critics' attempts to shore up an imagined separation between art and politics in an era when prominent works participated visibly in organizing or became targets of censorship." Copeland's article considers the trial of Dennis Barrie and Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center on obscenity charges for their display of the photos of Robert M a p p l e t l ~ o r p e .Copeland ~~ reiterates the idea that politics is bad for art, arguing that, while art may not be able to divorce itself entirely from society, it finds a better legal defense against censorship in modernist aesthetics than in postmodern attention to politics. He contends that modernism provides a special "art context," in which actions become acceptable because they are understood to be artistic, whereas postmodernism destroys the "art context," leaving art open to regulation for violating community standards.lY His main evidence that modernism protects artistic freedom is that the Cincinnati defendants were acquitted because eloquent art experts attested to the formal value of Mapplethorpe's work. I believe, however, that Copeland misconstrues the course of the Cincinnati trial. Elizabeth Hess, writing on the trial for the Village Voice, argues that the acquittal resulted from the prosecutor's overconfidence that the ostensible shock-value of the Mapplethorpe photos themselves would win a conviction. She notes that things might have been different had conservative art critics been called to counter the art authorities featured as witnesses for the defense. She asks, "Could [Prosecutor Frank] Prouty have made a convincing case that Robert Mapplethorpe is not an artist, or that his retrospective was unsuitable for a museum? I don't think so, but he certainly could have tried. Where was [conservative art critic] Hilton ICramer? Why wasn't Christina Orr-Cahall subpoenaed to explain why her Corcoran board voted unanimously to censor 'Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment'?" (Hess 281). Hess's questions suggest that the Cincinnati defendants won acquittal not because they were protected by a modernist "art context" but because the defense presented a group of experts that the prosecutors did not adequately rebut. In the end, I believe, Copeland misinterprets the facts, the modernists, the postmodernists, and society; he ignores overtly political modernist works, such as Picasso's Guernica, and he collapses the diversity of critical and artistic expression collectively called "postmodernism" into a single vague formulation. Copeland's
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33
argument that modernism is art's best defense becomes even more troubling when one considers that the far Right, pursuing its own vision of a unified and absolute "American Culture," makes no distinction between modernism and postmodernism, abhorring both as "nihilist" (Buchanan, "Losing the War"). In an article condemning not only the NEA, but also popular culture, Patrick Buchanan damns (literally) both postmodern and abstract art, calling on Americans to "sweep up the debris that passes for modern art outside so many public buildings" (Buchanan, "Pursued by Baying Yahoos" 88, emphasis added). To argue, as Copeland and others do, that casting postmodernism overboard will stave off such absolutism is naive at best. That Copeland's argument appeared in American Theatre, a widely circulated periodical catering to both practitioners and scholars, indicates that when the cases examined in this study occurred, questions asking whether art and politics could-and should-be separate played to a large audience. Perennial questions regarding performance and politics have inspired vibrant answers from scholars supporting their connection, and these answers have broadened our understanding. Also, questions of efficacy, relevance, endurance that tend towards the abstract (or even absurd) when asked of overtly political performance as a whole remain relevant when applied to specific works. One cannot therefore dismiss out of hand all perennial questions of politics and performance. Yet, the predictable, almost hackneyed entrance of these stock questions into almost every discussion of politics and performance begs different questions: Can one not say that the charges have been answered, and, if one does, what new issues arise? I suggest that contemporary critical and sociological theories offer the foundation for a model that allows one to explore the intersection of politics and performance as an exchange among those dedicated primarily to political work, those who see performance as their primary occupation, and those who negotiate roles in both occupations.
One cannot neglect entirely issues of political and aesthetic evaluation: it is important, for instance, to ask whether a particular overtly political performance succeeds in the social role in which it has been cast. However, when such questions are directed at the very idea that politics and performance meld, they perpetuate assumptions that these cauldrons of social activity may be hermetically sealed. Moreover, such interrogations tend to narrow the focus of inquiry to the texts of performances, thereby ignoring the ferment of social activity of which every performance is a part. Much contemporary sociological and many critical theories articulate a variety of perspectives on politics and performance that offer alternatives to the perennial questions discussed above and provide the foundation for
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Actors and Activists
a model based not only on analysis of texts but also on understanding social relationships. I first introduce concepts from symbolic interaction sociology relevant to my study, then discuss contemporary literary and performance theory, and conclude the section by reviewing a number of issues related to politics, culture, and representation. Symbolic Interaction As explained in the Introduction, I derive a central component of my model for the relationship between politics and art-the concept of art as the product of the interaction of people within a social world-from the work of sociologists working in a field known as "symbolic interaction." This sociological school constitutes an apt element in an analysis of politics and performance for a variety of reasons: symbolic interactionists consider art inherently tied to politics, and their work on issues as diverse as social hierarchies and individual identity and agency meshes with many of the issues of politics and art addressed by contemporary critical theorists. In addition, symbolic interactionists not only devote attention to the sociology of the arts, but some also view performance as a central mode for analyzing social behavior: the symbolic interactionist most familiar to performance theorists, for example, will likely be Erving Goffman, who used performance as a method for analyzing all social activity (see I
Exchange Between Art Worlds and Political Worlds
35
society as developing out of human interaction, as opposed to pre-existing "structure," a process that nevertheless remains inherently fraught and political. Symbolic interaction constitutes a broad field crossing the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and, to some extent, anthropology; I don't pretend to encompass the entire field here, but rather introduce interactionist ideas that are fundamental to my study because they offer tools for understanding performance's role in social processes. Symbolic interactionists generally avoid analysis through rigid formula but attend instead to the definitions forwarded by participants in social activity and to the networks participants develop through the conduct of social activity. These sociologists have forwarded the concept of the social world (see Gilmore 150-152). Social worlds tend to be larger, more diffuse, and less hierarchical than formal organizations (though organizations do constitute participants in social worlds; e.g., the Arena Stage is a part of the theatre world). Unlike a formal organization, such as a corporation, social worlds do not tend to have set mechanisms for defining membership and regulating activity; they depend, instead, upon conventions-shared understandings of how things are to be done-to coordinate collective activity. Conventions provide a basic understanding of how collective activity in a world shall be conducted. They also provide a sense of identity that allows participants "to locate and to be located by compatible collaborators"; in other words, participants in a social world evaluate a person's degree of involvement in the world by judging her or his knowledge and use of the world's conventions (Gilmore 152). Symbolic interactionists, then, characterize a social world by studying the definitions forwarded by participants, the conventions used by the participants in collective activity, the negotiations occasioned by social interaction, and the networks created through interaction. One interactionist in particular, Howard Becker, has applied the idea of social worlds to the specific arena of the arts in his study Art Worlds, which analyzes diverse artistic practices not in terms of the aesthetics of art works but rather in terms of the sociology of occupatioi~s.~' Becker (Art Worlds x, 34) examines the ways in which art is created by networks of people who share a joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things. He locates the mechanics of artistic creativity in conventions (Art Worlds 29-30). Both producers and consumers of artistic works constitute members of art worlds, and conventions govern the production, distribution, reception, and interpretation of art. For instance, conventions make a work of art comprehensible to an audience (and, conversely, an artist's abandonment or an audience member's ignorance of an art world's conventions threatens comprehension); as Becker puts it, "Only because artist and audience share knowledge of and experience with the conventions invoked does the art work produce an emotional effect" (Art Worlds 30). The world of performance art exemplifies this point; it has conventions that honor acting
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Actors and Activists
styles that would be received by theatre professionals as "amateur" or "unpolished." The conventions by which a particular art world operates are neither unique to nor monopolized by that art world, but instead are available to participants in other social worlds (Becker, Art Worlds 36,46). This understanding of art worlds as involved in a constant exchange with the rest of society provides part of the foundation for my discussion of the relationship between politics and performance. I will describe, for instance, the ways in which political activists adopt, as tools for organizing, specific conventions from the art worlds of mainstream and alternative theatre. Rather than search for abstract definitions and delineations of particular social worlds, symbolic interactionists examine the definitions and relations articulated by "participants" in a "social worldx-terms and methods that I have adopted to describe institutional performance and political activism. The character and boundaries of a social world are not concrete and static; they are constructed and negotiated by those involved. (This is not to say that anything a given artist calls art is art: remember that participants in art worlds include not only the people who produce art, but rather everyone involved in that artistic undertaking; for example, the theatre world consists of the network of individuals who share an understanding of how to initiate, stage, advertise, attend, and discuss a performance.) One recognizes the scope of a social world not by a set rule but by the networks and conventions created by participants. A social network is still a social world, no matter how large, as long as independent members may take up cooperative activity with little or no preparation or definition by employing shared conventions. For example, there is an international theatre world, wherein participants can stage a play in a foreign country without having to "reinvent the wheel," as evidenced by international theatre festivals, such as those in Avignon or Edinburgh. Such events, of course, require huge expenditures of resources and detailed negotiations among participants, but these negotiations (usually) do not pertain to defining what activity shall take place but instead constitute a deployment of already accepted conventions. Interactionists do not view social worlds as necessarily harmonious, however. Rather, their emphasis on the negotiation of conventions within and among social networks allows for analysis of both cooperation and power relations. Moreover, interactionists incorporate into their thinking the fact that negotiations frequently occur among groups with different degrees of power (as Becker's examination of the labeling of "deviants" indicates). They recognize the techniques of authority and the methods of resistance used by the relatively powerless: for example, authorities frequently control negotiations, but those who lack power may resist by refusing to follow the plan the group has "agreed" upon, by performing their roles poorly, or by seeking to move beyond the network to connect with those in other social worlds.2i
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Symbolic interactionists attempt to describe the character of a social world by analyzing the activities of participants and the relationships among participants, who range along a continuum from "insiders" who know intimately and, to some extent, shape, the social world, to "outsiders" or "strangers" who are not committed to the tenets of the world. David Unruh (120) articulates the difference between insiders and outsiders to a given social world in terms of commitment: an insider's identity very often revolves around the social world, while the outsider feels far less commitment to that social ~ o r l d . For ' ~ example, the Asian American performers involved in the protests against the casting of Miss Snigon were insiders to the worlds of commercial theatre and relative strangers to the worlds of political activism. In addition, I note that a given individual participates in a diversity of social worlds in the course of her or his occupational and social lives. When these worlds overlap, a person's activity may be seen as participating in several worlds simultaneously. Thus, Tim Miller is perceived-by himself, by AIDS activists, and by performers and performance critics-as an insider to both the worlds of performance art and political activism. In addition to providing a vocabulary for analyzing the organization of social activity, the symbolic interaction approach offers strong arguments for considering art as linked to politics. As the field's name implies, symbolic interaction views "symbolic" activity, such as performance, as inherently tied to the rest of the social process, supporting my contention that one cannot rend artistic activity from its social context. Becker and other symbolic interactionists argue that artistic activity is deeply embedded in public life. The social aspects of artistic activity range from the apparently mundane instance of a pianist deducting the tuning of her piano from her income tax (Beck, "Art and Inactivity" 10) to the fact that artistic activity encounters legal regulations involving intellectual property, public decorum, and public safety. Not only is artistic activity inherently social, it is also innately political. Becker ( A r t Worlds 166) points out that artistic activity is always politically engaged because the State is always concerned with artistic matters, whether the participants in art worlds like it or not. The State engages art worlds when it regulates property (as in the case of a contract or copyright dispute), when it responds to complaints that artists are creating a nuisance, or when it intervenes directly in the creation of art. When the State intervenes directly, it may support artistic work financially in a general desire to enhance the nation's reputation, or it may support only a certain kind of art, thereby "censoring" others through lack of support. Moreover, the State has a vested interest in "the propensity of its citizens to mobilize or be mobilized for collective action" and understands that both "high" and "popular" art affect the mobilization of citizens (Becker, Art Worlds 166). The State may therefore inhibit artistic activity it finds threatening with sanctions ranging from denying artists resources to
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Actors and Activists
imprisoning and executing art world participants. Moreover, such actions by the State do not merely encourage or inhibit artistic activity, but shape its conventions and interpretations (Becker, Art Worlds 188). Not only is artistic activity always subject to regulation by the State, but what constitutes "art" itself is also, in the eyes of symbolic interactionists, a question not of aesthetics but of the definitions negotiated within an art world and between that art world and other sectors of society (Becker, Art Worlds 165; 36). Whether people within a particular art world or in other parts of society will accept the designation of a certain activity as art and grant it honor and resources becomes a contest, a negotiation between people in groups. This not only implies that artistic activity engages the rest of society and is inherently political, but also indicates that the arts participate in contests surrounding occupational and social identity.
Cultural Studies Although it developed independently, symbolic interactionist sociology shares with movements in contemporary critical theory a perspective that views art as bound to society; these fields of critical theory include feminism, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, neo-~Varxism,post-colonial theory, new historicism, scholarship by and about women and men of color, and performance ~ t u d i e s . ~I 'am indebted to and draw upon work from all these movements, but rely primarily upon the literature of cultural studies (which intermingles with many of the other movements listed above), whose adherents view performance-inside and outside institutional theatre-as both a product of and a participant in social interacti~n.~" Joseph Roach defines the movement of "cultural studies" in humanities scholarship as more of a "point of intersection for various kinds of interdisciplinary work than as a unitary approach" and explains that the movement "investigates the various kinds of boundaries-inclusive, exclusive, and negotiated-that human societies construct. It features prominently the exploration of cultural difference and otherness, including differences based on social class, gender, and ethnicity" (Reinelt and Roach 9-10).27 Cultural studies constitutes an extraordinarily broad field; in this study I adopt an inclusive view of cultural studies encompassing methodologies ranging from ethnography to Marxist analysis to textual ~riticism.~' Like the symbolic interactionists, the scholars who identify themselves as working in the field of cultural studies view society as created by people rather than automatic or predetermined. Dwight Conquergood, for instance, points to the constructed nature of all culture, stating, "Cultures and selves are not given, they are made; even, like fictions, they are 'made up'" ("Poetics" 83), and Hortense Spillers observes: "Traditions are not born. They are made. We would add that they are not, like objects of
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nature, here to stay, but survive as created social events only to the extent that an audience cares to intersect them" (qtd. in Richards, "Under" 66; emphasis in original). This view offers an understanding of art as part of a dynamic social process that includes participation in public life. Cultural studies theorists differ from symbolic interactionists in that they juxtapose this understanding of culture as a dynamic result of human activity with the problems of "material and ideological structures" (which have been studied less by interactionists; Kathleen Weiler qtd. in Becker and McCall 7)." Articulating further this interplay between intractable power relations and dynamic knowledge produced via individual human activity requires attention to the definition of "culture" advanced by the scholars active in the field of cultural studies-a conceptualization that is at once versatile and complex. Raymond Williams, a sociologist credited with founding the "British School" of cultural studies, offers a definition of culture that has been widely influential and deserves some detailed attention (R. Williams 87-32).;" Following a thorough etymology of the word "culture" beginning with its original meaning pertaining to agricultural cultivation, Williams (90) offers the three most prevalent modern meanings of the term: culture as an abstract noun describing the process of an individual's intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual development (e.g., a "cultured person"); culture as a noun pertaining to a particular way of life of a people, group, or period (e.g., "Japanese culture"); and culture as a noun describing "the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity" (e.g., a museum as "cultural institution"-note that Williams sees the final definition of culture as art tied to the first idea of intellectual development). Rather than reject any of these definitions, Williams (91) argues for an understanding of culture that accommodates the various definitions of individual development, custom, and artistic activity, pointing out that the complexity of definitions reveals an unresolved tension in human thinking between material production and symbolic behavior. Williams further notes that, although a multifaceted interpretation of culture that sees symbolic and material action as always related may lead to confusing answers and unresolved questions: "These arguments and questions cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of actual usage" (R. Williams 91). Roach notes that subsequent scholarship has expanded upon Williams's understanding of culture (which is tied to a Marxist understanding of material production) to include "boundaries defined by ethnicity, intercultural encounter, and social circulation" (Reinelt and Roach 11). Here then is a definition of "culture" that relates the activity of individuals to abstract constructions that influence both individuals and societies. Culture, then, is not a static object, but a dynamic and ultimately "messy" human creation that serves as an arena-perhaps the arena-for political contest. Scholars working in cultural studies, like the symbolic
40
Actors and Activists
interactionists, understand artistic activity, such as performance, as inherently tied to the social process. As Margaret Drewal says, "Only if we understand performance as merely an entertainment, a diversion, cut off from the political and economic environment which sustains it, and in which it develops and transforms, could we then view it as socially insignificant, static, and impotent" (Drewal 10). Furthermore, cultural studies scholars declare culture to be central to political contests. For instance, Edward Said rejects critical theories, whether modern or postmodern, that separate culture from politics, complaining that many scholars have imagined "on the one hand an isolated cultural sphere, believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical speculation and investigation, and, on the other, a debased political sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur" (Said, Culture and Imperialism 57." Scholars who concentrate only on the abstracted sphere, says Said, fail to recognize that "the two are not only connected but ultimately the same" (Said, Culture and Imperialism 57." In the view of scholars working in cultural studies, culture is neither an abstracted and aesthetic object for contemplation nor an external machine determining human actions; rather, culture is the medium in which political issues are negotiated. I refer to examples of culture serving as an (or the) arena of political struggle as "cultural contest" (a concept discussed frequently among theorists; see Fuoss). One must, however, bear in mind a caveat regarding metaphors of culture: images of culture as an arena, battlefield, medium, or sphere of political contest do not signify a static, l~oinogenous, or single vision of cultures, a point that must be remembered lest the dynamic cultural studies model be confused with conservative rhetorics that define culture as a static object to be won or describe it as a pristine, traditional resource to be reclaimed and protected from declii~e.~' Politics and Representation Symbolic interactionists and critical theorists view the creation and reception of art as linked to and involved in political life. In order to understand these interconnections, one must attend to issues of representation; indeed, critical theorists often refer to the analysis of the social ramifications of art as the "politics of representation." According to cultural studies theorists, politics consists of more than contests regarding specific issues or elected offices; struggles over ideology, hegemony, representation, community, identity, discourse, and spectacle also constitute part of the political process, and here too cultural activity, such as performance, accomplishes what Jane Tompkins calls "cultural work" (Tompkins 200-201)." Further discussion of the issues listed in italics above provides the foundation for analysis in later chapters and situates my study within the debates that have arisen in contemporary criticism. Also, while I don't
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seek to explain performance's efficacy (as explained above), theories of representation serve to explain how artistic creations affect society. The central tenet of the politics of representation is that cultural practices, and the representations they create, do not simply reflect social reality through Aristotelian mimesis; instead, artistic activity both influences and embodies the beliefs that shape people's lives.;' In other words, one aspect of the politics of representation is the role art plays in the construction and preservation of ideologies. Ideology constitutes a notoriously difficult concept to define (Fuoss 83); moreover, scholars who use the term are frequently accused of resorting to empty jargon. I hasten to note that Webster's offers a serviceable definition of ideology: "the doctrines, opinions, or way of thinking of an individual, class, etc.; specif. [sic], the body of ideas on which a particular political, economic, or social system is based" (New World Dictionary, Third College Edition).'Tl~isstraightforward articulation of "ideology" is compatible with those forwarded by theorists; consider, for instance, Fredric Jameson's argument (expanding upon the theories of Louis Althusser) that ideology functions as a series of "strategies of containment" that map out the boundaries of thinkable behavior within a given group (Jameson, Political Unconscious 47, 52-53). Artists both work within and help shape these conceptual frontiers: participants in art worlds do not exist in a world apart; rather-as in all parts of culture-their creative process is influenced by their society's systems of beliefs, and the representations they create in turn shape these ideologies (by supporting them, subverting them, or both). The politics of representation, therefore, constitute a link between the individual artist creating a body of work and a central mechanism of politics in society. Just as military, financial, or governmental conflicts frequently occur on uneven fields, so too ideologies do not compete equally. Critical theorists use the term "dominant ideologies" to describe those belief systems fostered by those who control society, and argue that these dominant ideologies are as potent as military or financial power." In particular, Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued that ruling classes preserve a "cultural hegemony" (frequently shortened simply to "hegemony") as powerful as their social, political, and military d ~ m i n a n c e . ~Gramsci's ' thinking is particularly important for a discussion of performance and politics, since his explanation of the ways that state and civil institutions may support social domination via cultural hegemony emphasizes cultural practice as a central arena for contests surrounding resources and ideology. Gramsci distinguishes between State and Civil society, arguing that individuals and institutions operating in both realms have a stake in maintaining hegemony, but that they attempt to do so in different ways. Institutions that directly shape and regulate people-such as governments, police, and militaries-constitute State society. Civil society consists of affiliations that people enter without apparent coercion, but which nevertheless influence
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Actors and Activists
their lives. Examples include schools, professional organizations, unions, and the media. While State society may deploy the physical manifestations of power-armies, police, secret services, and so on-civil institutions shore up hegemony through cultural attitudes that often render the direct use of force unnecessary." Hegemony, however, is not a natural and transcendental force but a social order that must be constantly shored up by those groups in power. Cultural practices, therefore, are available as a vehicle not only to those who support a social order, but also to those who would resist and change it. Indeed, a given individual, institution, practice, or artifact may simultaneously resist and reinforce aspects of hegemony (an example would be a play, such as Waiting for Lefty, that challenges the relationship between workers and employers but depends, in several scenes, upon a hegemonic view of the relationships between men and ~ o i n e n ) .Gramsci's ~" and other theorists' work reveals that cultural hegemony, dominant ideologies, and "dominant culture" (the ideas, art, entertainment, and other cultural practices of the mainstream) should not be conceptualized as unified, omnipotent objects (a model that leads to the Right's "capture-the-flag" image of a war to "win back the culture"), but rather understood as multifaceted, unstable, and continually contested systems that may be challenged via representation. Ideology, however, does not constitute the sole facet of the politics of representation. The concept of "representation," of course, refers not only to the articulation of ideas but also to the act of speaking for or about 0thers. Scholars engaging the political analysis of texts usually use the term "representation" to refer to the cultural object itself or to the process of rendering events in artistic form (a play or book is a "representation" and to stage a play or write a book is to engage in an act of "representation"). These specialized uses of the word "representation" within academia coexist with more quotidian uses of the term to discuss political process and power: one speaks of a Congressional representative, someone representing a community, or a client seeking legal representation in a suit.41 With notable exceptions, critical theorists' inquiries have tended not to deal directly with these other meanings of the word "representatioi~."~~ The process of artistic creation, embedded as it is in human social activity, involves both representation understood as ideological construction and representation read in terms of struggles over resources and who speaks for whom. In the case of the Miss Saigon controversy, for instance, Asian Americans charged that their communities were neither represented well in terms of the show's narrative nor well represented in terms of employment. Indeed, when one examines a particular case, the various meanings of the term "representation" frequently bleed together. As legal scholar Martha Minow remarks, "there is something slippery and thus misleading in the use of a term like representation. One of its meanings slides into its other meanings without consistency or reliability" (Minow, "From Class
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Actions" 15). Minow seems troubled by representation's refusal to stand still-but where slipperiness may worry a jurist, it points to fascinating avenues for the performance scholar to explore. The "slippage" among the meanings of "representation" is particularly evident when one examines performances (as opposed to texts or visual works, for example) and confronts both an artistic representation (a character) and a human representative of various communities (an actor). Playing a part constitutes a nodal point on the web of cultural understandings of representation. An actor playing a role embodies simultaneously a character that produces meaning as part of the rendered text, a person with a social identity independent of the text, and a series of choices (casting, costuming, ticket purchases based on seeing a "star," and so on) by directors, designers, audience members, and others regarding the manufacture and consumption of cultural products. This complex, dynamic nature of representation raises issues regarding two terms that constitute the subject of debate within cultural studies and, indeed, in US politics: community and identity. Critical theorists note that the apparently benign concept of "community" actually conceals a variety of problems and interests; yet, the word has both a power and currency that cannot be dismissed. Community relates to the politics of representation in (at least) two ways: people produce and speak about community through acts of representation, and people who create representations frequently speak for their community, or are perceived as doing so. The ideas of "community" created via representations, like the concept of the "converted" discussed above, can signify a unity and homogeneity that belies the complexity of a group. Bruce McConachie-citing Sonja I
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Actors and Activists
whom they don't actually share interests. In fact, the act of speaking for or about a "community" has the potential to define and manipulate the character and boundaries of a previously fluid group. O n the other hand, someone who seeks simply to speak of their own experience may be accused of unfairly speaking for a g r ~ u p . ~ ' We cannot somehow abandon the idea of community, but we can remain aware of its complexities. Kobena Mercer, considering gayllesbianlqueer communities, refers to these complexities as the "burden of representation," suggesting that, as Jill Dolan paraphrases, "we consider gay, lesbian, queer representations as speaking from community or identity positions, rather than speaking for them" (Dolan, "Building" 8). The symbolic interactionist perspective, with its emphasis on on-going negotiation within networks also offers a paradigm of community as dynamic and representation as contingent. Furthermore, Roman argues that performers (he speaks specifically of queer performers) can, in fact, use representational strategies to puncture mythologies of community: "Queer solo performers trouble the comfort of community even as they invest in it, and this tension is what I find so exciting. One could even argue that queer solo performers are often at the frontiers of new social identities and more inclusive community formations" (Hughes and Roman 5-6; see also Miller and Roman). I seek to maintain a similar balance, offering analysis of the perils of illegitimate representation while also valuing radical tactics that appeal to contingent communities; in Chapter 4, I suggest (building upon the work of Fuoss and other) that one way to strike this balance is to conceptualize "performances of community." Like concepts of community, formulations of identity prove powerful when seen as contingent, and perilous when viewed as essential. As with community, identity constitutes a central feature of the politics of representation. Representations and cultural contests help to define the boundaries between who "we" are and how "we" behave; in other words, cultural contest relates to identities and identity politics. Edward Said, for instance, links the individual's negotiation of identity to struggles surrounding identity on a national scale, arguing: You read Dame or Shakespeare in order to keep up with the best that was thought and ltnown, and also to see yourself, your people, societ!; and tradition in their best lights. In time, culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or the state; this differentiates 'us' from 'them,' almost always with some degree of xenophobia. Culture in this sense is a source of identity, and a rather combative one a t that, as we see in recent 'returns' to culture and tradition. (Culture and Imperialism xiii) Said sees knowledge about representations, as well as the content of representations, as producing the ideological distinction between "us" and "Other." (Said's discussion of identity, culture, tradition, and power also brings to mind Pierre Bourdieu's argument that individuals negotiate class
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relations through knowledge of culture; according to Bourdieu, the ability to make distinctions of taste in art marks one's position within society, so iildividuals within a society acquire and spend not only monetary capital but also "cultural capital"; see Bourdieu Distinctions, 1-7, and "Cultural Reproduction. "4') The impact and complexity of "identity" become clear when one considers its relationship to issues of gender, race, aild class. When US culture operates upon a notion of fixed identity, those who cannot lay claim to a static identity find themselves trapped between categories, as Joseph Roach notes in an essay on the subject. After analyzing Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin's statement that the "most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries," Roach discusses James Clifford's account of a Native American nation's fruitless legal battle to assert its identity in order to claim land, pointing out that life on the boundaries has real consequences in terms of power and resources. Roach argues: The marginal conditions of life between powerful categories, the condition that postmodern ethnographers [Roach includes himself among them] find so rich in cultural expressiveness, renders the persons actually trying to live between them extremely vulnerable to the punitive consequences of their undecidability. . . . they live, for better or worse, in a double culture, invested in two worlds (at least), yet faced with powerful laws and customs favoring unitary identities. One reason for this phenomenon in Ainerican societ!; I belieye, is an historic tendency, first to collapse culture into categories of race, and then to enforce those categories as absolutes, as if they were set down in black and white. (Roach, "Mardi Gras Indians" 467-468)
Similarly, Audre Lorde dubbed the product of these powerful, static conceptions of identity the "mythic norm." Lorde argues that US society constructs an image of the perfect, successful, worthwhile person as young, White, wealthy, physically fit, and male, thereby telling those people who cannot possibly fit into the mold, especially women of color, that they have already been relegated to the fringe of the social order (Lorde 116). Critical theorists and symbolic interactionists not only critique tendencies to espouse static conceptions of identity; they also forward a more flexible understanding of identity (both of the self and the group) as a dynamic process (just as they posit a flexible model of community to counter the notion of a unified, homogenous, and mythic c o m m ~ ~ n i t y )Said, . ' ~ for instance, contrasts the tendency to define identity in terms of oppositions (LIS VS. them) with a more open idea that embraces multiple identities and permeable boundaries, a conception of identity he refers to with the musical term "contrapuntal." Indeed, speaking of American identity, he declares, "the battle within it is between advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex but not reductively unified one. This opposition implies two different perspectives, two historiographies, one linear and subsuming, the other contrapuntal and often nomadic" (Culture
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and Imperialism xxv; 5 1 ) . In conversation with Said, African American critic Gayle Pemberton similarly offered an articulation of identity as flexible, saying, "This raises such an important question in terms of black history in this country because it seems to me that being authentically black is being improvisational and anything" (Pemberton et al.). Similarly, the symbolic interaction perspective posits identity as a social process, not a given structure (see Katovich and Reese). Moreover, as I noted when discussing symbolic interaction and occupational identity, and as I shall explore in analysis of my cases, individuals routinely negotiate multiple identities, such as performer and activi~t.~' Theories of identity become more complex when one considers the debates surrounding "identity politics." In the history of social movements, numerous oppressed persons have found a sense of essential group identity to be a source of morale and power. Colonized peoples, women of color, White women, people of color, lesbian and gay people, and others with a sense of a common experience of oppression have all pursued what is now called identity politics. Without dismissing the achievements of these movements, critical theorists (many of whom have participated in the movements) note that many such campaigns have been predicated upon the same static concept of identity that fuels the "mythic norm," raising a variety of issues. O n the one hand, activists and theorists alike see grave dangers in defining a movement in terms of a shared identity. They point out that this approach has exposed activists to attack: many conservatives have railed against participants in movements based on identity as seeking "entitlement" and "special rights," and some liberals have argued (in a move that seems to blame the victim) that identity group politics divides social movements and deflects attention from economic reform." Though they denounce the manipulative rhetoric of such assaults, critical theorists and political activists have noted that movements based in a static sense of identity may become, for some, an end in and of themselves that supports rather than challenges static, oppressive social categories." Other theorists and activists contend that the politics of identity, which seek visibility in and protection from the mainstream, offer oppressed peoples little enduring protection (see E. Diamond 10; and Phelan, Unmarked). O n the other hand, critics and activists alike-including those forwarding an understanding of identity as multifaceted-appreciate the enormous power and even romance of conventional identity politics and the need for flexibility even as one advances an idea of contingency. Jill D o h , for instance-considering Judith Butler's argument that identities constitute surface enactments along with Ed Cohen's response that this view ignores potentials for subversion-suggests that "there is something that can't be so quickly dismissed about the emotional charge of what identity politics has come to describe too fixedly" (Dolan, Presence and Desire 16-17; see
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also Elam, Taking It, 136-138). Indeed, theories of contingency and improvisation may threaten (or be perceived as threatening) those categorized by the mainstream as Others by asking them to surrender a sense of identity that has only recently come to connote dignity and demand respect. Sandra L. Richards, for instance, notes that questions regarding the constructed nature of categories such as race can provoke rage and terror among Others, who fear such challenges not only endanger political gains, but also evaporate one's sense of self."' Those who wholeheartedly embrace the crisis in identity politics do not ignore these complexities, but they do argue that a philosophy of identity as protean offers newfound potential for social change (see Romin, "Speaking" 126).While I don't wish to sidestep these issues myself, I also harbor no illusion that this study will "solve" the problems presented by the concepts of "identity" and "identity politics," for struggles regarding the idea of identity constitute a consistent feature of negotiations within social worlds and of cultural contests. Another integral component of cultural contest and the politics of representation is the concept of discourse (Said, Orientalism, 94). The French philosopher Michel Foucault coined a specialized meaning of "discourse" to refer to the systemic and political nature of apparently neutral speech regarding controversial issues, especially institutional discussions of issues such as the proper regulation of deviance or resistance to the social order. Discourse is both more closed and more authoritative than simple conversation; for instance, most of those who shape a discourse possess some kind of "expert" status (Said, "Deconstructing"), though I suggest that those engaged in political action and cultural activity also contribute to, challenge, or reshape discourse^.'^ In addition, discourses exist independent of any one institution, comprised as they are of the speech and actions emanating from numerous segments of society. For example, the American Medical Association produced speech about smoking by publishing articles and making public health recommendations, but the discourse on smoking in the US involves not only activities of the medical establishment, but also the acts and rhetoric of government, corporations, farmers, libertarians, and other groups that participate in the formation of a recognizable but evolving debate that affects policy and beliefs. In this study I use the term "national political discourse" to describe various contests within US culture(s): struggles to define policy and belief carried out in national forums, especially in governmental institutions and the mass media.j2 (One might object that the term "political discourse" is redundant, since all discourse is inherently political. Indeed, the whole point of referring to a phenomenon as "discourse," rather than "debate," is to mark it as a system of thought able to produce its own reality and thereby influence government, resources, and beliefs. However, just as I use the phrase "politically engaged performance" to describe performances that foreground a political project, so too I use the phrase "national
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political discourse" to refer to discourses that highlight rather than conceal their political qualities.) Individual cultural products and discussions about them participate in national political discourses, both drawing upon and contributing to them. Miss Saigon, for example, participated not only in an intercultural discourse on "the Orient" but also in US national political discourses on race and on the war in Vietnam. Once the musical became controversial, it became part of national political discourses on affirmative action and multiculturalism. Considering Foucault's theories also raises the serious issue of the limits of agency. Foucault tends to discuss discourse and other concepts as though they exist independent of the human activity that creates them. In particular, Foucault suggests that modern people have become so accustomed to surveillance and corrective disciplines that they have internalized state sanctions, so that resistant actions tend to be short circuited in an individual's thoughts (see Discipline and Punish). A thorough critique of this philosophy lies beyond this study. I do note, however, that critical theorists and symbolic interaction sociologists both articulate approaches that simultaneously acknowledge the overwhelming power of social systems (be they institutions or less formally organized worlds or discourses), but nevertheless see these structures as constructed by people (cf., Drewal29ff; I
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Acknowledging the possibility of resistant spectacles does not necessarily fly in the face of spectacle and media theories. Consider, for instance, the ambiguity of Debord's theories with respect to political action. MacAloon critiques Debord's idea that spectacle forins an all-encompassing system, arguing instead that it constitutes one among several genres of cultural performance: Debord's thesis is marred by his refusal to distinguish spectacle as an organized genre of cultural performance from the ways in which social life in general is like a spectacle and affords an environment within which the spectacle grows. Not only is the claim that all society is a spectacle cheap wisdom, but it contradicts the very program of the situationists [the activist-intellectual group in which Debord participated]. As Xlain Touraine noted in 1968, 'The situationists . . . make use of street theatre and spontaneous spectacles to criticize society and denounce new forms of alienation.' H o w does one cure the disease with another dose of the disease? Debord does not explain, or eyen seem to notice the contradiction. (272; italics and ellipse in original)
Where MacAloon sees Debord as sacrificing accuracy to his "grandiose claim" that society is spectacle, IZershaw argues that Debord and the situationists pursued precisely the fire-fights-fire strategy MacAloon questions. Without dismissing the power of mass media that pursue their own interests, IZershaw suggests that performances "double society back on itself," revealing the constructed nature of state authority ("Fighting" 257, 260-261)." In either case, two important points emerge: first, spectacle specifically and media-dominated societies generally must be regarded as dynamic rather than omnipotent systems; second, performance constitutes a prime strategy for infiltrating and resisting the economies of spectacle and mass communication. IV. AN INCLUSIVE MODELFOR
THE
INTERSECTION OF POLITICS
AND ~ E R F O R ~ I A N C E
The ideas forwarded by postmodern critical theorists and symbolic interactions sociologists offer a foundation for a model of art's relationship to activism that focuses upon exchange among people in different but overlapping segments of society. Such a model neither ignores nor becomes overburdened by the cause-and-effect efficacy debate and other perennial questions that tend to tangle discussions of "political theatre." The point of articulating this model is not to create a new genre or category for overtly political performance, but to seek a system for understanding the intersection of performance (whether "mainstream" or "alternative") and politics as a dynamic relationship constructed and negotiated by participants in various social worlds. This section offers a detailed model for this sociocultural understanding of performance and politics, beginning with a brief consideration of an audience's reception of overtly political performances,
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and then considering broader questions of how performance institutions relate to political activist worlds.
The Audience In the chapters that follow, I am, in general, concerned more with the goals pursued and relationships established by performers and activists than with the reactions of audience members. An analysis of performance and politics would be incomplete, however, without some specific consideration of how audience members use performances they attend. As is the case in theories of politics and art in general, one finds that many casual observers use constricting binary oppositions to approach audiences' political responses. In particular, I'm suspicious of the tendency to imagine an opposition between pleasure and politics; not only can these aspects of experience coexist, but many audience members find pleasure specifically in the political resonance of a performance. Contrariwise, while one must be wary of exploitation in commercial performance, one should not assume that a performance aimed primarily at evoking pleasure necessarily forestalls political reception; indeed, audience members may have a radical reaction to (or against) mainstream performances that do not foreground politics." More generally, one discovers two common models used to explain an audience's reception of explicitly political performance: the propaganda model, in which spectators receive a message communicated by the performance, and the ritual model, in which the performance forges a sense of communal ties among spectators. While both models offer valuable insights, I suggest that a politically engaged performance functions for individual spectators not simply as an isolated incident that wins converts to a cause nor solely as a foundry of group identity, but as one among many experiences that form a person's political consciousness. This model requires some explanation. Performances work for the spectator as a component of a larger political life, which is, in turn, a component of their life as a whole. One cannot demand a direct cause-and-effect relationship between attendance at a performance and political action, not because theatre lacks efficacy, but because political action is rarely this clear-cut, and an individual's political consciousness can rarely if ever be traced to a single factor. I suggest the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, in which a performance offers spectators a "piece" that they assemble as part of a larger arrangement. An individual's political engagement (i.e., her or his recognition of and action regarding a problem that requires an organized response and systemic change) does not spring forth fully formed, but arises from the accumulation of experiences and thoughts. In this model, overtly political performances may, in fact, inspire immediate action, or they may not have an effect until long after the spectator leaves the theatre. Different audience members generally approach political performances with varying degrees of knowledge about
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both art and politics-with different pieces of the puzzle-and these levels of knowledge affect their reception of and political response to the work. For a spectator who already has a collection of pieces (in the form of ideas or even vague experiences), a political performance could offer the final segment that makes everything else "click." For a spectator who has already assembled a personal political puzzle, the performance may provide further links, or could be viewed by the spectator as old news. For still other spectators, a performance will be their introduction to an issue-the first piece in a puzzle that may initially appear illsignificant because it lacks context. Such audience members may later accumulate other experiences that, along with the performance, offer a picture that inspires action, or the performance may remain a random and irrelevant piece.j6 In addition, as suggested above, spectators inay receive inainstreain performances in similar ways. For example, many resistant spectators have reshaped reactionary plays into pieces of their radical puzzles (e.g., as an instance of the problems they perceive in the theatre world and the dominant culture). A similar metaphor can explain how performers create political meaning in their work: rather than rely upon a single technique, performers use a "toolbox" of strategies, shaping puzzle pieces they offer to spectators (a point I take up in the final chapter on the NEA Four). There are, of course, limits to the jigsaw puzzle metaphor. First, literal jigsaw puzzles offer a final, single picture, whereas political puzzles are always under construction and always interconnect with other aspects of an individual's psyche and social relationships. Second, a piece of a jigsaw puzzle has a fixed location whereas an individual's reception of a performance can fit into their "puzzles" of experience in a variety of ways. Finally, when arguing that each spectator reacts differently I do not meail to imply that a performance has as many meanings as spectators (one cannot privilege individual spectators' interpretations to the point of erasing a performance's political content and its connections with other parts of society). Rather, spectators can derive a mnge of meanings from a given performance, based upon the "pieces" of the puzzle they possess and the ways in which they arrange them. In summary, I consider performance to have a great potentzal to influence spectators, but see the actual effect of a particular performance as tied to a myriad of other social relations. Though I do, at times, consider the impact of particular political performances for certain audiences or audience members, throughout this study I am concerned primarily with the interchange between the social worlds of politics and performance. The remainder of this segment offers a model for those relationships. The "Constellation" of Institutional Performance In order to construct a model of the intersection of politics and performance, I return to the idea that artistic activity is organized in networks
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Actors and Activists
of shared uilderstailding called social worlds. One cannot fix the exact boundaries of a social world; indeed, one can focus one's gaze to discuss worlds within worlds: the art world includes the theatre world which includes the Broadway and the off-Broadway worlds. This is not sloppy terminology, but rather language that describes a messy reality. In addition, social worlds overlap or intersect one another, as when a performer works both on and off-Broadway (which requires connections to networks in both environments)." While all segments of society ultimately interconnect, one nevertheless finds affinities among certain social worlds: the ninetynine seat theatre in SoHo and a Broadway theatre, despite vast difference in income and prestige, share profound coimections (e.g., mores, traditions, personnel, and patrons). I refer to closely related and overlapping social worlds as "constellations" of social worlds. The configuration and relationships among the various elements in a constellation (unlike an astronomical constellation) are not rigid but are instead constantly negotiated by the participants in the various worlds. These negotiations are not necessarily hostile, but neither are they automatically amicable. For instance, participants in the world of commercial performance tend to be wary of association with community and educational theatre worlds, which they see as threatening their status as "professionals," even though all these worlds are part of the constellation I call "institutional performance" (which I discuss further below). When an occasion dictates that the worlds of professional and community theatre meet, as when a professional designer or director works for a community arts project, the participants don't have to "reinvent the wheel," since they share a common understanding of what happens in the theatre, but they do have to negotiate their differences. I refer to such encounters among constellations of social worlds as "shared territory." I should point out, however, that this metaphor has limits: whereas topographical territory has a geographic referent, these social laildscapes exist only in the constant interaction of people (though such interactions may be institutionalized to the point that they appear nearly geologi~al).'~ As mentioned above, I use the term "institutional performance" to refer to the constellation of overlapping social worlds in which people gather with the primary and express intent of creating and coilsuining live performance. The value of the idea of a constellation of institutional performance worlds is that it provides a means to recognize the similarities and interconnections among all those who consider live performance their vocation while simultaneously accounting for the vast and sometimes irreconcilable differences of practice and thought among these people and the organizations they create. To posit a constellation of institutional performance is also, of course, to argue that many activities are not part of the constellation. Film, television, and other types of broadcast performance form a different constellation of worlds, albeit a constellation that shares a great
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53
deal of territory with institutional performance; the difference lies not so much in the "specialness" of live performance (see Auslander, Liveness) but in the different networks and conventions participants in these worlds maintain (consider the relative power of playwrights versus teams of screenwriters, or the typecasting of actors as "theatre" or ''film" actors). Likewise, not all theatrical performances lie within the coilstellation of institutional performance. Such distinctions rest, however, not on genre, prestige, or aesthetics, but on the degree to which worlds share features, including personnel, training, criticism, and conventions. For example, since the mid-twentieth century, clear, institutional connections have existed between the worlds of commercial theatre, non-profit theatre, university theatre, community theatre, and much alternative theatre and performance art (to mine only a few performance worlds). That is, artists, teachers, critics, and patrons have moved among these worlds, sharing conventions and negotiating (amicably or hostile) differences. These worlds clearly form a part of the constellation of institutional performance in the present-day US. Rituals and other forms of what performance studies scholars call "cultural performance" (weddings, funerals, graduations, political demonstrations, and so on) clearly fall outside the territory of institutional performance (though, as the central point of this study argues, exchange occurs frequently). In addition, not all forms of theatre constitute institutional performance. Consider the hypothetical example of a graininar school play scripted and directed by a teacher with little if any theatrical training, performed by students, and decorated by parents who also have no ties to other theatre worlds. Most observers would agree that this production both constitutes theatre and lies beyond the realm of institutional performance (though it does use conventions associated with theatre worlds). Finally, perhaps most importantly, at the boundaries of the constellation of institutional performance, distinctions become moot as categories blur (can one find a fruitful answer to a question such as, "If the grammar school play described above were scripted and directed by a parent who was a professional actor, would this production then have ties to other theatre worlds?"). Just as performance worlds frequently, inevitably overlap, so too the constellation of social worlds that I refer to as institutional performance overlaps with other clusters of social worlds (consider the Actors' Equity Association, which is an integral component of institutional performance in the US, but is also part of other constellations, notably organized labor). Just as participants in performance institutions must negotiate the relationships among various worlds of performance, so too must they negotiate interaction with other social worlds. This coilceptualizatioil of politics and performance as the activity occurring at the intersection of coilstellatioils of social worlds constitutes a flexible model that accounts for the inherent political qualities of all art: if
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Actors and Activists
one understands art as a process coilducted by individuals interacting in constellations of social worlds, one must recognize that art exists in relation to other social activities, that it therefore participates in struggles for resources, and that artistic activity influences and is influenced by other worlds and their discourses. The model also (I hope) offers a method for analyzing specific instances of exchange between artistic activity and political activity that does not become preoccupied by the perennial questions that haunt discussions of overtly political art, concentrating instead upon the relationships, negotiations, and contests occasioned by the overlapping of social activity." What remains is to explain in greater detail how, specifically, interaction between institutional performance and political organizing plays out. Institutional Performance and Activism In this effort to understand the interaction between art and politics, I examine institutional performance as an example of artistic activity; on the political side of the equation, I consider political activism. Whereas the constellation of institutional performance is composed of worlds maintained by participants who view the creation of live performance as their vocation (Broadway theatre, regional theatre, performance art, and so on), the constellation of activist worlds consists of persons who devote their energy to achieving social change through direct action. Just as institutional performance includes worlds that may be informal (community theatre troupes) or quite structured (non-profit performance art organizations), so too the activist constellation includes everything from ad hoc committees to long-standing, institutional organizations. As is the case with institutional performance, some activities clearly fall outside the realm of activism (for example, most activists with whom I have worked, and, I believe, most observers, would not consider serving in Congress as activism, though it clearly constitutes participation in the larger realm of politics, and, of course, a community activist may be elected to Congress). As in institutional performance, participants in worlds within the constellation of activism must negotiate differences as they work together, and individual activists or entire activist worlds may disagree bitterly with one another, even when cooperating to achieve a common goal (as when coinmunists and social democrats-who hold opposing worldviews-work together on an anti-war campaign). In addition, activists frequently understand their activity as opposing the actions of other activist worlds. One could conceive of activism as divided into (at least) two constellations, situated on the Left and the Right: pro-choice and anti-choice activists, for instance, use similar conventions (e.g., street protests) but rarely if ever share resources or personnel."hMy own experience supports this view, though I recognize occasions when even these distinct boundaries appear blurry (as
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55
when representatives of Patrick Buchanan's presidential campaign appeared-many would say opportunistically-at generally Left-oriented demonstrations staged in 1999 opposing the World Trade Organization). I discuss the character of activism in greater detail in Chapter 2. My main concern at this point is to demonstrate that the worlds of activism and performance intersect in a number of ways on a variety of occasions. I conceive of the relationship between activism and performance as the intersection of two constellations of social worlds, each of which has semi-permeable boundaries. Insiders in each constellation initiate activities that enter this overlapping territory either when they use the conventions associated with the other constellatioi~,or when they cooperate directly with insiders to the other coi~stellation(see Figure 1.1). Moreover, some people constitute insiders in both constellatioils of worlds. Such exchange is not passive, but instead represents a negotiation among participants in their respective social worlds. It is important to note that, though this model focuses on process and insiders' actions, it does not ignore the content or representational politics this activity produces. O n the contrary, it recognizes that the work created by performers and activists grows out of and influences social interactions. Before discussing specific examples of exchange between insiders to the worlds of activism and performance, I wish to offer several additional caveats regarding my model and the chart I use to illustrate it. First and foremost, relationships in social coilstellatioils are not static; rather, they vary in character and intensity over time, exist only so long as they are maintained by participants in the various social worlds, and need not imply an inherent difference in value. In short, neither my model nor the chart indicate movement away from an authentic center of "politics" or "performance"; rather they graph degrees of engagement and exchange between insiders in institutional performance and in the constellation of activist worlds. Nor do I intend to imply motion from the center of activity to the margins. Such metaphors of distance create the false impression that certain forms or occasions for performance are more valid or authentic than others. Questions such as, "Which performance is more political: radical performance artist Tim Miller's monologues about gay sexuality or the commercial Second City theatre company's performance at a benefit to raise money for pro-choice activists?" quickly distract one from an exainination of the exchange between social worlds. Similarly, though artistactivists appear at the center of the chart, I do not mean that their activity is more or less authentic than other examples. Rather, all the items that appear where the circles overlap blur boundaries between institutional performance and activism; artist-activists simply personify a greater degree of this blurring. Finally, the chart obviously presents only a range of examples of performerlactivist interaction, not all possibilities.
Actors and Activists
\
/
ACTIVISM
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\ \
\
\
Activity lnitiated by Performance World lnsiders
Activity lnitiated by Activist World Insiders Demonstrations Usinq theatrical devices (e.g., costumes) Guerrilla theatre Activity called "theatre," including activist-performance troupes' work Working with professional performers
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INSTITUTIONAL \ PERFORMANCE
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Plays without overt political content Plays referring tolappropriating politics (e.g., Miss Saigon) Plays with overt political content (e.g., Angels in America) Community-oriented performance1 theatre for development Protests regarding theatre ( e g . opposing Miss Saigon's casting)
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I
Activity lnitiated by lnsiders to Both Worlds Artist-Activists and their work
Figure 1.1. EXCHANGE BETWEEN THE SOCIAL WORLDS OF ACTIVISM AND INSTITUTIONAL PERFORMANCE. The intersection of art and politics may be conceptualized as a process of exchange between insiders worlting within constellations of social worlds, in this case, the constellation of institutional performance worlds (consisting of networlts of people who undertalte the creation of live performance as a vocation, including but not limited to colnmercial theatre, non-profit theatre, community theatre, and performance art) and the constellation of activist worlds (composed of the networlts of individuals involved in diverse but intertwined social movements). Social world constellations blur and merge with the other constellations, as indicated here by the broken circles inscribing the worlds of activism and performance. The points in the circles represent events that manifest varying degrees of engagement between insiders in activist and performance worlds. It is important to note that all these occasions blur distinctions between politics and art, and that proximity to the center of the chart indicates more direct engagement between insiders in each world, not greater value, efficacy, or authenticity. Obviously, the chart presents examples, as it would be futile to attempt a schematic of all possible engagements between activism and performance.
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It will be worthwhile at this point to discuss in greater detail empirical instances of exchange between activism and performance. Following the sequence plotted in Figure 1.1, I begin with examples initiated by activists, moving from those instances of activism that display few if any direct ties to theatre as a n institutional practice to clear examples of cooperation between activism and theatre. Activists frequently engage in activities, such as political demonstrations, that clearly contain elements of performance but that lie outside the realm of institutional performance because the activists do not self-consciously recognize their actions as performance. These events can still be called "performative" (i.e., actions through which people enact ideas) and considered "cultural performances" (i.e., preplanned, staged activities not necessarily recognized as performance by the participants), but they evidence little direct connection with theatre as an art world.61 O n the other hand, as indicated by the next item on my chart, when activists use theatrical elements (e.g., by marching in costume or deploying props as part of a demonstration) they begin to forge links with worlds of institutional performance. When activists use perforinative devices in their actions, however, they draw not only upon theatrical practices, but also upon other performance traditions. "Theatre" exists both in institutions, such as theatre companies, and in not-necessarily-institutional sets of social practices and traditions, such as mummery or campfire skits. Activists' use of elements of theatrical practice, therefore, exist on the border of shared territory between activism and institutional performance. "Guerrilla" theatre pieces staged without announcement by activists constitute evidence of a greater degree of exchange. These actions fall within the shared territory of activism and institutional performance not only because they often involve the adoption of scripting, rehearsal, scenic elements and other conventions of theatre as an institutional practice (as the Schacht case demonstrates), but also because the activists who create them are often familiar with or versed in the tradition of grassroots protest theatre (itself a gray area where artists and activists work together and politics and art merge). Even more clearly linked with institutional performance are occasions during which activists stage performances that they themselves call "theatre." Activists sometimes identify their use of perforinative devices specifically with theatre; I have, for instance, been involved in meetings planning marches during which activists suggested using costumes or properties by explicitly saying, "Let's do theatre." Moreover, activists frequently create full-fledged performances they label "theatre" or "drama," thereby drawing upon performance as a set of institutional practices. This activist engagement of theatrical conventions and networks becomes even more apparent when one considers the example of activists who create standing activist theatre troupes in order to pursue political action. During my
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participation in activism in Chicago, I witnessed the work of two theatre troupes run by community activists. In each case, the activists involved defined their work as theatre and self-consciously articulated a relationship to institutional performance. Additionally, some of these activists had training in art worlds, evidencing a clear connection between activism and performance institutions: one troupe had members who had worked with alternative theatre troupes while another was directed by a professional visual artist familiar with performance art worlds. Yet, these activist performers identified themselves and their activity with activist movements, and they and other activists saw their theatrical activity as a component of activism; in other words, these were instances of activists using artistic conventions, not theatre world personnel "doing their thing" in the activist world. A final example of interchange between institutional performance and public life initiated by activists is the engagement of theatre world insiders by activists (e.g., to help create a performance or to perform at an activist function, such as a fund-raiser.) In such cases, the activismlinstitutional theatre link is self-evident: insiders in each world work together, in this case to further the projects of activists. I now shift to activities originating in institutional performance. Here too, my chart examines progressively more explicit instances of exchange between insiders in the worlds of activism and performance. Just as activists engage in activities that they do not acknowledge as performative, performance professionals pursue actions they do not consider to be directly engaged in politics. The musical Phantom of the Opera, for instance, exists outside the sphere of political activism, though it clearly participates in the political life of the US (by reinforcing conventional gender roles and by playing a part in the economy of the Broadway stage, for instance). Miss Saigon, on the other hand, skirted the border of the activist sphere even before the controversy surrounding the show's casting. As I shall argue, the play's producers self-consciously highlighted its topical subject matter. The musical generally and one scene in particular-in which a character delivers a speech advocating support for the children fathered by US soldiers in Vietnam while documentary footage of actual refugees appears on a screen-evidenced the appropriation of activist conventions for use on the commercial stage. Other forms of institutional performance engage activism in different ways. Examples of exchange between activism and performance include plays with political content, such as Angels In America, a play that contains speeches advocating attention to people with AIDS and depicts characters involved in AIDS activism. Figure 1.1 also considers the world of community-oriented performance as entering the territory shared by theatre and activism. Consider the Swamp Gravy theatre-for-development project. Director Richard Geer was employed by the town of Colquitt, Georgia, to
Exchange Between Art Worlds and Political Worlds
59
oversee the production of a theatre piece that would bring economic development to that rural community. Rather than create a conventional historical drama, Geer and his collaborators used oral-history techniques to script a performance based upon the experiences of members of the community and then cast the play using members of the community as actors. Geer intended that the production process be activist in several ways: as an economic engine; as an opportunity to engage the community in performance; and as a vehicle for provoking thought regarding the conventional understanding of historical events (Richard Geer et al.). In addition, insiders to institutional performance adopt activist conventions and work with activists in order to pursue social justice within their social worlds. Whereas Miss Snigon's appropriations lie at the fuzzy border between activism and theatre, the Asian American actors who protested the casting of Miss Snigon found themselves squarely in the overlapping territory shared by performance and activism. They adopted activist conventions not as part of a production, but in order to pursue activist goals within their art world. In so doing, they forged connections with political activists, and, in some cases, became activists themselves (e.g., many of the actors who organized against Miss Snigon's casting eventually broadened their actions from critiquing casting to decrying negative portrayals of Asians throughout US media). Many of the performers I talked to expressed both pride and ambivalence about this unaccustomed role. Finally, boundaries between performance and activism blur altogether when people work as insiders in both sets of social worlds. For example, Tim Miller considers himself, and is considered by others, to be both a professional performer and a gay-and-lesbian-rights and AIDS activist; likewise, he creates work he and others consider both art and activism. While all activities that occur in the territory shared by activist and institutional performance worlds blur boundaries between these constellations of social interaction, the work of those who negotiate insider status in both sets of worlds reveals the merging of categories to a degree that merits a separate designation in my chart and a chapter later in the book.
In the remaining chapters, I consider case studies that examine three combinations of politics and art, beginning with a discussion of exchange initiated within activist worlds, moving to a consideration of interaction begun in the constellation of institutional performance, and concluding with an examination of the work of artist-activists who maintain insider status in both these constellations. Before taking up this analysis, I discuss briefly (in this section) the sorts of situations I consider evidence of exchange between art worlds and political worlds, as well as the various critical approaches I draw upon in order to interpret this evidence, and I review (in the section that follows) the historical context in which the cases occurred.
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Actors and Activists
When one explores the connections between art worlds and political worlds, one encounters evidence of indirect exchange, direct exchange, and the negotiation of insider status in both worlds. Indirect exchange occurs when insiders to one world adopt or adapt the conventions associated with the other world. When activists stage performances and label them "theatre," or when professional actors recognize their pickets against the casting of a play as activism, social worlds intersect. In such cases, insiders to one world don't merely undertake an activity, they foreground that activity's relationship to another constellation of worlds. This form of exchange between art worlds and political worlds is particularly important precisely because it is indirect: it reveals that insiders in each world value the other world's activity independent of direct contact. This indirect exchange may constitute knowledgeable application of another world's conventions (as when activists staging performances based their work on experience with grassroots theatre troupes) or appropriation (as when, I argue, Miss Saigon's producers used references to politics and activism to advance the musical's plot and market its spectacle). Obviously, this sort of exchange may be initiated by insiders from either activist or performance worlds: I examine indirect exchange in the chapters on activist performance and Miss Saigon. More direct interaction among social worlds occurs when insiders in one world seek out insiders in another world in order to advance their activity. Instances of this more direct exchange range from transitory consultations (e.g., an activist asking a performer for advice regarding a planned political action) to long-standing relationships. Though such exchange may be either harmonious or tense, it inevitably entails negotiations of similarities and differences between the social worlds. As with indirect exchange, I take up the issue of direct exchange when examining activist performance and actors' responses to Miss Saigon. The final sort of exchange I consider consists of an individual's or group's negotiation of insider status in both political and art worlds. Moving back and forth between two sets of social worlds or maintaining insider status in two constellations at once blurs the boundaries between constellations. Maintaining dual status as an artist-activist, of course, does not exempt one from the tensions of either world; rather, artist-activists and art-activist organizations continually negotiate the intersection of worlds. I attend to this type of exchange primarily in the final chapter on the NEA Four. A final note on direct and indirect exchange: while I strive to be strict in my application of my terms in order to support my contentions convincingly, the process of exchange between art and politics, in fact, exists as a continuum of indirect and direct interaction, and therefore struggles to maintain distinctions between indirect or direct exchange become moot exercises when pursued too rigidly.
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My aim is not simply to document exchange between performers and activists, but also to interpret the politics of representation this interaction generates. In order to do so, I employ a variety of critical approaches, including: attendance at performances; interviews with participants in each of the cases; analysis of scripts and public documents; and examination of secondary sources, particularly journalism and scholarly articles related to the cases. While I strove for consistency in my methods across the case, inevitable differences arose; in particular, my comments on activism grew out of direct participation in organizing and performance not possible in the other two cases. I therefore wish to review my evidence and sources for each case. My comments concerning activism and activist performance are based upon my own observations, formal and informal conversations with activists, and analysis of primary sources (e.g., scripts and photos) and secondary sources (e.g., newspaper articles). I participated in anti-war, pro-choice, and AIDS activist groups in Chicago from 1991 to 1999. My participation ranged from simply attending demonstrations held by ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) or CISPES (the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), to "core" membership in Pledge of Resistance (an organization opposing US military interventions in Central American and the Middle East) and the Coalition for Positive Sexuality (a sexuality education activist group). Likewise, my involvement in activist-produced performance has ranged from attendance and observation of performances at demonstrations, meetings, and fund-raisers, to providing technical support and advice to activist troupes, to facilitating and performing in activist theatre myself. In addition to observing and participating in activist performance, I have interviewed activist performers informally throughout my involvement in activism, and have conducted formal interviews with activist performers and the leaders of two activistperformance troupes. These interviews lasted approximately an hour and, while not following a strict questionnaire, concentrated on the performers' methods, their reasons for choosing performance as tool for political organizing, and their relationship to institutional art worlds. I have also found evidence of activist performance in activist newsletters, the mainstream press, and scholarly books and journals, and historians' accounts of previous social movements. I consider exchange between art and politics initiated in art worlds through examination of the politics of representation of Miss Saigon and the controversies surrounding the musical's New York premier. My methods for analyzing Miss Saigon's politics of representation included textual and performance analysis of the musical itself-based on attendance at several performances of the musical in New York and Chicago, viewing a video recording of the original Broadway cast performance, and listening to the recording of the London production-and analysis of
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Actors and Activists
publicity materials (such as souvenir programs). My exploration of the debates surrounding Miss Snigon's casting and content draw upon evidence found in sources including newspaper reports, documents from legal proceedings, and minutes of activist meetings. As in previous cases, I benefited from the insights of a number of scholars who described and analyzed the musical and the debates surrounding the New York production. Finally, I conducted in-person or telephone interviews with a number of individuals who entered the Miss Snigon controversies at various points. As in the previous cases, these interviews lasted approximately an hour and investigated each individual's background, their views on the case, and their understanding of the relationship between art and politics. A brief overview of the interviews I conducted serves to illustrate the breadth of the controversies and account for some noticeable gaps. Beginning with the latter, I should point out that I tried to contact Cameron Mackintosh (Miss Snigon's producer) and Jonathan Pryce to hear their responses to the controversy, but I was unable to speak with them-I assume their schedules were simply too busy to allow for these interviews. I did, however conduct interviews with people representing most other perspectives in the controversies. I conducted seven interviews with Asian American theatre professionals who had protested the casting of Miss Saigon. I interviewed four officials of Actors' Equity Association, including Executive Secretary Alan Eisenberg and Bernard Marsh, a member of Equity's Committee for Racial Equality, the body within Equity that probably initiated the official sanction against Miss Saigon. I also interviewed three actors who were in the cast of Miss Saigon when it opened in New York, among them Lea Salonga, one of the actors whose casting elicited protests. Additionally, I talked with three professional actors who played roles in productions of Miss Saigon after the controversies subsided. I also met with Harry Newman and Beth Reiff of the Non-Traditional Casting Project to discuss the goals of that organization. In addition to these interviews with theatre professionals, I spoke with three individuals from Asian American community groups who protested against the content as well as the casting of Miss Saigon, and I spoke with Randy Wills, director of the legal department of the New York City Commission on by the Miss Saigon Human Rights, which held hearings-inspired controversy-regarding employment discrimination in theatrical casting. I examine the blurring of boundaries that occurs when individuals or groups maintain insider status in both art and political worlds through analysis of the artistic and political work of ICaren Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller (known collectively as the NEA Four due to the denial of grants to these performance artists by the NEA during the first Bush administration). My consideration of the work and experiences of the NEA Four is based upon my analysis of the following resources: in-person and telephone interviews, performances by the four, published scripts,
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63
reports and editorials in the press, scholarly literature, and legal documents. When researching the NEA Four, I conducted seven interviews. Among the members of the NEA Four, I interviewed John Fleck once, Holly Hughes once, and Tim Miller twice; Karen Finley declined to be interviewed. I also interviewed one of the attorneys for the NEA Four, David Cole, and performance-space administrators in New York and St. Louis who had worked with one or more of the artist-activists. During these interviews I asked the interviewees about their training, relation to the case, political aims, and artistic work. I attended a variety of performances by the four performer^.^' I also explored the debate surrounding the NEA Four in the mainstream press and investigated the scholarly literature on the work of the NEA Four and on the NEA controversy. Finally, I obtained documents from the NEA Four's suit through the Federal court in Los Angeles and online legal reference sites. These materials included rulings and opinions, briefs, arguments, legal exhibits such as NEA memoranda, and depositions by each of the four performers describing the political and artistic aims of their work. The depositions, in particular, constitute an unusual primary source worthy of a brief digression. Theatre scholars frequently have access to interviews in which artists offer insights into their work, but these discussions are rarely conducted under oath. Since legal depositions aim to accomplish a specific task (in this case, proving that the NEA Four had been denied funds illegally), it would be a mistake to assume they represent the artist's "final word." These legal declarations must nevertheless be considered neither more nor less reliable than any other public interview; moreover, the very fact that artists spoke of the conjunction of their artistic and political activities in a public document constitutes evidence of the intersection of performance and activism this study explores. VI. HISTORICAL EXAMPLES OF THE INTERSECTION OF ACTIVISM AND INSTITUTIONAL ~ERFORMVIXNCE Applying a model of social and artistic activity to empirical cases requires an historical balancing act: on the one hand, one cannot assume that one's model fits all times and cultures; on the other, one must attend to precedents and the socio-historical context of case studies. It is important to recognize that exchange between the worlds of activism and performance is not unique to the contemporary United States, that, indeed, examples of the intersection of activism and performance can be found at almost every point in US history (the same could be said, I suspect, of many periods in world history, but such global statements move beyond the scope of this st~dy).~' Without undertaking a comprehensive history of politics and performance, in this section I apply my model of performance and politics as an
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Actors and Activists
exchange among social worlds to a few examples of the intersection of politics and performance in US history. I wish to show that my model may be used to analyze political and performance history, as well as contemporary culture. Further, I suggest that an understanding of politics and performance as a process of exchange helps accomplish the expansion of theatre studies called for by Roach ("Mardi Gras Indians" 462) and others. Finally, a brief discussion of political and performance history offers a context for the cases that occupy the remainder of the study. In the chapters that follow, I first demonstrate that insiders to the worlds of activism adopt the conventions of institutional performance worlds and, furthermore, seek out professional performers. Activist engagement of performance and performance institutions is evident in the history of US social movements. Activists have employed theatrical techniques throughout US history-indeed, the performative activism of the Boston Tea Party constitutes part of the nation's creation mythology. Women seeking the vote at the turn-of-the-century employed performance, and women involved in the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s staged performance events." An example of activist engagement of performance conventions reveals why activists find performance a powerful tool. In 1915, ironically a year celebrated by many as the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation, D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation played throughout the country. The film's derogatory treatment of African Americans as lecherous villains and its favorable depiction of the members of I
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popular attraction for several seasons, renewing itself as Pins and Needles 1939 and N e w Pins and Needles (Bordman, 1986 ed. 506; Smith and Litton 166). The production broached political topics outside the realm of trade-unionism. For example, Gerald Bordman reports that "When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused the Negro [sic] singer, Marian Anderson, permission to give a concert in their Washington auditorium, a spoof of T h e H o t Mikado and T h e Swing Mikado [in Pins and Needles] suddenly found three little maids singing, 'Three little DARs are we 1 Full to the brim with bigotry"' (Bordman, 1986 ed. 506). Pins and Needles represents an instance of exchange between the worlds of activism and performance that occurred when activists-or at least people associated with activist unions-appeared on the institutional stage. The Workers' Laboratory Theatre (WLT), a troupe that performed in the US during the 1930s, further illustrates the blurring of distinctions between activism and institutional performance, though the company's career also shows that troupes fail when members cannot agree on how to approach the intersection of politics and (especially commercial) performance. Founded in 1928 by non-professional actors, the WLT existed in the gray area shared by activist and institutional performance. The WLT presented agitation-propaganda plays, performed by workers, to audiences of workers in union halls and public spaces. It was not expressly affiliated with an activist organization, but it was initially associated with the communist group Workers' International Relief and clearly supported the ideas of the Communist Party. Likewise, it was connected to the world of institutional performance, maintaining an association with the Group Theatre and briefly existing as part of the Federal Theatre Project under the name One-Act Experimental Theatre. The style of agitation-propaganda pioneered by troupes like the WLT affected the style of institutional performances, such as Odets's Waiting for Lefty. The WLT, in turn, was drawn towards the institutional performance, emulating the style of the mainstream theatre more and more as its career progressed, until some members became professional actors and others left theatre entirely (See McDermott; and Malpede Taylor 30-60). Exchange between performance and activism was also evident in the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. The performance-based activism of the Yippies (e.g., throwing money onto the floor of the New York stock exchange and "electing" Pigasus the Pig as president) constitutes a wellknown example. Significantly, the Yippies maintained ties with radical theatre artists. Yippie Jerry Rubin, for instance, cited a conversation with Sail Francisco Mime Troupe founder Ronnie Davis as the inspiration for his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee costumed as a Revolutionary War soldier (Rubin 59). For further evidence of activist engagement of institutional performance worlds during the 1960s, consider the case of Barbara Garson's MacBird. Garson, an activist
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in the student Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, conceived of the idea of critiquing Lyndon Johnson's character via a parody of Macbeth during an anti-war rally. She intended to write a skit for the 1965 International Days of Protest, but instead produced a full-length play that was eventually produced professionally in New York. Prior to its institutional production, MacBird also had an activist existence, appearing in the pages of radical newspapers (Garson ix-xi). As the second step in my argument contends, just as activists engaged performance, so too professional performers interact with the worlds of activism. Activism occurs in even the most commercial realms of performance, and such performance worlds always participate in public life via representations-both cultural representations that create meaning and material representations, such as employment. During the 1940s and 1950s, for example, some theatres became the sites of Civil Rights movement protests not only when their houses were segregated, but also because some producers cast White actors to play mulatto or African American roles, often employing blackface makeup, an affront that simultaneously denied an African American actor a job and reinforced negative stereotypes. In other words, some commercial theatre practitioners participated in widespread, oppressive social practices (both material and ideological), but also met with organized opposition from actors (see Woll 190-191; O'Neal; and An Introduction to Equity). An example from late-twentieth-century theatrelsocial history also supports my argument that insiders to performance worlds engage activism. Larry Kramer's career exemplifies the fact that a participant in worlds of commercial performance can become an activist and, furthermore, merge theatre and activism. ICramer worked for many years as a professional screenwriter, novelist, and playwright, only becoming an activist in 1981 at the advent of the AIDS crisis. Subsequently he was instrumental in founding first the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), one of the first organizations to respond to the epidemic, and then ACT UP, one of the most prominent activist organizations of the period. Moreover, ICramer's play, The Normal Heart, became one of the first discussions of AIDS to enter US public discourse. As such, it not only projected a message but became a site for contest.66ICramer, who initially identified only with the worlds of performance, became a central figure in activism and, moreover, managed to combine activism and professional performai~ce.~' ICramer's career points toward the final component of my model: the work of those who live with one foot in an art world and the other in an activist world. Later, I shall discuss the strategies employed by contemporary postmodern performers, but performers in previous periods also negotiated the dual identity of artist-activist. Female actors often constituted central figures in suffrage movements, for example. As women, they felt a stake in the issue; as actresses, they possessed a measure of economic and social independence that allowed them to contribute their skills to the
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struggle for women's rights, and wielded a degree of celebrity that garnered attention for suffragist campaigns. Moreover, these women excelled in both politics and art, serving as prominent activists and as artistic innovators. Many of theses suffragist actors pursued "new" artistic work, often participating in the production of plays with political, or at least social, themes. Actor Mary Shaw, for example, was both an active suffragist and an early producer of and performer in plays by Ibsen and Bernard Shaw in the US (Auster 67-90; Schanke)." Indeed, producing modern drama was, at points in US history, itself a feat of both art and activism. Producers of Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw (who does not appear to have been related to Mary Shaw), and other modern dramatists were frequently harassed by censorship, theatre closures, and pillories in the press. Mary Shaw, producer Arnold Daly, and others associated with the first US premiere of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, for instance, were arrested following the play's 1905 debut, and fought an eight-month court battle to re-open the production (Auster 79-80; Schanke 101-102). In summary, activism and institutional performance constitute constellations of social worlds; that is, they are spheres of human activity in which people construct, contest, and rebuild social boundaries. Social worlds intersect both within and between the spheres of activism and performance. Exchange between institutional performance and political activism may originate in either sphere, and assumes a variety of forms that integrate politics and performance to different degrees. These interactions are bound to a cultural and historical moment and cannot transcend history. Nevertheless, instances of exchange between activism and institutional performance manifest themselves in a variety of ways throughout US history, and these various occasioils in which performance and politics mingle offer a vivid context in which to consider contemporary cases.
I1 use the word "exchange" in its sense as "interchange," and I do not deploy its other definitions implying trade or co~ll~llodificatio~l. Yet, social conventions do not exist in a "free market of ideas" unfettered by politics, and at points I consider instances in which exchange between performance and activist worlds has been inequitable rather than reciprocal. On the problems of the word "mainstream," see the notes to the Introduction. 2 ~ n l e s sotherwise indicated, the facts surrounding Schacht's performance and the subsequent court case are derived from the Schacht v. United States Supreme Court decision; Graham; and Laufe. Direct quotatio~lsderive from the Supreme Court decision itself. 3 ~ h word e "amateur" in the preceding discussion in the text is somewhat misleading, since the theatre world includes numerous amateur actors and companies. I used the word thus far to represent accurately the language used in Scbacht LL Unzted States, but will now
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switch to the term "outsider actor," which more accurately defines Schacht's position vis-?+-,is the institutional theatre world. 4~usticeBlack wrote in his opinion: "Congress has in effect made it a crime for an actor wearing a military uniform to say things during his performance critical of the conduct or policies of the Armed Forces. An actor, like everyone else in our countr!; enjoys a constitutional right to freedom of speech, i~lcludingthe right openly to criticize the Gover~mlent during a dramatic performance" ( S c h ~ ~ cI h. tUnited States). jAll quotations in this paragraph are from Southeastern Promotions, Ltd. v. City of West Palnz B e ~ ~ cIth .is inlportant to note that the First Anlendnlent issue at stake here was the tendency of a city to impose a vague standard of "family entertainment." West Palm Beach had not claimed that H i l i ~was obscene; the city merely declared, via a single official, that the play was not family fare. 6 ~ h text e refers t o a crisis in the US criminal law enforcement system. Controversies that occurred in 1999 and 2000 illustrate the point: the Los Angeles Police Department admitted to widespread corruption in its ranks; New York police officers became embroiled in charges of brutality against people of color in incidents including the assault upon Abner Louirna while he was in custody and the shooting of the unarmed Arnadou Diallo; and the state of Illinois suspended executions because several persons sentenced to death had been proven innocent. Commentators argue credibly that such incidents are not anomalies but rather s y n ~ p t o n of ~ s a fundanlentally unjust legal system intended to protect business interests and prevent minority populations from gaining power. These critics also point to the disproportionate number of minorities incarcerated in the present-day US, the fact that minorities have borne the brunt of convictions during the drug war, and examples from US history, ssuch as the use of the legal system for decades after the Civil War to arbitrarily imprison African Americans, who were forced to work on chain gangs and the like (with the dual effects of providing cheap labor to business while preventing African Americans from gaining civil rights and property); see Franklin. 'when I argue that many terms derided by conservatives as jargon appear in standard dictionaries, I do not mean that critics ought to follow only dictionary definitions, nor that these definitions are adequate for all scholarship. Likewise, I recognize that some scholars do inflect their writing with a great deal of abstract terminology; this is, however, hardly a problem restricted to contemporary criticism.
h his does not mean, however, that left- and right-wing activists are "the same." Steven Dubin (Awesting llndges 227; 3351131, citing sociologist Howard Becker, distinguishes between left-wing activists, who tend to seek inclusion, from right-wing activists, who generally seek the prohibition of that which they find offensive. 9 ~ m o n gactivists with whom I have worked, the term progressive denotes a left-of-center political identity unaffiliated with a particular party but working towards deep-seated social change. My use of the tern1 is quite different than that of Ellen Willis, who describes a dichotomy between liberal commentators, whom she labels "progressive," and advocates of "cultural politics," such as those who struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Willis argues that the "progressives" viewed cultural politics as a distraction from organizing around economic issues and that they blamed those who attended to social issues for the Republican victories in the 1994 elections (19-24). This use of the term "progressive" is at odds with my experience: the activists with whom I worked identified themselves as progressives and fought for both economic and cultural change and were staunch advoprogressives also did cates of feminism and lesbian and gay rights. Late-twentieth-cent~~ry not see themselves as affiliated with earlier movements using the same name.
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1 0 ~ a l p e d e( 6 7 ) states the case particularly clearl!; asserting: "Since the play takes place in a public forum (the theatre) and always concerns individual characters in relaforces, it is always either in support of the status quo tionship to social/spiritualleco~~on~ic or it envisions another way." l ~ h final e question accusing overtly political performers of seeking shock rather than change is asked especially of avant-garde artists who use their bodies as tools for politically engaged performances; for discussion of such issues, see Schneider, Explicit Body, and my discussion of the NEX Four. 1 2 ~ h i point s was also made in conversation by Mary Trotter and Carol Burbank at the Southeastern Theatre Conference Theatre Synlposiurn 2000 (see Burbank, "Ladies . . . 1980s"). Cohen-Cruz (3) notes the prevalence of this question in discussions of politics and performance. 1 3 ~ o ar similar approach that critiques the assumption that all politically engaged performance "preaches to the converted," see Miller and R o m i n 169-188. The entire issue of Thentw Jozu'ndl (47.2) in which the article appears, which deals with "Gay and Lesbian Queeries," will be of interest to those studying performance and politics. 14111 arguing that one cannot easily demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship between theatre and change, I am questioning the stnndmds used to judge overtly political performance, not the ideil that performance can participate directly in social change. Many scholars of politics and performance, I believe, either settle upon a certain type of perfornlance as the form for organizing or, contrariwise, deny altogether the existence of a "truly" effective political performance practice. I believe IZershaw's The Polztzcs of P e ~ f o ~ n z m crepresents e the former trend, emphasizing 1960s popular theatre practice to the exclusion of other overtly political perfornlance forms. At the opposite extreme, Cindy IZistenberg asserts that "Performances, while they can be effective, are not likely to promote revolutionary changes in society. While they may assist in this process, one specific perfornlance can never be viewed as causing a revolution" (181). What single, discrete event can be considered the "cause of a revolution"? Both these works have contributed valuable insights to the study of politics and performance, but each tends to fixate upon a particular idea of theatre's political "efficacy," an impulse that tends to distract from performance's existence as a component of culture and social interaction. lS,\n article by anti-Gulf War activist Wayne Grytting illustrates the fact that questions of efficacy plague all political activit!; not just politically engaged performance. Grytting writes: "No myth is further from the truth than that protests are a worn-out tactic. From the Boston Tea Party to the abolitionists, from the labor movement to women's rights, every major gain for social justice has been carved out by people uniting and publicly displaying their determination for change." Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan (xi-xii) note that the debate surrounding the anti-Vietnam-war movement's effectiveness is unlikely to be resolved, asserting that the movement was important as a social phenomenon regardless of one's opinion of its direct impact. 161n a particularly blunt assertion that politics debilitates aesthetics, scholar Catharine Hughes (xi) quotes New Yo14 Times visual arts critic John Canaday's conmlent that "the more worthy the cause, the worse the art," and adds, "The situation is hardly confined to [visual] art. . . . [Plays] of political or social protest, plays in the theatre of controversy, have been subject to the same accusation. And more often than not have been guilty."
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1 7 ~ o other r examples of criticism of politically engaged art, see Risatti; and Gorton. For a critique of such rejections of the links between politics and performance, see Case and Reinelt xvii. 181n April of 1990 the city of Cincinnati charged the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, with obscenity for exhibiting R o b e ~Mappletho~pe: t The Pe~f'ectMoment. They were acquitted in October of 1990. The trial led, however, to Mr. Barrie's departure from the museum. 1 9 ~ o p e l a n dfails to define clearly what he means by "postmodern." In a very different stud!; Philip Auslander offers a useful discussion of the word, arguing that it applies both to an when the tenets of modernism have waned and to a style that self-consciously refers to contenlporary culture (P~esenceand Resistance 5-6; 9-11). Moreover, not all postmodern critical theory leads to engaged politics (although much of it does). For instance, postnlodernists challenge the Enlightenment idea of authenticity-the idea that one may discover an original, unadulterated form of nature, the self, a concept, and so forth. Postmodernists argue instead for contingency: nature, the self, and ideas exist in a world of chance and interaction perceived by hurnans via interpretation, and neither producer nor critic may stand aloof from the process. For many postmodern critics, this argument for contingency may lead to powerful arguments for engagement, such as stressing the power of art to participate in "real" social change. For some postmodernists, however, the idea of contingency suggests an inlpossibility of "authentic" political action of any sort (a view with which I obviously disagree). 2 0 ~ h elabel "syn~bolicinteraction" was coined in 1937 by one of the field's founders, Herbert Blumer (who admits it is a "somewhat barbaric neologism" [Blumer I]).I don't pretend to offer a comprehensive overview of this complex field; for an introductory and interdisciplinary discussion of the symbolic interaction approach, see Becker and McCall. 210bviously, the late-modern interactionists' attention to power and surveillance in society relates to postmodern critical theory, as discussed later in the essay. It is worth noting here that Katovich and Reese (397) suggest that Becker's work on deviance anticipated the analysis of "panoptical power" attributed to Foucault. 2 2 ~ h o u g hBecker (A1.t \Vorlds xi) places his work in the context of the sociology of occupations, his work encompasses far more than just the activities of those who make their living in the arts (i.e., he also sees "amateurs" and unpaid professio~lals as participants in art worlds). 23Bernard Beck offers the example of power relations in the theatre between the director and the actor: the director controls resources-including the right to hire or fire the actor-and the actor has the ability to comply with or resist the director's plans ("Retail Feelings"). Becker also discusses issues of power relations anlong artists in AT^ Wo~lds. 24"~nsider" and "outsider" do not constitute essential or absolute categories; instead, they describe an individual's degree of experience in and engagenlent with a social world. Symbolic interactionists also describe variations among participants within social worlds: Becker distinguishes "integrated professionals" from "mavericks," "folk artists," and "naive artists" AT^ Wo~lds226-271); Unruh describes "strangers," "tourists," "regulars," and "insiders" (see also Gilmore). Since I am interested in comparing interaction among participants from different worlds, rather than among participants in the same world, I have conlbined such categories under the rubric "insider." Also, I generally substitute the term "outsider" for Unruh's "stranger" in order to avoid the implication of
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ignorance that accompanies the idea of a "strangern-political activists, for instance, were often familiar with theatre as a social world but nevertheless defined themselves as separate from that world. 2 5 ~ twould be inlpossible to list all the contributions to these fields. O n connections between symbolic interaction and cultural studies, see Becker and McCall; IZatovich and Reese; and Musolf. Although it is not directly related to symbolic interaction, Philip Smith's New Anze~icanCzrltu~nlSociolog)~also explains the inlportance of cultural theory-including issues relating to performance-in contemporary sociology. 011 queer theory (as distinguished from gay and lesbian studies), see Dolan, "Building"; Romdn, "Speaking"; and Wallace. For studies or collections describing other fields of critical theory listed in the text see Reinelt and Roach; Hart and Phelan; Phelan and Lane; Conquergood; Drewal; E. Diamond; D o h , During; McConachie, "Using"; Richards, "Wasn't Brecht"; and Schechner. 2 6 ~ l t h o u g hit does not diminish the importance of cultural studies to performance theory, it is inlportant to note that cultural studies scholars have sonletirnes ignored the importance of performance as a cultural practice (E. Diamond 7 ) . 2 7 refer ~ to work by several scholars who identify with the discourse surrounding cultural studies, including: Drewal, Jameson, IZershaw, Phelan, Said, and R. Williams. Other critics whom I cite might not label themselves as working in cultural studies but would accept the wider rubric of "critical theorist." 2 8 ~ o a c hand Conquergood approach culture from an ethnographic standpoint; R. Williams and Grarnsci present Marxist philosophy inlportant to the field, and Said has analyzed text and culture-to name only a few scholars representing these various approaches. 2 9 ~ r i cLott attests to the importance of cultural studies to a political understanding of artistic activity in his study of the relationship between blackface minstrelsy and the working class in the ante-bellurn US, stating that "the significance of current work in cultural studies lies in making it possible to situate the analysis of cultural fauns, the various sorts of textuality and subjectivity most closely related to human agenc!; with regard to the analysis of social and cultural fo~lnations,the organizations, processes, and overdetermined conjunctures that bear most significantly on political life" (Lott 1 1 ) . See also Reinelt and Roach 9-15. 3 0 ~ o rdiscussions of the inlportance of R. Williams's conception of culture, see IZershaw, Politzcs of Perfor~nance36; Gilmore in Becker and McCall 170; and Reinelt and Roach 10-11. 3 1 am ~ aware of the charges that Said fabricated details of his own biography, but do not believe they have been substantiated or that they relate to the issue at hand; see Hitchens and my cornnlents in the notes to the Introduction. 320ther scholars voice the same view of culture t h ~ Said t articulates. Roach finds in the thoughts of John Fiske an argument that "culture is the occasion and the instrument of struggle between contending groups with differing amounts of power or, at least, with different kinds of power" (Reinelt and Roach 10). Striking a similar note, Auslander ( P m e n c e and Resistance 22) summarizes Fredric Jameson and Hal Foster's understandings of how art may be understood as political in postmodern culture, stating, "Jameson and Foster agree that the first order of business is to recover a space for critique within postmodern culture by conceiving of that culture not as a 'closed and terrifying machine,'
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against which 'the i~llpulsesof negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial,' but, rather, as 'a conjuncture of practices, many adversarial, where the cultural is an arena in which active contestation is possible'." 3 3 ~ cite o one example of a conservative rhetoric of static culture, in a radio interview, Lynne Cheney described culture as an ocean and children as the fish who swim in culture's now-polluted waters (Cheney attributed the metaphor to another conservative commentator). 3 4 ~ h ecultural work of texts-including the "performance text" of a live performance-does not, of course, necessarily favor the disenfranchised; for instance, Robert Toll and others (e.g., Lott) have studied the ways in which minstrelsy served as a medium for solidifying racial stereotypes. 3 5 ~ e r r yEagleton argues that texts have material effects, employing the metaphor of theatrical production: "The text . . . is a certain p~odzrctzonof ideolog!; for which the analogy of a dramatic production is in some ways appropriate. h dramatic production does not 'express,' 'reflect,' or 'reproduce' the dramatic text on which it is based; it 'produces' the text, transfornling it into a unique and irreducible entity,'' (64; emphasis in original); see also Said, Orzentillism 94. 36My introduction of a succinct dictionary definition of ideology is intended to rebut those who view the term as empty or arcane jargon, not to flatten the complexity of the concept. For in-depth discussions of ideology, see Eagleton, R. Williams 1.53-1.57, and Fuoss 83ff. 371 have encountered the tern1 "dominant ideology" in numerous discussions; see, for instance, IZershaw, Polztzcs of Perfomance 18-21; and huslander, "Toward a Concept" 32. 3 8 ~ h o s ewho associate Marxism only with the oppressive and justifiably discredited policies of the former Soviet Union would do well to remember that Gramsci articulated his theories as a political prisoner of Mussolini. Also, like "ideology," use of the word "hegemony" prompts accusations of jargon-laden prose from conservative critics. I would offer the same defense of the tern1 hegemony that I did for ideology: the world appears in college-level dictionaries, and that dictionary definition clearly relates to the ideas offered by critics (in this case, that hegemony-a group's dominant status-in culture is as important as its militar!; financial, or electoral hegemony). 390ther important thinkers, especially Noam Chomsk!; have delved into the ways in which civil institutions collude with the State in order to gain the consent of the general population. Chomsky's work focuses on the role the US media play in "manufacturing consent" for the US government's military interventions in foreign countries. He emphasizes that this participation of the media in the State's adventures is not a conspirac!; in the sense of a plan, but stems instead from the fact that the leaders of the media have the same social background as leaders in the government and the military. These leaders therefore trust the opinions of other leaders more than they accept voices of dissent, despite the fact that leaders often speak out of self-interest (see Herman and Chomsky). 4 0 0 n the theory and mechanics of hegemony, see Granlsci 12-13, 52, 801149. O n the role culture plays in resisting hegemony, see Granlsci 206-207. For an application of Gramsci's thinking to performance see McConachie, "Using."
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4 1 ~ l ~ estudying n the legislative process one finds books discussing the "politics of representation." but nolitical scientists use the term differentlv than critical theorists do. considering, for example, national political conventions and legal representation of clients, not the politics of culture (Sullivan's book, The Politics of Rep~esentation:The D e m o c ~ ~ ~ t i c Conventzon 1972, constitutes an example of this approach). Of course, both political scientists and critical theorists deal with the issue of who sueaks for whom and how thev do so, but each group of authors proceeds, I believe, from a different understanding of the idea of "representation." Exceptions exist, of course; for instance, David Cole-the constitutional lawyer who represented Karen Finley and other targets of censorship-considers the senlantics of "representation" in his article on David Wojnarowicz. 4 2 ~ a i d ' swork tends to exemplify the tendency to become preoccupied with textual facets of representation. Said sees the analysis of the politics of representation as a component of the struggles of Third World peoples to represent themselves in the world, as opposed to being represented by imperial powers, and he views artistic renderings as speaking for and about others. Yet, when he turns to the actual analysis of the politics of representation, Said is often preoccupied solely with texts-indeed, with canonical European texts-leaving aside issues regarding other forms and meanings of the word "representation." See, for instance, Said, "Orientalism reconsidered" 212-213. One also sees this textual focus in the title of Michael Shapiro's oft cited work, The Politics of R e p ~ e s e n t ~ ~ t i o\.v?' n :iting P~dcticesin Biog~dph)! Photog~dph)! 2nd Polic)~h d l y s i s . See also IZistenberg's (5-6) discussion of the work of Shapiro and Brian Wallis. Some critical theorists, of course, d o recognize the interco~mectedcomponents of the politics of representation. See, for example, Dolan, "Building" 8; Hughes and Ron16n 7; Josephine Lee 96-97; and R. Willianls 266-269. 4 3 ~ ~ ~ (117-120) oss offers an overview of social and perfornlance theories of "conxnunit!;" concluding that the term has nlultiple meanings and that no agreed upon definition exists. Moreover, he sites theorists who argue that, beyond the level of direct interactions among a close-knit network, cornrnunities exist more as imagined (and, he argues, performed) phenomena than measurable social groups. 440ne finds issues of who constitutes a legitimate representative cropping up during the NEA debates. Sarah Schulman, for instance, asserted that only a few, token gay men and lesbians had been funded by the NEA, and that these primarily White artists' styles were then perceived as representative of the gay and lesbian community. She argued that "recognition doesn't always equal betrayal, but I think that it is important not to blindly accept someone as our representative simply because she or he has been selected by a government agency . . ." (257). Members of the NEA Four with whom I spoke, while acknowledging the tokenisnl and discrimination of mainstream art worlds, argued that they had not sought to speak for some imagined cohesive gay and lesbian community. 4 5 ~ e r n a r dBeck points out that disagreements surrounding taste constitute negotiations that "are interestingly political, for they concern choices about social arrangements made in the name of a group, community or society." In Beck's view, the deployment of the concept of taste, "is a sign of political struggle, for it is a tactic in such struggles. If it this tactic allows a party of would-be proprietors of a public activity to serve is successf~~l, their own ends and interests by monopolizing the right to make assertions of taste. That right is characteristically particularistic and often thought to be a perquisite of pre-existing and entrenched power" (Beck, "Barn Doors" 2 ) .
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4 6 ~ o discussions r of identity and identity politics (some questioning the entire concept and others calling for an understanding of identity as contingent rather than static), see the work of Auslander; Conquergood; E. Diamond; Dolan, Pwsence and Desi~e;Drewal; Elam; IZondo; Lott; McConachie; L. Miller; Minow; Reinelt and Roach; Richards; Roman, "Speaking"; Said; Wallace; and Judith Butler (cited in Dolan [ P m e n c e and Deszre, 16-17]; Romgn, ["Speaking" 1261; and Wallace [98-991). 4 7 ~ o ranother perspective on overlapping communities and individuals' membership in multiple conxnunities, see Fuoss 120ff. Note, however, that Fuoss and I pursue different projects: he is interested in the use of czrltulzrl pe~fownanceto establish and negotiate identity group and "community" boundaries, whereas I examine community and identity issues as a component within a pTocess oiexchange among insiders in various worlds. 4 8 ~ o an r example of a liberal commentator blaming identity politics for the decline of left-wing n~overnents,see Gitlin, Tudight, especially 154; see also E. Willis's ( 2 4 )response to Gitlin and others. 49,\ctivist IZarin Aguilar-San Juan makes this point eloquentl!; arguing that "In the 1990s, we [Asian American activists] must take care not to subsunle ourselves solely in efforts to build Asian American pride. Reducing race to a matter of identity, rather than expanding our experience of racism into a critique of U.S. society is detrinlental to our movement. . . . If in our desire simply to claim our identit!; we overlook, for example, the ways that race is connected to imperialism (not just in Asia but in Latin America and the Middle East), then we hover perilously close to the trap of defining race as a biological rather than a social construct. . . . So we are left with the task of both asserting race and a t the same tzme challenging its categorization of people by skin color. What we are after is the power to articulate and define our experiences in all their complexity" (Aguilar-San Juan 8, emphasis in original).
~ O T O have finally gained some degree of social autonomy and respect and then to be confronted with a philosophy that sees identity as contingent and ever-changing constitutes not only a threat to oppressed groups' newfound position of relative power but also an emotional blow, as Sandra L. Richards explains. Richards exanlines the question "Is race a trope?" as part of her analysis of a performance by Anna Deavere Smith (who performs monologues derived from interviews with people from a community in some kind of crisis), explaining resistance to the idea that identities are constructed rather than given: "[The] argument that race is a trope seems to denland that Others give up their misconceptions about the reality of 'race' and attempt to conform to the standards set by the norm. There is a second, and perhaps more powerful, reason why among peoples of color this argument is likely to engender not only anger but also terror when advanced by one who shares a nonwhite identity. . . . As J o A m e Cornwell-Giles notes, even though this marginalized identity has become the symbol of an otherness despised by the dominant group, it also f ~ ~ n c t i o nass a means by which the marginalized individual and group frame a concept of the self whose very difference is understood as a positive value. . . . If 'robbed' of that nurturing definition in what categories does one think oneself?" ("Caught in the Act" 45-46). j l ~ a i d("Deconstructing" 1 6 ) surnmarizes Foucault's concept of discourse as "an impersonal, continuing activity . . . with its rules of formation and possibility. Those rules mean that users of the discourse must have qualifications and academic accreditationplus a specialized technical knowledge-that not just anyone can either possess or provide." Without wishing to dismiss this central point that distinguishes discourse from simple conversation, I do argue (perhaps adapting Foucault somewhat) that one may learn the
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rules of a discourse and attain the status to shape or resist it through experience and action, rather than solely through ncadelnic accreditation. Certainly activists (Civil Rights organizers and the members of ACT UP spring to nlind) have done just that, as have artists. j21 wish to offer two caveats regarding my discussion of contests regarding "national political discourse." First, I recognize that Foucault tends to regard discourse as a closed, rather than contested, system. As I argue in the text, however, postnlodern critics question this and other denials of agency in Foucault's work, and therefore adapt Foucault's ideas to discussions of cultural contest (see, for instance, Said's work). Second, I recognize that the terrn "national" carries with it connotations of "nationalisn~." I include the terrn "national" in my formulation not so much to refer to projects of nation-building as to distinguish such formations from debates within local communities; that is, in my use of the term, "national political discourses" consist of debates undertaken on a vast scale, as when issues arise in the mass media. I recognize, however, that many national political discourses have strong connections to the dominant ideological project of constructing and maintaining the idea of "America" as a national unit with a mo~~olithic, identifiable culture. j31n the passage from which the quotation in the text derives, Dolan questions the effectiveness of grassroots fenlinisrn and the performances that grew out of that movement, though her work also-perhaps primarily-argues for the continuing power of radical performance ( P m e n c e and D e s i ~ eI ) . For another example of a scholar struggling with issues of local action versus global media, see Boney. j4similar arguments appear in Auslander, Presence and Resistance, and were made by Carol Burbank, Mary Trotter, and others at the Southeastern Theatre Conference Theatre Symposium 2000. 5 S ~ o r i IZondo's ~ ~ ~ ~ About e Face offers an in-depth discussion of issues of pleasure and politics in performance; see also Bennett. I also wish to note that the nlininlal attention in this study to spectator response is not intended to suggest that meaning resides in the text alone, awaiting discovery by the truly adept reader or spectator. 56Miller and Romin (175-176), citing Bennett, make similar arguments, though not within this metaphoric frame. j7Unruh (124) attributes the concept of the intersection of social worlds to Anslem Strauss. One should also note that, while all social worlds connect with other segments of society, some social worlds, such as the Freenlasons and other secret societies, seek to remain inaccessible to participants from other social worlds. j81 recognize that metaphors of "territory" evoke images of "exploration" and "occupation" tied to a history of colonial exploitation. This does not, however, mean that one should abandon the metaphor when dealing with interactions among participants in social worlds, since, as with geographic encounters, socio-cultural interaction always presents the possibilit!; though not the certaint!; of exploitation and appropriation. j91t is inlportant to reiterate that I do not mean to dismiss scholarship that seeks to address pervasive issues such as the efficacy of art for social change or the allegation that it preaches to the converted. Indeed, I could not have forwarded this model had other scholars not already argued for the value of overtly political art.
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6 0 L U t h o ~ ~Ig argue h that activist worlds may divide between left-wing and right-wing constellations, while considering institutional perfornlance as a single constellation, I recognize that stark ideological differences appear in performance worlds. Theatre history is replete with instances in which artists have rebelled against conventional standards, leading to bitter disputes and new n~overnents.Moreover, much overtly political performance defines itself as expressly opposing conlrnercial theatre and its values. These caveats s same notwithstanding, I suggest that institutional performance tends not to w i t ~ ~ e sthe degree of overt division as one finds between left-wing and right-wing activists; consider, for instance, that one of the hallmarks of conservative theatre worlds is the assertion that their aesthetics are universal and apolitical. 6 1 ~ h eideas of "the performative" and "performativit!." are associated with the work of Judith Butler and other scholars who argue that social formations such as "gender" do not constitute nlaterial entities, but are "real only to the extent that [they are] performed" (Butler qtd. in E. Diamond 4; see also Parker and Sedgwick). Scholars also use these terms more loosely to identify the use of theatricality in human behavior. The idea of "cultural performance" (planned activities that clearly entail theatricality but are not labeled as perfornlance by participants), along with the related term "social drama" (human activities as diverse as individual interactions and social crises that rely upon performance), derive from the work of anthropologists, especially Victor Turner, and the subsequent use of that work by performance studies scholars; see Fuoss 173-175.
6 2 have ~ attended several performances by Finley, Hughes, and Miller; though I have not seen Fleck perform live, I have been able to view a video-recording of one of his performances. I saw Karen Finley perform We Keep OUT Victinzs Ready in Chicago in ~ i n of Denial in Chicago in April of 1995. October of 1990 and attended her A C e ~ t ~Lez~el I viewed a video recording, courtesy of John Fleck, of Fleck's A SnowOilllS Chance zn Hell, which was performed in 1992 in Los Angeles during the Mark Taper Forum's "Taper Too" festival. I attended a performance of Sins of O~nissionby Holly Hughes in Chicago in April t e Boston d in 1999; I attended performances of of 1993 and her P~eachingto the P e ~ z ~ e ~ in Tim Miller's M y Queer Body in St. Louis in October of 1992 and in Chicago in April of 1993 and saw his Naked Breiltb in Chicago in June of 1994. 6 3 ~ h European e avant-garde of the early twentieth century offers obvious examples of exchange between activist and institutional performance worlds, as when, during the optimistic early years of the Soviet Union, artists (many of whom were later imprisoned or executed by the Soviet state) such as Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, and the Blue Blouse Group sought to use art to further revolutionary ideals, epitomized in such public performance demonstrations as Yeveinoh Petro, IZugel, and Annenkov's massive partial re-enactment of "The Storming of the Winter Palace." See Goldberg, Performance AIT: F ~ o mFuturzs~n to the P~esent40-49. 6 4 0 n suffrage theatre see Auster; Friedl; and B. Green. Also of interest, though not about US theatre histor!; is Spender and Hayman's collection of English suffrage plays. O n women's liberation perfornlance art see Lippard.
6 5 wish ~ to stress that I view performance as a form that may be used as a tool to resist, subvert, and challenge state authority; this view must be distinguished from the idea, criresists the power of tiqued by Auslander (Liz~eness7 ) ,that live perfornlance azrtonzatic~~lly the mass media. 6 6 0 n IZramer as a founder of G M H C and ACT UP see Marcus 420-421; and Solomon Z ~ / as a site of contest see Roach, "Normal Heartlands," and other 39. O n Tbe A ~ O T I IHemt l y which Roach's article appears. articles in the issue of Text and Pe~fownmceQ z m ~ t e ~in
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6'1 do not mean to celebrate uncritically IZramer or The N o m n l Hemt. IZramer's work (like other "first generation" AIDS plays) has been critiqued for its reliance on conventional heterosexual narrative patterns that tend to favor gay and lesbian assimilation into US culture rather than articulate radical change (e.g., the play ends with a gay marriage, thereby validating what remains a heterosexual institution); see T. Jones ix-xv. 6 8 ~ e r n a l eactors were also chief participants in suffrage campaigns in other countries. In Japan, for example, the female actor IZimura IZomako was an earlier organizer for women's suffrage ("IZimura Komako,"). O n female actors and suffrage in the UIZ, see Holledge.
CHAPTER 2
Political Insiders and Art Activist Performance in the 1990s
In an era when television and film dominate the landscape of popular culture, the worlds of institutional performance have experienced a crisis. Some scholars and practitioners of theatre despair of performance playing any role in public life, while others argue for a return to the conventional canon. But theatre's importance lies not in its dubious status as mass communication but in its presence as one among many cultural practices through which social issues are contested. When one approaches the issue of the connection between public life and performance from the perspective of people, such as political activists, involved in struggles surrounding politics, one discovers that they not only value but also use performance. What's more, these "political people" who have no stake in the "theatre world" nevertheless use methods associated with theatrical institutions and forge relationships with performance professionals. Political activists consistently turn to performance as a part of their political activity, such activity warrants attention from theatre scholars, and activists often articulate links with the worlds of institutional performance. In this chapter, I document and analyze activist performance and offer evidence of connections between institutional performance and political activism, based upon research, interviews, and my own participation in political activism in Chicago during the early 1990s.l Such an exploration is worthwhile for three reasons. First, it documents activity that has not generally been included in the narrative of theatre l~istory.~ Second, analysis of activist engagement of theatrical institutions challenges a root cause of that exclusion-the tendency among some practitioners and scholars of the arts to view art as above the fray of politics-and suggests that embracing connections with other segments of society will strengthen rather than undermine performance scholarship and practice.; Finally, such an exploration supports the specific argument of
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this study, that the relationship between politics and performance may best be understood as a process of exchange among social worlds. The range of political activists' engagement of institutional theatre provides the structure for this chapter: I move from an examination of activism as a constellation of social worlds through a discussion of activist performance to a treatment of the negotiations between activism and institutional performance. Within this consideration of activist performance, I examine the continuum of activist engagement of performance worlds. Some activist events, such as demonstrations, clearly involve theatricality, but do not engage institutional performance because they are rarely if ever recognized as performance by the participants and do not refer explicitly to conventions of performance worlds. Other activities, such as consciously using costumes, makeup, or props in demonstrations, touch the margins of theatre as an institutional practice. In so doing, they do not simply create ideas from thin air; they use conventions that derive, in part, from the worlds of institutional performance, but also stem from intertwined traditions such as clowning, carnival, masquerade, and protest that do not relate directly to performance institutions. When activists refer to demonstrations or sketches as "theatre," however, they do articulate a relationship with performance as an institutional practice. Moreover, while some activists dissociate their performance from institutional performance, others actively allude to theatrical practice, work with professional performers, include professional performers in activist events, or are themselves both activists and performance professionals. In addition, activists at times view theatre-world debates as connected to their political organizing, an issue I take up in the subsequent chapter on Miss Saigon.
Before discussing further my findings regarding the use of performance by activists, I must offer a broad description of activism, in order to define key terms and explain the historical and contemporary context in which the activist performances I observed occurred. I use the term "activism" to refer to social worlds in which people gather in order to struggle for social change through "direct action," such as public demonstration. I frequently refer to the work of activists as "political organizing"; that is, people involved in an activist world see themselves as engaged in activism when they are conducting work that mobilizes, or supports the mobilization of, people to address a particular issue or set of issues. The issue at the center of a social movement can, of course, be quite specific (e.g., working to protect a single lake) or quite broad (e.g., advocating protection for the environment in general). Political organizing can consist of activities as diverse as mounting a demonstration, lobbying a legislator, or hosting a social event that has a political purpose. What activism means at a certain
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time or in a certain community depends not upon some rigid and predetermined definition but upon the activists' shared understanding of who they are, what they wish to do, and how they will go about doing it. My discussion of the social worlds of activism relies upon my experiences as a participant in activist organizations in Chicago in the 1990s. This activism itself must be seen in the context of the history of left-ofcenter activism in the US, so I first provide a brief sketch of that activism's history, then explain my experience in activism, and conclude the section with some general observations regarding 1990s activist conventions. I should note that, while I compiled the history that follows primarily from academic sources (cited below), much of the information was common knowledge or lore among the activists with whom I worked. Although the first examples in the Oxford English Dictionary of the term "activism" applied to politics emanate from the 1920s (pertaining to socialism and the Irish independence movement), activism clearly has a long history: independence from Britain, abolitionism, and women's suffrage constitute obvious examples of social movements in the US.4 Indeed, the history of public demonstration and social movements covers centuries (see Rude and Zinn). Though a current of activism has always been present in US history, social movements themselves have flowed and then ebbed. In the nineteenth century, abolitionism gave rise to the "first wave" of feminism, which fought for issues including birth control and suffrage, and which ebbed in the early twentieth century when women in many countries won the right to vote but also suspended activism under the pressures of the First World War (Randall 208-217). The "Old Left" movements, centered around class issues, also had their roots in the nineteenth century and included struggles as diverse as socialism, international communism, labor organizing, the New Deal, and, in some cases, racial equality. This "tide" of activism began to ebb in the 1940s, when the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 disillusioned many activists and World War I1 monopolized the country's attention and resources (Elam, Theatre for Social Change 220-222). The Old Left activists did not disappear after the war, but the rabid anti-communism of the period constrained their activities. The next activist "high tide" began with the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and expanded throughout the 1960s and early 1970s to include liberation struggles among not only African Americans but also Latinos, Native Americans, women (the "second wave" of feminism), and gays and lesbians. These social movements coexisted with activism opposing the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War, which quickly evolved into a general rejection of "the establishment" by youth seeking to change not only US policy but also US culture. The "New Left" associated with the 1960s declined in the early 1970s, due to the end of the fighting in Vietnam following the 1973 cease-fire and because of harassment of activists by the Federal government and local police forces (Albert and Albert 54-56;
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Shank 102). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, some movements, notably environmentalism, gained in popularity, though this period generally represented a "low tide" for activism. This ebb was followed by renewed activism in the 1980s and early 1990s. As this constitutes the period of my study, I address this cycle of activism in more detail. In the early 1980s, the "tide" of activism began to rise again, as leftists and liberals reacted to the election of Ronald Reagan and the growing power of right-wing fundamentalist Christians, represented by organizations such as Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority (S. Diamond). Anti-intervention activists organized movements calling for an end to interference in the affairs of Central American nations such as El Salvador and Nicaragua; anti-apartheid organizers called attention to US support for the racist government of South Africa; and gay and lesbian activists and feminists sought to curb the New Right's attacks on gay, lesbian, and reproductive rights. By the mid-1980s, when the impact and scope of the AIDS epidemic had become clear, new groups of activists had organized to challenge what they saw as social and governmental negligence toward fighting the disease. Though these groups often flourished separately, people participating in these social movements did work on more than one issue, and various organizations cooperated to address some issues, as exemplified by the broad coalitions of peace groups, lesbian-and-gay rights organizations, student groups, and other organizations that joined together to oppose the 1991 Persian Gulf War.' The social movements of the 1980s did not peak simultaneously. At the same moment that ACT UP was gaining momentum, for instance, the anti-nuclear movement was fading due to the decreased probability of a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers that accompanied the rapid decline of the Soviet Union. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, the tide of new social movements did not recede, but its water level did drop. Some groups folded, exhausted by twelve years in opposition, while others struggled to find their bearings on the new political terrain. In late 1999 and 2000, a resurgence of activism manifested itself in mass demonstrations opposing the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund, which were considered undemocratic institutions dedicated to advancing multinational capitalism. The activism of the 1980s and 1990s, during which the cases in this study occurred, was not merely a rehashing of earlier movements, though many of the activists involved had been working since the 1960s. The 1990s activists had a style all their own, though they combined aspects of earlier activism. Roger Neustadter, comparing the Old Left of the 1930s with the New Left of the 1960s, argues that each generation of activists has its own style and agenda in political protest (Neustadter 37-55).6 Since 1990s activism utilized the programmatic organizing strategies Neustadter attributes to the Old Left and employed spontaneous and disruptive actions introduced by the New Left, it might be more accurate to say that each
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generation develops its style of activism in relation to previous movements and contemporary events.' It is also important to reiterate that, in the 1990s, people who had tended to be marginalized by other activists in the 1960s, notably gay and lesbian activists and feminist activists, now stood at the forefront of activism. Instead of identifying with a "Movement" or "Revolution," (watchwords of 1960s organizing), most activists in this period were divided into distinct, though often interdependent, issueandlor-identity-based organizations that often worked in local communities rather than organizing national actioi~s.~ While a complete survey of contemporary activist communities lies beyond the breadth of this study, some characterization of 1990s activist social worlds is necessary if one is to understand why and how these activists sought to use performance in their organizing and engage the worlds of institutional performance.' Within the social worlds of activism there are numerous communities whose boundaries are defined by factors such as the issue they address, political philosophy, geographic location, or a sense of identification with a particular understanding of race, gender, or sexual orientation. In addition, of course, activism exists along a continuum from "left-wing" to "right-wing" views (so much so that one may describe activism as two constellations of worlds, since left-wing and rightwing activists rarely share resources, networks, or convei~tions).~" I have been involved in a community of activism that describes itself as "progressive" or "Left."ll The progressive community in Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s consisted of a number of organizations addressing a variety of causes, such as protection of abortion rights, improvement of sex education, prevention of US military intervention in foreign countries, and the elimination of police brutality. The memberships of these groups were relatively diverse in terms age, class, and ethnicity (though diversity within groups varied depending upon their issue and location). Since I base my characterization of activism upon my own experience, I will briefly describe the groups in which I participated. I worked closely with three progressive groups while in Chicago: the Pledge of Resistance, the Emergency Clinic Defense Coalition, and the Coalition for Positive Sexuality. Though these groups worked upon distinct issues, they often cooperated with one another and with other organizations in the progressive community. Pledge of Resistance (the Pledge) grew out of the movement to end US intervention in Central America. Founded in the mid-1980s, Pledge initially consisted of a network of people who signed a pledge stating that they would demonstrate against a US invasion of a Central American country; when I became involved in 1991, it was a national non-profit group organizing protests against the Gulf War (see Epstein, "Antiwar Movement" 120).12In Chicago, the Pledge had been quite small before the war, its membership consisting of approximately ten women who kept the group alive.
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The size of the group's meetings exploded during the Gulf War, but after the war its membership decreased once more. I became a member during the Gulf War and quickly became a "core" member of the Chicago chapter (i.e., I attended meetings frequently, took on work, and participated in collective decision making regarding the group's activities). I remained in the group until it folded, a few months after the election of Bill Clinton, due to financial strains and difficulty in redefining its mission given the uncertain course of US foreign policy. The Emergency Clinic Defense Coalition (ECDC) was a local Chicago pro-choice group organized in the late 1980s to confront harassment of abortion clinics. Every week for years, members of the group spent their Saturday mornings at various local abortion clinics, escorting women into the facility and counter-demonstrating against fundamentalist Christian protesters. ECDC members also organized or attended various pro-choice demonstrations in Chicago and other cities. The organization went into dormancy in 1995 when local anti-choice activists, who had been protesting at Chicago clinics every weekend, ceased demonstrating on a weekly basis." Though I attended some ECDC meetings, my involvement mostly entailed attendance at demonstrations and "clinic defense." The Coalition for Positive Sexuality (CPS) is a "guerrilla sex education" group founded in 1992 by members of ECDC, ACT UP, Queer Nation, the Women's Action Coalition (WAC), and the activist street theatre troupe N o More Nice Girls-people working on various issues involving sexuality who felt that the abstinence-based sex education curriculum used by the Chicago Public Schools was inadequate. (The fact that an activist organization listed a street theatre troupe among its parent groups supports my argument that activist and performance worlds intertwine, a point I shall discuss in more detail below.) Though initially a joint venture by its parent organizations, CPS soon became an independent entity. The group's membership consists of activists, students, teachers, and social workers. The members of CPS authored and distributed to high school students a sexeducation booklet that encouraged teens to think about sex as a positive part of life, to treat others with respect, regardless of the choices they make about sexual activity, to use birth control, and to use condoms to avoid contracting HIV and sexually transmitted infections. The group achieved its goal of conducting unannounced visits to distribute condoms and booklets outside every Chicago Public High School that didn't already have an adequate (in the group's view) sex education program (visiting approximately 70 schools in all). The group also conducted these actions at private high schools, staged public demonstrations calling attention to the need for meaningful sex education, created a series of public education posters, and hosted a website that featured the same information iilcluded in its pamphlet, but which also allowed teens (and others) to ask questions via e-mail and post messages on an online bulletin board. At this writing, the group continues to operate, though it no longer conducts school actions, focusing
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instead on distributing its materials and maintaining the website." I joined CPS in the summer of 1993. I attended meetings, helped prepare for demonstrations, and participated in the group's actions. Eventually, I became the group's bookkeeper and a central participant in its collective decision-making process (capacities I continue to fulfill). Through my long-term participation in the Pledge, ECDC, and CPS, I became familiar with the features of activist social worlds of the 1990s. In addition to favoring public demonstrations and other non-violent direct actions over lobbying, progressive activist organizations in the 1990s differed in fundamental ways from more formal political groups (e.g., parties, Political Action Committees, and national non-profit political organizations). Specifically, activists organizations tended to replace formal procedures with networks, conventions, and negotiations. For instance, the progressive activist organizations with which I worked did not generally have formal procedures for finding and orienting members. Individuals usually found specific activist groups via activist networks and public sources, such as the recommendation of friends, advertisements in newspapers (especially "alternative" papers and media serving specific communities), or through information distributed by the group itself. Similarly, membership in and orientation to an organization was often based upon membership in networks and adherence to conventions (as opposed to, say, the payment of membership dues). Generally, all one needed to do to become a member of an organization was to adhere (or appear to adhere) to the group's principles and plans. A person "joined" the group when other members included him or her in regular activities (e.g., members "joined" CPS by attending meetings, taking on work, and placing their name on the group's phone list). Once in a group, the person learned about the group and the people in it-and also about the world of activism-by taking on tasks, and by attending meetings and demonstrations. This is not to say that activist organizations were completely casual regarding finding and training new members: ECDC and CPS held training sessions, for example, that were aimed at attracting and orienting new members, and CPS created a New Members' Packet to acquaint new arrivals with its history and activities. Like membership, activist meetings also tended to rely upon activistworld conventions. For instance, most activist organizations with which I worked ran meetings via collective decision making, rather than using formal systems such as Robert's Rules of Order." Moreover, activists frequently congregated after or outside of meetings, so an individual learned a group's history-and heard stories regarding the larger "movement" to which the group adhered-during such gatherings.16 Similarly, new organization emerged through a process whereby insiders to local activist worlds negotiated conventions and networks. Just as individuals joined groups in order to address an issue or set of issues, so too activists formed new groups because they believed they had found an issue
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that was not being addressed. For example, the Coalition for Positive Sexuality (CPS) formed when members of lesbian-and-gay rights and women's rights groups decided that Chicago's institutions were not offering teens adequate information about safe sex, HIV, birth control, and abortion rights. These people knew one another through the interpersonal networks of activism in Chicago; in other words, the people who formed CPS either knew one another, had mutual colleagues in activism, recognized one another as mutual participants in previous activists events, such as demonstrations, or knew of one another's work. It is also important to note that activist organizations and social movements are not immutable and permanent structures, but social worlds that (like all social worlds) exist only as long as individuals maintain networks, conventions, and interaction." Conventions also serve to mark differences between activist groups and other types of political organizations. The tensions that arise over conventions evidence negotiations within or among insiders to social worldsnegotiations that hinge upon beliefs as well as tactics. Activists with whom I worked, for instance, saw their use of "direct action" as setting them apart from "mainstream" groups. Though activists often engaged government bodies through letter writing campaigns or "phone zaps," they were more likely to respond to a crisis through public demonstration, public information campaigns, or actions aimed at interrupting normal affairs in order to call attention to their cause. They saw themselves as distinct from mainstream political groups engaged in the same causes, such as the American Civil Liberties Union or the National Organization for Women, because these groups tended to employ "mainstream" political conventions, such as litigation or legislative lobbying. Activists did not necessarily dislike these groups and did work with them, but activists and mainstream groups alike recognized a difference in strategy (i.e., conventions) that also reflected a different outlook on social change. The progressives with whom I worked had to negotiate differences not only with mainstream organizations but also with some other activists who sometimes advocated more confrontational tactics. Activism, then, is a constellation of social worlds characterized by insiders negotiating networks and social-world conventions that facilitate cooperative activity aimed at addressing issues through direct action. Like all clusters of social worlds, activism has the potential to overlap and engage other realms of society. I suggest that activists see particular possibilities in negotiation with performance worlds. Activist ideologies emphasizing action and expression mesh well with similar philosophies found in performance worlds. Additionally, contemporary activists work within a tradition of organizing that emphasizes not only self-expression but also performance as an organizing strategy (this is especially true of activism since the 1960s-see Neustadter; and I<ershaw, "Fighting"). In
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both structure and belief, then, activist organizations are receptive to the idea of negotiating (and appropriating) the conventions of performance worlds.
Insiders to activist worlds frequently perform as part of their political organizing efforts. I concentrate, in this study, upon performances that activists label explicitly as "theatre" or "performance," arguing that such direct reference to theatricality always hints at and often reveals connections with theatre worlds. It is important to begin a discussion of performance and activism, however, by noting, as many scholars have, that all protest constitutes a type of performance, whether or not participants recognize it as such." Demonstrations do not simply happen, they constitute pre-arranged and choreographed events; as the seldom-used synonym for protest implies, these events are "manifestations" of previously established desires and grievances. Many conventions activists use when mounting demonstrations constitute elements of performance. These components include: signs, banners, marches, speeches, chanting, and die-ins (in which a crowd of demonstrators lies down in a public place, such as a plaza or the middle of a street, to symbolize deaths caused by the action, or inaction, of officials). Moreover, a demonstration as a whole constitutes performance. Public protests conform to Richard Schechner's well-known definition of performance as "restored" and "twice-behaved" behavior (Schechner, Between Theatre 35-116).lY Likewise, demonstrations fit the definition of a "cultural performance" forwarded by anthropologists and scholars of performance studies (Fuoss 173-174): they are scheduled and pre-planned events presenting a program to an audience (the activists themselves, the target of the demonstration, and passers by); they frame space as "marked off" (i.e., a square or street temporarily becomes a space for communication); they are "heightened occasions" employing display or spectacle; and they seek to reshape rather than merely reflect social reality. An article in Harper's Bazaar, commenting on ACT UP'S work, sums up the performativity of demonstrations: "An ACTUP [sic] march is punk theatre. Demanding civil rights with guerrilla protest methods and forthright slogans (We're here, we're queer; Support vaginal pride), these groups are effecting real change-and having fun in the process" ("Think p ~ n k " ) . Protests, ~" then, constitute performance events that simultaneously work for change and sustain the members of a movement. Events staged by activists-such as demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience-constitute cultural performances; moreover, activists frequently employ conventions that relate to theatre worlds. Activists routinely incorporate costumes, masks, makeup, puppets, and other
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elements of spectacle into their demonstrations. For example, performance devices were prevalent at a large march opposing the Gulf War that took place in Washington, DC, on January 26, 1991. Theatrical elements included people costumed in gas masks or death's heads; an Uncle Sam figure on stilts; a person wearing a business suit whose head was completely engulfed by a mask depicting the dome of the Capitol building (she or he scratched this "head" in bewilderment, presumably referring to the legislators' initial confusion when reacting to the war); and an activist wrapped in an American flag who wore the gutted box of a television set over his or her head-the TV became a puppet-stage and the activist performed a skit using hand-puppets of Uncle Sam and a newscaster. In general, the crowd of demonstrators also performed by chanting, by carrying signs, and by periodically emitting a "whoop" that would start at the back of the two-mile-plus line of marchers and progress to the front in a "wave." When insiders to the worlds of activism use theatrical elements in their demonstrations, they begin to forge links with the constellations of institutional performance worlds. Activists draw their performance strategies (i.e., the use of costumes, masks, mime, and other theatrical elements in an action) from a pool of conventions, a well of theatricality available throughout society. This social aquifer is fed by the practice and traditions of the institutional performance. It is also supplied by customs flowing from clowning, street performance, masquerading, carnival, effigy, and other forms of popular performance. So, when activists deploy theatrical devices within their actions, they step into (though just barely) a social territory shared with institutional performance, but also occupied by many other performative practices. Some people (from both inside and outside activist worlds) might object that discussing protests as performances belittles the sincerity of activists, asserting that when students were shot at Kent State or when Martin Luther King, Jr., was stoned in Bridgeport, Chicago, that was reality, not a staged ~ p e c t a c l e . ~This ' view, however, inaccurately conceptualizes performance as "fake" and separate from "reality," a binary Jonas Barish labels the "antitheatrical prejudice." Performances, including protests, are not "imitation" but rather constitute "re-presentations" of actual ideas and behaviors that exist and affect reality (see Schechner, Between Theatre 35-1 16; and Drewal 1-1 1 ) . As with written or scripted texts, the representations created by protesters have a politics of representation, producing meaning that has the potential to resist or comply with dominant ideologie~.'~ During protests in Chicago opposing the Gulf War, for instance, protests often took on a carnivalesque quality when demonstrators crossed social boundaries, literally and symbolically, walking into the streets and blocking traffic.'' Such performative demonstrations were doubly resistant: they voiced an opinion
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authorities sought to discount, and they did so by transgressing the borders of "normal" space and behavior. The resistant potential of performative demonstration and the complexity of its politics of representation also becomes evident when one considers the fact that protesters are not the only "actors" and spectators in demonstrations-onlookers and authorities also perform ideological positions. During a demonstration mounted by ACT UP calling upon the American Medical Association to take a more pro-active approach to the AIDS crisis, demonstrators were accompanied by Chicago police officers wearing rubber gloves. In part, the gloves were a component of police procedure; the officers did not bring their own gloves, but were provided with gloves by the department, ostensibly to protect them from infection. The demonstrators, however, perceived a clear ideological message in this procedure, maintaining that the police (both the department as an institution and the individual officers who donned gloves) considered all the protesters to be "diseased." The demonstrators also asserted that the police monitoring the protest displayed homophobia (for instance, many activists reported that police officers made anti-gay comments as they accompanied the march). The gloves, in the activists' eyes, therefore symbolized both the paranoia regarding people with AIDS (the myth that one could be infected simply by touching them) and also homophobia (the mainstream social, religious, and pseudoscientific constructions of gay people as "sick" that predated the AIDS c r i ~ i s ) . ~The ' ACT UP marchers responded to the police performance of wearing gloves with their own performative act, chanting "You'll see it on the news: your gloves don't match your shoes." This was a simultaneously symbolic and practical action, serving to resist the phobias the rubber gloves embodied, but also to remind the officers that they were in public and their conduct was open to scrutiny. It is also important to note that demonstrations-including their performative aspects-can comply with, as well as resist, hegemony (see Kondo, About Face 251). During the Gulf War, for instance, demonstrations served as sites of contest among activist groups when heterosexual activists denuded actions of references to queer politics, thereby complying with the dominant ideology of compulsory heterosexuality (queer organizing constituted a prominent movement prior to, during, and after the war, and gay-rights groups participated in many anti-war coalitions). For example, anti-war activists appropriated a campy slogan that gay-rights demonstrators would chant as they marched through a shopping district, such as Chicago's Michigan Avenue. The original chant said, "We're here, we're queer, and we're not going shopping," but during anti-Gulf-War protests staged by coalitions of groups (many of which had not participated in gay-rights activism, and a few of which were hostile to gay-rights organizing), the chant metamorphosed into, "We're here, we're angry, and we're not going shopping." The theatrical discourse of protest has the potential to become
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the site of transgressive affirmation of cultural identity, or an arena for contestation or appropriation of identity within a movement or coalition. Activists are not uncoilsciously "dramatic" in their protests; rather, they choose to use theatrical techniques in demonstrations (though such choices are not always explicit). If this were the extent of activist performance, however, the connection with theatre as a set of institutional practices would be vague, at best. In fact, the links between activism and institutional theatre run far deeper. Activists use coiwentioils associated with other performance worlds in their organizing, sometimes explicitly referring to these events as "theatre" or "performance." This process occupies the remainder of this chapter.
Activists create events that they themselves categorize as "theatre" and "performance," and in so doing articulate relationships between politics and the worlds of institutional performance. Even the use of a simply theatrical element by insiders to activist worlds changes when the activists label it as "theatre": when activists incorporate a costume, puppet, or die-in within an action without remarking upon it, the event constitutes a component of cultural performance; when activists use the same type of device and call it theatre, they articulate exchange (albeit indirect exchange) with performance as an institutional practice. At some point, of course, such a strict distinction begins to blur. The analogy of foreground and background proves helpful here: during some events activists explicitly foreground performance, but during others they leave performance as an unacknowledged background. In this part of the chapter I define the activist foregrounding of performance as "activist performance," argue that this activist performance demonstrates that "political people" use artistic techniques and see them as compatible with-indeed, sometimes inseparable from-activism. In addition, though activist performance takes place squarely within the worlds of activism-its practitioners and consumers define it as activism-it also clearly reveals points at which activist worlds mesh with the coilstellation of institutional performance. I begin my examination of activist performance by offering evidence of the prevalence of direct references to performance practices in activism. I then discuss the range of activist-performance practices, from simple inclusion of perforinances within demoilstratioils to the creation of activist theatre troupes that exist as activist organizations independent of other groups. I then explain why activists find performance attractive, arguing that it serves both immediate material ends, such as fund-raising, but also constitutes a strategy to resist doininant ideologies.
Political Insiders and Art Activists Value and Use Performance As an Organizing Tool Activist performance-the range of activities conducted by activists in which they recognize and foreground theatricality-constitutes a recurrent element throughout activist history. The use of performance by activists has become particularly clear since the 1960s, as activist performance has been acknowledged as a central feature of grassroots political organizing. Scholar Roger Neustadter, for example, contrasts the 1930s Old Left's use of performance simply as a tool of communication with the New Left's emphasis upon performance as a paradigm for action (Neustadter 39; see also Kershaw, "Fighting"; Schechner, Future of Ritual; and Elam, Taking It 139). In the 1960s, activist groups such as the Yippies and WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) conceived of their radical and often parodic actions-including "levitating" the Pentagon, demonstrating at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and disrupting the Miss America Pageant-as theatre-in-the-streets, self-consciously appropriating conventions from the theatre world in order to express outrage and attract media attentioi~.~' For many activists since the 1960s (as well as some working in previous periods), performance served as an integral part of activism; as Norman Mailer put it, the New Left pursued "revolution by theatre and without a script" (qtd. in Neustadter 42). Activists in the 1990s similarly saw performance as a central tool for organizing, consciously incorporating performances into political actions, but in distinctly different ways than the earlier paradigm of "revolution by theatre." Scholar Barbara Melosh, describing the ambivalence she felt toward the political art of the 1930s when she worked as a feminist activist in the 1970s, states that the political activism of the 1930s nevertheless "offered a usable cultural past" (Melosh 2). People involved in 1990s activism, particularly those who did not participate in the movements of the 1960s, felt a similar sense of ambivalence toward the "zap actions" and theatrical demonstrations of the 1960s-according to my observations, they valued this "usable cultural past," but were wary of falling beneath its shadow or repeating its mistakes. In addition, they felt a sense of a "usable cultural present," appropriating models and material not only from activist traditions, but also from "high" and popular culture, past and present. Abundant evidence exists to demonstrate that activists not only use performance as an organizing tool, but self-consciously label their activities as "theatre," indicating that they consider performance a valid and valuable tool in organizing and revealing links with the worlds of institutional performance (links I shall explore in a subsequent section). At times activists acknowledge explicitly the use of theatrical devices as components of public actions. For instance, during a meeting I attended preparing for a protest opposing the Gulf War, an activist recommended that the group "do theatre" during the march, by which she meant that we should march in
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costume. We eventually protested in black clothing wearing death's-head makeup. In addition, explicit reference to "theatre," "drama," or "performance" in ephemera produced by activists provides empirical evidence of the existence of self-conscious deployment of full-fledged performances in organizing. A flyer publicizing a 1991 pro-choice march and rally announced that the event would feature "Speakers, Music, Drama, Rally and March" (Figure 2.1). Another poster touted "Live Music, Improv, Theatre, Comedy, Good Eats" in order to attract activists to an event raising money for the 1992 pro-choice "March for Women's Lives" in Washington, DC (Figure 2.2). A poster announcing the annual dinner of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador lists the "CISPES Players" alongside "FMLN S~eaker."~%narticle on "Getting Media Coverage" in a newsletter published by a peace and human-rights group, the American Friends Service Committee, advised activists to send media outlets an "event description" including "a 'photo memo' . . . that describes the visuals of the event, such as street theatre, the use of props, or picket lines" (McMullen 8). Correspondence sent to chapters of the Pledge of Resistance by the group's national office in 1991, detailing planned protests against US aid to the government of El Salvador, included references not only to typical activist activities, such as rallies and speeches, but also to plans for "roving street theatre" in Washington, DC, "guerrilla theatre" in Baltimore, a "benefit performance" of a play in Rockford, Illinois, and a "'Seymour = Death' street theatre and protest" targeting State Senator Seymour in San Franci~co.~' These prevalent, explicit references to theatre in activist meetings and ephemera reveal that activists both use and value perf~rmance.~'
Ad Hoc Activist Performance What, exactly, constitutes an activist performance? How, specifically, do activists incorporate performance into their political actions? Selfcoilscious activist perforinance runs the gamut from the use of makeup, props, or costumes in marches (described above) to the creation of activist theatre troupes that exist independent of other activist organizations. The following examples move from instances in which activists incorporate performance into demonstrations and programs, to cases in which activists use perforinance itself as the entirety of a demonstration, to examples of activist-performance troupes.2y Activists create full-fledged perforinance pieces (as opposed to the use of performance conventions-costumes, makeup, puppets, and so forth-as visual components of a march or rally). These vignettes may be scripted or depend upon rough scenarios, and may be thoroughly rehearsed or improvised. Frequently, such vignettes appear as part of the program presented at rallies or are staged at events, such as fund-raisers, that support activist activity. Other activist performances are more fully integrated into
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Figure 2.1. FLYER FOR A PRO-CHOICE RALLY (1991). Activists create performances that they identify explicitly as performance-thereby associating their activity with institutional performance worlds-as illustrated by this flyer that announces "drama" as part of a rally's itinerary. Courtesy of the designer, David Nanasi.
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Labor Donated sponsored by PCAC for more infomation about Wis event or the March in Washington call PCAC f312j €320-1402
Figure 2.2. FLYER ADVERTISING A PRO-CHOICE BENEFIT (1991). Among other attractions, the flyer mentions "theatre." Courtesy of the designer, Tracey I
Political Insiders and Art
Figure 2.3. F R E E D O M BED PERFORMANCE-DEMONSTRXTION (1989). This political action staged by ga!; lesbian, and abortion-rights activists consisted entirely of a performance. In this scene, activists portraying a gay male couple talked from their bedlstage and rebuffed other activists playing Supreme Court Justices who attempted to persecute them. Photographer unltnown; reprinted courtesy of Jeanette M a y
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Figure 2.4. N O MORE NICE GIRLS PERFORMING "RESPECT" (1991). N o More Nice Girls, an example of an activist organization dedicated to worlting for social justice via performance, staged this piece at a pro-choice demonstration. While Xretha Franltlin's "Respect" played in the background, Erica Gafford, Ellen Slagis, Sarah Wood, and Jeanette May produced condoms and handcuffs from their pockets, asserting themsel~esas sexually independent. Each time the chorus of the song declared, "A11 I'm asking for is a little respect," the performers held the condoms aloft. Photo attributed to and used courtesy of Carol Hayse.
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Figure 2.5. N O MORE NICE GIRLS "BOGUS CLINIC" PERFORMANCEDEMONSTRATION (1994). The troupe staged a performance-demonstration calling attention to non-medical clinics that offer free pregnancy tests but attempt to dissuade women from choosing abortion (using scare tactics and misleading information, the activists alleged). N o More Nice Girls erected a "Doop Crisis Pregnancy Center" booth at the entrance to a building where a "bogus clinic" operated, performed a satire of the clinic's presentation and parodied figures from the anti-choice movement, and dropped character to hand out informational flyers to passersby. Photo by Jeanette May and David Schlossman.
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Figure 2.6. TWAT TEAMITHEATRE W I T H ALIENATING TENDENCIES PERFORMING ALIEN-NATION (1991). The lesbian activist-performance troupe Theatre With Alienating Tendencies, also ltnown as TWAT Team, performing for a meeting of the National Lawyer's Guild. In this scene, the company parodied a television commercial for the Dodge Stealth, colnlnenting on the links between corporations, the military, and the mass media. Note that "alienating tendencies" in the troupe's name referred to Brecht's alienation effect, revealing knowledge of performance theory among activists. The performers in this scene, from left to right, were Susan Seizes, Paula Brush, an ullltnown activist, and Teri Silvio. Photo by- David Schlossman.
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Figure 2.7. TWAT TEAM PERFORMING AT A DEMONSTRATION DENOUNCING POLICE BRUTALITY (1991). Theatre With Alienating Tendencies, assisted by fellow activists, performed during an anti-police-brutality protest in the Chicago ~leighborhoodof Bridgeport. Activists who were not members of the company performed by holding paper lnaslzs depicting prominent political figures (scripts were pasted to the back of the masks). In this scene, "postfeminist" reporter Holzie Sappy interviewed an unidentified activist portraying Chicago Mayor Richard M . Daley in front of the Mayor's actual house. Photo by David Schlossman.
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Figure 2.8. A TRUE PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER ColUmBUs PREPARING T H E WAY FOR T H E FIRST sUBUrb. Franltlin Rosemont, collage, 1992. To protest the celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas (viewed by activists as a festival honoring colonialism), the artistactivist Surrealist Group distributed this postcard at Chicago's Colulnbus Day Parade. The image and text both adopt Jarry's E r e Ubu as a symbol of colonialism's brutalit!; manifesting a mixture of art, theatre history, and a c t i ~ i s mand a blurring of boundaries between a c t i ~ i s tand institutional performance worlds. Courtesy of Franklin Rosemont.
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actions. Pro-choice activists, including myself, performed a "guerrilla" theatre piece during a march in the fall of 1991 protesting Rust v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court's decision to uphold a "gag-rule" denying Federal funding to any health clinic that offered counseling or information about abortion to its client^.^" The march was led by eight or nine women representing reproductive-healthcare workers costumed in lab coats and mouth gags and carrying placards that said, "The gag rule denies women information about abortion." The gagged women were followed by eight or nine men (and perhaps a woman representing Justice 07Connor) who donned pillows and black gowns to play pregnant Supreme Court Justices. As we marched, we "Justices" explained to anyone who would listen (other marchers and passersby) that we had become pregnant but couldn't find any information about abortion. We assailed the healthcare workers, begging, pleading, or demanding information; all they could do was shrug or mumble something like, "You're the ones who made the law." During the march and the rally that followed, we Justices huddled together on our knees, bemoaning our fate, and were booed and hissed by the crowd while the activist guiding the march (who was not otherwise "in character" and who had not, incidentally, expressed any prior interest in "acting") carried on a derisive exchange with us. Activists also use performances as vehicles for protest in and of themselves. That is, activists not only use performance in actions, they use performances as actions. In October of 1989, for example, activists from the Emergency Clinic Defense Coalition and ACT UPIChicago collaborated in a performance-demonstration at the State of Illinois Building (now the Thompson Center), responding to what the activists perceived as a growing climate of censorship and sexual oppression epitomized by increased harassment of abortion clinics, public officials' homophobic statements, the enactment of repressive policies, and reactionary Supreme Court decisions. Rather than target a single group, and in order to initiate action rather than wait to react to the next crisis, the activists decided to take a collective stand articulating their positions on reproductive freedom and gay and lesbian rights. The resulting demonstration consisted solely of a theatre piece, Freedom Bed, that was scripted, rehearsed, designed, and staged by the activists." The activist-actors rehearsed prior to the event and read from scripts pasted to the back of masks or concealed in the set. The performance was staged on a bed placed in the plaza in front of the State of Illinois building. Freedom Bed did something subtler than simply make literal the metaphor that the government was invading citizens' bedrooms: by transforming a public square into both a stage and a bedroom, the performing activists rendered their argument that sexual behaviors and identities constituted civil rights, and that infringement of these rights was a political issue. The action of the play depicted people successfully defending their
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sexual liberty against intrusions by public figures: activists playing groups of gay, lesbian, or heterosexual lovers lay on the bed and staved off assaults by activists portraying various local and national public figures who worked against gay, lesbian, and abortion rights (i.e., in each scene, an official's speech would reveal his or her malice towards gay, lesbian, and reproductive rights; he or she would then be shouted down by the lovers in bed). One group of activist performers portrayed the justices of the Supreme Court snooping upon the various lovers in bed together, an action that critiqued the 1986 Bowers v. Hnrdwick decision which upheld a Georgia law prohibiting anal and oral sex (Figure 2.3). Another exchange between an activist playing Senator Jesse Helms and activists depicting two gay men in bed together went as follows: Helms [singing]: Father and mother and baby ~nalzesthree The pure foundation of our great nation-state These plague carriers threaten the american [sic] family We enforce god's word and they call it a crime of hate. And non7, as the creator of artistic legislation, I say the NEA must be permanently cut. Let's use the money for moral reeducation People in the bed [interrupting]: 011, go shove your Norman Roclzwell right up your butt! (Freedom B e d )
The lovers proceeded to rebut Helms's skewed moralist vision. Significantly, this passage reveals that activists identified governmental attacks on radical artists and the National Endowment for the Arts not as censorship alone, but as a symptom of the nation's homophobic fever (an issue I shall discuss in greater depth in Chapter 4). In addition to banishing their demons with wit, the activist-actors' reactions to the various public-official-characters articulated the activists' beliefs. One character's response to the figure of a female, anti-choice public official, stated: It is in every woman's best interest to fight to keep abortion safe, legal and funded, even if it is not an o ~ t i o nshe would consider for herself. Women will decide if and when to have a baby, and this includes women with HIV. I a m amazed by the illogic of the argument that abortion exploits women! I've never seen someone on a street corner harassing women into aborting their pregnancies."
The content of this speech was similar to that of speeches delivered at other demonstrations, but in this case the rhetoric was scripted by one activist and performed by another. In Freedom Bed, activists used a
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performance/action to articulate links between national political debates, infringements upon the right to privacy, restrictions to their own sexual freedom, and reactionary public policy. In short, they used performance conventions to challenge the repression they perceived.
Activist-Performance Troupes In addition to incorporating theatrical devices into demonstrations, staging full-fledged performances at meetings and protests, and staging performances as activist actions, political activists also create theatre troupes that function as independent activist organizations and perform in a variety of settings. Activist-performance troupes differ from ad hoc activist performances because they constitute standing groups dedicated to staging performance/actions, and may be distinguished from alternative theatre companies (even street theatre troupes involved in activism, such as Bread and Puppet Theatre) in that they emanate from the worlds of activism, not from an art world.'; Those who perform in and manage such troupes regard their work as activism, other activists view their performance work as a part of organizing, and their efforts contribute to and draw support from networks in activist social worlds. In other words, these groups constitute performance companies that function as activlst organizations. The activist-performance troupes created by activist-world insiders participate fully in the conventions and networks of activism. Scholar Carol Burbank's studies of the parodic feminist troupe Ladies Against Women offer examples of the formation and activities of an activist troupe. The Northern California activist theatre troupe Plutonium Players (which formed out of the Theatre Collective of People Against Nuclear Power) created a sub-company, Ladies Against Women (LAW), that confronted the New Right through outrageous exaggerations of stereotypical images of femininity and satiric manipulations of the Right's rhetoric (Burbank, Interview; the "Ladies," for instance, held a bake sale at the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas, selling cakes for billions of dollars each, with the ostensible purpose of lowering the Federal deficit). Other activists found out about the LAW concept in a number of ways. The troupe's work became common knowledge among activists in the Sail Francisco area. LAW'S performer/activists toured the country, appearing at universities, political benefits, and churches. They also garnered occasional attention in the national news media. As a result of this notoriety, other activists began to imitate LAW, but the troupe members realized that many activists were using their company's name while doing work that they believed lacked political integrity or failed to conform to their performance practice. They therefore claimed ownership of the name and subsequently chartered other troupes as "Ladies Auxiliaries." That is, they created a convention where'~ LAW participated in by other troupes might be ~ r e a t e d . Furthermore,
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progressive organizing and networks of activism in the 1980s; as Burbank explains, "The original troupe won awards for its stage work and performed all over the country in support of various progressive causes, simultaneously training and supporting a network of feminist protesters and performers who used their techniques to confront right-wing protesters and presentations by groups such as Phyllis Schlafly's influential Stop-ERA movement and [the] Christian Coalition" ("Ladies . . . 1980s"). That an activist troupe "won awards for its stage work" affirms my study's basic argument: that exchange occurs between the worlds of activism and professional performance. Burbank's comment also demonstrates the point at hand, describing an organization that was savvy and skillful in using performance as a means of working within social movement networks. My own observations allow me to offer a thorough account of the work of activist-performance troupes. I became familiar with two activists theatre troupes during my participation in Chicago activism: N o More Nice Girls was a feminist theatre troupe that was formed in the summer of 1989 by activists in the Emergency Clinic Defense Coalition and performed campy sketches emphasizing a woman's right to express her sexuality; Theatre With Alienating Tendencies, or TWAT Team, was a troupe formed by lesbian activists during the Gulf War.;' These two troupes were founded by people who were already active within activist organizations; though some members of N o More Nice Girls and TWAT Team had artistic training, these troupes grew directly out of activist work. The work of these two troupes merits extended treatment that will document their actions and demonstrate their diverse activities within Chicago's activist communities. N o More Nice Girls formed in the summer of 1989 as an ad hoc ensemble that performed as a representative of the Emergency Clinic Defense Coalition at a rally held by a coalition of pro-choice groups (another troupe called N o More Nice Girls existed in New York in the 1980s [see Harvey]; Chicago's N o More Nice Girls group derived their name from this troupe, but was not otherwise influenced by it). Unlike other ad hoc troupes that disbanded after a single performance (e.g., the Freedom Bed performers), the activists who performed under the name N o More Nice Girls reconstituted their group in 1991 and evolved into a troupe that existed independent of ECDC-though it continued to work closely with ECDC specifically and pro-choice activists in general. The group stopped operating in the spring of 1995 as its members became too busy with other projects to continue meeting. N o More Nice Girls employed a camp style, using humor, outrageous behavior, pop-music, and surprising imagery to articulate an assertive conception of women's sexuality. During a performance at a pro-choice fundraiser, for instance, the troupe members dressed as cocktail lounge singers and, with their backs to the audience, began lip-synching to "Condoms are a Girl's Best Friend" (a camp reworking of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best
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Friend" by drag queen Memory Lane). When they turned to one side, showing the audience their profiles, they revealed pregnant bellies, an image calculated to be funny, to disrupt the iconography of woman-as-sexsymbol, and to call attention to the need for improved education and access regarding birth control.i6 Two pieces N o More Nice Girls performed at a pro-choice rally illustrate the company's approach and aims. O n November 16, 1991, N o More Nice Girls served as one of ECDC's representatives in a rally called by a coalition of pro-choice groups to protest the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the "gag rule." At this time N o More Nice Girls consisted of Erica Gafford, Jeanette May, Ellen Slagis, and Sarah Wood. The four women wore black leather jackets and earrings made from condom packages; they performed two skits in the plaza of the Federal Building in downtown Chicago, in which fellow activists (who were not part of the troupe) played supporting roles." The first piece presented a potent image of women asserting their sexuality. The women lined up next to each other, danced, and lip-synched to the Aretha Franklin song "Respect." At key points in this song, which N o More Nice Girls assumed their audience would know, the performers pulled objects from their pockets and waved them in the air. O n the line "I ain't going to do you wrong while you're gone," they pulled vibrators from their pockets, at another point they produced handcuffs (which the troupe viewed as a symbol of women's control in sexual games), and each time the chorus said, "All I'm asking for is a little respect," the performers would hold up condoms (see Figure 2.4). The performance's effect resulted from the new context created by N o More Nice Girls' actions, which played off the song's words in order to emphasize safe-sex practices and women's agency in sexuality. Jeanette May described the skit as an attempt to transgress conventional images of women as passive sexual objects. She explained that the troupe performed this piece at an abortion-rights rally for two reasons: first, the N o More Nice Girls' vignette argued that the anti-abortion movement sought to repress women's sexuality and women's power; second, the performers were concerned that the rhetoric of prochoice rallies frequently dwelled upon oppressive legislation and other obstacles to a degree that fostered pessimism, so their "Respect" piece aimed to provide a celebrative image of empowered women who could control and enjoy sexuality. The second performance rendered by the company at the pro-choice demonstration used the same conventions to address directly issues of reproductive freedom. N o More Nice Girls members lip-synched to the Aretha Franklin song "Think" while holding signs advocating abortion rights. In the middle of the performance a maniacal Supreme Court Justice entered and began tearing pages out of a book marked "Roe vs. Wade" and throwing them around the playing area, until he ran into the N o More Nice
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Girls, who intimidated him so much that he ended up quivering on the ground. Like the "lounge act" piece, this performance worked on several levels, partly providing an entertaining image within a demonstration, but also embodying in a single image the protesters' commonly held belief that male authorities fear assertive women and seek to curb their rights. N o More Nice Girls orchestrated performance-actions independent of other organizations. On October 10, 1994, N o More Nice Girls staged a performance-demonstration on Michigan Avenue in front of the Loop Crisis Pregnancy Center-one among many organizations pro-choice activists regard as "bogus clinics."i8 These agencies are found throughout the country and derive much of their funding from the religious Right; volunteers and staff (who rarely if ever possess medical training) offer women free pregnancy tests, but then attempt to dissuade them from having abortions (Kaufmann 13-19). In order to draw attention to the crisis pregnancy centers' hidden agenda, N o More Nice Girls, now consisting of May, Gafford, and Kim Hassenfeld, staged a guerrilla theatre event in which each member of the group played a caricature of members of the anti-choice movement-a nun, a "clinic" volunteer, and a "simulated health care provider" (i.e., a member of the "clinic" staff). These figures stood behind a booth, reminiscent of Lucy's "The Doctor Is In" stand in the comic strip Peanuts, or walked along the sidewalk handing an informational flyer to passersby (Figure 2.5). The performers did not always stay in character, but instead engaged passersby and potential clients of the center in conversation regarding the agency's actual aims. Intermittently, however, the activists would step into character, delivering a parody of the "bogus clinic" presentation, which they knew first-hand, since a fellow activist had "infiltrated" the clinic, pretending to need a pregnancy test in order to observe the center's procedures." Most notably, the activist portraying a "simulated health care provider" would deliver an anatomy lesson from the "Doop Crisis Pregnancy Center," pointing to labels on a female mannequin that read, "milk dispenser," "sperm depository," and "baby incubator." The parody presented the performers' contention that the anti-abortion clinic operated upon an ideology that viewed women as bearers of children, rather than as independent people with their own agency. This demonstration, planned and executed in its entirety by an activist theatre troupe, was important to the pro-choice activist community in general, since only a few protests have directly addressed what activists perceive as the problematic presence of crisis pregnancy centers in the Chicago area. Also, the members of N o More Nice Girls found theatrical tecl~niquesto be an effective means of drawing attention to what they perceived to be a deceptive organization that was usually inconspicuous. The N o More Nice Girls troupe, therefore, existed as an independent entity within the network of Chicago activist organizations, and did a great
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deal of political organizing following its genesis. An indication that N o More Nice Girls constituted an organization within the activist community was its role as a founding member of the safe-sex education group Coalition for Positive Sexuality (which now also exists as an independent organization, as opposed to a coalition of groups). Just as activists value theatrical conventions such as costumes and props, so too activists value the performance-world conventions of standing ensemble companies. They use this practice from the worlds of institutional performance to create fullfledged activist-performance organizations, capable of representing groups in a coalition, staging their own actions, and contributing to the formation of new (theatrical and non-theatrical) activist organizations. The work of Theatre With Alienating Tendencies, or TWAT Team, offers further evidence of activists' use of the complex theatrical convention of the ensemble company. TWAT Team addressed issues of representation and commodification by producing work that used camp and satire to critique both homophobia in US culture and the complicity of the mass media in the creation of the oppressive conditions of the Reagan-Bush era. The performance troupe shared N o More Nice Girls' goal of transgressing conventional notions of the limits of women's sexuality. Their name, for instance, epitomized their attempt to reclaim words, such as twat, that describe women through references to parts of their bodies. The troupe consisted of lesbian activists (Paula Brush, Cheryl Miller, Susan Seizer, Teri Silvio, and other Chicago activists), and formed when its members, who had discussed performing guerrilla theatre together, finally felt compelled to act (in both senses of the word) by the Gulf War."' TWAT Team first performed in February of 1991 at meetings of groups opposing the Gulf War, and continued performing at demonstrations, meetings, forums, and fundraisers until late in the summer of 1991, when several of the troupe's members left to study abroad. The TWAT Team's aim was to parody conventional gender roles, homophobia, and the jingoistic language that "sold" the Gulf War and other policies to the US p ~ b l i c . ~ The ' troupe's members intended that their performances be "low-tech," campy, and fun: they self-consciously sang offkey, used obviously home-made props, and often called upon fellow activists to play roles in skits. Their scripts featured satiric depictions of members of the media and the military, ironic renditions of found texts (e.g., television commercials or press briefings), and frequent recourse to sexually explicit puns, props, and actions. In Alien-Nation, a performance presented to activist groups, TWAT Team parodied a television commercial for the Dodge Stealth (a car marketed after the much-ballyhooed deployment of the Stealth fighters and bombers by the US military at the time of the Gulf War). The set for the performance was a puppet-stage-like proscenium in the shape of a television (see Figure 2.6). While two performers imitated a couple in a car commercial, another maneuvered a small picture
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of the Dodge Stealth glued to a stick, and the final member of TWAT Team stood at a podium and read text that parodied the sexism, machismo, ethnocentrism, consumerisin, and technophilia characteristic of advertisements and military briefings. The text read: American Dodge brings you the latest in contoured success: The Dodge Stealth. More than a car, it's a way of life: not only what we fought for, but the very vehicle of our success. The sleek, radar-evading body of the F-117A Stealth fighter aircraft afforded spectacular bombing possibilities in Baghdad. Now that same stealth finesse can be all yours: a jet-black body so matte, a plush camel interior so exotic, you'll feel like you are inside the mother of all desert beauties. Cock-pit tight steering includes laser designators and cross-hair aiming d e ~ i c e sto keep you honing in on all your professional goals. Dodge lets you be all you can he: deathly silent, seductively evasi~e, and unerringly oiled. Stealth. Ey Dodge. Capturing the horizons of the whole world."
Elements of the passage drew upon and critiqued actual advertising copy; for example, the performers linked the civilian brand name "Dodge" with the Army's slogan "Be All You Can Be." Other segments of this text call attention to racism or sexism in advertising and military rhetoric, and explicit sexual gestures accompanied the reading of the passage: as one performer read, the two women playing the man and woman in the commercial mocked conventional gender roles; at one point, for instance, the "man" put his arm around the "woman's" shoulder and groped her breast. According to the performers, the sexual puns and actions had a dual purpose: they called attention to the sexist imagery of the US'S militarist/consumer culture, but, since these sexual moments were performed by lesbians before an audience composed primarily of heterosexual activists, they also challenged spectators to accept public displays of lesbian sexuality. Another TWAT Team piece, The Rape of Kuwait: A Press Briefing, similarly called attention to the passivity of the media during the Gulf War and to the hypocrisy of a culture that uses misogynist language when describing military tactics but renders unspeakable any frank discussion of women's sexuality and women's oppression. The sketch had a detailed introduction that began with an activist portraying a general telling the "press corps" (the audience) that the military couldn't offer any specifics, generally speaking, on the war. They could, however, offer some specific generals, "General Motors, General Electric and General Dynamics." Three women costumed as generals walked to the front of the playing area and performed a brief vignette consisting of absurd mechanical movements, after which the performers broke character and sang a campy song celebrating their lesbian identity. The TWAT Team then informed the audience that fighter pilots in the Gulf were reportedly shown pornographic videos prior to flying bombing missions (see also Gottlieb). As the sketch itself began, one woman climbed onto a chair and held up a "map of IZuwait" which actually featured the cartoonish outline of a nude woman.
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A woman playing a general took questions from a third actor playing a reporter. She bristled at implications that the military could do any wrong and then proceeded to discuss battle tactics for the "liberation of Kuwait" in language not far from that of actual Pentagon briefings, except for a series of sexual puns. For instance, the general asserted that Hussein, "cunt [sic] snatch Kuwait" and pointed to the crotch of the drawing, saying, "We're keeping in constant contact with Bush. The president is abreast [sic] of the situation." The sketch ended when the general used a lipstick to draw lines across the "mapn-superimposing the image of a pair of underwear over the figure-and declared, "The briefing is now complete and all your questions have been covered," creating a pun but also alluding to the "cover-up" of serious questions regarding foreign and domestic policy. TWAT Team found that people expressed shock at the sexual language and nude cartoon in The Rape of Kuwait. TWAT Team members stated that they were troubled that "audience members are offended not by the meaning of a piece [i.e., the connection between the discourses on war and sex] but by being presented with a woman's body." Althougl~disturbed, the players attributed this reaction, in part, to a mainstream culture in which it is not considered "ladylike" for women to speak explicitly of sex, politics, or the gendered rhetoric of conquest. A TWAT Team member pointed out that part of TWAT Team's aim was to reclaim words that the culture of the US does not permit women to utter. She stated that some people physically can't or won't say "cunt" or "twatn-even to critique sexismand that many people have never said "lesbian" out loud. She suggested that women need to reclaim, "to own," words that have been deemed offensive-this gives a woman control over the discourse about her body (some audience members agreed-one woman who was initially offended when she saw The Rape of Kuwait later told a TWAT Team member that she had come to appreciate the intent of the piece). The TWAT Team performer also reiterated another dimension of The Rape of Kuwait that sought to reveal the power relationships inherent in any act of drawing up boundaries: she hoped that people, "won't ever be able to look at a TV map again without connecting mapping to the imperialist/colonialist discourse that includes the imagery of rape." TWAT Team's method, then, consisted of using a campy, agitprop, and deceptively straightforward style to stage a complex dynamic: the troupe members critiqued mainstream rhetorics of sexualized consumption and violence, but they also asserted women's rights to explicit sexual expression. Like N o More Nice Girls, TWAT Team was an independent theatre troupe that participated in the planning and execution of actions mounted by coalitions of activist organizations. For example, the Task Force to Confront Police Violence asked TWAT Team to compose a performance for a demonstration opposing police brutality. On April 27, 1991, approximately three hundred activists marched through the Chicago neighborhood
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of Bridgeport, which not only has a history of racism, but was, at that time, the home both of Chicago's mayor, Richard M . Daley, and of the police department's Ninth District (whose officers, the activists alleged, had recently committed several acts of brutality).'; A couple of weeks before the demonstration, I spoke with one of TWAT Team's members, and she expressed misgivings, since the troupe was known among activists for its campy and ironic sketches, but its members were worried about trying to perform anything "funny" dealing with police torture. The troupe ultimately presented an "interview" skit that mocked nationally-known conservative figures, as well as local officials, the performers viewed as ignoring police brutality, without making light of the subject of brutality. The targets of the troupe's irony included President Bush, First Lady Barbara Bush, Gulf War hero Norman Schwarzkopf, Mayor Daley, and Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, a police official later dismissed from the force due to allegations that he tortured suspects. TWAT Team enlisted the help of activists to play several parts-though the troupe members and fellow activists engaged in little rehearsal, they were able to perform together effectively because their scripts were pasted to the backs of their paper masks. The performance's effect lay in the wit of TWAT Team's script, but it also depended upon the activist context that resulted in caricatures of authority rendered in the authority figure's "home territory." The performance revealed complex relationships among the activist performers, the demonstrators, and the people they opposed. In one segment, a TWAT Team character called "Hokie SappX-a yellow-ribbon-bedecked parody of "post-feminist" female journalists carrying a dildo instead of a microphone-interviewed a mock Mayor Daley (complete with devil's horns) in front of the actual Mayor's house (see Figure 2.7).4' The dual occasions of public protest and performance allowed the activists to cast the Mayor's "authentic" home as scenery in a narrative challenging the city's authority. The performance also permitted the demonstrators to confront their opponents. A row of Chicago police, the target of the demonstration, stood between the foreground where the activists performed and the backdrop provided by the Mayor's house. As they stood silently and watched the activists perform and as they were watched by the protesters, the police contingent was transformed from authorities regulating the demonstration into both a captive audience and supernumeraries in the performance. The performance was witnessed not only by the crowd of protesters and their police "escorts," but also by a ring of belligerent residents of Bridgeport, who, at points, mocked the demonstrators and announced their support for the police. Yet, since the performance occurred in the context of a visible, public demonstration (e.g., many activists carried cameras to record any violations of civil rights during the action), neither the police nor the residents could disrupt or disband the performance; rather, the presence of the
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hostile crowd and the police allowed the activists to literally stage their challenge to representatives of authority. This power to physically embody resistance to dominant groups and ideologies demonstrates why activists value and create performance and activist-performance troupes, a question I now take up in greater detail.
The Aims of Activist Performance Why do activists choose performance as a tool for organizing, and how do these performances function politically? Why do political activists use a form of communication as intimate and "low-tech" as performance? These questions do not merely constitute academic queries but exist as issues that activist performers must negotiate when considering their performance in relation to other activist actions. Critics have conventionally viewed activist performances as agitationpropaganda-an attempt to persuade onlookers to adopt a political point of view (see van Erven and C. Hughes). Activists do view their performances as communicating a message and potentially converting undecided members of the public to their position, but they do not view theatre's role in a demonstration as limited to propagandizing. In an article describing their actions, N o More Nice Girls member Jeanette May asks, "Why do we express our concerns through campy performance art?" She responds: Because fernmists do have a sense of humor. Because carryng banners and signing petitions gets boring. Because we are the society of the spectacle. Because it's empowering to stand in front of 200 people at the Federal Building plaza waving a vibrator over your head while Xretha Fra~llzlin belts out "Respect." Because we are aggressively and unapologetically sexual women. ([May], "No More Nice Girls")
In this section, I expand upon May's comments, examining: the advantages activists find in performance; the relationship between the pleasure of performance and resistance; the ways in which resistant activist performance may function in national political discourse; the relationship between activists, the media, and the "society of the spectacle"; and the use of performance as a means to forge identity but also to negotiate differences within activist communities. The relative immediacy and simplicity of theatrical production, as opposed to television or film, renders performance both practically and philosophically suited to political organizing. O n the practical plane, the very fact that theatre is a "low-tech" form of performance (i.e., one requires relatively few resources to create and present a performance) makes it a useful tool for activists. Though activists do communicate via films and videos, these endeavors require expenditures of time, skill, and money that activists can afford only on rare occasions. Likewise, while activists have made extensive use of new communications technologies
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such as the Internet, these tools have supplemented rather than replaced public demonstration. With only a few meetings, rehearsals, and forays for props and costumes, activists can create a performance that attracts the attention of activists, passersby, and the media. Furthermore, as an accessible and intimate form of communication, performance suits activist philosophies that emphasize self-reliance and creativity over mass communi~ation.~' Activists use performance in their organizing not only because it meshes with activist-world philosophies, but also because it is pleasurable. Fun constitutes one of the central qualities that attracts activists to performance. When I spoke with members of TWAT Team, they emphasized the fact that, though they see performance as a potent tool for analysis and protest, they perform because it is fun for themselves and their audiences. Organizing often entails a great deal of effort and frustration. Activists must cope with the glacial pace of social change, confronting again and again reactionary discourses that Dorinne Kondo labels the "changing same" (About Face 229). Activists also face pragmatic impediments. Meetings, though frequently stimulating, require extensive discussion before issues can be resolved or tabled. Likewise, though many activists find demonstrations exciting, protest entails long periods spent outdoors, marching, chanting, listening to speeches, and doing other activities that deplete participants' energy. Performance constitutes a means of inspiring hope and enlivening activist activities. Even apparently insignificant performances have the potential to make a demonstration memorable for activists. During a protest addressing the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the US, I participated in a performance that consisted of myself and another activist marching in costumes shaped like Columbus's ships. At one stop along the march we performed a set piece that was (from my perspective) dismally under-scripted and underrehearsed. Nevertheless, a fellow activist complimented the performance, stating that the demonstration, which was poorly attended, would have been frustrating had it not included performance. The pleasure of performance is important beyond its obvious capacity to enliven demonstrations and activist functions, for fun is also a strategy for resistance and empowerment. A view that focused solely on performance's "entertainment value" would tend to separate activist performance from "serious" politics. O n the contrary, as theorists including Dorinne Kondo (About Face), Carol Burbank, Joel Schechter (Durov's Pzg), and Jill Dolan (Presence and Desire) argue, the pleasure of performance-both the stimulation of creating and watching it and its power to forge enduring representations-constitutes a central force in culture, both contributing to and challenging dominant ideologies. Furthermore, pleasure is not only a strategy, but an end in and of itself. Often, activists view pleasure itselfparticularly pleasure found in acts, identities, and cultures scorned by the
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mainstream-as a political right, one that must be asserted through performance (in all senses of the word). Consider, for instance, the Freedom Bed theatre action, discussed above: activists staged scenes in which couples asserted their right to perform pleasurable acts despite the objections of authorities who found their behavior subversive. Performance also meshes with activist strategies based on irreverence and satire because it has the potential to reveal the machinations of power and to upset, or at least resist, spectacles staged by those in p ~ w e r . When '~ Yippie Jerry Rubin appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) dressed as a soldier from the US Revolution, for instance, he aimed to disrupt a government body that derived its power from intimidation and a dominant ideology that saw all protest as unAmerican. One can almost see the glint in Rubin's eye as he contrasts the Yippies' attitude toward HUAC with that of activists who remembered the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s: "HUAC has destroyed reputations overnight and forced people to lose their jobs," said one member of the Colnlnunist Party. Reputations? We had no reputations to lose. Jobs? We had no jobs to lose. H o w could HUXC hurt us? What names could they call us? Communists? Xnarchists? Traitors? Motherfuclzers? The worse the bettec . . .What were HUXC members going to d o when they found themselves face-to-face with the biggest media freaks and publicity seekers since Jesus Christ? I began thinking about HUAC as theater. (59)
By replacing any pretense of respectability with outrageous performances, by calling attention to the state's own staging of authority, Rubin and the Yippies attempted to subvert the very standards from which HUAC derived its power. According to Rubin, they succeeded insofar as HUAC was unable to convince Congress to pass laws to curtail the Free Speech Movement in which the Yippies worked. Of course, not every activist, much less outsiders to political activism, will be willing to risk imprisonment and unemployment; the Yippies staged their protests at a particular moment in history when it was possible to "drop out" (indeed, Rubin himself eventually did get a conventional job). Nevertheless, 1990s activists continued to stage outrageous protests that managed to resist spectacles of power and offer possibilities not available in non-performative protests. When activists Nancy Kent and Lynn Frederiksson learned that there would be a massive parade in Washington, DC, on June 8, 1991, celebrating the Gulf War victory, they decided that "we had to do something and it had to be as dramatic and symbolic as the parade itself" (N. IZent and Frederiksson). Frederiksson dressed as Death, wearing a full length black shroud and black-and-white makeup, while IZent wore black and distributed flyers explaining their objections to the war. When spectators asked what they were doing, Frederiksson (playing Death) responded, "This is MY parade. I supported the troops, and they
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supported me" (2).As the parade began, Frederiksson climbed atop a tank, stopping the parade for several minutes-and offering the media a compelling image-before being arrested. As with Rubin's colonial soldier, Frederiksson and I<ent7s Death-at-the-parade performance undermined (temporarily) a celebration of US military might and thereby challenged the dominant ideology that constructed the US as a victor in a just war. Moreover, by playing Death, Frederiksson and Kent were able to appropriate dominant ideologies, such as patriotism, in ways not available to non-theatrical protesters. In addition to telling spectators that this was Death's parade, the activists were able to thwart the patriotic fervor of opponents. They reported that when they were handing out flyers, prior to their arrest, a group of "junior-patriots . . . trailing large American flags" began to march alongside them, seeking to disrupt their protest. Kent and Frederiksson "disarmed them by thanking them for joining us, since the symbolism was all the more clear: Death with an entourage of American flags. . . . After a while our escorts left, one whispering to another 'These girls have balls."' (2). Though Kent and Frederiksson's performance did not bring the patriots around to their point of view, the performance tactic did at least convince them that Kent and Frederiksson were stalwart protesters who couldn't be intimidated. Moreover, by employing performance, Kent and Frederiksson were able to engage the supporters of the parade by folding them into their protest rather than confronting them. Activists recognize that theatrical devices can achieve what rhetoric cannot. The example above also suggests that performance sometimes offers activists the means to resist but also influence national political discourses, as another example makes explicit (remember that I use the term "national political discourse" to describe struggles within US culture(s) to define policy and belief-especially those issues debated in institutionalized forums such as the Federal government and the mass media). During the Gulf War, protesters opposing the war staged an action that entered the spotlight of the national media and the public record. A group of demonstrators gathered in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, and began beating drums continuously, occupying the square for weeks (Rosenfeld). This simple performative protest became the subject of press conferences, news articles, and police actions. There were reports that the drums were keeping President Bush awake at night, which he denied, apparently realizing that this claim proved to the activists that their protest was being heard, literally. This performative protest injected its anti-war message into public discourse in a variety of ways. The protesters clearly aimed to disrupt "business as usual" at the White House, as one protester put it, "One reason [to do it] is that it bugs the president" (Rosenfeld C3; brackets in original). Serendipitously, on one occasion the drums were heard during a White House press conference just as the president was expressing relief that they had stopped. Moreover, since discussion of the
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drum protest took place during official presidential press conferences, they became part of the public record of the United States (Bush 110-1 11). The US also expended resources to respond to the protest via the Park Police, who arrested demonstrators repeatedly and measured the sound level generated by the demonstrators' drumming, ostensibly to ensure that it was below the legal limit of 60 decibels (though perhaps hoping it was higher so that the demonstration might be interrupted). Though the performative protesters disrupted the "war effort" in concrete ways-annoying the president and consuming police resources-their chief success lay in manifesting public resistance to the authority of the Federal government. Standing in stark contrast to the power, technology, and size of the US military campaign in the Middle East, a small group of protesters registered dissent through the simplest of performances. It is important to note that activist groups, and the performances they create, can reinforce one dominant ideology even as they resist anotherthe sexism of much of the Yippies' philosophy stands as a case in p ~ i n t . ~ ' Most activists therefore devote a great deal of energy not only to the aesthetics of a performance, but also to its political connotations, recognizing that even carefully thought-out performances may be misinterpreted either by activists or by passersby. More troubling is the tendency to mistake performance for "real" traits. In public discussions, for example, members of TWAT Team went to great lengths to point out that their camp strategies were conscious performance choices aimed at constructing a lesbian identity, not a "natural" feature of gay and lesbian behavior. When camp is appropriated by mainstream media the constructivist bent of oppositional performances and identities often disappears; when actors perform the roles of drag queens on television shows such as Saturday Night Live, for instance, the fact that drag queens themselves may perform an oppositional identity tends to be lost within humor that fosters, rather than subverts, discourses of h o m o p h ~ b i a . 'Since ~ they frequently espouse minority points of view, activists tend to be accustomed to mediating problems of appropriation and misinterpretation, and they usually consider the consequences of representations when deploying performance in their organizing. Activists attend not only to the politics of their representations, but also to the potential of performance to create subversive spectacle. Activists use the spectacular qualities of performance to attract passersby to demonstrations, believing that people on the street will approach a demonstration out of curiosity and then comprehend its message. The relationship between activists performance and spectacle, however, runs deeper than simply attracting attention. Indeed, many political activists recognize the importance of spectacle in postmodern society, which is dominated by globalized, commercial mass media and emphasizes surface and pastiche over message. For instance, Jeanette May, in the passage on N o More Nice Girls quoted above, refers directly to Guy Debord's description of contemporary society
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as based in spectacle (May, Interview). But whereas many critics view spectacle as a monolithic process that co-opts all discourse, activists find ways Activist performers also see theatricality to deploy spectacle as re~istance.~' as a means of negotiating their complex relationship with the mass media, including television, radio, and newspapers. In my experience, activists generally distrust the mainstream media, which they view as controlled by the large corporations that own media outlets and fund newscasts through advertising. They believe the mainstream media willfully ally themselves with other commercial interests and therefore willfully neglect or distort stories that might upset the interests of the powerful. Likewise, they assert that the media misrepresent political actions due either to hostility toward an issue or to simple ignorance."' Consequently, activists pursue long-term projects, such as making film documentaries, that seek to take charge of mediatized representation of their views. Activists also depend upon the "alternative" press, which is often staffed by activists or people receptive to activism, to cover their actions. A performance by TWAT Team protesting celebrations of the US "victory" in the Gulf War, for example, became the subject of a feature in an alternative weekly newspaper, The Render (M. Miller). Nevertheless, activists recognize that the mainstream news media are bound to be present at major actions; furthermore, working with the mass media constitutes one of the few ways to communicate a message to the general public. As activist and former reporter Marrialme McMullen puts it, "Activists don't organize actions just for the sake of getting press coverage . . . [and] the effectiveness of their actions certainly cannot be judged by the media attention they generate. That said, though, it does remain true that media coverage can multiply the impact of an event or action" (McMullen 8). Political activists, therefore, use performance to create spectacles that can represent their message in the mainstream media. As an ACT UP member put it, activists "understood that the news media need spectacle" and staged a performance in order to gain press coverage (Mendel, Interview). The final set of issues that explain why activists perform and how their performances function politically is the use of performance to empower spectators and performers. In addition to using theatre to communicate with potential supporters, activists use performance as a means of negotiating relationships within and among activist groups. Activists recognize performance's power to construct a sense of community and identity within a group. Also, activists who feel that they have been marginalized within a larger movement may employ performance as a means to express a minority opinion or identity. Activists use performance because it can foster a sense of group identity. People become political activists first and foremost because they feel strongly enough about a particular issue to seek out or create an organization aimed at directly addressing the problem. It is important to note,
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however, that activism also constitutes a subculture that offers its members a sense of community. Activists share certain attitudes and ideologies that serve to maintain the integrity of their social worlds (this is not to say that activist groups are homogeneous; the members of an activist group invariably have a wide range of opinions and interests). They may share bonds with other activists that they do not feel for co-workers or even family members (this is especially true for gay and lesbian activists who may not be "out" at work or who may have been rejected by their biological families). Activists find friends, employers, and lovers among other activists. When activists choose to perform, they do so, in part, because performance helps sustain a sense of community and identity. This function of performance within activist circles coincides with activist-performers' political goals, for performing this group identity constitutes a public political act; as Carol Burbank notes when considering the parodic work of the Ladies Against Women, "parody became a public performance of oppositional identity, a vital strategy to maintain what Nancy Fraser has called a 'subaltern counterpublic' presence" ("Ladies . . . 1980s"). Theatre scholar Harry J. Elam, Jr., offers an entree into a discussion of performance and group identity, considering radical performance as a ritual process. He relates the work of Luis Valdez's El Teatro Cainpesino and LeRoi Jones's Spirit House Movers to anthropologist Victor Turner's theory of communltas. Elam summarizes Turner's term, stating that, "During the ritual performance, the spirit of communitns was characterized by a spontaneous, collective effervescence, a feeling of endless power, mutual understanding, and illumination on the part of the gathered community" (Elam, Qumta Temporada 468; see also V. Turner). He argues that it was precisely this galvanizing character of ritual activity that made the theatre of Jones and Valdez politically effective, saying that "The spectators and performers at those early productions were swept up in a unique bond of spiritual and emotional commitment to the righteousness and eventual success of their cause" (470-71). Elam overstates the point, arguing that politically engaged performance always preaches to the converted and failing to account for the fact that not all members of the audience will accept the ritual quality of the performance." Nevertheless, Elam aptly articulates the use of performance by activists as a means of forging a sense of unity and purpose within a group. As an activist participating in the drum demonstration across from the White House during the Gulf War said, "The drumming is . . . unifying; instead of listening to rhetoric, it's a rhythm, a harmony of life" (Rosenfeld C3). The TWAT Team discussed the complexities of performance and identity when articulating its reasons for using performance during a forum on "Homophobia and the Anti-War Movement" held by the Pledge of Resistance. TWAT Team members discussed their use of performance and identity in terms of the "camp aesthetic," which they defined as the use of
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"camp, style, aesthetics, flamboyance, and a sense of humor" to "exaggerate things so that people see what we [gays and lesbians] feel."" Within this paradigm, overt theatricality constitutes a means of articulating the vitality of gay and lesbian experience and a method for drawing attention to oppression. Camp validates the culture of the lesbian and gay community and it is also "potentially subversive and revolutionary." As one speaker put it, "Camp works as a mediator. It's a mode for constructing an oppositional identity." This speaker argued that, far from constituting "superficial anti-establishment" behavior, camp is a strategy, a means of defining a personal sense of self with respect to gay aild lesbian culture aild in opposition to the dominant culture's assumption that heterosexuality is "normal." Self-conscious performance, in this case camp, constitutes an integral component in a struggle to define identity for oneself and one's community. In addition to empowering spectators and performers through appeals to a sense of community, performance allows small groups of activists to negotiate differences within larger communities. At times, some activists feel that their point of view-or their entire identity-has been marginalized within a larger movement for social change. Likewise, activists frequently seek to work together, but such coalitions require a negotiation of differences within the group. Activists use performance as one tool to carry out these negotiations. For example, the "Respect" performance enacted by N o More Nice Girls, described above, not oilly sought to project an image of powerful women in control of their own sexuality, but also addressed divisions within feminist communities, containing, as it did, imagery of "unconventional" sexuality: at one point the performers pulled handcuffs and whips out of their jackets. Indeed, the troupe's motto, emblazoned on buttons they sold to support their work, was "We have handcuffs and we know how to use them." The bondage imagery was intended as a humorous but clear image of sexual women who were powerful rather than objectified-an image that encouraged some activists to reconsider their own definitions of acceptable female sexuality. In an Emergency Clinic Defense Coalition meeting I attended, during which the rally where the N o More Nice Girls performed the "Respect" piece was evaluated, a woman stated that she was shocked by the imagery when the skit began but that it did challenge her to examine the boundaries people imposed upon sexuality and to question society's image of "good girls" and "bad girls." In the previous chapter I explained that performance may function politically by adding a "piece" to a person's cognitive "jigsaw puzzle." Here is an example in which a person responded to a performance by rearranging and reexamining her picture of politics. The imagery of the piece intimidated some demonstrators with more mainstream conceptions of women's sexuality, an unintended effect of which N o More Nice Girls nevertheless approved: May stated that the troupe heard that men in a more mainstream pro-choice organization had expressed dismay at this
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particular skit, so, the performer said, "We figured we must be doing something right" (May, Interview). Like N o More Nice Girls, TWAT Team's performance functioned as a means of negotiating difference within activist communities. The TWAT Team, for instance, approached subtly the tendency of large movements to marginalize lesbians. A TWAT Team member stated that one of the most important aspects of TWAT Team's work was that it created lesbian visibility by presenting heterosexual members of the peace movement with lesbians who were out, critical, radical, and engaged in a political analysis of world events. Performance, therefore, constitutes not only a tool activists use in demonstrations but also a device that helps political organizations deal with one another. One could, of course, articulate many other reasons that activists find performance an effective tool for organizing-my point in this section has been to demonstrate its value for activists, not to catalogue exhaustively its various uses. Clearly, however, activists perform in order to render the reality they seek, to manifest the power of action by mobilized individuals, and to rally for social change (see Cohen-Cruz 6 ) .
IV. ACTIVIST PERFORMANCE AND INSTITUTIONAL PERFORMANCE Two preconceptions influence an understanding of how the rich tradition of activist performance documented thus far relates to institutional performance worlds. O n the one hand, some among activists and theatre personnel alike tend to view activist performance as agitprop or simple shenanigans with little if any relationship to theatre worlds; on the other hand, many people in both realms assume that activist performance stems from theatre people "doing their thing" in the service of a cause (as opposed to theatrical activity initiated by activists). As I have implied earlier in this chapter and will articulate explicitly in this final section, the actual dynamic between activism and institutional performance is far more complex: activists do more than simply use theatrical conventions and welcome professional performers to their midst; they actively engage performance worlds. The key to understanding this exchange lies in recognizing that activists are not naive regarding performance (or performance theory, for that matter), but are instead participants in a dynamic social process in which conventions and social networks intertwine. Numerous examples of activist engagement of the worlds of institutional performance present themselves to those who look beyond the confines of the mainstream and alternative theatre, demonstrating that people outside theatres and drama departments do have a use for performance as an institutionalized practice: activists refer to theatrical practices by name; study and credit theatre practice as influencing their activism; attend the theatre; seek the advice and aid of performance professionals; and, at a point where the boundaries between worlds begin to blur altogether, work in the arts or performance
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industries themselves. Both theatre history and contemporary activist practice are replete with examples of exchange between the worlds; indeed, in many cases, the boundaries between the worlds blur.
Indirect Exchange and Direct Exchange I have already discussed a variety of examples of what I call indirect exchange between activist and performance worlds, instances in which activists use conventions associated with institutional performance worlds but do not necessarily forge direct links with performance professionals. Early in my discussion of activist performance, I noted that activists sometimes refer to various actions-including inarching in costume, using props, carrying puppets, wearing makeup, or presenting scripted performances-as "theatre" or "drama." These devices and practices do not exist as some ethereal abstraction, but, as Howard Becker argues, constitute conventions. These conventions do not derive solely from the worlds of institutional performance, but neither are they wholly separate from it; they lie in a shared social territory Kirk Fuoss and other cultural theorists call "cultural performance" (Fuoss 173-175). Moreover, when activists employ these devices and label them as theatrical practices, they appropriate conventions that derive, in large part, from the worlds of institutional performance: to evoke the term "theatre" or "performance" is to relate one's activity, however remotely, to the worlds with which that activity is strongly associated. Such oblique relationships do not, however, constitute the sum total of activist exchange with institutional performance worlds. Activists often explicitly relate their performances to the worlds of institutional performance, citing performers as influences, asking professionals for assistance, or inviting performers to participate in actions. The Theatre With Alienating Tendencies (TWAT Team) exemplified many of these ties between activism and performance. The troupe's name itself reveals its links with theatre history: the "Alienating" in Theatre With Alienating Tendencies referred to Brecht's "alienation effect," which the troupe employed in many of its performances by subverting suspense or by having one performer narrate another's action. The performers also drew upon the work of political performers including Augusto Boa1 and ICaren Finley and utilized the "camp aesthetic" theorized by gay and lesbian critics-a philosophy in which performers critique traditional social roles and notions of propriety by behaving outrageously (see M. Meyer). Moreover, though their identity and activity was anchored firmly in activist worlds, members of the TWAT Team deployed theatrical theory and practice they learned from formal theatre troupes. Members of TWAT Team had worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre and Women's World Circus, established companies from the alternative theatre movement that, I argue, constitutes one of the worlds of institutional performance.
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Members of formal activist troupes are not the only activists who engage in exchange with members of institutional performance worlds. Other activists similarly turn to performance professionals for training and aid with specific projects. Direct activist engagement of institutional performance may take a form as simple as activists requesting that professional performers appear at events, as when organizers of a benefit supporting prochoice organizations in Chicago engaged the Second City comedy troupe to perform at the fund-raiser. Activists also seek the aid of performance professionals when creating performances. Members of a group affiliated with Chicago's Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center worked with a playwright to produce a brief sketch, Father Time, which allegorized the relationship between the US and Puerto Rico using conventions from English mummery. In this case, the piece was not only scripted, rehearsed, and performed, but further evidenced adoption of theatre-world conventions when the script was preserved and revived: in September of 1991, I played the villainous Uncle Sam in a well-rehearsed reprise of the piece at a benefit for the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. Activist engagement of institutional performance worlds also manifests itself in the attention activists pay to theatre-world activity. Many activists are also theatregoers, for example, and see politically oriented mainstream theatre as related to activism. One of the ironies one discovers in the discourse on performance and politics is that many people who identify primarily with activism nevertheless see greater political potential in theatre staged in conventional venues than do many radical performance professionals (e.g., Boney or Kershaw). Some activists even argue that such performances can accomplish activist work. For example, I asked a member of the activist organization Task Force to Confront Police Brutality why the group requested a benefit performance from the producers of a Chicago production of Dario FO'S satire of police violence, Accidental Death of an Anarchist. He reported that the group was motivated not simply by the possibility of raising funds but also by the conviction that the text and the particular production functioned as a means of communicating their point to a general audience, as "a [l~umorous]way of saying 'here's what we mean"' (Nanasi, Interview). Activists not only attend theatre, they also attend to theatre-world issues, further evidencing activist engagement of institutional performance (insofar as institutional performance is involved in the larger constellation of the arts). As mentioned earlier, for instance, the Freedom Bed performance-action not only addressed policy issues, such as freedom of choice, but also responded to conservative attacks upon NEA funding of the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which contains homoerotic imagery. Chicago activists with whom I worked similarly saw the denial of NEA grants to the NEA Four (whose engagement of both activism and performance practice I consider in Chapter 4) as related to activist campaigns fighting
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AIDS and homophobia. Likewise, Asian American activists with no particular affiliation with the theatre industry saw Asian American actors' protests against the casting of Miss Saigon as symbolic of a new spirit of activism (as I discuss in the next chapter).
Negotiating Distinctions and Conventions Further evidence of exchange between performance and activism appears in the negotiations of difference that arise when these worlds encounter one another. Frictions between activism and performance do not imply that the two worlds ought somehow to remain separate (as some in each world assert); just the opposite, they evidence continuous and vibrant negotiation within the gray area shared by activism and institutional perf ~ r m a n c e .Note '~ that I speak here of tensions between activists and artistic conventions; such frictions are not necessarily interpersonal. Indeed, in my experience as an activist and performance scholar observing and participating in activist-performance practice, conflict between artistic and activist conventions usually leads to compromise and negotiation, that is, to exchange between the two constellations of social activity. Although activists frequently work with artists, and may regard their activist performances as artistic as well as political, activists and artists alike tend to maintain distinctions between their respective worlds. These distinctions rest not in the aesthetics of their work, but in the networks and conventions they maintain. Leaders of prominent alternative theatre companies have tended to describe their goals using language (i.e., conventions) drawn from art worlds and, furthermore, have eschewed too close an identification with a particular protest movement, even (or perhaps especially) when their troupes clearly participated in activism." Contrariwise, activist performers define political organizing as the primary goal of their performance, articulating a boundary between their work and that created by participants in the worlds of institutional performance. Jeanette May, writing on N o More Nice Girls, states that the group usually called its work "campy street theatre" as opposed to "performance art," because "we usually perform at rallies and demonstrations, not at art events" ([May], "No More Nice Girls"); in other words, N o More Nice Girls concentrated upon the "street" in street theatre. Activists do not necessarily deny the artistic or aesthetic qualities of their performances, but they do emphasize their connections to social movements and activist networks. One discovers negotiations of differences between activist and theatre worlds not only in the distinctions between activist versus artistic networks, but also in the conventions through which performers and audience members receive and evaluate performances. Reception of an activist performance depends upon knowledge of activist conventions. Therefore, outside observers might conclude that an activist performance constitutes
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"bad theatre" simply because they do not appreciate the conventions at play." Freedom Bed, for instance, began with a "prayer" by an activist playing the Pope who said, "Some people actually think of sex as pleasurable. In fact, I've heard them sing 'sex is good, sex is great, it's not just to procreate . . . it's not just for the married and straight'." The last line referred directly to a common chant used by pro-choice and lesbian-andgay rights activists, and the performers could therefore count upon some sort of reaction from their audience-be it spontaneous chanting, laughter, cheers, or simple appreciation of the allusion. Uninitiated observers, however, might not have perceived the importance of the line, not because there was anything "wrong" with the performance, but because they were not versed in the conventions needed to fully appreciate the piece. In other words, the reception of this performance depended upon an understanding of the conventions of activism. This is not to say that all activist theatre is of excellent quality, but rather that activists evaluate the quality of activist performance based upon standards that do not match those used in the worlds of institutional performance. Activists consider both the entertainment value of a work and its political implications when judging an activist performance. When political activists critique a work, however, political content often takes precedence over polished presentation, a fact that activist performer Jeanette May finds enabling: she feels that activism offers participants the opportunity to perform without the fear of aesthetic failure (May, Interview). Activist performers can forget lines, read from scripts, ad lib, or "ham it up," because the conventions of activist performance emphasize fun and a resonance between the performance's message and the group's beliefs, rather than polished performances. Tensions that indicate the negotiation between social worlds become evident not only in the distinctions activists and artists use to define and evaluate stylistically similar work, but also in conflicts or misunderstandings regarding each constellation of worlds' conventions that arise during activist performance. Activists, even those involved with groups that use performance, occasionally display misunderstandings regarding the theatre world. An example from my own experience evidences such a negotiation of conflict between activist and artistic conventions. At a demonstration opposing the Supreme Court's decision upholding the "gag rule," pro-choice activists who knew that I was connected with theatre worlds approached me, saying they had brought along robes to serve as Supreme Court Justice costumes, and asked me to "do some theatre." While such expectations of spontaneous performance are consistent with activist world ideologies, the appeal to my professional identity caused me considerable consternationon the one hand, I didn't want to disappoint my activist colleagues or appear incompetent; on the other, I didn't have the scripting and rehearsal
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time conventionally available in institutional performance settings (where even improvisational troupes prepare prior to performances). I scrambled to facilitate some kind of performance. Significantly, though I felt dissatisfied with the outcome, the participants in the demonstration responded enthusiastically, some of them even joining in the action. My point here is not to bemoan the imposition of activists upon my status as a theatre "professional" but rather to describe the negotiations that arise at the intersection of social worlds. In this case, the expectations of activism forced me to mediate my own expectations of activism and performance. Just as some activists misunderstand or even reject institutional performance conventions, so too some professional performers refuse to engage fully in the conventions of activism. In 1992 I served as the facilitator (i.e., the informal producer and director) of a brief play, Good Lie Columbus, staged by Pledge of Resistance during a protest occasioned by Columbus Day and the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the America~.'~ One of the participants in this activist-performance piece identified herself as a professional actor. During the performance, however, she not only forgot her lines but announced that fact to the audience-an annoyance to the activists and a violation of basic conventions of the institutional theatre of which she considered herself a part. Though activist performers commonly ad lib or stumble over lines, they do not generally call attention to their missteps. Why should a professional performer agree to participate in an activist performance and then violate conventions of both activism and institutional performance? One explanation is that the individual was simply an incompetent performer, but (in my view as "director" of the piece) it appeared instead that the performer refused to invest all her skill and effort as a professional performer in an activist performance. Even those versed in both activist and performance world conventions encounter conflicting conventions, as a miscalculation of my own illustrates. When working with fellow Pledge of Resistance activists to stage Good Lie Columbus, I suggested to the group that we incorporate into the performance audience participation techniques based upon Augusto Boal's theory of Forum Theatre." The group as a whole then created a scenario and one of the activists, Mike Myers, wrote the dialogue based on the group's brainstorming. As in Boal's technique, performers first enact a conflict, then ask members of the audience to propose solutions. Good Lie Columbus presented a scenario in which members of a civic group meet to plan a Columbus Day parade and begin to reproduce offensive stereotypes and historical inaccuracies (Myers's script presented these stereotypes and errors through humor, creating, for example, a caricature of a bumbling mayor who, among other gaffs, hails Columbus as "that great, first Eyetalian American-the guy with the guts and stick-to-itiveness to set sail in 1942 [sic] in search of new trade routes to Indiana" [Myers et al.]). When
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a progressive character challenges these flawed plans, the townspeople demand that the naysayer offer better suggestions. The audience of activists was then asked to offer alternative ideas for a parade addressing Columbus's arrival in the Americas. When people emerged from the audience to speak, however, they did not participate in the performance scenario we had constructed (and that I had envisioned as following Boal's theatrical conventions), but instead offered their opinions regarding Columbus Day. The problem (that I failed to anticipate despite my experience in both theatre and activism) was that the request for input into the perforinance dovetailed with the idea of the "open mike," an activist convention whereby the organizers of a demonstration offer anyone attending a deinonstration the opportunity to speak extemporaneously. When offered the opportunity to contribute to a performance, the Columbus Day protesters followed activists conventions and the performance became an open-mike session.
Blurring Boundaries Misunderstandings and conflicting conventions do not indicate that politics and performance are incompatible, but rather that cooperation requires negotiation. In fact, activism and institutional performance are at times so compatible that boundaries between the two groups of social worlds blur, as when an individual works as both a professional performer and an activist. The boundaries between the worlds of performance and activism are not fixed but rather constitute semi-permeable membranes: members of one group of worlds can practice the conventions of and forge connections in the other. Perhaps the quintessential example of border-crossing from the activist point of view is the ability of activist performers to enter the worlds of institutional performance. Burbank, for instance, reports that, in the 1980s, activist troupes such as Plutonium Players used an ensemble approach that required all members to perform, and that, as a result, these activist companies, "trained theatre workers who often moved into nonpolitical professional work as a result" ("Ladies . . . 1980s"). This exchange could itself occasion tension and negotiation in activist circles when activists found themselves dividing resources between professional and political theatrical activity. McDermott reports that the agitprop company Workers' Laboratory Theatre pursued ever-more aesthetically sophisticated productions over the course of its existence and eventually merged with a performance-world institution. Similarly, El Teatro Campesino, which began as a troupe of farmworkers performing for farinworkers at union meetings and on picket lines, evolved into a troupe independent of the Chicano union movement. Such shifts from activism to professional performance can raise objections from non-performing activists, who see the shift from activist to institutional performance as a betrayal of activist
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beliefs (McDermott 124ff; Elam, Theatre for Social Change 230ff; van Erven 182ff). The possibilities of professionalism can also strain relations within activist-performance troupes. When I spoke with Jeanette May (a professional visual artist herself) in 1992, asking her how the N o More Nice Girls troupe evaluated its aesthetics, she responded that the troupe was not unduly concerned with polished aesthetic presentation, since their purpose was to function within activism, not as an art troupe, and that abandoning art world standards offered the performers the liberty to be outrageous. Subsequently, however, other members of the troupe decided that they did want to create more polished pieces and perform in art venues. This desire to enter more fully the worlds of institutional performance decreased N o More Nice Girls' participation in activism, since members expended time and energy attempting to create complex performances; it also created divisions within the group between those who wished to continue making street theatre and those who wanted to enter institutional performance. It would be a mistake, however, to see institutional performance itself as a threat to genuine activism or a constant drain upon activist resources; these antitheatrical views recapitulate the more general notion that cultural action represents a siren song that distracts one from "legitimate" action. One must remember, instead, that this tendency to move from activist to performance worlds constitutes another sociological negotiation. The fact that traffic moves not only from activist worlds into performance worlds, but also in the other direction, may serve as an antidote to the prejudice that artistic activism strays from the purpose of politics. Furthermore, examples in which professional artists contribute to activist worlds offer further evidence of the exchange between activism and institutional performance and the blurring of the boundaries between the two constellations of social worlds. For instance, artist-activists played a fundamental role in the cycle of activism that began in the mid-1980s. The influential activist organization Women's Action Coalition (WAC), began its life in New York as an organization of women artists using artistic techniques, including the conventions of performance art, to stage actions confronting conservative politicians and the religious Right.'' As the WAC concept spread to other cities, the specific identification with art worlds faded, and the group became identified with the social worlds of activism, though its members continued to employ conventions from the institutioilal worlds of visual and performance art. Exchange and blurring boundaries between activist and performance worlds constitute matters of degree, not absolutes. One discovers direct exchange when members of one world move into another; one finds an even greater blurring of boundaries when people work in both worlds at once. For example, several people I knew through activist networks in Chicago worked in theatre specifically and the arts generall~.'~ Activist who are also artists recognize their dual occupational roles: practicing visual
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artist Jeanette May, for instance, asserts that she and some other activists perform because "we are political activists with background in visual arts, theatre, writing and dance" ([May], "No More Nice Girls"). May and other art-world professionals do not constitute interlopers in the worlds of activism (to put it in colloquial terms, they are not artists who merely want to "do their thing" in a political context). May asserts the activist occasion first and foremost: though she works as a visual artist and has participated in performance art works with institutional-performance-world figures such as Carolee Schneemann, she views performances created under the auspices of social movements as activism. In my experience, activists (at least those in my networks) who are not also artists generally understand this distinction as well, and value the contributions artists bring from art worlds to activism. Activists maintain a sophisticated sense of the relationship between the various occasions for artistic creation, one that meshes with the thinking of sociologists such as Howard Becker. Though activists who also work as artists distinguish between some of their professional and activist creations, they also recognize, reckon with, and frequently embrace the moments when activist and artistic projects merge and efforts to maintain distinctions become fruitless. In other words, at times the boundaries between activism and institutional performance blur completely. For example, an artistlactivist organization called the Surrealist Group has been active in Chicago since the 1960s; it attempts to apply the artistic work of the surrealist movement to organizing (Roediger). This art-activist group's response to the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas offers an intriguing example of a blurring of boundaries between activism and institutional performance. During Chicago's official Columbus Day parade, the Surrealists distributed a postcard depicting Columbus as Alfred Jarry's Ubu (Figure 2.8). Clearly, the activist-artists sought to deflate the figure of Columbus through association with Jarry's murderous and absurd E r e Ubu. Since Jarry was a forerunner of the first surrealist movement, the appropriation by the Chicago Surrealists is not entirely coincidental, but nevertheless constitutes a simultaneous act of activism and reclaiming theatre history. Other artist-activists blur the lines between performance and activism even more explicitly. Figures such as Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finley create overtly political performances in order to make their livings as performers, evidencing a clear identification with performance as an institutional practice by applying for grants, publishing scripts, founding performance spaces, and touring their performances to theatre venues across the country. Yet, Miller, Hughes, and Finley constitute recognizable figures in the worlds of political activism: Miller participated in ACT UP Los Angeles, and Hughes and Finley, though not as closely associated with a particular organization, staged activist actions.
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Political activists, people who by definition participate in politics, create performance within the sphere of activism. Moreover, they negotiate relationships with the worlds of institutional performance, engaging performance worlds indirectly by using conventions associated with theatre, interacting directly with theatre worlds by asking performance professionals to participate in activism, and blurring the boundaries between the two constellations of worlds when they themselves become professionals or merge performance and activist work. In the final chapter of this study, I return to the work of artist-activists and their negotiation of activist and performance worlds. First, however, I take up the following question: H o w do people who view performance as their primary vocation and are not immersed in activism relate to activist worlds? In other words, this chapter has considered primarily "political people" and their relationship with theatrical conventions and performance worlds. The next chapter explores the musical Miss Snigon and the controversies surrounding its New York production in order to look at the flip side of the coin: how "theatre people" engage activist worlds while pursing activity in the constellation of institutional performance.
l 1 should note that I did not seek out activism as a participant-obserration research project; on the contrary, I became involved in activism and then began observing activists' frequent recourse to theatrical techniques. For more on my methodology, see Chapter 1. 2 ~ o r n escholars, of course, have attended to performances created by activists; for example, Neustadter compares the use of theatre by the Old Left and the New Left; IZistenberg discusses performances created by AIDS activists; Fuoss studies how striking workers in the 1930s used performance; Schechner (Futwe of' Ritzrdl) and IZershaw (Radzcal in Perfomance) study the dramaturgy of late-t~\,entieth-centuryprotests; and the essay collections edited by Cohen-Cruz and Burnham and Durland document many activist art works. These studies, however, do not focus upon the relationship between activism and institutional performance. 3011 the tendency among some scholars to articulate a separation of art and politics, as well as arguments that view art as inherently political, see Chapter I. 4",\ctivisn~," Supplenlent to the Oxfold English Dictionaq~,1985 compact ed. OED's earliest example of use of the word "demonstration" in the sense of political protest is dated 1839. j ~ h Gulf e War was viewed by activists as hypocritical and unjust because the US was seen as prosecuting a brutal war to protect its own interests (particularly access to oil) and to shore up its sagging stance as a world power-note, however that anti-war activists in no way supported Iraqi leader Hussein (in fact, many contended that the West had helped Hussein when he was cornnlitting human rights abuses against his own people and
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only turned against him when its own interests were threatened). The war also occasioned a heightened level of anti-Arab prejudice in the US; see Epstein, "Antiwar Movement"; and Grytting. 6 ~ e ealso Barbara Epstein who, citing the work of social analysts including hlain Touraine and hlberto Melucci, points out that the issue-and-identity-based movements of the 1960s and beyond have been described as "new social movements," as opposed to the "old" social movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were based primarily upon issues of class ("Antiwar Movement" 134; see also Political P ~ o t e s t ) . 'Douglas McDerrnott (1211, for instance, argues that "the resurgence in the 1960s of theatrical activity that paralleled that of the previous generation suggests that social and artistic forces are at work in the creation of political theatre that are not the property of any particular era." 8 ~ p s t e i n("Antirv~~r Movement") corroborates my observ'1t1ons. ? w h e n describing the social worlds of activism as I experienced them in Chicago, I concentrate 011 issues that become important later in the chapter, such as activist conventions, or upon issues that offer a context for an understanding of activism in general. I attend little to other issues. For example, I devote little space to the issue of how the individual is socialized into activist worlds because, in my experience, activist performance is usually conducted by individuals already initiated into to the world of activism. 1 0 ~ h o u g hleft-wing and right-wing activists rarely if ever share conventions, resources, or networks of insiders, exceptions and gray areas exist. For example, I once attended a peace rally-a generally left-wing event-only to discover that some of the activists marching with me were Catholics pacifists who were also involved in the right-wing anti-choice movement. Such exceptions, however, tend to be accidental and short-lived. l ~ h term e "progressive" carries with it some semantic baggage. The reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are referred to as "progressivism." Various "Progressive Parties" have appeared in twentieth-century US electoral campaigns. Some communist movements that sought to distinguish themselves from liberalism following World War I1 also used the terrn (Gitlin, The Sixties 62). Contrariwise, some contemporary critics use the terrn to describe liberal opponents of cultural politics (E. Willis 24; see my comments on Willis's use of the term "progressive" in the notes to Chapter 1). In my experience, by the 1980s and 1990s, the terrn was not associated with political parties, communism, or liberalism; rather, it was used by activists to connote a generally leftwing outlook unaffiliated with a particular party or explicitly defined ideology and concerned with economic justice, social justice, m d cultural politics. 1 2 ~ u r i n gthe Reagan and Bush administrations, progressives opposed US military intervention in Central American countries, especially El Salvador (where US military advisors aided a governnlent implicated in a number of human rights abuses) and Nicaragua (where US aid supported the Contra insurgents attempting to overthrow the country's socialist government). The Pledge initially grew out of fears that US military adventures in the region would escalate. 13ECDC activists now devote their energies to other issues, or other aspects of prochoice organizing; the group's members still respond to the occasional actions nlounted by anti-choice activists. As a pro-choice activist, I was not privy to reasons behind the antichoice demonstrators' decision to cease regular protests. Other activists and I speculate
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that their disappearance resulted from a number of factors. The murders of several abortion providers perpetrated by anti-choice activists in other states rnay have made it difficult for Chicago anti-choice activists to find people willing to protest at clinics (or the organizers may have called off protests out of fear that violence would occur). Also, the anti-choice activists in Chicago may have decided to devote their energies to organizing in ways other than clinic protests following the victories by a number of conservative Republicans in the 1994 mid-term Congressional elections. 1 4 ~ o rfurther infornlation on the Coalition for Positive Sexuality and its materials, browse ~\r\l-\l-.positive.org. lSCollective decision-making processes, such as the "consensus method" used in many activist organizations, strive to replace hierarchies and votes with democratic debate and mutual consensus. Of course, collective processes can offer the illusion of consensus while in practice suppressing minority voices (or permitting vocal minorities undue influence), a fact of which many (though not all) activists were aware. 1 6 ~ h i infornlal s nlenlbership structure does have drawbacks (as does any social structure). For instance, though activists will exclude people who are clearly hostile to their cause from meetings and actions, activist ideologies and conventions provide few vehicles for censuring people who, though agreeing with a group's goals in principle, behave in ways that disrupt the group. Groups continue to function because most members are willing to concede a point rather than destroy the group, because particularly disruptive individuals are simply tolerated and ignored, and because those individuals who do the most work tend to accrue respect and knowledge, and therefore the power to direct the flow of discussion (a fact that can itself provoke objections from less active members). 17My point that activist organizations must be maintained by activists relates to Harry Elam's discussion of a sense of urgency as a prerequisite for the development and continuation of theatre companies involved in social change ( T h e ~ ~ft ~b eSocidl ~ Cbmge, see especially 87, 124-12.5, and 448-4.51; see also Tilkzng I t ) . One should not, however, disnliss as failures activist groups that collapse or decline. Activist organizations frequently make pivotal contributions to social change but cannot sustain themselves. Consider the example of ACT UP. This organization not only influenced the politics of the on-going AIDS crisis, it also offered new strategies to activists in general and challenged the conventional doctor-patient relationship. By the mid-1990s, however, only a few ACT UP chapters remained active (e.g., at this writing, the New York chapter remains active and influential). ACT UP'S decline as a national presence stemmed from ideological differences within the organization (in the most extreme and unusual case, ACT UP San Francisco was reportedly "hijacked in 1993 by conspiracy theorizing extremists, who now preach that the AIDS epidemic is over and that the real killer of gay men is not HIV, but AIDS medications" [Paulin]), but also from the death of many members and exhaustion among others. See Patten. 1 8 ~ a n yscholars have analyzed public demonstration as performance. See, for instance, Drewal; Fuoss; Kershaw, Radicill zn Perfonnilme; Neustadter; and Schechner, Fzrtuw of' Ritual (especially the chapter entitled "The Street is the Stage," in which Schechner describes activists as self-consciously staging events and manipulating syn~bols). 19~checl~ner's definition of "restored behavior" (which he cites as the central characteristic of all performances, from ritual to fornlal theatre) is similar to synlbolic interactionists' definition of a convention: Schechner argues that such behavior exists independent of its creator, and rnay be "stored" in society and "restored" by others (see Between Thelltw 35-36). The traditions of activism mesh with Schechner's discussion: chants,
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slogans 011 placards, die-ins, tactics of civil disobedience, and other activist "behaviors" circulate within activist worlds independent of a single creator. Note, however that, although Schechner's theories remain important in perfornlance studies, they have elicited significant critiques. Baz Kershaw ("Fighting" 26.5-266) and Elin Diamond ( 6 ) describe postnlodern skepticism regarding the tendency of Schechner's theories to present "totalizing metanarratives," and Rustom Bharucha ( 4 ) accuses Schechner of ethnocentrism, a preference for synthesis at the expense of individual histories, and a tendency to divorce rituals from their "larger structures" and meanings. 2 0 ~ na tantalizing example of the exchange between activism and performance upon which this study centers, the performance art world recognized the theatricality of ACT UP'S activism, awarding the group a Bessie award, the "Tony" of Off-Broadway performance (Solomon 39). 2 1 ~ h i sview is expressed even by theatre practitioners. Luis Valdez, founder of the farmworkers' protest theatre El Teatro Campesino, commented in 1970: "It is particularly inlportant for teatro Chicano to draw a distinction between what is theatre and what is reality. A denlonstration with a thousand Chicanos, all carrying flags and picket signs, shouting CHICANO POWER! is not the revolution. It is theatre about the revolution. The t y , on stage (which could be anywhere, even a sidewalk) in people must act in ~ e ~ ~ l inot order to achieve real change. . . . [Unless] the demonstration evolves into a street battle (which has not yet happened but is possible), it is basically a lot of emotion with very little political power, as Chicanos have discovered by demonstrating, picketing and shouting before school boards, police departments and stores to no avail" (Valdez 8). Note that Valdez defines all public demonstration as "theatre" but nevertheless regards it as existing at a remove from "the revolution." The rub in the argument, of course, is that if the only legitimate revolution involves armed struggle and Chicanos (or any other resistant group) exist in the minority or are out-armed, then they are doomed to perpetual "pre-revolutionary" activity. If, on the other hand, one agrees with Granlsci that cultural movements constitute revolutionary acts in times when "frontal assault" is undesirable or impossible, one allows that the potential exists for revolutions that require neither superior force nor violence. It should also be noted that Valdez's conlrnent cannot be separated from its context, the revolutionary fervor of the 1960s and early 1970s (indeed, Valdez himself began writing for the mainstream theatre within a few years of publishing the above comment; see Yarbro-Bejarano, "Female Subject" 395). 2 2 ~ o m i n a n tideologies are ideas promulgated within the mainstream of societ!; and often enforced by authorities, that seek to define the boundaries between behavior that is "normal" or "central" and that which is "deviant" or "marginal." For a more thorough discussion, see Chapter 1. 2 3 ~ n l e s sotherwise indicated, all accounts of demonstrations, meetings, and activist performances in this chapter are based upon my own observations. O n carnival and transgression, see Stallybrass and White. 2 4 ~ o more r on dominant discourses regarding AIDS and their relationship to gay-andlesbian rights see IZistenberg, especially her introduction. 2 5 ~ o rprimary source accounts of Yippie protests as theatre see Rubin, especially 132-143; IZrassner; and A.Hoffman. On WITCH see Moskowitz 9 and Echols 76-101. I should note that it is not my intention to celebrate the Yippies or 1960s performance uncritically; Rubin's book, for instance, contains numerous sexist comments.
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2 6 ~ h FMLN e (in translation, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) was the central revolutionary group battling the US-supported and often oppressive government of El Salvador during this period. 2 7 ~ h equotation appears in a Pledge of Resistance letter to local Pledge activists. Though the letter describes only plans for theatrical activity, Pledge representatives reported in a meeting I attended that these performances did, in fact, take place. These activists also reported that other performative events, not explicitly defined as "theatre," were included in the weekend's protests; in Los Angeles, for instance, protesters carried a cross and made a trail of fake blood from the Federal Building to the Salvadoran consulate. 28Burbank ("Ladies ...1980s") also notes that activists employ and value performance, offering examples from the work of the parodic feminist troupe Ladies Against Women. 2 9 ~ h i sprogression simply offers a rhetorical means for discussing the range of activist performance, and it should not be taken as an indication that activists themselves value a particular type of or setting for performance above others. 3 0 ~ h e"gag rule" was eventually suspended by executive order during the early days of the Clinton administration; at this writing it is unclear whether the George W. Bush adnlinistration will revive it. did not see this performance-demonstration; my account is based upon reading the script and accounts in the gay and lesbian press, and upon conversations with one of the author/organizers, Jeanette M a y The performance is also mentioned in passing by Patten (391)who-in an otherwise co~npellingarticle-inaccurately describes the piece as the sole creation of ACT UPIChicago. 32"Woman's Response to Penny Pullen," F~eedomBed. Emphasis in original. The final line of this passage criticizes the anti-choice movement's tactic of picketing clinics and hounding women entering clinics to carry their pregnancies to term. 331 differentiate between activist troupes created within the networks of political organizing and the work of alternative theatre troupes created by participants in art worlds. The distinction is subtle, and the basic contention of this study is that bou~ldaries frequently blur and insiders in these worlds often interact. For this argument to make sense, however, one must recognize that distinctions do exist in the eyes of artists and activists: activist troupes do feature a greater degree of engagement of activist world networks and conventions, even when their activity is similar to that of alternative theatre troupes. As I explain in greater detail below, well-known political theatre troupes, such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Bread and Puppet Theatre, operate independently from political movements and see themselves 11s s e p m ~ ~fj.onz t e nctiz~isnz(see Fenn 29, 54). Burbank ("Ladies . . . 1980s") notes a similar tendency when she argues that historians of social movements (when they consider performance at all) tend to focus on professional theatre troupes such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, rather than on the performance work of political activists. 3 4 ~ h e r ewere LAW troupes in, among other locations, Atlanta and Chica,rno , as well as CLAW (Colored Ladies Against Women) in Atlanta. My account of LAW derives prirnarily from my interview with and the work of Burbank. Some of the information offered appears in Schechter, Du~ov'sPig 180-183. The Plutoniunl Players are also described in The~1twwo~R 102-103.
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3\51 have also encountered discussions of activist-performance troupes in the media. For p show in Chicago discussed the group Chicano instance, guests on the MUTUT ~ p radio Secret Service that grew out of the national Latino student organization, MECHA, and has attracted national attention by touring campuses and performing satires of r , c~ ~-1'astereotypes of Latinos. MUTUT ~ p Show. p
.
3 6 ~ n l e s sotherwise indicated, descriptions of N o More Nice Girls' performances are based upon interviews with troupe member Jeanette M a y 371 attended this demonstration and witnessed the performance, and also interviewed members of N o More Nice Girls regarding its meaning and impact. 38Lktivists also refer to anti-choice pregnancy centers as "fake" or "phony" clinics. For a more detailed discussion of these centers from an activist perspective, see IZaufnlann. 39My description derives from my attendance at the performance/demonstration. The activists demarcated a fairly clear transition between being "in" and "out" of character. My observation was that, though passersby paused to understand the meaning of the piece, they understood immediately that it was a political demonstration, as opposed to a genuine health booth or some other activity. 4 0 ~ characterization y of TWAT Team is based upon conversations with members of the troupe, some of whom prefer to remain anonymous. 4 1 base ~ my description of the TWAT Team's perfornlances upon my observations of the troupe's performances at a meeting of the Pledge of Resistance, at a conference of the National Lawyers' Guild, a progressive attorneys' organization, and at demonstrations in Chicago. For further descriptions of TWhT Team performances, see my review of their work.
4 2 ~ h epassage in the text is quoted from an unpublished script of Alien-Nation used by permission of TWAT Team members. The original text appears in all-capitals, which I have converted to standard text. 4 3 ~ o rdocumentation of struggles concerning police brutality in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, consult the film The End of the Nigbtstzck: Confronting Polzce Bmtalzty zn Chicago. 4 4 ~ u r i n gthe Persian Gulf War yellow ribbons were used by members of mainstream US cultures to symbolize patriotisnl and "support for the troops." Activists, however, saw the ribbons as products of media hype and nlilitaristic rhetoric that silence dissent and privilege abstract "troops" over individuals (whether they be civilians or soldiers). 4 5 ~ h e s ephilosophies have their most immediate roots in the theatrical activism of the 1960s, which rejected (in principle, at least) hierarchical institutions in favor of personal participation in the creation of a new society. See Neustadter; and Rubin 82. As mentioned earlier, for some activists in the 1960s and 1970s, theatre served as a metaphor for the entirety of their activism. Abbie Hoffman, for instance, said of the Yippies, "The only way you can understand is to join, to become involved. Our goal is to remain a mystery. Pure theater" (Hoffman 420). 4 6 0 n the power of satire to confront authority, see also Schechter, DUTOIJ'S Pig, especially 19 and 166. O n the use of performance to expose the mechanics of power, see huslander, Presence and Resistance.
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4 7 ~ e r r yRubin, for instance, denlonstrates a typical attitude that views women as objects when he says of the soldiers at the theatrical assault on the Pentagon, "We believed that they might throw off their helmets and come to our side. We had girls, pot, food, community warmth and we weren't taking any orders" (Rubin 78). For another case in which a company built a positive identity for one group while slighting another, see Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano's analyses El Teatro Canlpesino and other Chicano theatres led by men, which she argues helped Chicanos generally, but did not serve Chicana women well. 4 8 ~ a r o d i e sof nlinority performances in the mainstream media are sometimes created by artists who are members of that minority group themselves. In such cases it is often very difficult to decide whether individuals have "sold out" or managed to subvert the mainstream from within. Such issues generally lie beyond the scope of this study, but see the discussion of the problems of politics in conmlercial theatre in the section on Miss Snigon. 4 9 ~ h elimits of agency in the society of the spectacle-and the need to recognize the potential for resistance to and progressive action in it-were recurrent themes at the Southeastern Theatre Conference's Theatre Symposium 2000 on Politics and Theatre; see Thelltw Symposium, the proceedings of the meeting (forthcoming). For a discussion of issues surrounding the "society of the spectacle," see Chapter 1 . jO1 have witnessed instances of media distortion of activism. For instance, Chicago media outlets tended to downplay the size of demonstrations opposing the Gulf War; they also tended to devote equal amounts of air time to descriptions of actions by activists denlonstrating opposition to and support for the Gulf War, despite the fact that the antiwar protesters outnunlbered pro-war denlonstrators by ten to one. j l l t should be noted that sorne scholars find comnzzrnit~~s, as articulated by Victor Turner, dangerous rather than liberating. Michael Taussig (4421, for instance, notes: "Impregnating people with unity may fit well with certain fantasies of maleness and fascism." For an analysis of the varying degrees to which spectators invest themselves in ritual performance, see Obeyesekere. For a discussion of the idea that politically engaged performance "preaches to the converted," see Miller and Roman (the entire issue of Thelltw Jounml, in which their article appears, deals with "Gay and Lesbian Queeries" and will be of interest to those studying perfornlance and politics). j2Activists' comments on camp are quoted from my notes from this meeting. For a variety of theoretical perspectives on camp, see the essays in M. Meyer. 5 3 ~ o s k o w i t zoffers evidence that sorne activists oppose performance in organizingor at least the outrageous perfornlance practiced by many activists-when she notes that Betty Friedan "bemoaned the 'infantile deviants' in the feminist movement who used 'sexual shock tactics' to attain their goals" (10). O n institutional perfornlance practitioners who attempt to rend apart politics and art, see earlier chapters. j 4 ~ e a d e r sof prominent radical theatre troupes draw upon art world language and conventions to articulate the goals of their work and, moreover, distinguish their work from activist movements. Arthur Sainer quotes Joan Holden as stating that, in the 196Os, the members of the Mime troupe "thought of ourselves as outside agitators; outside the establishment, obviously, but also-in our roles as artists-outside the movement" (Sainer qtd. in Fenn 51). Even troupes strongly associated with political demonstrations eschew the label "protest theatre." Fenn notes that Bread and Puppet Theatre founder Peter Schun~anndistanced hirnself not only from the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s, but also from "what he called the 'professional protest theatre,"' looking instead for "audience
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reaction to his works expressed in the form of spontaneous outbursts of emotion rather than as responses preconditioned by aggressive presentation. He commented: 'I don't think our business is to protest but to say what needs to be said or what feels good to say'" (Fenn 54). Even though the theatre Schumann created constituted a perennial presence at progressive demonstrations from the 1960s through the 1990s (at least), he described that work using theatre world conventions (e.g., emphasizing audience response over message) and did not see political organizing around a particular issue or set of issues as the work of his company. Moreover, he appears to assunle that activist troupes ("professional protest theatre") did not share these aesthetic goals, or that too close an identification with protest would lead observers to believe that he had abandoned artistic aims. That is, Schun~ann,like members of the Mime Troupe and other practitioners of alternative theatre, gave priority to his role as artist even as he participated in the social worlds of political activism.
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>"This point is important to my earlier arguments that activist theatre deserves attention from theatre scholars despite its difference from institutional performance. Just as perfornlance artists use conventions that honor acting styles that would be considered "unpolished" in the professional theatre, so too political activists employ conventions that depart from those used in institutional performance. j6,\ctivists protested the celebrations of the quincentennial of Colun~bus'sarrival in the Americas not only because they objected to the notion that Columbus discovered a continent already occupied by Native Americans, but also because they charged that Columbus and subsequent colonists brutalized and enslaved this indigenous population. j7Boal's concept of "Forum Theatre" entails constructing a scenario that presents a solvable but difficult political problem. Actors perform the scene and then a "Joker" asks the audience to suggest possible changes that will provide a favorable outcome and the actors then proceed to experiment with these ideas; see Boal, Thent~eof the Oppwssed 119-197. j81 base the contention that WAC chapters are nunlerous and influential upon my participation in activist communities. O n the founding of WAC see IZelleher. 5 9 ~ o l ~ e n - ~ (4) r u zalso notes in passing that some radical street performers are also professional actors, but does not explore the implications for each world.
CHAPTER 3
Theatre Insiders and Politics Miss Saigon, Commercial Theatre, Professional Actors, and Activism
Though people often struggle to maintain separations between various categories of human activity, such as art and politics, the boundaries between social worlds frequently overlap or blur. In my first case, I examined the intersection of politics and performance from the perspective of political activists, arguing that insiders to explicitly political social worlds not only created their own performances to facilitate organizing, but also worked with institutional performance insiders. I now argue that the converse is true: professional performers, though they invest a great deal of their energies in the worlds of institutional performance, nevertheless engage in exchange with the conventions of and participants in social worlds of political activism; in addition, the worlds of institutional performance do not exist at a remove from politics, but rather exist in culture and become the sites of political contest, demonstrating further exchange between activists, performers, and society. Rather than look at a piece of commercial performance that has fairly clear links to political issues or includes activist characters-such as Larry IZramer's Normal Heart, which describes political ferment at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, or Angels in America, Tony Kushner's epic linking politics, personal relationships, and AIDS-I examine the musical Miss Snigon and the protests surrounding its New York production (I consider artists creating overtly political performance in the subsequent chapter on the NEA Four). Miss Snigon epitomizes commercial theatre, and the musical and (especially) the controversies surrounding its production reveal theatre's engagement in contemporary politics in general and the exchange among performance professionals and political activists in particular. Miss Snigon retells the Mndnmn Butterfly story of a US soldier who marries and then deserts an Asian prostitute, set this time in Vietnam in 1975 during the withdrawal of US troops. As the much-anticipated new work by the team that authored the hit Les Misembles, Miss Snigon's September 20,
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1989, opening was greeted in London by record advance ticket sales and favorable, if sometimes mixed, reviews. Few critics remarked on the fact that several Asian characters in the show were portrayed by White actors, including the lead role of a pimp, played by Jonathan Pryce (though there were exceptions; see Koenig). In 1990, producer Cameron Mackintosh sought permission from the US Actors' Equity Association to allow Pryce to reprise this role in a Broadway production (the union's agreements with producers and foreign unions allow it to govern-to a degree-foreign actors' appearances in the US). Equity, responding to complaints from its membership and Asian American rights groups, refused to grant Pryce a visa on the grounds that it could not "appear to condone the casting of a Caucasian actor in the role of a Eurasian" ("'Saigon' application"). Mackintosh responded by canceling the production, and Equity, deluged by complaints from members and pilloried in the mainstream press, rescinded its decision. When Miss Saigon opened (as scheduled) on Broadway in April of 1991, it was greeted by protests from a coalition of Asian American community groups objecting to both the casting of Pryce and the content of the musical, in which the only Asian characters are prostitutes, pimps, and maniacal communists.' Both the musical itself and the protests against it merit attention in a study of performance and activism. The protests, particularly those emanating from outside the world of professional theatre, might be seen as extraneous to the musical's text. It would be a mistake, however, to view these controversies as an imposition of politics upon Miss Saigon. Rather, Miss Saigon and productions like it evidenced the continued cultural and economic power of institutional performance. Many commentators have noted, with considerable justification, that theatre cannot compete economically with popular media such as television, film, and the Internet, nor does one discover performance's power when one views it merely as mass communication (Boney; Auslander, Liveness). These caveats notwithstanding, commercial theatre constitutes both an influence on contemporary culture and an industry, as becomes apparent when one considers the economic clout of the "mega-musical." Time International reported in 1999 that Phantom of the Opera (produced by Miss Saigon impresario Cameron Mackintosh) had grossed $2.8 billion (double the worldwide box-office takings of Titanic, then the highest-grossing film); in the same year, The Seattle Times noted that Miss Saigon had grossed $900 million ("Showtime"; Berson, "'Miss Saigon' is Back"; see also I<ershaw, Radical in Performance 34). Long before the protests against it, Miss Saigon was embedded in politics as an economic provider (or withholder) of employment and as a major cultural edifice. More importantly, the Miss Saigon controversies deserve study because they demonstrate the connections among performers and activists this study seeks. The protests against Miss Saigon did not end employment
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discrimination or racial stereotyping in the entertainment industries or elsewhere, nor did the actors and community activists who mounted the protests expect that they would. Indeed, the Miss Snigon controversies were followed in subsequent years by controversies such as people of color's objections to the casting of the film House of the Spirits and to the content of the film Rising Sun. Likewise, figures released by Actors' Equity in the late 1990s suggest that minorities continue to encounter obstacles to employment on Broadway (Armbrust). This is not to say that the protests were ineffectual-many Asian American activists argue that the protests did increase casting opportunities and curtailed the "yellowface" practice of White actors portraying gross stereotypes of Asian characters (Kamiyama). Yet, as argued in earlier chapters, one cannot measure the importance of a moment in which politics and performance intersect through rigid adherence to cause-and-effect analysis. Rather, the protests against Miss Saigon constituted a moment in which performance world activity became a case-in-point of social justice issues throughout US society. For years after the event, many Asian Americans-from inside and outside the theatre world-viewed the protests as a watershed moment and referred to their own or others' participation in the protests as a touchstone of political engagement.' As I shall show, the protests constituted an element of a long-standing if sporadic tradition of activism among actors of color, and occasioned alliances between professional performers and community activists. The Miss Saigon controversies have raised a variety of complex questions; though many of these question fall beyond the boundaries of this study, they nevertheless constituted important features of the debate: Do performers cross ethical boundaries when they portray ethnicities other than their own? Can one perhaps contrast critical and uncritical representations of an Other? (For instance, Caryl Churchill's script Cloud 9 calls upon a White actor to play the African servant Joshua-a role I myself played in a staged reading as an undergraduate-in a clearly critical attempt to comment on internalized colonialism.) Yet, even then, isn't one denying an actor of color a relatively rare opportunity to perform? Can a production use actors from White ethnic groups (for White actors do have ethnicities) when no actors of color are available? How does one balance the director's and producer's rights to control their production while also fighting employment discrimination? (This question arose when Mackintosh and others defended the casting of Miss Snigon based upon the producer's right to creative expression, alluding to the concurrent debates about funding, free expression, and the arts that I address in next chapter.) Should ethnic actors perform in mainstream performances in which they have little artistic control and may well reproduce cultural stereotypes? At the risk of appearing to play academic dodgeball, I argue that these questions-though they are important, complex, and certainly relevant to any discussion of casting and the politics of performance-fail to address
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fully the politics of Miss Snigon or the positions of those who protested against the casting of the musical. My research addresses a number of factors that were less often remarked upon during the debates. First, Miss Snigon itself did not constitute an innocent victim of protest, but participated in politics prior to the controversies. Second, in my view, the leaders of Actors' Equity Association (excoriated frequently in the press at the time of the debates) pursued the path they did because they found themselves caught between the conflicting interests and identities of the union's membership (which, in turn, represented a microcosm of the unresolved tensions regarding race and equity that lie at the heart of US history). Third, the Asian American actors who protested against Miss Snigon have been mischaracterized as defending modernist essentialism, as opportunists or malcontents, or as naively fighting to play stereotypes. These various views, I suggest, misunderstand the Asian American actors in a variety of ways. Each assumes the actors formed a hoinogeneous group, while the actorslike Asian Americans in general-were diverse in experience and opinion. Some did advocate strict ethnic parity between actors and roles; most, however, sought to simultaneously raise the long-festering issue of employment discrimination against people of color in the professional theatre and challenge the prevalence of derogatory stereotypes of Asians in the entertainment industries. Nor were they oblivious to the double bind Miss Snigon represented: either fight for the opportunity to play a caricature of a Third-World pimp or relinquinsh a voice in mainstream culture. Additionally, the Asian Americans were not alone in staging their protests against Miss Snigon, nor was the incident unique. Though most of the Asian American actors who protested against the musical were new to activism, they were participating in a tradition of activism in professional theatre. They were joined in their protests by other actors of color who had been struggling persistently for equitable representation. Moreover, these actors forged connections with activists outside the theatre world. Fourth and finally, protests against the musical mounted by activists outside the theatre world were perceived by some as ancillary to the casting controversies. I argue that, in fact, these activists communicated with the performer-protesters, and that their protests manifested a concern for theatreworld activity by outsiders. This chapter pursues these issues more or less in the order presented above, demonstrating that Miss Snigon and the protests against the musical reveal indirect and direct exchange between insiders to the institutional performance world of commercial theatre and the conveiltioils of the worlds of political activis~n.~
Commercial theatre entails performances (usually plays, musicals, or revues) staged for profit and understood by those involved in their production and consumption as existing within the "mainstream" of theatrical
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activity. Coininercial theatre is often very similar to other inainstream theatre worlds, such as the not-for-profit theatre. Indeed, personnel, especially creative personnel such as actors, playwrights, and directors (as opposed to stagehands, ushers, and so on) frequently travel between the commercial and not-for-profit aild even "alternative" theatre worlds. As in any social world, the boundary between "mainstream" and "alternative" and even "commercial" performance can be indistinct and changeable, constructed as it is by the activity of the participants in the world (who include not only actors, playwrights, and directors, but also theatregoers, critics, and scholars). This having been said, one can recognize features that distinguish commercial theatre from other performance worlds. In part, one finds formally maintained relationships defining the difference between commercial and not-for-profit theatre, such as the different contracts Actors' Equity maintains with the League of Resident Theatres (a largely not-for-profit consortium) as opposed to the League of American Theatres and Producers (a commercial theatre league). Frequently, however, the commercial theatre is defined by its symbolic rather than its institutional quality: though small in number in comparison to not-for-profit and other theatres, commercial theatres, particularly Broadway theatres, constitute the icons of the theatre industry in the US in the twentieth century.' The art world of the musical constitutes the epitome of commercial theatre practice in the US. It consists of the cooperation among producers, composers, critics, audience members, and other people who share an understanding of how to create or consume a performance including music that these participants recognize as a "musical." The combination of large staffs (including actor-singers, dancers, musicians, and technicians), lavish spectacle, and uptown New York City venues has meant that, from its earliest antecedents, inusical theatre in the US has been an expensive commercial venture. The inusical developed in the US in the mid-nineteenth century, drawing upon conventions from popular entertainment forins as diverse as variety, minstrelsy, comic opera, and European "grand" opera and ballet.' US musical theatre tended to consist of variety shows (such as Ziegfeld's series of Follies that began in 1907) or to look to European operatic forins until after World War I (Smith and Litton 202). Musical entertainment prospered in the 1920s due to a general economic boom and the influence (and often appropriation) of new artistic movements, especially the Harlem Renaissance. During this period what is now identified as "the musical" emerged in productions that eschewed variety numbers in favor of a "book," or coherent narrative, as epitomized by Haminerstein and Kern's S h o w Boat (1927). Despite the diversity of the 1920s, most of the musicals considered "classics" of US musical theatresuch as the works of Rodgers and Hainmerstein-were produced during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, an era when the musical was a central form of mass popular entertaininent and successful Broadway shows sold millions of record albums and often were recreated as films (Smith and
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Litton 347). Though the musical remained a popular and successful form of performance, it lost its central role in popular culture during the 1960s: inflation in both production costs and ticket prices coupled with the popularity of television transformed going to a show into an "event" rather than a simple night Despite its econoinic and social woes, the musical did embrace some change during the 1960s and 1970s, as innovators, such as Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheiin, created "concept" musicals that offered new variations upon musical world conventions while other producers adapted new forms, such as rock music, to the musical, as exemplified by Hair. In the 1980s and early 1990s, a new phenomenon with obvious relevance to this study emerged in musical theatre: "blockbuster" showsoften produced abroad-that were more expensive and depended upon special effects to a greater degree than previous musicals dominated Broadway venues by running for years (long runs were common by this time, but the dominance of Broadway by a number of "mega-musicals" constituted a new trend). The musical, both historically and at present, constitutes an art world characterized by large-scale projects accomplished by large numbers of artistic and support personnel working on specialized tasks within a relatively rigid hierarchy. These projects entail a high degree of risk for most participants, but a successful musical can run for months or years, offering job security to actors and profits to investors. A glance at Miss Snigon's production history, profits, and personnel reveals its power as a major piece of commercial theatre. The first production of Miss Snigon debuted on September 20, 1989, at the renowned Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in London's West End theatre district. Miss Snigon has subsequently enjoyed great commercial success at major venues throughout the world, playing on Broadway, in touring productions in the US, and in other countries such as Canada and Japan. The economic and critical rewards garnered by Miss Snigon also point to its status as a major piece of commercial performance. The musical reportedly accrued a record-breaking $8 million (in US dollars) in advance sales of tickets prior to its London debut and cost $10 million to restage on Broadway, where it amassed another record advance of over $25 million (Behr and Steyn 165; M. Rothstein, "Equity Plans" 16). The musical was generally well received in its initial productions and lead actors have won major awards for their performances: Jonathan Pryce and Lea Salonga won Olivier awards in Britain for their respective creations of the characters of the Engineer and Kim; Pryce, Salonga, and Hinton Battle (who played John, a supporting character) won Tony awards for their roles in the Broadway production. A final indication that Miss Snigon was an influential piece of commercial performance is the fact that the "creative team" that authored and staged the musical consisted of central personnel in the art world of the musical theatre. The musical was written by the French team that created Les Mise'mbles, composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricist Alain Boublil.
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The musical was produced by Cameron Mackintosh, the British manager of mega-musicals including Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and Les Mise'mbles. In order to create the English lyrics used in the London premiere, the musical's French authors collaborated with US citizen Richard Maltby, J t , a well-known director and author of musicals such as Ain't Misbehavin' and Baby. The production was directed by Nicholas Hytner, who made his reputation as a director of "classics" at England's National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The production staff included other personnel of great repute within the professional theatre, such as choreographer Bob Avian and scenic designer John Napier, who designed Les Mise'mbles. H o w do Miss Saigon and the commercial theatre worlds it epitomizes relate to politics and representation? When one views political engagement as imperative to understanding art, one is left with a paradox regarding the musical specifically and commercial theatre in general: one cannot deny that mainstream productions have political potential and one cannot surrender this visible field of representation, yet one recognizes that work in cominercial contexts brings with it the dangers of conflicted interests and the potential for exploitation. The expense and risk involved in the Broadway musical-and commercial theatre generally-mitigate against shows with overt political content, since producers and their investors tend both to avoid "unsafe" themes and generally favor diversion over content.. Yet, frequent exceptions exist: the musical (and its parent genre, the variety) has produced diverse politically engaged works, from the revue P ~ n s and Needles to Brecht's Three Penny Opera to Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 commentary on the social oppression of African Americans, Ain't Supposed t o Dle a Natural Death (see Bordman; Smith and Litton). Even when a work of commercial theatre includes political content, however, critics favoring politically engaged performance tend to express skepticism about the ultimate relationship between cominercial theatre and politics. Many critiques of the commercial theatre's use of politics tend to focus upon the affluence of its audience, suggesting that such audience members are likely to adhere to middle-class values and that "popular bourgeois culture learns to assimilate the fiercest attacks on its values by transforming them into pleasing entertaininents" (Bowman and Pollock 113).' Even if one credits audience members with political sensibility, producers may merely appropriate political themes: since political content can be appealing to a mainstream audience, some artists include political references in their work merely in order to realize an abstract idea or to make the work more marketable. Other critics argue that the works presented on the stages of commercial theatres find their political paces confined within fences erected by the formal and ideological demands of cominercial theatre (Davy, "Constructing" 46; Kistenberg 39).
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Despite its pitfalls, it remains difficult to dismiss commercial theatre entirely, as practitioners and critics alike recognize.' I suggest that connecting debates regarding the politics of commercial theatre's content to the politics of its production-while not "solving" this paradox-offers a position from which progressive critics may celebrate those instances in which commercial theatre becomes involved in politics while still critiquing its contributions to dominant ideologies. Indeed, commercial institutional performance constitutes a realm in which issues of ideology, politics, and representation manifest themselves in concrete, institutional ways. In the case of Broadway theatre, performance constitutes both an economic engine and symbol for New York City (NYC-CHR, Untitled . . . Report). As an industry and a representation of the city, it is open to scrutiny from individuals, groups, and government bodies. Moreover, the routine details of a commercial musical's creation raise a variety of politically charged issues: are the people represented granted some degree of creative control; are authors remunerated for their labor; are the casting processes free of discrimination; are actors treated with dignity; are they offered roles that permit expression or simply ones that use them as objects for display? In other words, the political potential and portent of commercial theatre, including the musical, lies not only in what happens on stage, but in its status as an institution, a major field of representation in US culture, and a site for cultural contest. One should neither deny categorically the commercial theatre's potential for social change, nor dismiss its failures or offenses as trivial. Miss Saigon and the controversies surrounding it offer an opportunity to explore the commercial theatre world's potential to perpetuate stereotypes and exploit individuals, but they also present a case in which institutional performance served as a social site for struggles regarding representation and for cooperation among protesters from different social worlds. To these ends I first examine the politics of the musical's text and production process, then broach the controversies surrounding its New York production.
A comprehensive analysis of the content of Miss Saigon lies beyond the scope of this study and has been uildertakeil ably elsewhere, but the musical's politics of representation merits brief consideration."' The actors who first protested against Miss Snigon frequently met with harsh criticism that seemed to assume, at best, that their objections arose out of the blue, or, at worst, that they represented opportunism or professional jealousy. When one examines the musical's text and the production process through which it was created, however, one discovers that the musical itself participated in politics prior to the controversies, perpetuating stereotypes of Asians and appropriating political content (and even the conventions of political organizing) in the service of its tragic melodrama.
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Miss Snigon closely follows the story of Madamn Butterfly, transposing the action to Vietnam in 1975, after the cease-fire when the US withdrew most of its troops but before the fall of Saigon (readers familiar with Madamn Butterfly will also recognize significant departures from the Italian opera, which I shall analyze later).'' As the play opens, Kim, an orphaned virgin, is just beginning to work as a prostitute for the sleazy pimp, the Engineer (the musical's title derives from a mock-beauty pageant staged by the Engineer and prostitutes). A Marine, John, buys a night with Kim for his buddy, Chris, an angst-ridden GI frustrated both with the chaos of Vietnam and the banality of life in the US. In the course of their night together, the GI and the prostitute fall in love and decide to "play house" and live together. The couple's mock-wedding is interrupted by I
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US resumed relations with Vietnam, and in some numbers Miss Saigon does parody US consumerism and does attend to the plight of refugee children. Yet, the musical was hardly the first piece of popular culture to deal with these issues." More importantly, I argue that Miss Saigon's political content, seen in the context of the show's entire narrative and production history, ultimately serves a tragic story that appropriates politics to further "universal" themes. The musical deals with the topic of the US war in Vietnam as a metaphor against all wars rather than as the result of specific political decisions. In public statements the producers routinely referred to the production's universal meaning and emotional basis. Producer Mackintosh is described in an interview as saying the show has "'to do with the reality of human nature' and [has] a powerful emotional appeal" (qtd. and paraphrased in Fisher 4). Similarly, Claude-Michel Schonberg writes of the photo that he claims inspired Miss Snigon (depicting a child being sent from Vietnam to the US), "The child's tears were the final condemnation of all wars which shatter people who love each other" (Schonberg 4).14Political moments in Miss Snigon-even those derived from documentary sources-serve universal tragedy. The opening number of Act Two exemplifies the ways in which Miss Snigon's text manipulates political sentiment and the conventions of activist organizing. The scene depicts John, now on the staff of an aid agency, delivering a speech while documentary film footage of refugee children is presented on a gigantic screen above his head. The song sung by John and the chorus introduces the Vietnamese term "bui doi," or "dust of life," which refers to the children of Vietnamese women and Western men who were rejected by people in both cultures. John's speech pleading the case for the bui doi is delivered in direct address to the audience, and none of the musical's other characters are on stage. In this sequence, the producers of Miss Saigon appropriate the conventions of political organizing (described earlier in this study), manipulating both activist rhetorical strategies and documentary footage. John's activist speech is at once moving and moot: it is set in 1978, so it presents the audience with an appeal which refers to an occasion for action that peaked eleven years before the musical opened in 1989. The use of actual footage raises even more serious issues of representation and ethics. Michael Feingold, writing in the Voice, angrily denounced the producers, asserting that "You can assume provisionally that the creators of Miss Snigon see absolutely nothing wrong in using the real anguish of genuine abandoned children to jerk a few extra tears on their way to parlaying themselves a multimilliondollar profit" (Feingold, "Heat-Seeking Bomb")." Even if one gives the producers the benefit of the doubt, presuming good intentions, this scene specifically and the musical in general represent people (e.g., refugee children from a past decade, mediated through film and editing) who cannot possibly speak for themselves.
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The choices made by the producers of Miss Snigon reveal that their primary concern was not advocacy, but offering the audience a satisfying tragic narrative. They worked assiduously to avoid images that might have disrupted the narrative, and they also sought to mitigate questions of responsibility for the war in Vietnam. In the bui doi sequence, the producers intentionally chose shots that depicted the faces of children under the age of seven and avoided images of graphic suffering, such as maimed children (O'Haire, "When faces tell"). In another instance, the musical's creators reworked a scene to avoid the "embarrassing" spectacle of American tourists applauding the entrance of a giant statue of H o Chi Minh (Behr and Steyn 177). More fundamentally, Miss Snigon's text skirts the issue of the US'S responsibility for the war and the consequent devastation of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people-a question far likelier to disturb US audiences than images of refugees or statues of Uncle H o (see also Koenig; Smart). For example, there is never any suggestion, as far as I know, in either the text, staging, or accompanying materials (e.g., program notes) that the US government might bear a responsibility toward the refugees or that the problem might extend beyond the "tragedies of war" to peacetime operations by the contemporary US military (at the moment Miss Saigon was staged, for instance, US servicemen serving at Pacific naval bases continued to abandon children they conceived with indigenous women). Instead, the issue of who shall care for children conceived during the war became the subject of domestic melodrama among private individuals, a transubstantiation of national political debate into personal tragedy that participated in a readjustment of history and tended to short-circuit questions regarding US conduct in Vietnam.lThe narrative of Miss Saigon also functioned to mitigate the blame that could be leveled at its proxies for the US government-the US characters. Evidence of this exculpation appears when one compares Miss Snigon to the work that inspired it, Puccini's Madamn Butterfly. The narratives of both works depend upon the image of the Eastern prostitute who is faithful to her lover and devoted to her son. The most apparent differences appear in the Western characters. Most centrally, the creators of Miss Snigon softened Puccini's philandering Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton into a sympathetic character, Sergeant Chris Scott. The conventions of the mainstream musical required that the male lead be young and sympathetic, and Boublil and Schonberg envisioned this male lead as vulnerable and human (Boublil 5), so they made their male lead different from Pinkerton in a number of ways. Where Pinkerton is callous, Chris is sincere. Pinkerton buys Cio-Cio-San; John buys Kim for Chris. Pinkerton abandons Cio-Cio-San in peacetime; Chris and Kim are torn apart by war. Pinkerton marries without a thought of Cio-Cio-San, but Chris agonizes over Kim's fate. Pinkerton refuses to see Cio-Cio-San upon his return to Japan, whereas Chris rushes to Bangkok when he learns that Kim is there. Most importantly, Boublil and Schonberg
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changed Pinkerton's clear intention to marry a (presumably White) American to an intimation that Chris views Kim as a lost fiancke. Far from abandoning Kim, Chris betrays her only when he gives up hope and marries, thereby failing to wait as faithfully as she. The effect of the adaptations from Mndnma Butterfly to Miss Snigon almost all serve to relieve the young, love-struck US soldier from the guilt of provoking tragedy while maintaining the emotional impact the earlier opera derived from the downfall of an idealized Asian woman, exemplifying the general tendency on the part of Miss Snigon's creators to use politics in order to advance a tragic narrative they saw as "universal"-and palatable to West End or Broadway audiences." The softening of Pinkerton into Chris juxtaposed with the relative similarity between Cio-Cio-San and Kim also reveals another aspect of Miss Snigon's politics of representations: its participation in a tradition in the US musical that exoticizes Asians and promulgates stereotypes about them. Representation of "Asianness" appeared in a spoken drama in the US as early as 1767 (Moy 9), and a survey of the musical's history yields a plethora of works clearly preoccupied with the exotic East or the unpredictable "Oriental."" Though the Orientalist settings of some musicals served simply as exotic backdrops for comic plots or varieties, most such musicals featured derogatory stereotypes of Asian characters, portrayed by non-Asians, often speaking pidgin English. In either case, as Edward Said's theory of Orientalism contends, the stereotypes that appeared in these productions functioned to define the US as rational by opposing it with a chaotic and inscrutable "Orient." Furthermore, Orientalism buttresses Western imperialist projects (i.e., the colonization of other, ostensibly "less civilized" peoples).'' The characters created in these productions fostered pejorative stereotypes that have haunted the history of Asians in the US. The portrayal of Asians and the "Orient" on Broadway shares profound links with other aspects of the history of Asians in the US-a history that includes exploitation of immigrant labor, White fears of the "yellow peril," restrictive immigration laws, internment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War 11, postwar celebration of the "model minority," and, beginning in the 1980s and continuing during the twenty-first century, paranoia about Japanese business practices and Chinese espionage. Cultural productions created during each phase of this history, including the musical, added new images of Asians to a pantheon of stereotypes: the coolie, the opium addict, the evil sorcerer and the dragon lady, the despotic ruler using yellow hordes to overtake American lands, the simian Japanese soldier, the dutiful but utterly unthreatening Charlie Chan, the Chinese Tong, and the sinister, unscrupulous Japanese businessman. The stereotypes persist, but in the post-civil rights, postmodern era they have taken on a new form: often regarded as outmoded, stereotypes in fact have a renewed power in the contemporary
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US precisely because they persist while appearing to be antiquated (Moy 5). (For more thorough treatments of Asian and Asian American history, and of stereotypes produced by White fictions dealing with Asians, see Moy; Berson, Between Worlds; Kim; Marchetti; and Takaki.) This persistence of stereotypes is evident in Miss Snigon's text. All the featured female Asian roles in Miss Saigon (i.e., roles that stand out from the ensemble) are prostitutes. One should not assume that prostitution connotes immorality. In Miss Snigon, however, the prostitutes, while allowed to display something of an emotional life, clearly signify desperation and squalor. Paradoxically, Miss Saigon also romanticizes the prostitutes' plight: by highlighting Kim's virginity and the vulnerability of the other women, Miss Snigon's text employs the "hooker with the heart of gold" scenario that erases the actual circumstances endured by particular women in the sex industry with an image of "the triumph of the human spirit." The images of male Asians in Miss Saigon are equally limited and pejorative: ensemble numbers portray robotic North Vietnamese soldiers and inane Japanese tourists, and the only two prominent Asian male characters are the maniacal communist, T h y , and the sleazy pimp, the Engineer. The Engineer (the crux of the casting controversies) personifies the stereotype of the self-hating Asian; for example, he sings, "Why was I born of a race 1 That thinks only of rice / and hates entrepreneurs?" During the controversies, the producers justified their casting of a White actor in the role of the Engineer by claiming that the character was Eurasian and therefore could be played by either a White or an Asian actor. Ironically, defining the Engineer as Eurasian rather than Asian makes the character even more consistent with a tradition of Western fiction that presents frustrated Eurasians and "tragic mulattos" as figures torn apart by a war between races in their very blood (see Kim; W. Fletcher). Orientalist strategies appear not only in Miss Snigon's text but also in the musical's production process, through which the producers spoke for Others instead of allowing people to represent themselves. Edward Said notes that the Westerner claiming to speak for those who ostensibly cannot speak for themselves "is perhaps the most familiar of Orientalism's themes . . ." ("Orientalism reconsidered" 219). Analysis of Miss Saigon's production process reveals that the musical's producers set about creating a spectacle of a generalized "Orient" with very little consultation with individual Asians. Principal librettist Alain Boublil saw his own childhood as a White European boy growing up in Tunisia as offering him an informed perspective on "the Orient." Indeed, in another typically Orientalist move (see Said, Orientalism 21), he generalized his own experience into a commentary on the entire "Orient," stating that "[Characters such as Kim and Thuy] pray to other Gods with other words but they believe, as people I knew from my childhood believed, that the world proceeds from the same organized miracle which, good or bad, is far
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beyond our understanding" (Boublil 5). Likewise, the creators of Miss Saigon went to great efforts to find and record the sounds of Asian instruments, but their goal was not an accurate presentation of a particular culture, but a creation of symbols of "the Orient," as indicated by orchestrator William Brohn's explanation of the reason that certain instruments are linked with certain characters: "We limited the use of the shakuhachi [a Japanese flute] to Kim . . . The wailing of the Oriental flute comes to represent the sacrifice of the Oriental woman" (Behr and Steyn 53; see also 50-54). Nor were Asian people deeply involved in the creation of the musical-a lacuna that contrasts sharply with the producers' concerns regarding input from the US. The producers of Miss Saigon hired American Richard Maltby, Jr., to aid in the translation of lyrics from French to English because "on an issue which many in the US still feel sensitive about, it clearly made sense to enlist at least one American on the creative team" (Behr and Steyn 39). Members of that team did not show the same concerns regarding Vietnamese ~ensibilities.~" It may be unsurprising that the producers of a musical bound to play on Broadway and unlikely to appear in H o Chi Minh City should be more concerned with US than with Vietnamese responses. Such sentiments, however, led to a production process that marginalized Asians in terms of representation. The producers' desire for authenticity regarding Vietnam appears to have been limited to consulting with the Vietnamese Embassy in London to advertise auditions and inquire about details of costumes and properties (Behr and Steyn 141; 160) and seeking advice (presumably at little or no cost) from waitresses in Vietnamese restaurants. Lyricist Boublil declared, for instance that, in order to find an appropriate Vietnamese blessing for a scene, "I kept going to Vietnamese restaurants and asking the waitress for a translation, and every waitress had a different answer. . . . So finally I decided to stick by one of them and choose the version which made the best sound" (Behr and Steyn 63, emphasis in origii~al).~' Here again is the typical Orientalist formulation-where relations among Westerners must be conducted with care, "Oriental" voices may be obtained as informally (and, perhaps, as inexpensively) as possible and may be deployed in order to achieve an ambiance that may have little to do with the particularity of Asians' lives. The discourse on the Orient, in which Miss Snigon's text and process participate, shares close ties to other discourses, notably those regarding gendet2' In particular, Miss Snigon participates in a tradition within Western culture (both popular and "high") of representing the sacrifice of the "Oriental" woman-a powerful myth bearing close ties to Western imperialism. Angela Pao argues that the myth engendered by Madamn Butterfly and its successors rests upon the depiction of the Asian woman as embodying both eroticism and "exceptional maternal devotion" (Pao 21; 30-31). Film critic Gina Marchetti considers the same sort of myths that Pao describes, labeling them "Butterfly tales" and noting that they
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constitute one of the most popular images of Asian-White romance in Hollywood. Marchetti argues that "Butterfly tales ennoble female sacrifices of all sorts. They argue, in support of dominant male notions of the social order, that women can be morally 'superior' to men by sacrificing themselves completely for the patriarchy" (Marchetti 78-79). "Patriarchy," the reservation of authority to successive generations of men, is a word that conservatives label jargon, but in Miss Snigon, at least, this is exactly what is at stake: Kim sacrifices her own life that her son might prosper in the US. Miss Saigon, then, literally re-presents the stereotype of the exotic, sexually available Asian woman endowed with superhuman devotion to lover and child, thereby reinvigorating an image that supports simultaneously imperialism and sexism. As in the case of Orientalism, gender stereotypes played out in the musical's production process as well as in the text. The interplay among issues of power, Orientalism, and gender in the creation of Miss Snigon are exemplified by the staging the "Miss Saigon" contest, from which the show derives its name. In this sequence the Engineer sells the bar girls' services to GIs by holding a mock beauty pageant, during which the female chorus members, costumed in bikinis, gyrate before the Marines-and the audience. It is easy to understand why the lyrics used in this scene offended many Asians: the GIs sing (in the first full-fledged song of the show) "The heat is on in Saigon 1 The girls are hotter 1' 1' hell / One of these slits here will be Miss Saigon / God, the tension is high / Not to mention the smell" (Boublil, Schonberg, and Maltby, lyric sheet). It goes almost without saying that such language denigrates women (specifically Asian women"slits" suggests a stereotypical image of "slant-eyed" Asians as well as an offensive sexual metonymy for women). Moreover, when rehearsing this scene of erotic exhibition, the production team employed an "innocent conspiracy" to hide the bikini costumes from their female Asian cast, knowing the women would likely find them distasteful. Just as aspects of the writing of Miss Snigon reveal a tendency on the producers' part to speak for the Orient, so too the treatment of cast members evidences a power dynamic in which the producers (almost exclusively men) made decisions about how women-both women in general and specific female cast members-would be represented." Like other aspects of the musical's production process, casting practices in Miss Snigon reveal the producers' efforts to speak for and about Others. When one examines the public statements made by the producers of Miss Snigon, one discovers a double standard in the casting of the Asian roles that illustrates the license they apparently felt to represent Others: female Vietnamese characters were played by Asian women while the male Vietnamese characters were played by White men. The producers clearly felt that the conventions of the Western musical theatre demanded that female parts be played by women of Asian descent. Miss Snigon chronicler
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Edward Behr reports that "Boublil, Schonberg and Hytner were determined to have as inany real-life Asians in the cast as possible; Mndnwze Butterflytype make-up, though suitable enough for opera, would, they knew, be inadequate, especially for female members of the cast. Also, the physical demands made on performers in Miss Saigon required an authentic Asian litheness and grace" (Behr and Steyn 141; emphasis added). In a typically Orientalist move, the producers of Miss Saigon attributed certain characteristics to Asian women and then sought out female actors who could render the ostensible trait "authentically." The requirement of "authenticity" clearly did not extend to male Asian characters, since the male Asian roles were played in the London production by White actors. . The producers' argument that the Engineer constitutes a Eurasian character is irrelevant here, since Thuy (who must be Vietnamese if his rage at a half-Western child is to be believed) was also played by a White actor in London. The double standard between the casting of the male and female roles derives from the conventions of the commercial Western stage. Angela Pao argues that the casting of Miss Snigon is consistent with a the history of the musical, where female Asian characters are viewed as exotic songbirds that must be rendered authentically but where Asian male characters become ciphers to be rendered by Whites (Pao 22). In addition to revealing a double standard based upon Orientalist preconceptions, the producers' choice to cast White actors in Asian roles reveals the complexities of casting's role in the politics of representation. The producers clearly overcame their reluctance to use "yellowface" makeup, noted by Behr in the comment quoted above, in the case of the Asian inale characters. During the majority of the London run, Jonathan Pryce and the other White actors playing prominent Asian roles (understudies for the Engineer and actors playing Thuy) altered their appearance to look more Asian, primarily by wearing prosthetic devices that made their eyes squii~t.'~ Though no actors used yellowface in the US production, that this convention was used at all in Miss Snigon further exemplifies a convergence of social and ideological aspects of the politics of representation: yellowface allowed White actors to play Asian characters in a semi-naturalistic form of performance, denying Asians actors roles; it also participated in a performance history that includes not only naturalistic forms, such as film, but also presentational forms, like minstrelsy, all of which contributed to the construction of ideas about race in the US. Furthermore, the use of yellowface reveals a desire among the producers of Miss Saigon to cope with the dissoilance between actor and role-that is, to cope with the "slippage" between the actor's "representation" of a character and their "representation" of an ethnic gr~up.~' I conclude my consideration of the politics of Miss Snigon's text and production process with a brief digression considering the audience's reception
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of the work. I do not wish to imply that the millions of spectators who have attended Miss Saigon functioned as uncritical ciphers for its political manipulations. O n the other hand it is important to reckon with the fact that millions found pleasure in Miss Saigon, a spectacle that, I argue, supports dominant and oppressive ideologies regarding race and gender. It is particularly important to note that Asian and Asian American spectators have comprised a sizable segment of the musical's a ~ d i e n c e . ~ W odoes w one explain this apparent contradiction? Richard Fung, writing to the Toronto Star, offers one explanation, pointing out that the musical offers an "unprecedented opportunity . . . for Asian audiences to see any reflection of themselves in a major theatre" (R. Fung). Also, one cannot automatically separate Asian audience members from the audience as a whole and assume that their motivations and reactions are necessarily different from those of any other spectator. Moreover, it is important to recognize that audience members may critique a performance even as they derive pleasure from it. Spectators, including Asian American spectators, mediate critique and pleasure, suggesting on the one hand that one cannot draw a direct line between Miss Snigon's support for dominant ideologies and the audience's experience of the musical, but also revealing that spectators may subordinate critical urges to p1easu1-e.27
My main aim in detailing the Miss Snigon controversies is to explore how professional actors adopted the conventions of activism, and how they and the political activists with whom they worked negotiated territory shared by activism and institutional performance. Often represented as the confrontation of Mackintosh versus Equity and a few Asian American actors, the debates in fact reveal a variety of complex negotiations among a large number of people from a variety of social worlds. Before considering the Miss Saigon controversies, therefore, I demonstrate that the actors' protests against Miss Saigon's casting were not unique but part of a history of actors of color, including Asian actors, fighting for equitable casting and respectful characterizations. Why did the Miss Snigon controversies occur? Why did the musical's casting become controversial in the US when it provoked little comment in the UI
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England did not occur on the same scale as the protests in the US." So one returns to the question, "Why did Miss Saigon provoke such controversy in New York?" Given the prevalence of derogatory stereotypes of Asians and the persistent tradition of White actors portraying "ethnic" parts, one might reverse the question and ask why such protests don't occur more often. Helen Zia (112) explains that Asian coininunities suffer the assaults of stereotype so often that only especially outrageous iilstailces occasion rebellion. For actors of color in particular, Miss Snigon typified a history of exclusion. Nevertheless, the Miss Snigon controversies resulted not from any single event but from a convergence of debates and tensions circulating in the commercial theatre world and in US society generally in the late 1980s. The Miss Saigon debates occurred in a commercial theatre world that has discriminated against actors of color, both historically and during the period just prior to the controversies. Though discrimination has pervaded the history of the commercial theatre generally, affecting personnel from playwrights to stagehands, it is the history of denial of roles to people of color that relates most closely to the Miss Saigon controversies (as Newman notes, NYC-CHR, "NYC Commission" [lo]). From nineteenthcentury blackface minstrelsy to films contemporaneous with Miss Saigon, such as House of the Spirits, "ethnic" roles in US performance forms have been played by White actor^.^' Actors of color have often been relegated to supporting or ensemble roles while more lucrative and prominent lead roles have been played by White actors. The list of White actors who have played African American, LatinoILatina, or Asian roles in the commercial theatre, on film, and on television is far too extensive to present here, but some well-known examples include: Natalie Wood as a Puerto Rican woman in the film version of West Side Story (1961), Ava Gardner as a light-skinned African American woman in the film version of S h o w Boat (1951), Yul Brynner as a Thai ruler in T h e King and I on stage and in the film of the musical (1956), Mickey Rooney as a Japanese buffoon in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Marlon Brando as a scheming Japanese con-man in Tenhouse of the August M o o n (1956), and Warner Olaild and five other White actors who played Charlie Chan. Many of the Asian roles portrayed by White actors also contributed to the pantheon of racial stereotypes in US national discourse-in the case of depictions of Asians, characters such as Fu Manchu represented the inscrutable and demonic Orient while Charlie Chan embodied the helpful and harmless "model minority" (see Kim). Discrimination has even been institutionalized, as when the Hollywood studios' production code forbade scenes in which an actor of color would kiss a White actor-resulting in the casting of Gardner in S h o w Traffic in the other direction, that is, actors of color playing "White" roles or even portraying roles with no specific ethnicity, was rare by
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comparison to the voluminous history of White actors playing people of c ~ l o r . Actors '~ of color had to endure long periods of intermittent employment (at best) between "ethnic shows" that employed large numbers of actors of color. For instance, though there were a number of shows on Broadway featuring large Asian casts prior to Miss Saigon (including Flower D r u m Song in 1958 and Pacific Overtures in 1976), the lack of opportunities to perform in other works meant that the actors granted exposure in "all-Asian" shows subsequently became discouraged, often leaving the profession; then the producers of the next "all-Asian" show would claim they could find no Asian actors and search outside the theatre world for "ethnic talent" (see "'Overtures' Opens Door"; Ching; Bluinenthal G9; and Krieger 862). Moreover, this vicious cycle itself became a rationalization used by producers to justify casting non-Asians in Asian roles: the notion that there were no professional Asian actors allowed producers to ignore those high-profile Asian actors who had achieved mainstream success and to dismiss the burgeoning Asian American theatre movement (at the time of the Miss Saigon controversies, in particular, several Asian actors had become prominent when performing in mainstream plays by Asian American playwrights such as Gotanda and Hwang, and several Asian American theatre companies had achieved widespread acclaim, including Pan Asian Repertory and EastIWest Players; see Zia 121-122). The one-way casting street also projected an ideological message: since, in most cases, White characters were played only by White actors, but Asian characters were played by actors of all ethnicities, "Whiteness" acquired an air of stability and "normalness" (McConachie, "The 'Oriental' Musicals" 393). The dearth of Asian performers affected Asian spectators as well as actors: since Asians so rarely appeared in major roles, Asian people had few role models in the entertainment industriesliterally, they rarely saw themselves on stage.i2 Nor was the aforementioned employment discrimination a thing of the past at the time of the Miss Saigon controversies. In 1986 Actors' Equity completed a four-year study that "revealed that over 90 percent of all the professional theatre produced [in the US] . . . was staged with all-Caucasian castsx-this in an era when most cities with large theatre worlds had populations that were far from 90 percent White (Newman, "Holding Back" 23; Equity reported similar statistics in 1990 [M. Rothstein, "Equity Reverses"] and 1999 [Armbrust]). In the 1980s, actors of color found that their roles could still be played by White actors (in spite of changes in US society that had made rare such obviously racist practices as blackface minstrelsy). During this period, for instance, Asian characters were portrayed by White actors onstage in productions such as Rashomon, and in films such as T h e Year of Living Dangerously and R e m o Williams. Ethnic actors, however, were rarely cast in non-ethnic roles, despite the advent of concepts such as non-traditional casting (wherein an actor of color plays a role
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"traditionally" played by a White actor). Actors Bernard Marsh and Mary Lum both told the New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR) that theatrical agents would not send them to audition for non-ethnic roles, either because the agents themselves were not willing to take the risk or, more often, because they knew the directors in question would not cast ethnic actors in anything except explicitly ethnic roles (NYC-CHR, "NYC Commission" [2-31). Another actor, Judi Long, stated that when her agent asked one casting director why she was not considered for a part, the agent was told point blank, "No Asians" (NYC-CHR, "NYC Commission" [12]). Ethnic actors also frequently discovered that the roles they did play represented caricatures, at best, and often reproduced negative stereotypes. In a personal interview, Eurasian actor Herman Sebek described his own awakening to racial typecasting. When he obtained a role in a Broadway revival of West Side Story early in his career, he realized "that I would never be a Jet. That's when I really woke up to it [employment discrimination]. I was a Shark." That is, Sebek realized that though "I knew I could sing and dance and do all the things" required to play a member of the White gang, he would always be cast as a member of the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks (Sebek, Interview). This employment discrimination not only perpetuated offensive stereotypes but had material consequences for individual actors, who found that they received less pay than their White counterparts (in part because they lacked the star-status that resulted in prominent roles and representation by powerful agents; Ma, Interview). When challenged regarding the lack of opportunity for actors of color, mainstream theatre personnel tended to pass the buck; for example, actors charged that directors and producers failed to cast them, while directors and producers said they simply catered to audience expectations and could only work with the material provided by playwrights. While one suspects that some "buck-passing" may have been a disingenuous attempt to avoid change, the reaction also reflected the fact that institutional practices in the theatre world tended to perpetuate inequitable casting.'; During the period that Miss Snigon was produced, employment discrimination-perpetuated by informal attitudes that allowed casting choices to go unquestioned and by institutional practices that established European aesthetics as the standard-trapped ethnic actors in a cycle of stereotypes and unemployment that pervaded their careers. The venom with which some mainstream commentators responded to Asian American actors' objections to Pryce playing the Engineer might lead one to think that the issue had never been raised before. Far from striking from out of the blue, however, the Miss Snigon protests grew out of a history of prior objections to White actors playing Asian characters. Despite the obstacles and indignities faced by people of color who took to the stage, there were a large number of Asian American actors, playwrights, and directors working in the US theatre in the last half of the
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twentieth century (see Berson; Holly; and Gussow, "Striding Past"). These actors were not oblivious to casting discrimination. Describing a few of the protests that preceded the Miss Saigon controversies shows that the objections to the musical were not historical anomalies; these protests also reveal a tradition of activism within the professional acting community. The most well-known previous protests among the Asian American actors I spoke with were pickets mounted in the early 1970s by Oriental Actors of America objecting to shows featuring Whites-playing-Asians. The group included figures such as Calvin Jung (who still worked as a professional actor when I spoke with him in 1993) and Alvin Lum (the sole Asian American member of Equity's Committee for Racial Equality at the tiine of the Miss Snigon debates). In 1970 this group demonstrated against Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen, a musical based upon the 1953 play Teahouse of the August Moon. The musical centers upon the exploits of Sakini, a Japanese con-artist who operates a "tea room" in Japan during the US occupation. The New York actors' protests centered upon the casting of White actor I<enneth Nelson in the lead role and the general dearth of roles for Asians in the piece. Though the actors' specific objections focused upon the casting, they were clearly concerned about the representation of Asians in the work and in the media, objecting in particular to reports that Nelson had declared, "I shall be pleased to be playing a straight, slant-eyed Oriental" (qtd. in Haru, "'Miss Saigon'-So What Else"; it also appears that unaffiliated groups protested against the musical's portrayal of Asians when it previewed in other cities). The protesters first picketed the offices of producer Herman Levin, charging that he had not bothered to audition a single Asian for the role of Sakini. When the musical returned from out-of-town try-outs some months later, Asian American actors picketed its opening and subsequent performances. One protester, Lori Chinn, reportedly played the role of Miss Higa Jiga in the musical-she apparently picketed until the last possible moment and then went into the theatre to perform.34Asian American actors also protested against the lack of Asian performers in the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center's 1970 production of Good Woman of Setzunn. They took their objections to the State Division of Human Rights, eventually winning a judgment that the company's hiring practices had been discriminatory (Ching).Ironically, the lead character, Shen Tell, was performed in this production by Colleen Dewhurst, who was president of Actors' Equity during the 1990 Miss Snigon controversies (Gussow, "Striding" L11). The Oriental Actors of America protests not only constituted an important precedent to Miss Snigon, but also eventually led to the founding of permanent groups, such as the Association of Asian Pacific American Artists (AAPAA), that have been advocating on behalf of Asian American actors since that tiine (Haru "'Miss Saigon'-So What Else"). Though Jung, Alvin Lum, and other Asian American actors who had been active in the 1970s participated in the Miss Saigon debates, the
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controversies also, perhaps mainly, evidenced a new generation of Asian American actors taking on political issues (Haru, "'Miss Saigon'-So What Else" 13). Asian American communities experienced tremendous growth in the period immediately preceding the Miss Saigon controversies. Between 1980 and 1990, Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the US grew by 9 5 percent, making this the fastest growing "minority" group in the US at that time ("Population"; Aguilar-San Juan 2; C. Chin 201). This demographic growth was accompanied by a rise in prominence both in US society generally and in the commercial theatre. Indeed, many people were struck by the irony that Miss Saigon's Orientalist themes graced the London stage shortly after M. Butterfly, Hwang's dissection of Orientalism, became a hit on Broadway." Asian American theatre personnel also knew of efforts made by Asian American activists in the 1980s to use the growing clout of their communities to challenge pejorative images of Asians in the media. When practices such as yellowface first appeared in the nineteenth century, Asian American communities were far too small and powerless to challenge the practice (C. Chin 216ff). In the 1980s, however, stereotypical depictions of Asians met with protest. Asian American rights groups objected to stereotypes of Asians and Asian American communities in the films Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Year of the Dmgon, and Sixteen Candles. Demonstrations opposing films such as Year of the Dmgon influenced directly the Asian Americans protesting against ' ~ protests against Miss Saigon, therefore, were important Miss S a i g ~ n .The but not unique, falling as they did into of a history of activism within the Asian American acting community and of general protests against negative stereotypes of Asians. Moreover, since at least the 1970s, protests regarding discrimination and stereotypes formed part of a national Asian American movement (Wei 47-54). In other words, Asian Americans outside the theatre world saw institutional performance as an appropriate subject for activism, and Asian American actors who organized to confront discrimination in their field self-consciously adopted activist conventions and participated in a larger movement.;' Asian American actors were not the only group confronting discrimination in the theatre world in the 1980s. Bernard Marsh, an active member of Equity's Committee for Racial Equality during the controversies, stated in a personal interview that frustration surrounding discriminatory casting practices had been building within the African American acting community during the decade preceding the Miss Saigon controversies. During the late 1970s, according to Marsh, there were numerous African Americans employed on Broadway, often in all-Black shows. Under those conditions, "people were asleep" to the realities of bias against minority actors in mainstream theatre (Marsh, Interview). The 1980s represented a rude awakening, as many African American (as well as Latino and Asian) actors suffered a drastic decline in hiring, which Marsh blames on the Reagan
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administration's attempts to undermine civil rights legislation and the renewed tolerance for discrimination these policies permitted.'" These actors of color responded to the increase in employment discrimination much as Asian American actors had done in the 1970s: they founded activist organizations. An actors' activist group called the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors (HOLA) protested against the all-White casting of Goodbye Fidel in 1980 (Santiago 235). Another group formed, according to Bernard Marsh, in reaction to the initial casting of Jerome Robbins' Broadway." Marsh stated that he and others complained of discrimination such as they encountered in Jerome Robbins' Broadway to Actors' Equity, the Mayor's office, the NAACP and the ACLU. Realizing that discrimination in casting had become endemic, Marsh and other actors formed an advocacy group for actors of color called Performers Against Racism on a Theatrical Stage (PARTS). (For more on HOLA and PARTS see Walsh.) There existed, then, a vibrant history of activism by actors of color prior to the Miss Saigon controversies; similarly, Actors' Equity Association had both censured previous productions that failed to cast equitably and seen debate regarding casting within its membership. During the 1980s Equity had pressured producers to cast ethnic actors, and the union's membership had engaged in contentious debate regarding equitable casting prior to the Miss Saigon production in New York. In the 1980s, Equity protested against the dearth of actors of color in the productions of Rashomon, won in arbitration against the producers of Goodbye Fidel (who blatantly-and illegally-refused to cast Latino actors because they "felt their audience would be more comfortable with Caucasian actors"), and protested against the casting of a White singer in the role of Dorothy in The Wiz, one of the few musicals in which actors of color were normally guaranteed major role^.^" These actions notwithstanding, in the late 1980s actors of color perceived widespread employment discrimination among mainstream producers, and argued that the union was not doing enough to fight it. In the year prior to the Miss Saigon controversies actors of color raised the issue among the general membership, sparking a prolonged debate evident in the letters page of the union newspaper, Equity News. So, almost one year prior to the casting controversy surrounding Miss Saigon, Equity members were debating the exclusion of people of color from major Broadway musicals. Significantly, actors of color cited two musicals produced by Mackintosh as excluding actors of Two points emerge from this history of activism and debate surrounding employment discrimination in the commercial theatre world. First, actors had long organized to protest both exclusion from roles on Broadway and the stereotypes perpetuated on the "Great White Way." This tradition of activism manifested both indirect adoption of conventions associated with activist worlds and direct exchange with insiders to the
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world of activism. Second, one should not conclude that actors or Equity made an intentional scapegoat of Miss Saigon. Rather, far from being a passive bystander, Mackintosh played a role in contests within the US commercial theatre world regarding employment discrimination and stereotypes that predated Miss Saigon and continued after the musical opened. IV. ACTIVISM GOESTO THE THEATRE: THEMISSSAIGON CONTROVERSIES ANALYZED In this section I pursue two objectives: 1)I document the controversies surrounding the New York production of Miss Saigon and 2) I argue that these debates show that professional actors engage in activism and that activists attend to the politics of institutional performance. These two features of the debates are not necessarily separable; the history of the events and rhetoric of the controversies reveal that a wide variety of groups, from within and outside the world of commercial performance, participated in contests that began in the theatre world but became a part of national political discourse. I begin with a brief summary of the context and events of the controversies, then discuss their progress and discourse in detail. The preceding section explained the debate and activism within the commercial theatre world regarding employment discrimination at the time of the controversies. Miss Saigon also aggravated tensions not directly related to issues of race and casting. The acting workforce was under considerable pressure in the years immediately preceding the Miss Saigon controversies. Rising costs led to fewer productions (and therefore fewer roles) and created tension between the producers of various forms of communication products and the professional performance workforce. Producers also sought safe and lucrative shows, especially West End musicals that offered both the prospect of large profits and the prestige of successful London runs (see Passell). The resulting "British Invasion" led to considerable tension between US actors and British producers (as well as the US producers who imported their ~ o r k ) .Here ' ~ too, Mackintosh was a central participant. In 1987 he fought with Equity to permit Sarah Brightman to perform in the Broadway production of Phantom of the Opera, despite her relative lack of either star-status or unique services (the two criteria Equity used to evaluate petitions for performances in the US by foreign actors). As in the Miss Saigon disputes, Phantom's producers threatened cancellation and, after arbitration, Brightman was allowed to perform (0.Stuart 87; Greig and Birrell; the situation was complicated by the fact that Brightinan was then the wife of Phantom creator Andrew Lloyd Webber). When Cameron Mackintosh proposed casting Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon, therefore, he provoked a US commercial theatre world experiencing deep tensions concerning not only employment
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discrimination but also exchange of actors between the US and the UKtensions to which Mackintosh's own productions had contributed. In addition to developing within a commercial theatre world where employment was a contested issue, the Miss Snigon controversies arose at a time when several relevant issues circulated within US national political discourse. Racial minorities, frequently scapegoats in US political discourse, became particular targets as the economy began to sour in the mid1980s and as reactionary politicians branded poor minorities as the source of social problems. The relative strength of the Japanese economy versus the US inspired politicians, pundits, and "average" White Americans to indulge in "Japan-bashing," reviving perennial anxieties about the "yellow peril" and creating a mood of irrational hostility towards Japanese people, and, by extension, Japanese Americans and all Asians. The era was marked by material as well as rhetorical manifestations of anti-Asian violence, such as the murder of Vincent Chin by unemployed auto-workers (see the essays in Aguilar-San Juan). Between 1985 and 1990 hate crimes against Asians in New York City rose 680 percent.4i Anti-Asian bias constituted one element of a reactionary period in US history. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Reagan and Bush administrations inaugurated a full-fledged attack on the legacy of the civil rights movement, and by the late 1980s conservative activists had succeeded in undermining concepts such as affirmative action in both the law and the popular imagination. Organized labor was similarly in decline by the late 1980s, due to internal corruption within some unions but also because of prolonged anti-union campaigns by conservative politicians. Conservatives also sought to brand those who spoke out against injustices great and small as mere mavens of "politically correctness" while themselves attacking publicly funded works of art that supported marginalized ideas and identities (Bronski). For instance, the NEA's defunding of performance artists Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller due to the sexual, political, and gay-positive content of their work unfolded at exactly the same time as the Miss Snigon controversies. At the same moment that Equity rejected and then admitted Jonathan Pryce, the Bush administration undertook the material and ideological escalation towards the Gulf War, which Bush would later declare had freed the US from guilt and frustration ostensibly harbored since the Vietnam War.'4 Finally, conservative politicians in the 1980s called for a "return" to "traditional values," in both society and aesthetics. The definition of "traditions," however, usually rested in an imagined idyllic past and took mainstream (middle-class) White experience as the norm (Santiago 228-229). Miss Saigon therefore entered a social and cultural scene marked by numerous racial and cultural tensions, many explicitly targeting people of color. The Miss Saigon controversies developed through a series of stages over the course of a year. The first stage consisted of activism within Equity and
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communities of actors of color that culminated in Equity's refusal to allow Pryce to perform the role of the Engineer on Broadway and Mackintosh's cancellation of the show. During the next phase, Equity endured harsh criticism from members and pundits, eventually reversing its decision. Mackintosh refused to restore the show until Equity assured him that it would not interfere further. The producers and union representatives met and formulated a "Statement of Mutual Understanding," and Mackintosh resumed production of the show. Between Equity's ban and retraction, large numbers of Asian American actors organized in order to urge Equity to uphold its decision. In the third phase of the casting controversies, these Asian American actor-activists, who felt they had been abandoned by the union, organized further, picketed Equity offices and auditions for the musical, and generally tried to inform the public of their views. The casting controversies flared again when Mackintosh sought permission to have Filipina actor Lea Salonga perform on Broadway, a request Equity felt Mackintosh had promised he would not make-the issue was eventually resolved in Mackintosh's favor via arbitration. The final phase of the controversy revolved around the musical's content. Members of two Asian American lesbian-and-gay groups, who viewed Miss Snigon's depictions of Asians and women as racist and sexist, were outraged when they realized that major lesbian-and-gay organizations planned to use the musical as a fund-raiser. When one of these groups refused to cancel its event, the Asian American activists cooperated with other community organizations and Asian American actors to create a coalition that staged demonstrations at the benefit and the opening gala of the musical. The Miss Saigon Casting Controversies The Miss Snigon controversies were a series of complex disputes the origins of which cannot be traced to any single i n d i v i d ~ a l . ~ The ' evidence strongly suggests that the objections to Miss Snigon arose simultaneously in the Asian American theatre community and within Equity's Committee for Racial Equality (CRE), a panel of Equity members specifically charged with reviewing scripts for productions that negotiate contracts with Equity members and suggesting to Equity's governing Council options that would increase minority employment. O n March 1, 1990, Mackintosh announced that Miss Saigon would begin previews in New York in one year. As early as April, the CRE had begun discussions of the casting of Pryce. Prior to the spring of 1990, the CRE did not expect to protest against Miss Snigon, according to CRE official Bernard Marsh (Interview). Members of the CRE assumed that the New York production of Miss Snigon was an "ethnic show" in terms of Asian ~ m e r i c a n s(i.e., that Asian Americans would be cast in all appropriate roles). Marsh recalls that the initial concerns of the CRE following Mackintosh's announcement that he would bring the
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musical to New York revolved around the options open to African American and LatinoILatina actors. Marsh recalled that, after Alvin Lum (the CRE's only Asian American member at that time) and other members of the script committee assigned to Miss Snigon reviewed the piece, the CRE sent a letter to Mackintosh and his associates, asking for assurances that minority actors would be cast. The producers replied that yes, the show would include interracial casting, but due to certain features of the show, such as the necessity for actors portraying US soldiers to double as Vietnamese citizens, casting options might be limited. This reply disturbed members of the CRE, who wrote for clarification. At this point Mackintosh announced that Jonathan Pryce would play the Engineer on Broadway (on June 1, 1990, the New York Times reported that Pryce would reprise the role of the Engineer on Broadway [Neiny]).It was at this time that the members of the CRE decided to call for sanctions from Equity and to seek support in the Asian American acting community (Marsh, Interview). Members of the CRE also met with Mackintosh in July to discuss the casting of the musical, at which point the producers refused to consider anyone besides Pryce for the role (M. Rothstein citing CRE head Chuck Patterson, "Equity Panel Head; Flamm). In June, Equity received letters of complaint from members of the Asian American theatre community. The Asian American theatre personnel stated that the casting of Pryce denied an Asian actor a high-profile role and argued that the casting harmed the Asian community generally, pointing to Pryce's use of yellowface makeup in London as an example of the musical's perpetuation of offensive stereotypes. Tisa Chang, artistic director of Pan Asian Repertory, linked jobs, politics, and the politics of representation, saying of the producers of Miss Snzgon, "The real issue is not who gets cast but that any organization [can] continue to perpetuate and encourage stereotypes at the expense of artists of color, which borders on 19th-century imperialism" (Witchel, "Actors' Equity"). Though the literal controversy was instigated by a large group of actors in New York City, it would be a mistake to say that Mackintosh and the Miss Snigon production team bore little responsibility for the dispute. The producers appeared neither to understand clearly nor to take seriously the objections to Pryce, at least initially, as demonstrated by Mackintosh's comment that the union members' objections to Pryce were "a storm in an oriental teacup" (Greig and Birrell). That Mackintosh also referred to other instances of White actors playing Asians, such as Yul Brynner's role in The King and I, to defend his own casting decisions indicates that he probably failed to grasp the fact that actors of color were trying to change a long-standing practice they viewed as oppre~sive.~" One particular assertion by the production team exacerbated tensions between Mackintosh and Asian American actors: the claim that a worldwide search had not found an Asian actor capable of playing the Engineer.
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When the controversies began, Vincent Liff of the Johnson, Liff & Zerman casting agency, one of the companies casting Mackintosh shows, wrote to Mackintosh (in a letter released to, among other papers, the New York Times) asserting that numerous auditions had been held and that "if there were an Asian actor of 45-50 years, with classical stage background and an international stature and reputation, we would surely have sniffed him out by now" (Witchel, "Union Weights"). The implication, whether accidental or intended, was that no Asian American was sufficiently talented to play the part. The idea that the producers had scoured the world and failed to find a qualified Asian actor to play the Engineer stung actors of color with the inference that they were inferior to White actors and, to make matters worse, was quickly used by commentators to discredit the actors' assertions of discrimination. In fact, no worldwide search had been conducted to fill the role of the Engineer on Broadway. A worldwide search had been conducted to cast Asian female roles for the London production, but even there the producers clearly conceived of a White playing the role of the Engineer (as evident in the video The Heat is On: The Making of Miss Saigon). Similarly, the searches that Liff implied had failed to find an Asian actor to star as the Engineer on Broadway had, in fact, only sought actors to serve as understudies and replacements. A spokesperson for Mackintosh eventually admitted that the producers never considered anyone other than Pryce for the role of the Engineer on Broadway, stating that the producers had not intended to imply a worldwide search, and that "it is unfortunate and regrettable if any misunderstanding has arisen" (M. Rothstein, "Equity Panel Head" C15; see also Wayman Wong). It is, of course, impossible to know for certain whether the "misunderstanding" was an accident, an attempt to defuse controversy, or a ploy for publicity. While it seems unlikely that all controversy could have been avoided had the Miss Salgon team displayed more candor, their inflated claims not only inflamed the immediate controversy but also offered the communities of actors of color yet another example of the rhetoric used so often to justify their exclusion from major roles." By July of 1990, Equity's governing Council faced the unenviable choice between thwarting one of the world's most powerful producers and ignoring its own commitment to equitable casting (thereby abandoning members of color already frustrated by what they viewed as the union's lukewarm response to previous cases of employment discrimination). O n August 7, 1990, Equity's Council voted by a narrow margin to reject Pryce's application to perform in the US on the grounds that he did not satisfy the requirement of "star status" as described in agreements between Equity and unions in other nations (M. Rothstein, "Union Bars White" C16).48 According to Equity's Executive Secretary Alan Eisenberg, the union saw itself as making a moral statement of objection to the practice of White actors playing ethnic characters; Equity expected that Mackintosh would
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take the matter to arbitration and that Equity would lose (Eisenberg, Interview). Instead, Mackintosh-following through on a threat made shortly before Equity's meeting-canceled the New York production the day after Equity's vote. Mackintosh asserted that, even if he won in arbitration, Equity had poisoned the atmosphere in which he would have to produce the show and he would have no assurance against further interference (M. Rothstein, "Producer Cancels" C17). While Mackintosh's feelings that his artistic prerogatives had been infringed upon were no doubt sincere, it is also important to note that he gained publicity by canceling and that he was in a position of superior power, since he could afford to forgo a New York production more than New York could afford to lose Miss Saigon. Equity was pressured to reconsider its actions by many groups because of the economic benefits the show would bring the city. Equity's decision provoked a deluge of reactions from supporters and opponents alike. Ping Wu, an Asian American performer involved in the protests regarding Miss Saigon, told me that he and most other Asian American theater personnel became actively involved in the dispute at this point, in order to support Equity and call upon the union to stand by its initial decision (Wu, Interview). Ethnic theatre personnel in Britain also expressed support for US Equity's position (McCrystal). Actors of color held press conferences in New York on August 15, with members of the CRE explaining the decision. Similarly, public officials and prominent Asian American actors, such as George Takei (of Star Trek fame), pleaded the case for opportunities for actors of color during a press conference in Los Angeles on the 16th (M. Rothstein, "Equity Panel Head"; APACE, "Cameron Mackintosh Busts"). Likewise, prominent theatre directors, such as Joseph Papp, came forward as Equity's allies (Zia 125)." In addition to receiving backing for its decision from many in the Asian American acting community, Equity heard support from figures outside the theatre world. A number of Asian American community organizations rallied to applaud the union's position (Wei 53). Articles supporting Equity or critical of Miss Saigon's producers appear in Variety and the Voice (Hummler; Finkle). Some unions, including the AFL-CIO, supported Equity's position (Zia 125; 0 . Stuart 88). Similarly, though it is impossible to gauge the opinion of the diverse Asian American communities throughout the US, articles by Asian American journalists in both mainstream and Asian American publications tended to display sympathy and support for the Asian American actors, and several Asian American organizations rallied behind Equity's decision."' Despite these currents of support, Equity was buffeted by criticism from its members and the public. Hundreds of Equity members voiced their Charlton Heston went so far as to quit the union in discontent-actor protest of its ban on Pryce, calling Equity's action "incredibly bigoted and racist" (Bering-Jensen 54; see also Flainin). Many other unions, including
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British Equity, condemned US Equity's decision (Behr and Steyn 186; 0 . Stuart 88). The mainstream press in the US and Britain frequently attacked Equity's stance and the arguments of the actors of color, publishing editorials condemning the union's action as racially biased and inconsistent with standards of artistic freedom. Many papers did eventually print articles and editorials explaining the plight of ethnic actors, but these appeared, for the most part, after Equity reversed its decision." Not only was Equity accused of either moral hypocrisy or outright "reverse" racism, but the fact that the union's action had led to the cancellation of a production offering roles to many Asians was itself cited as evidence of Equity's presumptuousness (e.g., "Lost Courage, Lost Play"). Though much of the reaction to Equity's decision from the theatre community and the press displayed considerable polarization, many people apparently felt caught in the middle of the debates. Not the least of these was New York City Mayor David Dinkins, who met with various participants in the controversy (including Patterson, Hwang, and Wong). Dinkins expressed sympathy for the actors but hoped for a settlement to the dispute." The Mayor was clearly in an awkward position, since he was widely identified with the causes of racial minorities but could not be seen as derailing a major economic engine for the city. Equity members, including Asian American actors, also felt conflicted, responding to both the activists' charges of discrimination and the press and producers' references to artistic freedom. Equity Councilor Gale Garnett, for example, saw the controversy as pitting equitable casting against artistic freedom and asked, "What do you do when two principles you hold dear are in conflict?" (Garnett 116; Asian American actors not involved in the conflicts told me that they experienced similar dilemmas). Equity reconsidered its decisions in the tense atmosphere created by these diverse reactions to its initial stance. During the uproar following Equity's vote to prohibit Pryce from playing the Engineer, petitions were circulated within the theatre community and posted on call-boards at Broadway theatres (including those hosting Mackintosh productions)." According to Equity's bylaws, the union must hold special meetings if they receive petitions signed by more that 100 members-the union received far more than the requisite number of requests (M. Rothstein, "Producer Cancels" C15). On August 1 6 the Council met and rescinded its earlier decision, saying that the union had "applied an honest and moral principle in an inappropriate manner" and granting Pryce permission to perform in the US for one year (M. Rothstein, "Equity Reverses" Al).j4Mackintosh, however, issued statements that, despite Equity's retreat, he had not yet decided whether or not to reinstate the show, and that he required assurance the union would allow him to cast the remaining roles without interference. Asian American actors reacted to Equity's retreat with activism. The Association of Asian Pacific American Artists (AAPAA) placed an ad in
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Variety, signed by a number of Asian American rights groups from within and outside the theatre world, that explained Asian American opposition to yellowface and the traditions that permitted White actors to play Asian roles ("True Equity Now!"). Personnel from Asian American theatre companies, such as Pan Asian Repertory, corresponded with Asian American actors and human rights groups, urging them to lobby Equity. Ad hoc groups of actors of color met frequently following Equity's first vote. Their actions included mounting press conferences, lobbying the union, and sometimes demonstrating outside union offices (Chu Lin). Many Asian American actors (including some AAPAA members), felt betrayed by Equity's reversal; one of these actors, Ping Wu, said that many actors felt that they had become involved in order to defend the union's decision and then the union "left us kind of hanging in the breeze" (Wu, Interview). Since they harbored concerns about the course of the pending negotiations and felt that no other group was focused solely on casting issues pertaining to Asian American actors, a number of actors decided to form a cohesive activist organization from the ad hoc groups that had been meeting and holding press conferences since the initial rejection of Pryce." The group they created, the Asian Pacific Alliance for Creative Equality (APACE) became one of the most recognizable activist groups involved in the later stages of the controver~ies.'~ In short, the casting of Miss Snigon and Equity's reactions to it led Asian American professional actors-insiders to the institutional performance world of commercial theatre-to adopt conventions from activist worlds, ranging from public speaking to the formation of full-fledged actor-activist organizations. In September of 1990 representatives of Equity and Mackintosh held a series of meetings during which they drafted and revised a "Statement of Mutual Understanding." In the statement, Mackintosh agreed to expand his efforts to cast minorities in Miss Snigon and, to the extent possible, in other of his productions, such as Les Mise'rables, then running on Broadway and touring throughout the US. The agreement also affirmed the producers' artistic freedoms. In mid-September, Equity's Council approved the "Statement of Mutual Understanding" and Mackintosh reinstated Miss Snigon. Actors of color continued to deploy activist conventions to respond to the "Statement of Mutual Understanding" and the revived production of Miss Snigon. The negotiation and ratification of the "Statement of Mutual Understanding" exacerbated tensions between actors of color and the union. APACE members, for instance, charged that they had been excluded from the negotiations between Mackintosh and Equity (and were therefore being marginalized by the union) and that the CRE had been "forced to amend [the Statement] under unreasonable time constraints . . ." (Asian Pacific Alliance for Creative Equality, "Cameron Mackintosh Busts"). Asian American actors who participated in protests against Miss Saigon also felt that Equity made far too many concessions to
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Mackintosh (personal interviews). They responded by organizing simultaneous demonstrations on September 21 at Equity offices in New York and Los Angeles, accompanied by a press conference in Sail Francisco (Miyori, Interview; Ohnuma, "Asians Blast"), and succeeded in prompting meetings with Equity." APACE, Pan Asian Repertory, and other groups also picketed outside the auditions for Miss Snigon held in New York and Los Angeles in late September and early October (Ng, "Hundreds"). In addition, groups of Asian American actors, often led by APACE, held public forums in efforts to organize Asian American actors and to raise the general public's awareness of the problems faced by minority theatre personnel. For instance, APACE, in collaboration with other organizations, held forums at the Asian American Theatre Center in Sail Francisco on September 1 0 and at the Public Theatre in New York on October 3 and November 5.'These and similar actions by actors of color evidenced direct exchange among insiders to the worlds of institutional performance and activism. Panels at these programs featured both prominent actors, such as Takei, spokespersons for APACE, and also academics and public officials who could place the problems of Asian American actors in the context of US politics generally. APACE members also met with representatives of the New York City Justice Department and the Commission on Human Rights. The NYC-CHR did hold hearings on employment discrimination in the theatre on December 1 0 and 11, 1990. The casting controversies reprised briefly in late 1990, when Mackintosh sought permission for Lea Salonga to appear in the Broadway production. Equity, with the support of Asian American actors, objected that Mackintosh had agreed not to cast Salonga, that the choice denied a US actor the opportunity to "create" the role on Broadway, and that the producers' claims that only Salonga could play the part slighted the Asian American acting community." O n December 11 the Equity Council rejected Mackintos11's request on the grounds that Salonga was neither a recognized star in the US, nor did she provide "unique services." This time Mackintosh went to arbitration (Greg Evans, writing in Variety ["Actors Shun"], cited a source as saying that neither the union nor the producers wished to disrupt the production, which had accumulated $31 million in advance sales, with public "saber rattling"). The arbitration hearings were held on December 21 and arbitrator Daniel Collins, apparently accepting the producer's claim that Salonga offered unique services, ruled in favor of Mackintosh on January 7, 1991 (Eisenberg, inter vie^).^" Salonga did play Kim on Broadway, sharing the role with Asian American actor I
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high-profile media campaigns, picketed, petitioned, held forums, and founded APACE, a new activist organization that outlasted the controversy and addressed issues beyond Miss Saigon's casting. (Equity too could be said to have engaged in activism during the controversy; as I argued above, the union viewed its actions as fulfilling its obligations to its members and as part of a long-standing involvement in civil rights struggles.) Just as political activists knowingly drew upon the conventions of theatre to pursue organizing, so too professional actors self-consciously deployed the conventions of organizing to confront problems in their art world (as will become evident in the section on negotiations that closes the chapter). Moreover, the actors didn't merely act collectively to address a local grievance, but linked their protests to issues of representation in US society.
Actors' Activism and National Political Discourse The Asian American actors' organizing generated a variety of responses, arguments, confusions, and appropriations that reveal the controversies' connections to national political discourses. (Those who reacted to the casting controversies targeted either the actors, or Equity, or both; as stated above, my main interest lies in the reactions to the performers cum activists.) I rehearse these debates not to take the part of the actor-activists, but rather to raise issues that were important in the debates and note distortions that reveal the nature of the political discourse of the period. Some in the Asian American theatre community felt that offensive caricatures might as well be left to White actors. For example, the well-known Asian American playwright Frank Chin "saw Miss Saigon as a racist musical and believed that Asian American actors were fighting to portray stereotypes" (Pao 37, citing William Wong). Asian American actors (and others) responded that, while improvement of portrayals of Asian Americans in mainstream performance constituted the only true solution to stereotypes, in the meantime they must take work where they could find it, and that each actor had to maintain his or her own standards (Wall-Lee 14; Rennert). They argued further that Asian actors might be able to use their own experiences to salvage an element of dignity from even a stereotypical role, whereas a White actor, lacking any experience in any Asian culture, might teild to fall back on stereotypes (Interviews; Long). Moreover, Asian American actors said that stereotypes could be changed only if Asian Americans constituted a powerful presence in the world of professional perf~rinance.~' I now turn from critiques of Asian American actors offered by other Asian American theatre personnel to misconceptions surrounding the protesters' positions. Foremost among these was the idea that Asian American actors fought for an absolute racial parity between performer and role, a
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reduction of legitimate challenges to systemic discrimination to supposed demands that would mean that "only blonds play Hamlet."6' Demands for race-specific casting do indeed raise complex questions regarding race and representation: Does a demand that roles be portrayed only by actors matching the character's ethnicity require adherence to notions of race as an essential category that tend to uphold dominant ideologies? Yet, can one imagine a White actor portraying an Asian character in a way that would not reproduce stereotypes regarding Asians (except, perhaps, in productions where the casting clearly leads to an examination of race and power)? What does one make of the fact that, as of September 1999, Phong Truong was the sole actor of Vietnamese decent to have been cast in any Miss Snigon company?6iThe point to be made with regard to the Miss Saigon controversies, however, is that the Asian American actors were not, in fact, calling for absolute parity between race and role. Most actors, including most of those involved with APACE and Equity, argued not for racially specific casting but for an end to discriminatioi~.~' They asserted that anyone appearing to have an Asian ethnicity was systematically excluded from almost any role, even those for which they seemed most appropriate, and asserted that this practice was linked to traditions of portraying Asians as less than fully human. They therefore demanded that, until such time as these traditions disappeared, Asian actors be granted greater opportunity, and at the least that roles depicting Asians go to actors of Asian descent interview^).^' Closely related to misconceptions regarding supposed demands for racespecific casting were widespread misunderstandings and appropriations of the concept of "non-traditional casting" that circulated throughout the controversies. The concept of non-traditional casting developed within Equity (probably within the committee that became the CRE) in the early 1980s precisely t o provide greater opportunities for minorities and wornen (Gibbons 19ff); Equity defined the term as "a policy of casting ethnic actors in roles where race or gender is not germane to the character" (Horwitz 28).6"quity also coined the term "color-blind" casting, which meant placing an ethnic actor in a "traditionally" White role without seeking to offer justification and often in situations that would be "impossible" in reality, as when an Asian actor plays the biological daughter of characters enacted by an African American and a White performer (Horwitz 28-29)." Neither color-blind casting nor non-traditional casting implied casting White actors in ethnic roles. Moreover, at the time of the Miss Snigon controversies, these concepts were neither widely practiced nor widely accepted by either theatre professionals in general or actors of The casting of Pryce in Miss Snigon was not non-traditional casting; indeed, it was the epitome of a very traditional sort of casting that members of the Asian American theatre community had hoped was on the decline (see Bronski l l f f ; and M. Lee). Yet, as the Miss Snigon controversy
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played out, mainstream publications began, almost as a matter of course, to refer to the debates as hinging on issues of non-traditional casting, which they misconstrued as a commonly practice of casting any actor in any role." Though activists and many in the media argued that cross-racial casting constituted the exception rather than the rule, the impression remained that Equity had violated its own standards of non-traditional casting. Conversely, in the confusion surrounding the concept of non-traditional casting, Miss Saigon's producers were seen as defenders of actors' rights.'" The defense of Pryce's performance as a n instance of nontraditional casting exemplified a double-bind familiar to actors of color: when an ethnic actor played a part usually cast as White, non-traditional casting was viewed by many with skepticism if not hostility; yet, when a White actor played an ethnic role, the choice was lauded as a coup for non-traditional casting." Confusion regarding non-traditional casting emanated, in part, from the assumption that White Western aesthetics, values, and traditions (and, by extension, White actors) constituted the norm and that non-European aesthetics, values, and traditions could only dilute the t r a d i t i ~ n . 'Indeed, ~ the outrage that greeted the Asian American actors challenge to the casting of Pryce as the Engineer exposed the endurance in mainstream US culture of deep-seated prejudices and anxieties regarding people of color, employment, Western and non-Western aesthetics, and even miscegenatioi~.'~The double standard surrounding non-traditional casting, then, exemplified a nodal point in culture where aesthetics revealed its investment in power relations. The misunderstandings regarding the Asian American actors' supposed demand for racially-specific casting and the debates surrounding nontraditional casting revealed a tendency among participants in the world of commercial performance to attempt to separate art and politics (see Cavett; ICissel, "The Color"; Untitled column in Variety). That is, the same impulse that allowed the producers of Miss Saigon to create a text that appropriates political moments into the service of a "universal" tragic narrative also contributed to the misunderstandings surrounding casting that evolved during the controversies. As Michael Bronski says of the frequent assertions that Equity's decision constituted a call for racespecific casting, "The constant reduction of the question from the political to the ridiculous belied the fact that this very defensive stance was based, partly, on the idea that 'art' was somehow above political consideration; that it existed in a world removed from everyday reality" (Bronski 11). In addition to exposing the politics of the commercial theatre world, the Miss Saigon debates also flowed along with and swelled the currents of specific political debates that flooded US society during the period (some of which I described earlier in the chapter). Equity's objection to Pryce was folded into a general hostility towards organized labor, as exemplified by a comment published in a letter in Theatre Week magazine that read, "It's
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clear to see unions are ruining this country, but I always thought Equity was different. I was wrong" (Wagner 7). Similarly, Equity's action became a part of discussions of "political correctness," the idea, forwarded primarily by conservatives, that US culture was being dragged down by those who insisted on attention to the sensitivities of every minority group (Bronski 16). The Gulf War and the rhetoric it generated also resonated with the musical and the controversies-the debates surrounding Miss Snigon's casting occurred during the buildup of US troops in the Gulf and the musical began rehearsals while the war was underway. Opponents of Miss Saigon argued that the musical was cut from the same cloth as the rhetoric used to drape a flag around US imperialism, epitomized, for them, by the war in the Gulf (Aguilar-San Juan 280-281). The Miss Saigon debates also revealed the complexity and hypocrisy of discourses on race, immigration, and employment: David Henry Hwang noted the irony that, during the debates, foreigners (British actors and producers) were considered representatives of "American" traditions such as free expression while, in his view, Asian Americans were seen as interlopers and somehow "foreign" (Hwang, Interview; see also Zia ix-x). The Miss Snigon casting controversies meshed particularly closely with the discourses on artistic freedom and affirmative action, two hotly contested issues in the early 1990s. When Equity banned the casting of Pryce, Mackintosh donned the mantle of "free expression." Many commentators likewise accused the union of abridging the producers' artistic freedom, associating the union's move with concurrent incidents of censorship (e.g., the defunding of the NEA Four occurred just as objections '~ the association probably to the casting of Pryce came to the f ~ r e ) .While appeared natural to proponents of Miss Saigon, the two debates were hardly comparable. For one thing, the power dynamics were dissimilar-can one equate a union responding to the perceived needs of its membership and minority actors organizing to fight for fair employment in one of the most expensive musicals ever produced with the spectacle of politicians and evangelists attacking individual artists from minority populations? Additionally, Asian American actors responded to charges that they were depriving the producers of their artistic license by asking what creative freedom they enjoyed if they were relegated to bit parts (Interviews with Marsh, B. D. Wong, and Wu; Levine 89-90; Suh). Similarly, the Miss Snigon controversies occurred following a decade-long attack on affirmative action programs by conservatives and the Reagan and Bush administrations (itself part of a larger discourse regarding the legacy of the civil rights movement), which branded affirmative action plans as "quota" programs and founts of "reverse discrimination." Little if any evidence existed to support the claims that White or male workers were being discriminated against in favor of minorities and women (A. Fletcher). Nevertheless, persons vested with authority mentioned "reverse discrimination" and "quotas" so often that many simply assumed that the
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"problem" was widespread. Indeed, many opponents of Equity and the Asian American actors decried their demands for equity in casting as "quotas" and "reverse discrimination."" Thus far I have been discussing the use of the Miss Snigon controversies in discourses that supported the dominant order and meshed with conservative political rhetoric of the period. The Miss Snigon controversies also contributed to what might be called the discourse of r e s i s t a n c e . ' ~ l ~ e debates became symbolic of pride and resistance to discrimination and stereotypes for both the Asian American actors who protested against the casting of the musical and for the community organizers who objected to its content. One finds evidence of the symbolic power of the Miss Saigon debates in discussions of the controversies. Joseph Papp, who expressed qualms about the implications of Equity's ban on Pryce for free expression said that he finally decided to back the union when he "spoke with a young Asian actor [who] spoke with such eloquence about how this Equity decision was a tremendous symbol for him" (qtd. in M. Rothstein, "Producer Cancels . . ." C17). Bronski, discussing the protests against the musical's content, described the debates as a local struggle that became part of discourse, saying, "The Miss Snigon fight was about the response of some Asian activists to a Broadway show they found offensive, but it also functioned-on a symbolic level-as a symbol of racism, of the violence perpetrated against the Asian community, and of the 'oriental' stereotypes that have always been used against Asian people" (Bronski 18). The status of the Miss Snigon debates as symbols of resistance is important in and of itself, but it also indicates that institutional performance participates not only in reactionary or hegemonic discourses, but also in national discourses of resistance. For instance, a photo of the protests against Miss Snigon appeared as the sole image on the cover of a book recounting Asian American "activism and resistance in the 1990s," demonstrating that activism surrounding commercial performance became symbolic of Asian American resistance throughout US society (Binder). The Miss Saigon controversies not only constituted an important conflict within the art world of commercial performance, but also participated in debates that pervaded US society. Furthermore, the Asian American actors' political organizing demonstrated that professional actors-persons who devoted their occupational energy and activity to worlds of institutional performance-adopted conventions from the social worlds of activism in order to respond to challenges they faced in the commercial theatre, a process I refer to as "indirect exchange" between activist and art worlds. Throughout the controversies, the performers also engaged in direct exchange with activists (though, for the sake of clarity, I address this issue explicitly late in this chapter). Likewise, though the professional actors focused upon issues of employment discrimination, they and others recognized links between issues of casting and stereotyping
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(i.e., between two aspects of the politics of representation) throughout the course of the controversies. Activism and Representation: Protests Against the Content of Miss Saigon Representation was an issue throughout the controversies, but the questions of Miss Snigon's content rose in prominence as the opening of the show neared and as activists not affiliated with theatre worlds, who viewed the musical as inherently offensive, began to organize to protest what they perceived as sexist and racist images of Asians. Some observers have viewed the content controversies initiated by gay-and-lesbian activists as ancillary to the "real" issues." It is an error, however, to separate the content controversies from the questions regarding casting, particularly when one considers that the activists objecting to Miss Snigon's content cooperated, to some extent, with the actors opposing the musical's casting. Dismissing protests regarding content that emanated from outside the theatre world ignores precisely the sort of history and evidence that demonstrates links between theatre and the rest of society, obscuring the relationship between institutional performance and politics. From the very beginning of the controversies, Asian American actors who protested Pryce's appearance as the Engineer articulated links between casting practices and the representation of Asians in US society. When forming their independent activist group, the members of the nascent APACE had to decide whether to address only the issue of casting or the broader issue of the content of Miss Snigon and other productions. The union had only taken a position regarding employment-indeed, could only comment on issues of employment. As APACE was an independent advocacy group, some members wanted to comment on the content of the musical as well as its casting, but the group decided that addressing Miss Snigon's content would dilute their objections to employment discrimination and give the appearance that the group was calling for a boycott of the show, rather than for equality in casting." Though APACE focused initially on employment discrimination, its members clearly were concerned about issues of representation (and, later in the controversies, the group was a member of the Heat is On Miss Snigon Coalition that protested both the musical's casting and its content). For example, a draft of an informational packet authored by the group describing their objections to Miss Saigon included a list of issues; "no equal opportunity" appeared second on the list, "yellow face is demeaning" was the first issue critiqued. The text analyzing yellowface reads: The offensix practice of blackface has been abandoned on the American stage yet the practice of yellowface in Miss Saigon, wl~ichis just as offensive and an affront to the Xsia~dPacific community, persists. It gives
Theatre Insiders and Politics generations of young AsianIPacifics, and Americans, in general, the iinpression that Caucasians are superior, since a white person can evidently "play yellow" better than an Asian. (APACE, "Miss Saigon: Raising- Issues" 2; other items on the list include: "Casting- a Caucasian as an Asian is not non-traditional casting" and "Artistic freedom veils racism. ")
The members of APACE clearly associated the issue of who depicts a character with the impact of representation in society.-9 APACE continued to operate after the Miss Saigon controversies, broadening its goals beyond Miss Saigon to supporting Asian American actors and critiquing negative representations of Asians on stage and in the media in general." In so doing, the professional actors' organization developed links with the worlds of activism: they built upon their experience working with activists (described below) during the controversy to function not only as advocates within the world of commercial theatre, but also as political activists engaging US society generally. The actors' activism was even honored with a citation for excellence and service in the arts from the Manhattan Borough President's Office (Stoker 3). An ad that APACE ran in Variety, timed to coincide with the Tony awards in which Pryce was nominated for best actor in a musical, demonstrates the group's increased attention to issues of representation and to activism beyond the theatre world. At the top of the page the word "racism" appears in large, bold type. Beneath it are two rows of images: the top row consists of stills from well-known films in which White actors portrayed stereotypical Asian characters (e.g., The Mask of Fu Man Chu, 1932, and Dark Alibi, 1946); the lower set depicts news photos of oppression directed towards Asians (e.g., a Japanese Internment Camp and Vincent Chin, a victim of anti-Asian violence). Copy placed between these two sets of images reads, "Racism: Sometimes it whispers / Sometimes it shouts / But / It always hurts / and / It's always wrong." The group's name appears at the bottom of the ad. Here the actors' activist organization made an argument very similar to Said's point in Orientalism: that Whites' fantastical images of the "Oriental" character not only take on a life of their own but also influence social events (APACE, "Racism: Sometimes it whispers"). The ad also demonstrates an engagement of issues that influence commercial theatre but are not limited to that world, showing that the actor-activists built links between their work in the world of commercial performance and the realm of political a d ~ o c a c y . ~ ' While Asian American actors initially avoided attacks on the content of Miss Saigon, protests against the musical's content did arise from other segments of the Asian American community. The protests objecting to the content (as opposed to the casting) of Miss Saigon demonstrate exchange between activism and commercial theatre in two ways: first, members of activist communities engaged a work of commercial theatre, seeing it as part and parcel of politics within US culture; second, these activists
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engaged the professional actors who themselves had become activists to oppose the musical's casting. Though not peripheral to the theater world, the content protests did develop initially within the New York lesbian-and-gay community from debates which began in the late fall of 1990." Two New York Asian American lesbian-and-gay groups-the activist organization Asian Lesbians Of the East Coast (ALOEC) and the community group Gay Asian and Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAP1MNY)-were outraged when they realized that two major lesbian-and-gay institutions were undertaking fund-raisers using Miss Snigon, the content of which the Asian Americans considered inherently racist and sexist." Prior to the casting controversies, several community organizations had planned to use Miss Snigon as a fund-raiser since the show's status as that season's "hot ticket" promised a lucrative and prestigious event. Some groups abandoned these plans once the casting controversies began (M. Fung), but the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (Lambda), one of the largest national lesbian-and-gay rights organizations, and the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center (the Center), a major community organization in New York, continued to sell benefit tickets for Miss Snigon long after the casting controversies had exploded. ALOEC and GAPIMNY had not planned to protest against Miss Saigon; members knew of the casting controversies and the gist of the musical's content (through the cast recording and the libretto that accompanies it, as well as via reports from friends who had seen the show); though they considered it racist and sexist, they did not differentiate it from the multitude of stereotypes regarding Asians and women circulating in popular culture. When individuals in ALOEC and GAPIMNY learned of the continuing fund-raisers by major lesbianand-gay rights groups, however, they began to coordinate in order to object to what they perceived as lack of respect for Asian American members of the lesbian-and-gay community within otherwise laudable organizations. In December of 1990, ALOEC and GAPIMNY sent letters to Lambda and the Center explaining their objections to the Miss Saigon fund-raisers and demanding that they be terminated. During the early months of 1991, these groups continued to correspond with Lambda and the Center, to hold meetings with leaders of the organizations, and to contact other organizations to ask for support (other organizations representing people of color within the lesbian-and-gay community, civil rights organizations, and actors' groups such as APACE eventually joined with ALOEC and GAPIMNY in protest; some of these organizations may have been planning protests of their own). The groups' efforts soon became public knowledge and led to considerable debate, particularly in the newspapers serving the lesbian-and-gay community. Detractors charged that Asian American activists were dividing the gay-and-lesbian community and accused them of hurting other Asian Americans (either jeopardizing the jobs of the Asian
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American actors in the show or defaming the actors by implying that they were participating in the creation of racism). Articles and letters in the press document both support for and criticism of the Asian American activists' position.'' The activists insisted that they were not calling for a boycott of the show (and therefore were not endangering jobs) and that Asian American actors needed better parts to play (Cho, Interview; J. J. Lee, Interview). In March of 1991 the Center, with the support of its African American and Asian American constituents, stopped selling tickets to Miss Saigon. Lambda, however, refused to cancel its fund-raiser, citing the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would forego through cancellation, though it did send a letter to ticket holders offering to buy back their tickets.'' The activists charged that Lambda should have voided its contract during the period when Mackintosh canceled the show." Interactions between the activists and Lambda, initially cordial, became more tense (Yoshikawa 283-285; J. J. Lee, Interview; McDonald and Miller). As the debate heated up, Lambda's intransigence was seen by many as a sign that the organization tended to disregard the opinions of people of color within the lesbian-and-gay communities. Most notably, African American lesbian poet, scholar, and feminist Audre Lorde refused to accept Lambda's Liberty Award due to their association with Miss Saigon (Yoshikawa 286; Haile reports that the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum also declined an award). Meanwhile, as their relationship with Lambda deteriorated, ALOEC and GAPIMNY shifted their energies from negotiating with Lambda and publicizing their grievances to organizing public demonstrations at performances of Miss Snigon itself. They forged relationships with other groups, including the actors' group, APACE, to form the "The Heat is on Miss Snigon Coalition." Lambda's benefit at a preview performance on April 6, 1991, which was picketed by The Heat is on Miss Saigon Coalition, raised $140,000 but was, as OutWeek [sic] put it, "A PR Disaster" (A. McDonald, "Miss Snigon a Financial Success"). Shortly after the benefit Lambda released a statement of apology and held meetings with representatives from ALOEC and GAPIMNY in an effort to heal wounds.'' The early performances of Miss Snigon, then, were greeted by protests mounted by a coalition of political activists, community organizers, and actors. The first protest took place at the preview performance on April 6 that served as Lambda's benefit. The demonstration included approximately 500 protesters, representing a number of organizations and identities, decrying both the show's casting and its content. The behavior of the police at the first demonstration (opposing Lambda's fund-raiser) and the links between the police and Lambda elicited particular attention from both the activists and the press, and Lambda director Tom Stoddard later admitted that his group had warned the police to expect protests.'"
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Demonstrators also picketed the musical's official opening on April 11, 1991. These protests were smaller and more somber. The approximately 200 activists were vastly outnumbered by police who contained them across the street from the theatre. This protest, however, garnered a great deal of attention from the media, though the exact issues broached by the lesbian-and-gay Asian Americans were frequently lost in the mainstream media's c ~ v e r a g e . ~ ' A remarkable event transpired at the first (April 6 ) demonstration, when two activists literally attended the theatre. Two Lambda donors spontaneously decided to give their tickets to the demonstrators. Following a typical strategy in 1980s activism, two activists, Yoko Yoshikawa and Milyoung Cho, capitalized upon the opportunity by leaving the pickets, entering the theatre and disrupting the performance: they waited until the first scene (the "Miss Saigon" contest) was under way and then stood up and yelled, "This play is racist and sexist, Lambda is racist and sexist!" until they were escorted out of the theatre (Yoshikawa 277). Since the activists' interruption of the performance of Miss Saigon could be seen as an unforgivable breach of the respect the theatre world accords actors during performance, it is important to reiterate that, though actors were present at the protest, the women who interrupted the show were activists, not professional actors, and therefore followed standards from the world of politics rather than the etiquette of theatre. Moreover, their action was not intended as a display of disrespect for the actors but as a manifestation of resistance, a refusal to allow the play to proceed with "business as usual" (Interviews). The interruption of Miss Saigon by activists also points to another important facet of the controversies worthy of a brief digression: the awkward position occupied by Asian American actors in the production itself. These performers felt conflicted, as indicated by the comments of Jason Ma, an Asian American actor performing in the ensemble who sympathized with the views of Asian American actors protesting the show. Recalling the activists' disruption; he said, "You know, I heard these women screaming 'we're not greasy chinks, we're not whores, we're human beings' and I have to say that was amazingly resonant . . . to me personally" (Ma, Interview; Iwamatsu made similar comments). The Asian American cast members understood the position taken by their peers picketing outside the theatre; indeed, they often had friends or relatives who supported the protesters' views (regarding both casting and content), privately if not publicly. They had been stung, along with the rest of Asian acting community, by the idea that circulated during the controversies that no Asian actor could match Pryce. A few of the actors I spoke with stated that they fully supported the actors' protest against the lack of opportunities for Asian actors, even though they also worked well with Pryce and thought he was a fine actor. Some of the actors who performed
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in Miss Snigon had even been marginally involved in the initial casting controversy (e.g., one actor remembered signing a petition objecting to the casting of Pryce as the Engineer and another had signed one denouncing Pryce's use of eye prosthetics). Furthermore, the Asian American cast members I spoke with expressed frustration regarding the stereotypes of Asians promulgated in theatrical roles and in US society generally. Yet, these actors supported the show and felt that the characters they played were not mere offensive stereotypes (each actor, of course, felt differently about the show and its depiction of Asians)."' These actors expressed their views regarding the casting controversy to other cast members, and felt that the producers of the musical appreciated the awkwardness of their position." According to the actors involved, the protests against Miss Saigon affected the entire cast, but the conflict was felt most acutely by the Asian American cast members. The protests surrounding the content of Miss Saigon formed a part of an ongoing struggle on the part of Asian American activists to challenge negative representations. The opening night protests against Miss Saigon were the last formal, large-scale protests against the musical in New York, as far as I know, but they did not constitute the last time Miss Snigon met with protests. The debate regarding the musical's content persisted, leading to demonstrations and other political actions targeting the musical in cities such as MinneapolisISt. Paul, Seattle, and Toronto (casting was less of an issue after the New York production, since the producers were careful to cast Asian or Eurasian actors in the Asian roles)." Significantly, the Toronto demonstrations occurred in the context of accompanying activism objecting to a revival of S h o w Boat by a coalition of African Canadian groups who viewed the latter musical's restored lyrics as offensive (see Breon). The Miss Saigon protests were also followed by challenges to stereotypical portrayals of Asians in other media, such as protests against the 1993 film Rising Sun, which a coalition of Asian American rights groups charged fostered racist stereotypes (McQueen; Ferrell and I
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community) and contributed to resistance to stereotypical renderings of Asians in US ~ u l t u r e . 'In ~ addition to serving as a case-in-point and a symbol of resistance for Asian Americans, one can discern the impact of the Miss Snigon debates on the theatre world. The controversy may have prevented the use of yellowface makeup in US productions of Miss Snigon. In terms of casting, had the controversy not occurred, it seems quite probable that White actors would have played the Engineer in major productions in the US. Following the controversy, the Mackintosh production team cast the Engineer with Asian or Eurasian American actors in every US production, with the obvious exception of the first months of the Broadway production in which Pryce played the Engineer (Zia 129). Actors with whom I spoke expressed optimism, or at least hope, that Mackintosh and other producers had recognized that they could not ignore actors of color. Indeed, casting opportunities for actors of color increased following the Miss Snigon controversies, though problems of casting discrimination by no means disappeared." The debates occasioned by the casting of Miss Snigon also led to discussion within theatre institutions regarding issues of discrimination. For example, Kitty Lunn, head of Equity's Performers with Disabilities Committee reports that, until the Miss Snigon controversies, some members of the union's Committee on Racial Equality wanted to separate contractual language regarding the casting of minorities and women from language for actors with disabilities; during the Miss Snigon controversies, says Lunn, "I think people learned [that] the issue was [that] discrimination, . . . whatever form it comes in, is wrong; whether it's because of race or ethnicity or gender or sex or sexual orientation or age or disability, it's [a] denial of the opportunity" (Lunn, Interview).'" The Miss Saigon protests did not, of course, end employment discrimination, and it would be absurd to judge their impact by that standard. Indeed, in 1999 Equity released a study showing a marked decline in employment of minority actors (Armbrust). What the protests did manifest was exchange among professional performers and political activists as part of an ongoing struggle for social justice. The final portion of this chapter describes professional performers' engagement with the social worlds of activism.
Examination of the details of the organizing among Asian American actors who objected to Miss Snigon's casting reveals the self-conscious adoption of activist conventions by professional actors. Some of the participants in the organizing surrounding Miss Saigon-such as Sumi Haru and Alvin Lum (who contested the casting of Pryce as a member of Equity's CRE)had participated in casting protests in the 1970s. Others, such as David
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Henry Hwang, identified themselves with activism in general and with the Asian American movement that emerged in the 1970s in particular. Yet, most of the actors who organized the protests against Miss Saigon came from a generation that had not been involved in activism previo~sly.~' H o w could a group of people deeply involved in the social worlds of professional performance (which require huge commitments of time and energy) and little if any experience with activism organize so quickly and successfully? Two explanations present themselves. First, when the controversies began, there already existed a tradition of activism among performers of color, institutionalized in organizations such as Oriental Actors of America (which led to the formation of the Association of Asian and Pacific American Artists), PARTS, and HOLA. Even performers not involved in these organization knew of their activities. For example, several Asian American performers with whom I spoke knew a story of an Asian American performer who had picketed a show in which she or he was performing. So the worlds of commercial performance evidenced a history and lore of activism as well as activist institutions that aided the neophyte Asian American actor-activists. Second, activism existed as n constellation of social worlds that offered the actors-cum-activists models upon which to build (for example, numerous activist organizations, such as the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, worked in Asian American communities and cooperated with the actors as they protested Miss Saigon). The actors' efforts surrounding Miss Snigon not only tapped the experience of the social worlds of activism, but also inspired activism outside the theatre: the actors' activism prompted Asian American activists groups such as ALOEC and GAPIMNY to look more closely at the musical. Upon examining the Miss Snigon controversies, then, one discovers exchange and cooperation between the social worlds of political activism and institutional performance. When ALOEC and GAPIMNY first wrote to Lambda, objecting to its plans for a Miss Snigon fund-raiser, the activist groups referred to APACE by name (ALOECIGAPIMNY, Letter to Thomas Stoddard, courtesy of ALOEC, GAPIMNY, and The Heat is on Miss Snigon Coalition archives; the letter mentions a forum on racism and the theatre organized by the actors' activist group). When ALOEC and GAPIMNY decided to seek out other groups and form a coalition to protest at the opening night of Miss Snigon, "Our first new ally in this initiative was the Asian Pacific Alliance for Creative Equality (APACE)" (Yoshikawa 289). Just as ALOEC and GAPIMNY recognized the importance of APACE'S challenge to Miss Snigon, so too APACE members addressed the lesbian-and-gay organizations' concerns, issuing a statement that called upon "not-for-profit agencies and educational institutions not to contribute to profits reaped at the expense of racial harmony by sponsoring MISS SAIGON fund-raising events" (APACE, "Statement on
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MISS SAIGON," courtesy of APACE). These statements, along with the actors' and activists' cooperation in a coalition protesting Miss Saigon, manifest direct exchange between artistic and activist social worlds. During the Miss Snigon controversies Asian American actors became activists themselves and worked with activists not affiliated with commercial performance. That is, the debate led professional actors to negotiate the demands of performance and activism. Such negotiations create both tensions and benefits for actors (and for activists too, as discussed in the chapter on activists producing performance). Evidence that professional actors at times engage the worlds of activism can be found through analysis of the tensions that inevitably arise when people negotiate the demands of different social worlds. The actors who became activists to oppose Miss Saigon reckoned with two sorts of tensions-those emanating from the theatre world and those coming from activism. Many of the features of the commercial performance world caused tensions for the Asian American actors who became activists. As soon as the actors became activist, they were accused of violating ideas accorded honor in the commercial theatre, such as "artistic freedom"; APACE members felt compelled to respond to this perception that their organizing violated professional and artistic conventions. Asian American actors not only confronted these ideological tensions, but also faced the potential material consequences of activism in the theatre world. Chief among these was fear that speaking out would hurt one's career. Professional actors depend for employment upon networks of directors and casting directors, as Becker's Art Worlds suggests and a study of theatrical casting by Lori Morris illustrates. By protesting, the actors-cum-activists not only diminished their chances of being cast in Miss Saigon itself (should they wish to be) but also potentially hurt their reputation among directors in general (Honda and M . Fung Interviews). B. D. Wong expressed precisely this anxiety, but also felt compelled to protest Miss Snigon: My fr~endswarned me, "You'll neyer get another lob." And I thoz~ght, " O h no, I ' m not an act07 a n p o r e , I'm a polltzcal actwlst." But as an actor, I had to speak up. I was being told, "You're not good enough to play this part . . . ." If Asian American actors aren't good enough to play Asian roles, what are we good for? (Zia 125; e~nphasisadded)
Wong's comment illustrates several important points. First, the quotation offers explicit evidence that Asian American actors did not casually organize merely to address a grievance in their occupation, but rather selfconsciously perceived their activity as engaging the conventions of activist worlds. Second, while Wong's fear that protest would lead to blacklisting was strong, it did not prevent him from protesting. While such anxieties were reasonable, B. D. Wong and other APACE actors continued to get work; indeed, they managed to work as both actors and activists (for
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instance, after the controversies Wong continued to speak out regarding stereotypes; he also voiced a principal role in the Disney film Mulan; while it is possible some actors may have lost employment opportunities due to their involvement in the Miss Saigon protests, none of the actors I spoke with mentioned any such incidents). Wong's comment, then, reveals not simply a reasonable concern regarding one's career, but more importantly the sense of both anxiety and empowerment encountered by those who enter the territory shared by activism and performance. Similarly, APACE succeeded as an activist organization in spite of fears of blacklisting (as earlier descriptions of the group's activities demonstrate), though this tension did make the group more cautious than their activist counterparts, who did not need to worry about maintaining good working relationships in the theatre world. Another tension between commercial theatre and activism that emanated from the theatrical side of the equation was the difficulty of organizing while maintaining a theatrical career. Most activists must resolve tensions between their jobs and their activism. Commercial theatre, however, created particular problems for the professional actors seeking to organize. Their schedules were demanding, unpredictable, and frequently took them away from New York (where the most cohesive chapter of APACE existed). Indeed, logistical problems, not philosophical concerns, caused APACE to disband a couple of years after the Miss Saigon controversies (Honda, Interview, 1995).'" Actors organizing to oppose Miss Saigon experienced tensions from the demands of the worlds of activism, as well as those of theatre. By taking on the role of activists, actors placed themselves in an unfamiliar and often frightening position. Carol Honda pointed out that "it's tough for us to all of a sudden become activists and articulate people [who can deal] with the media. . . . We didn't have any idea how to begin protesting or having a voice" (Honda, Interview, 1992). The actors who formed APACE acclimatized to activism with the help of already existing actors' activist groups such as PARTS. In addition to dealing with the unaccustomed role of activist, actors also had to function alongside the community activists protesting Miss Saigon's content. Some APACE members felt that their central point regarding the employment discrimination was lost in the new controversies occasioned by the activists attention to Lambda's benefit performance of Miss Snigon and the musical's content. Other members of the actors' organization felt gratified that their objections to the producers' actions prompted a wider response. The community activists also disturbed a few of the actors because they tended to be more outspoken (in part because they were outsiders with no direct stake in the theatre world). According to participants, the tensions were evident in meetings of the Heat is on Miss Snigon Coalition, but did not lead to confrontations or disrupt activism (Interviews). In other words, organizing in the gray area
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shared by two social worlds entails coping with tensions generated by differences in outlook and approach, yet such tensions often prove productive (or at least tolerable) rather than debilitating. While many of the conflicts that activism provoked for actors revolved around organizing and making their point regarding employment discrimination, some problems prompted by activism were less concrete and more related to one's sense of identity and security. Activism can be very frustrating, since it frequently brings more problems to one's attention than any individual or small group can hope to address. When one becomes involved in activism, one quickly discovers that instances of injustice are far more prevalent than one had imagined, and that the pace of social change is frequently slow. One of the most fascinating comments I heard during my research-one that resonated with my own experience of entering the world of activism-was expressed by an Asian American actor who stated that, though he was proud to have participated in the Miss Snigon protests, on a personal level, he experience mixed emotions: Because . . . I feel like I'm a less happy person now than I was before. . . . I've become so much more aware and sensitive to discrimination and the racism and the lack of understanding between races-not just between Asian Americans and Caucasians, but in all directions-and it's made me actually much less happy. Whereas before, when you don't realize how much it's happening and how much it's hurting people, there's a sense [in which one can say] "Oh, we're all getting along." So I'm hopefully less ignorant now and unfortunately more aware of the real situation.
This statement should not be dismissed as either selfishness or a rehashing of the "sadder but wiser" trope. Rather, this actor's comment reveals a confrontation with the conventions and realities of the worlds of political activism. Nor is the problem unique to actors. Activism demands that one confront widespread suffering, ignorance, and abuse of power. In my experience, even people fully committed to the worlds of political activism, who generally find organizing an experience that gives them as sense of empowerment when faced with injustice, tend experience occasional periods of burnout. It is also worth noting briefly the reactions of the community activists to the actor-activists. As stated earlier, the Asian American community activists were inspired to examine Miss Snigon by the actors and cited the actors' organizing as instrumental in publicizing what they perceived as the musical's racism and sexism. So, as with the actors' qualms, it is important to note that the tensions that arose when the activists began to work with the actors did not disrupt their work but, rather, constituted an expected component of negotiating between participants in different social worlds. Some activists, however, did see the actors' approach as limited (Interviews; Yoshikawa). One activist with whom I spoke stated that he believed that the actors were simply exhausted by the time of the protests at
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performances of Miss Saigon, since they had been organizing for a year (whereas the activists had only been dealing with the issue intensively for a few months). The activists also recognized that the actors were concerned, to an extent, with different issues and that activists, as outsiders, enjoyed a greater freedom to speak out than did the actors, who could lose their livelihood if they took protests too far. Nevertheless, some activists wanted the actors to be more vocal and were puzzled by the apparent contradiction between the actors' desire to protest and what the activists perceived as a willingness to accept roles in offensive shows. The activists did recognize, however, that the actors-both those performing in and those protesting the musical-for the most part had to accept stereotypical parts or leave the commercial theatre altogether; as one activist put it, "We decided that this was part of the tragedy of racism." I should also repeat the point that these tensions were an undercurrent within the organizing surrounding Miss Snigon, not a public dispute. Just as the actors managed to mediate the conflicting demands of activism and professional theatre, so too the activists worked alongside people with a different agenda." It would be a mistake to record only the tensions caused by actors' involvement in activism, for APACE members articulated a variety of benefits they derived from becoming activists. Although, during the controversies themselves, many actors reported frustration at their inability to prevent Pryce from performing, in retrospect they expressed gratification at having spoken out. They asserted that they had participated in a major event working for social change; moreover, they described a sense of pride at having resisted stereotypes-particularly since one of the stereotypes they disrupted was that of Asian passivity. They contended that they had advanced the cause of Asian American actors specifically and actors of color generally. In addition, they said that they had raised awareness in theatre worlds and in Asian American communities regarding the problems faced by Asian American actors, and that they had linked discrimination against actors to other issues regarding the treatment of Asians in the workplace (Interviews; Wall-Lee). Though tensions offer more immediate evidence of negotiation between theatre and activism, the actor-activists of APACE clearly perceived benefits in activism, asserting that their endeavors contributed to movements for change both inside and outside the theatre world. By organizing to protest Miss Snigon, actors of color and members of Equity called attention to inherent connections between commercial theatre and the politics of representation, and they exemplified the potential for exchange among participants in professional art worlds and activism.
Actors and Activists
lMiss Snigon's producers maintained that the Engineer is "Eurasian" and could therefore be played by a White actor as well as an Asian actor, but many actors objecting to the casting of Pryce saw this argument as a contrivance, arguing instead that the text of the musical indicates that the character is Asian (compare Behr and Steyn 27; M. Rothstein, "Producer Cancels" C l j ; and Patterson 417). There were also other views-members of Eurasian rights groups took offense at the coiltention that a Eurasian role was available to either White or Asian actors, arguing that only a Eurasian should play the part (Miao; Harrison). Irrespective of the Engineer's contested ethnicity, the role and the musical participated in theatrical traditions that permit White actors to play Asian or Eurasian roles, but exclude Asian performers from depicting White characters, and frequently deny them Asian or Eurasian roles. In London, for instance, Pryce used prosthetics to appear more Asian, as did other White actors who played clearly Asian (not Eurasian) characters. Since those who objected to the musical's casting were often accused of endangering the livelihoods of those involved in the New York theatre industr!; it is important to note e Volume 47 5-the that-despite accounts to the contrary (see J. Willis, T l ~ w t ~Wodd production opened on schedule (Behr and Steyn 180; M. Rothstein, "Dispute Settled"). 2 ~ r t i c l e sciting the protests as a pivotal event in Asian American history and/or citing an author's or another Asian American's participation in the protests include Her; Hsu; Tang,"Signs of the Times"; Hong; Harlan; and Ayuyang; see also Zia 112, where this scholar comments on the prominence of the Mzss Silzgon controversies. It should be noted that these and other conmlentators were not Pollyannas in their memory of the protests: they recognized that the musical provided numerous roles for Asian American actors, that Asian Americans still had to accept demeaning roles if they wished to work as professional actors, that the practice of yellowface persisted, and that not all Asian Americans objected to Miss Silzgon's politics or casting (see, for instance, Tang; Hong). -?Since the paragraph in the text and the one that preceded it introduce issues to be explored in greater depth, most points will be substantiated by research presented later in the chapter. A few specific contentions, however, require support here. O n the terms "ethnic" and "White," see the notes to the Introduction. Mackintosh's association of the Miss Siligon controversies with issues of free expression appears in "Miss Saigon Canceled." Cavett's article constitutes an example of criticisnl of Actors' Equity in the press (it should be noted that other members of the media supported the union's stand). The Asian American actors protesting the musical were criticized from a number of quarters (both during the controversies and since): some cornnlentators critiqued what they perceived as a denland for strict parity between the ethnicity of actors and roles (e.g., IZershaw, writing in 1999, suggests that the actors' protest was "apparently based on an appeal to a racial 35); others accused Equity and authenticity that was essentialist," Rddicnl in Pe~fo~nznnce the actors of everything from indulging professional jealousy to fomenting racial tensions (Resnikova); critics iilcluded some Asian Americans, who saw the protesters as fighting to play stereotypes (a view attributed to Asian American playwright Frank Chin-see Pao 37). Zia (112) analyzes the debate among Asian American actors regarding playing derogatory roles. It is also important to note that there is no single or monolithic "Asian American" cornrnunity or a single, homogeneous community of Asian American actors. IZaren Shimakawa (374) makes this point, noting that Asian America is comprised of people with diverse national heritages and is divided by other social realities, such as gender. Finall!; Anderson (30) views the protests against Miss Sdigon by gay and lesbian activists as incidental to the casting controversies. 4 ~ e n e r a statements l regarding theatre worlds are based upon my interviews with participants and my own observation and knowledge of the field. O n the relative size of the
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commercial and not-for-profit theatres, note that John Willis reports that during the 1990-1991 season there were more than 250 new Off-Broadway productions versus 26 new productions (as opposed to long-running shows) on Broadway. While not all of the Off-Broadway theatres might be considered not-for-profit, the disparity between Broadway and Off-Broadway is clear (J. Willis, Thent~eWodd Volume 47 5 ) . Similarly, Harry Newman notes that "As of the 1986187 season . . . the resident not-for-profit theatres [in the US] were responsible for employing more actors than any other kind of theatre." Newman also notes that the growth of theatre has been accompanied by a growth in bureaucracy, supporting my point that not-for-profit theatre, although technically noncommercial, is often "mainstream" nonetheless (Newman, "Holding Back" 29-30). S ~ o l l o w i n gsociologist Howard Becker, my definition of the musical as an art world focuses upon social process rather than aesthetics (see Ayt Worlds x). It is important, h o w ever, to note the existence of a frequently-cited, aesthetically based definition of the musical as a theatrical production that uses popular music in the service of a discernible plot or concept (see Engel; Smith and Litton 31). As with most art worlds, it is impossible to cite an exact date of formation. Scholars tend to view the 1866 production of The Bldclz Cyook as an immediate antecedent to the book musical, since it combined a loose story and a score and, more importantl!; was wildly successful, thereby inspiring imitators (see Smith and Litton 2; Bordman, 1986 ed. 20, 23). The Bldclz C~oolzalso denlonstrates that musicals have always been expensive, commercial endeavors: it was produced at a cost of from $35,000 to $55,000, which Cecil Smith notes was "a staggering figure " for the time (Smith and Litton 8). 6 ~ i s t o r i a n sof the musical explain the further complexity of the decline in the musical's centrality in popular culture in the 1960s. High costs and dinlinished attendance had an aesthetic impact and created something of a vicious circle: producers (who faced exorbitant production costs and fickle audiences) refused to invest in anything but a "sure thing," leading the musical to inferior imitations of the successes of the 1940s and 1950s; the lack of innovation caused the musical's audience to wane, since older people felt that "they didn't make them like they used to" while younger people avoided the established theatre in favor of the burgeoning youth culture. Also, the New York theatre district declined economicall!; and, as a result, theatres began sharing social space with adult movie theatres and other establishments that offended the musical's now-middle-class clientele. Finally, Glenn Litton argues that, in an era marked by social turmoil, "Musical theatre didn't have too much to say about a very unfanciful, unromantic, unsentimental world. For many it seemed too trivial-even as a diversion" (Smith and Litton 297). 7~roducershave not always seen political forms, such as social satire, as "unsafe," but reactionary periods in US politics tend to stifle political speech in conmlercial performance. For instance, Engel (17) argues that anti-Communist fervor in the 1940s and 19.50s caused investors to eschew political speech, thereby forcing into extinction the satiric reviews that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. $ ~ a r r Newman, y in a personal interview, cited statistics from surveys of audiences in conmlercial theatres in the early 1990s, compiled by the League of American Theatres and Producers, that revealed that most patrons had incomes greatly exceeding the average national income. This has not always been the case, but is rather a f ~ ~ n c t i oofn rising costs of production in the last half-century (see Bordman, 1986 ed. 642). 9 ~ h e o r i s t sand practitioners alike recognize both the power and the pitfalls of mainstream performance. IZondo devotes a chapter of About Face to issues of resistance and complicit!; arguing that their relationship ought to be viewed as a continuum, not a binar y Dolan analyzes dangers of exploitation presented by nlainstreanl performance, but
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argues that one cannot ignore its political impact (Presence and Desire 3-13, especially 8); Steward argues that members of oppressed groups can (and must try to) conmlunicate resistant viewpoints even within the context of hegernonic discourses; and David Henry Hwang notes that commercial success inevitably influences a playwright's approach to subsequent projects: "There are some times when I feel that having a Broadway hit made me, and other times when I feel it ruined me. And, of course, the answer is that it did both. It ended one life, and it began another" ("Worlds Apart" 53). loMiss Saigon and the protests it provoked have attracted the attention of a number of scholars, including: Gibbons; Heung; IZondo; IZershaw (Radzcal zn P e ~ f o ~ m a n c e ) ; Josephine Lee; Lu; Manalansan; Pao; Shirnakawa; Ty; Wei; Worthy; and Zia. Studies of the Mzss Sazgon controversies tend to divide along two lines; to cite an example of each path, Pao, though examining the casting controversy, is primarily concerned with the representational strategies employed within Miss Snigon's text and their relationship to the history of the representation of women and cultural Others; contrariwise, Gibbons is concerned not with the musical's representational strategies but with the Mzss Sazgon controversies as they relate to his larger subject, the history of non-traditional casting. These sources have all been extremely valuable as I have pursued my inquiry. These studies, however, have devoted little attention to the connections Mzss Sazgon reveals between activism and professional performance. I1 base my analysis of Miss Snigon upon listening to the original London cast recording, attending a preview of the Chicago national touring production on October 6, 1992, seeing the New York production on December 2, 1992, and viewing a return engagement in Chicago on November 7, 1995. I also inject conmlents from materials created by the producers (such as souvenir programs) and from reviews and conmlentaries on the musical. I should note that I did not see a live performance of the London production, nor did I witness a live performance featuring Jonathan Pryce and Lea Salonga in New York; I did, however, watch (courtesy of Actors' Equity ) a videotape of a perfornlance of Miss Saigon in which Pryce and Salonga appeared, available at the New York Public Library for the Perfornling Arts at Lincoln Center. 12Various persons involved in the production and marketing of Mzss Sazgon refer to its content as political. In the introduction to the libretto for the recording released at the time of the West End premiere, for example, Mark Steyn writes, "Mzss Saigon is a triumph of popular theatre: a moving love story-just like Puccini's-but packing a considerable political punch and with a grin1 sardonic humour beyond any Italian opera librettist" (lyric sheet to Boublil, Schonberg, and Maltby). References to the danger of broaching the war in Vietnam appear in Hulbert. The musical's appeals to politics sometimes took the form of literal appropriations, best exemplified by the use of actual images from Vietnam. The musical's scene design includes photojournalistic images of war-torn Saigon painted on scrims that hung above or behind the action during scenes set in Vietnam. Similarl!; promotional materials for the shorn; such as souvenir programs and the libretto included with the recording, seek to augment the musical's apparent political potency by juxtaposing production shots with journalistic photos from the Vietnam War. The musical was also initially received in the press as a liberal con~mentaryon the US war in Vietnam; see Billington; Whitney; and Safire. For a rare exception among journalists' responses-one that critiqued the musical's stereotypes prior to the casting controversy-see Ratcliffe. Billington coined the phrase "Puccini with politics" (quoted in the text). 1 3 ~ h e nMiss Snigon played on the West End and Broadway, the US war in Vietnam and the Cold War generally were potent and unresolved issues in US and European politics, yet the war was far from a taboo topic. The play premiered in September of 1989, whereas the changes that swept over Eastern Europe did not arrive until that December, so
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the production was created and read, in England at least, in the light cast by the Cold War. Sirnilarl!; it was not until July 11, 1995, that President Clinton announced that the US would nornlalize relations with Vietnam-four years after Miss Sdigon transferred to Broadway. But US popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s used the war and its consequences as the setting for plays, films, and television shows that ran the gamut of the political spectrum, from relatively subtle considerations of soldiers' experiences, such as Torn Cole's play Medal of H o n o ~Rilg, to the jingoistic Rambo films. For plays on Vietnam see Coming to Tevns: Alne~icnnPlays & the Vietnam \.KIT. O n film treatments of Vietnam, see Malo and Williams; for a brief surnnlary of films treating the US war in Vietnam, especially as they expose issues of gender and race, see Marchetti 99ff. 1 4 ~ h photo e also appears 011 page 2 6 of Behr and Steyn, in the cast recording lyric sheet, and in all programs and souvenir programs for Mzss Siligon. For more detailed analysis of the "Miss Sdigon photograph," see Pao; Heung. ISL1feature article 011 the bzri doi film sequence, published in a New York newspaper shortly after the Broadway premiere, reveals that the film consists of actual documentary footage of Vietnamese refugee children in the late 1970s, compiled specifically for Miss Snigon by a London film researcher (O'Haire, "When faces tell" and "The Selling of 'Saigon"'). For a further analysis of the problems of the film sequence, see Heung 167; and IZoenig. Those who defend the producers argue that their work is charitable, and I found some evidence of fund-raising on the part of the Miss Sdigon producers: the London program included the address of an aid agency working with Vietnamese refugees, the souvenir program sold in theatres in New York and Chicago contained articles on their plight, and Mackintosh set aside a snlall amount of the proceeds from the show to benefit refugee children. Critics might well argue that such charity pales in conlparison to the play's profits and constitutes a ploy to avoid charges of exploitation. Regardless of the producers' motives for charity, the representational impact of the sequence remains, in my opinion, paternalistic and exploitative. See [Miss Sdigonj Souveni~B ~ o c h w eand the Miss Sdigon program from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (available at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center). 1 6 ~ i n Marchetti, a in an analysis of The Lady Fmm Yesterday ( a television drama that, like Miss Snigon, deals with the children conceived by US soldiers in Vietnam) argues that such domestic melodrama serves to diminish governmental responsibility for the war, noting that, in such works, "National guilt becomes personal anguish. . . . Clearly the emotions and ethical consequences of fathering Amerasian children are more easily digestible than the far more controversial issues of the legitimacy of the war itself" (101-102). She also notes that this obfuscation of national responsibility obscures other issues, especially racism. Bzrtte~flycontains a marvelous critique that do not mean to imply that M~~dnnzn Miss Sdigon disrupts. Though Pinkerton is clearly unsympathetic in Puccini's opera, audience members may nevertheless vicariously enjoy his power-a character in David Henry Hwang's M. Butte~flysays, "I suggest that, while we men may all want to kick Pinkerton, very few of us would pass up the opportunity to be Pinkerton." O n the stereotype of the idealized Asian woman, see Pao. 80rientalism in the musical forms a part of a general tendency in the musical's history to use and produce stereotypes about minority populations. For example, the musical's parent genres included popular entertainments, such as minstrelsy, that participated in the formation of national ideologies regarding race. See Lott; and Toll, "Show Biz," and Blacking Up. Standard histories of the musical, such as Bordman or Smith and Litton, catalogue countless examples of Orientalist nlusicals from the genre's origins to the present;
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indeed, Bordman notes that in the late-nineteenth-century Orientalist settings "had become almost the sine gun non of comic opera" (1986 ed. 108). It is unlikely that Asian actors appeared in many, if any, of these nlusicals prior to the mid-twentieth century. Several scholars document the history of White actors playing Asians and the slow integration of the Broadway stage in general; see Berson, Between Wodds; Josephine Lee; and Woll. 1 9 0 n Orientalisnl and imperialism, see Said, Cultwe 2nd 11npe~inlism;Pao; Moy 10-11; and Kim 21. For a concise definition of Orientalism, see Said "Orientalism reconsidered" 211; see also Orientillism. It is important to note that Said's formulation of Orientalism as totally separate from "actual" Asians has been critiqued as reducing the relationship between various cultures and classes to binaries that limit analysis; Said has also been accused of writing as if he himself were outside the representational system he describes; his work nevertheless remains useful to an understanding of the politics of representation and has inspired other scholars to attend to the power of texts; see R. Young (who compares Said's work with that of Homi Bhabha) 127-142. Finall!; as mentioned in notes for the Introduction, Said has been accused of fabricating details of his own biography (Weiner), but these charges seem unsubstantiated (Hitchens) and, in any case, do not relate to the scholarship included in this study. 2 0 ~ h eproducers' disregard for Asian sensibilities is illustrated in a comment by William Brohn, who orchestrated the score of Miss Snigon by combining Asian and Western nlusic in a style he labeled "Bamboo rock"; Brohn told Mark Steyn, "I suppose . . . that some Vietnamese might find the idea of 'Bamboo rock' offensive. But, er, I think it's funny" (Behr and Steyn 54). 2 1 ~ tis possible, of course, that the producers hired Vietnamese consulta~ltsof whom I am not aware; I found no nlention of such personnel in Behr and Steyn, which in and of itself indicates the priorities of the creative team. In any event, the list of creative staff published in programs and recordings suggests that no Vietnamese (or other Asian) personnel were involved in the writing of the musical as centrally as White American lyricist Maltby. 2 2 ~ a i dcalls attention to the links between issues of race and gender, arguing that Orientalism is "a praxis of the same sort, albeit in different territories, as male gender dominance, or patriarchy, in metropolitan societies: the Orient was routinely described as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main syn~bolsthe sensual wonlan, the harem and the despotic-but curiously attractive-ruler. Moreover Orientals, like Victorian housewives, were confined to silence and to unlimited enriching production" (Said, "Orientalism reconsidered" 225). 23My critique of the "Miss Saigon" contest does not aim to condemn all eroticism, but to point out Miss Snigon's producers' nlanipulations of eroticism. A photo of this sequence appears in Behr and Steyn 68-69. The "innocent conspiracy" is described in Behr and Steyn 1.56-1.57, and has been analyzed more extensively elsewhere (see the authors' Politics and Pe~fownmce516; and Kersham; Rddicnl in Pe~fbwnmce36). The costunles for the bar scene did, in fact, cause considerable consternation among the actors who were to wear them. Likewise, female actors were upset by the prospect of dancing in revealing costumes even during preparation for the New York run, according to some cast members I interviewed (despite the fact that the actors would have known about the scene from the London production). The producers attributed this reticence to prudishness or the female actors' discomfort with their bodies (Behr and Steyn 157). They viewed the female actors' eventual acceptance of the costumes as a sign that they matured in the craft. I note, however, that women had relatively little representation in the production process.
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2 4 ~ h yellowface e makeup employed in Miss Saigon to make White actors appear Asian is clearly visible in photos in Behr and Steyn and in sequences in the video The Heilt zs On: The Making of Miss Saigon. The actors clearly wore the prosthetics for some time and it is unclear when they stopped. An article in the Voice implies that the makeup was removed early in the London run after "protest from local Asians" (0.Stuart) while a comment by Behr indicates a much later date: Behr writes, "As soon as the campaign against [Pryce] began in America [i.e., July of 19901, he stopped using [eye prosthetics]" (Behr and Steyn 183). Moreover, the London Tzmes said of Pryce in July of 1990, "He tapes over his eyelids nightly to appear more oriental and plans to do the smze in New Yolk" (Greig and Birrell, emphasis added). In any case, the producers clearly did use yellowface makeup and that fact is significant irrespective of when they decided to cease the practice. Similarly, listening to the recording of the musical leaves the inlpression that producers employed a sort of aural yellowface by having Pryce speak some of the Engineer's lines in what sounds like "pidgin" English. O n the general prevalence and politics of yellowface makeup in twentieth-century theatre, see Josephine Lee 12. 2 5 ~ o rdiscussion of the multifaceted qualities of representation, see Chapter I ; the term "slippage" between senses of the word derives from Minom; "From Class Actions." Richard Schechner notes that, in naturalistic forms of performance, any wide gap between performer and character must either be "justified" or masked by the actors' virtuosity"audiences marvel at such performers' abilities to mask the gap" (Schechner qtd. in Gibbons 38). This masking of difference was incredibly literal in the case of Pryce's yellowface: in an interview, Pryce compared wearing eye prosthetics to mask-work, saying, "It's a great release for the actor to wear a mask. Thinking that no one can see you, your body becomes very expressive" (Witchel, "British Star"). Pryce converts a signifier of racial difference into a feature of the actor's craft. There is a further, presumably unintended, irony in Pryce's comparison: Elaine Kiln, reviewing early-twentieth-cent~~ry US commentary on Asian appearance, notes that, in this stereotype, "There is a 'yellow mask' on the face of the Asian brute" (Kim 6). The comparison of an ethnic makeup and mask-work has deeper inlplications than Pryce may recognize: not only does the "mask" of ethnicity construct an oppressive stereotype, it can also, as Kim suggests, solidify into a permanent metaphorical mask that must be worn even by ethnic actors. See also Sandra L. Richards, "Bert Williams." 2 6 do ~ not know of any specific statistics on audience makeup for Miss Saigon; this statement is based upon my own observations at perfomlances and sympathetic reviews of the musical discovered through a search of the Ethnic Newswatch online database. Many such articles expressed pride at the prominence of Filipina star Lea Salonga. 2'1t is important to avoid articulating a binary opposition in which pleasure automatically disables critique. Rather, the "problem" of pleasure derives from culturally constructed traditions that separate pleasure and meaning. See Kondo's consideration of the politics of pleasure in Abozrt Face and Josephine Lee on the seductiveness of stereotypes. Recall also my metaphor for how theatre functions politically for an audience: the jigsan-puzzle. One cannot assume that spectators at a musical passively receive a musical's political implications; rather, they fit them into a picture of experience that may be cornplicit or resistant. 28111 addition to 0 . Stuart (quoted in the text), other journalists also nlentioned protests opposing the London production of Miss S ~ ~ i g o nCarole : Beers reports that he musical's casting provoked pickets in London, and Mark Haile states that the musical was denounced in its initial run due to its language and depiction of Asian characters. That protests occurred, but that they were not on the same scale as those in the US, is also corroborated by Cal McCrystal, who talked with ethnic actors and directors in Britain
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immediately following US Equity's decision to ban Pryce and found support for Equity's stand. When he asked BBC editor Farouk Dhond!; "Why then did British Asian actors not oust Mr. Pryce in London?" he was told that "in this country they're not strong enough. They don't have the muscle." 2 9 ~ h efilm adavtation of Chilean novelist Isabel Allende's House of the Stirits drew complaints from ~ a t i n oactors due to the producers' failure to cast ~ a t i l i o sin i o s t of the film's major roles (the film starred Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, and Michelle Pfeiffer). Another, particularly ironic, case illustrating the history of White actors playing "ethnic" characters arose during attempts to make a film based on the life of Frida IZahlo. The director of the project was Luis Valdez, a major figure in Latino theatre and a critic of the casting of Miss Saigon. Under pressure from the production compan!; however, Valdez cast a White actress, Laura San Giacomo, as IZahlo, prompting protests from Latino actors (J. Green; Hurwitt). 3 0 ~ o raccounts of White actors playing Asian roles, see, among other sources, IZim, esp. 18; Dubin, Awesting Iinages; Holly; and Breon, "Show Boat." The explanation of the casting of Show Boat appears in a documentary film on M G M musicals in which Lena Horne asserts that she was considered for the part but was prohibited by the studios' codes (Thdt's Ente~tainment!111). l ~ l people ~ e of~ color ~ have played roles that were not specifically "ethnic," they still have had to deal with the prejudices that also led to discriminatory casting. Paul Winfield reports one such case, an ironic reversal of the convention of blackface that occurred when he was cast as the Gentlenlan Caller in a production of The Glass Menage~iein the late 1960s. Winfield says, "The casting was so unusual at the time that, to avoid having student audiences misinterpret a black man playing a white woman's suitor, I submitted to two hours of makeup daily to become a white man" (Winfield). Winfield does not say exactly why he and the producers decided to leave student expectations unchallenged, though the context in which this comment appears implies that the project-a multiethnic conlpany performing for school audiences-was experimental enough in and of itself that they feared such "confusion" would place it in jeopardy 32B. D. Wong argues that the lack of Asians in perfornlance results in "racial anorexia"-young Asian people, he believes, see the constructed image of White America in the media, and want to resemble it, just as, in some views, anorexia results from young women seeing a media construct of beauty and starving themselves in hopes of resembling it (B. D. Wong, "Change, Hope"). 3 3 ~ o ran example of this "buck-passing" see the commellts of Bernard Jacobs quoted in NYC-CHR, "NYC Commission" [S]. Lori Morris (220ff) offers some insight into the institutional mechanisms in the theatre world that further discrimination in casting. She relates the circumstance in which a director who decides to cast ethnic actors may discover that he knows few minority actors and does not know how to contact others-they are not part of his or her standard "pool." The director may therefore experience a "crisis" in which she or he finds it difficult to cast the show, this at the same moment that dozens of minority actors complain that they cannot find work. Informal and institutionalized discrinlination also appeared as frequent issues in testinlony before the New York City Commission on Human Rights. 3 4 ~ h eanecdote of an Asian American actor who picketed a show in which she performed was reported by a number of the Asian American actors with whom I spoke (including many too young to have \vitnessed the initial protests). Calvin Jung cited Lori C h i m as the protester-in-the-show. Sab Shimono also performed in Lovely Ladies and was
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involved in Asian American actors' activism-I heard stories that he also picketed-and-performed. Other information on the protests against Lovely Ladies, Kznd Gentlemen appears in "Asian Actors Angry"; "Too Many Okinawans Western"; and in Ching. For another historical example of actors of color creating organizations to advocate for fair employment see Woll (190-1911, who discusses the work of the Coordinating Council of Negro Performers during the 19.50s. 3 5 ~ D. . Wong, who played the featured role Song Liling in M. Butte~tly,told me that the casting of Miss Saigon shocked him into a realization that the fornlations Hwang analyzed in M. Butterfly were still quite current (B. D. Wong, Interview). It should be noted that the play is not universally viewed as subverting stereotypes. Mo!; for instance, acknowledges that the play "strenuously contested stereotypes" but argues that it ultimately reinscribes those stereotypes in order to remain acceptable to a Broadway audience (Moy 139). 36An informational sheet compiled by The Heat is on Miss Saigon Coalition (a group organized to protest Miss Snigon's content spearheaded by cornrnunity activists but including actors) states, "Direct challenges to exploitative and dehumanizing depictions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders can succeed, as shown by . . . previous protests against, for example, 'The Year of the Dragon"' ("The Heat is on Mzss Sazgon: Say N o To Racist"; courtesy of APACE archives). Please note that all archival materials cited in this chapter are reproduced with the permission of their creators. For a critical analysis of Yea!. of the D ~ n g o n see , Marchetti 215-218. This cops-and-robbers film should not be confused with Frank Chin's donlestic drama of the same title. 37~videncethat Asian Americans protesting against casting discrimination in the 1970s self-consciously used activist conventions and participated in a larger movement among Asian Americans-indeed, among people of color generally-appears in Haru ("'Miss Saigon'-So What Else"), who reports that an organization called "Brotherhood of Artists" (which formed to protest the casting of Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen) included not only members of East West Players and Equity, but also members of "the Chicano organization Justicia [and] Inner City Cultural Center . . . " Haru reports on similar incidents met by similar coalitions of protesters from inside and outside the theatre world. Her article also reveals her insider status in both the world of professional perfomlance and that of activism. See also Wei; Ching. 38111 testimony before the New York City Conmlission on Human Rights, Marsh stated that "Prior to 1990, at least since 1985 and until 1989 all of a sudden there [was] a specific exclusion of African American perfornlers on Broadway" (Marsh, Testimony 126-127); Chuck Patterson, chair of Equity's Committee for Racial Equality at the time of the hearings, also characterized the 1980s as a period during which ethnic actors lost those few guarantees of fair employment they had gained (Patterson 410-421). 39Marsh told the NYC-CHR that, although Robbins had been instrumental in establishing interracial casting 011 Broadway in 194.5, he decided to cast 110 African Americans in his 1989 retrospective revue. The producers implied, according to Marsh, that "Blacks do not possess either the technique or facility to do Mr. Robbins' style of ballet-jazz" and that African Americans would be too dark-skinned to blend into chorus numbers from originally all-White shows. Marsh stated further that when the producers finally did hire a single African American dancer (following complaints from actors of color and Equity) they required that she wear white make-up and leggings (until further complaints were lodged). See Marsh, Testimony 127, 131, 134-13.5. Chuck Patterson asserted that Robbins also refused initially to cast Asian actors in a scene excerpted from The King and I because they would have to play White characters in the following scene (Patterson cited in Horwitz 27). See also Jacobs 48.
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4 0 ~ o m p l a i n t sagainst Rdshomon reported in 0 . Stuart 86; arbitration of Goodbye Fidel in Horwitz 28 (the characterization of the producers' claims is a quote from comments by Chuck Patterson cited in that article); protests regarding The LViz nlentioned in Gibbons 32. 4 1 discovered ~ evidence of debates within Equity during my research, and the frustration of actors of color with Equity is also mentioned in NYC-CHR, Untitled and Unpublished Draft 1.5. Beginning in September of 1989, Equzty News published letters debating enlployment discrimination in the theatre. Bernard Marsh initiated the exchange in a pair of letters that objected to the union's cooperation with a number of major productions that, Marsh argued, denied roles to African Americans; these included J e ~ o m e Robbins' B ~ o ~ ~ d wMe n y ,and My Gid and two Mackintosh productions: Les Mise~L~bles and Pbilntom of the Opew ([Marsh] "A protestn-Marsh revealed his authorship of this letter by reading it to the NYC-CHR in his testimony, 133-137; Marsh, "An open letter"). When Mackintosh eventually did cast Robert Guillaurne as the title character in the Los hngeles production of Pbilntom of the Opera, many in the theatre community felt that it was too-little-too-late (Garnett). Responses by officials of Equity to the actor's charge that the union failed to protect their interests cited the union's support of minority hiring and Equity's popularization of the concept of "non-traditional casting" in the early 1980s ("Report from the Executive Secretary"). Equity's failure to satisfy the need for representation perceived by its members of color may be explained in part by the fact that the union lacked the power to enforce equity in hiring, but the NYC-CHR also suggested (in a d~ilftreport on its hearings) that the union's tendency to deal with complaints informally (as opposed to filing grievances) "can result in arbitrariness and an appearance of impropriety . . . If the norm is that grievances are not filed, complaints will continue to go unredressed, and the true scope of the problem will remain hidden from the mainstream" (NYC-CHR, Untitled . . . Report 1 8 ) . Marsh's letters also prompted responses from the union's membership. Letters from minority and non-minority members expressed support for the positions outlined by Marsh and added other ideas. Equzty News also published letters the editors received from White actors opposing Marsh's call for action regarding the casting of people of color. Some letters appealed to freedom of expression, argued that cross-racial casting disrupted verisimilitude, or simply accused actors of color of seeking special treatment. For instance, Carrie Solomon Schultz wrote a letter (that itself provoked several rebuttals) in which she complained, "I am tired of Black actors and other ethnic groups continually screaming foul play. . . . Did you ever stop to think [that] many plays and nlusicals would lose their authenticity if they were cast with Blacks, Asians and others?" The mention of Asians is interesting since this letter predates the Mzss Sazgon controversy by nine months. The debate continued in Equity News during and after the Miss Snigon controversies (see the May and June 1992 issues).
4 2 ~ h eMiss Silzgon controversies occurred at a time when US entertainment workers experienced considerable stress. Critic John Willis labels the 1990-1991 season (in which Miss Sdigon opened) "the most dismal, depressing season in memory Broadway had a record-setting low number of productions . . ." (J. Willis, T l ~ w t ~Wodd e Volume 47 5). John Downing notes that "labor has been called upon to bear a major share of the costs" of increased production of theatre, television, and film, leading to confrontations evidenced by strikes called during the 1980s by, anlong others, the Screen Actor's Guild, the writers' guild, the directors' guild, the musicians' union, and the Screen Extra's Guild. In the 1980s, musicals were created abroad, especially in London's theatre district, in part because musicals that were a proven, "hot" cornrnodity in a foreign country represented a safer investnlent than a new, home-grown production (Passell). Musical chronicler Gerald Bordman calls his section on the 1980s "A Musical Trade Imbalance," typifying the impression that a British invasion dominated Broadway beginning in the 1980s (Bordman, 1992 ed. 707; see also 725). One should note that this imbalance began to right itself in
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the 1990s, in part because the prevalence of blockbuster shows had themselves led to stagnation on the West End. Indeed, Misha Berson ("'Miss Saigon' is back...") says, "Miss Snigon was, in a sense, the last true blockbuster in a wave of whale-scale, semi-operatic musical entertainnlents . . . ." See also "Showtin~e"and Christiansen, "Musicals Score!" O n tensions between the US and UI< theatre worlds in the 1980s see Horwitz; Winfield; Granville; and J. Stuart. 4 3 ~ h estatistics 011 anti-Asian violence cited in the text appears in The Heat is on Miss Siligon Coalition's flyer "Why are we demonstrating?" (courtesy of APACE archives) which cites the NYC Police Department Bias Unit as its source. David Henry Hwang offers an interesting perspective on the connections between econonlics and stereotypes, writing that in "recent years, with the economic ascendance of Asia, Western society has been forced to update its colonial notions, but still evidences a nostalgic affection for old stereotypes. If the Japanese are beating us abroad and Asian students are getting good grades at home, then 'crafty Orientals' must have some secret advantage. Japan-bashing goes on in Washington and a Caucasian 'expert' on Donabue recently proclaimed that Asians possess a hidden genetic intelligence factor. The emasculated Asian male has evolved into the goofy nerd and the technological coolie-the Japanese businessman" (Hwang, "East of Reason," 170). 4 4 ~ February n 17, 1991, Bush declared that "it is my hope that when this is over we will have kicked, once and for all, the so-called Vietnanl syndrome" (Bush 151). One could also relate the Gulf War to the quasi-imperialist adventures undertaken by the US government during the 1980s, including funding the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, supporting the oppressive governnlent of El Salvador, and invading Pananla to topple its dictator (and one-time CIA informant) Manuel Noriega. These actions also participated in dominant discourses on race and patriotism that informed the Mzss Silzgon controversies. In a similar vein, Martha Minow cites "the United States Supreme Court's repudiation of most public affirmative action programs" as part of the context underlying the Miss S~~igon controversies ("From Class Actions" 8). 4 5 ~ h eorigin of the Miss Snigon controversies was attributed widely and erroneously to letters sent to Actors' Equity by playwright David Henry Hwang and actor B. D. Wong, who were neither the first nor the only persons to complain to Equity ("Only Blonds" 28; Bone; Barnes, "Equity Missing"; Bering-Jensen 55; Brustein, "Lighten Up" 35; Gibbons 143; Juffe; and Witchel, "Union Weighs"). Even some writers defending the Asian American actors' protests cited Wong and Hwang as its instigators (Day; Wah-Lee). In some quarters, the idea that prominent Asian American artists who had nothing to do with Mzss Silzgon were protesting against the musical led to suspicions of jealous!; the idea being either that B. D. Wong was upset that he had not been offered the part or that the duo was expressing general professional envy (see Pryce's cornnlents in Witchel "British Star" 15; and Resnikova 53). While Hwang and Wong were deeply involved in the controversies, they clearly acted as part of a much larger group of Asian American theatre professionals indignant at the casting practices of Miss Sdigon. The evidence also suggests that it was Equity's CRE that first took action to prevent Mackintosh from casting Pryce, but that it did so with the support of a large number of union members and theatre world personnel and as it was fulfilling its appointed function of examining the casting opportunities available to minorities in shows that would enter into contracts with the union (personal interviews; M. Rothstein, "Equity Panel Head" C17; Garnett 116; Zia 119). My overview of the controversies' history is based upon a wide variety of sources, including: articles in the New York Tzmes, the London Tzmes, Equity News, and other newspapers; interviews with ~ a r t i c i ~ a n twritten s: documents from activists: and articles in iournals and books. Citations are offered only for particularly inlportant or obscure dates, cornments, or incidents.
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4 6 ~ a c k i n t o s l ~ 'references s to Brynner and others White actors who played Asians appears in Greig and Birrell. That the producers did not fully appreciate (or were unwilling to consider) the variety of opinions and depth of feeling within Asian communities is also evident in the tone of Miss Saigon consultant Edward Behr's observation that "In London, the creative production team's relations with the Asians in the cast were marked by friendship and trust. Suddenly, in the United States, they had become the enemy" (Behr and Steyn 183).While this is, of course, a cornnlent made in retrospect, Behr's observation suggests that the producers saw the Asian Americans as antagonists and, more importantly, conflated their objections with the views of all Asians (indicating that they did not appreciate the conlplexities of the actors' objections). It is also important to note that, despite such comments, the Asian American actors in the cast of Mzss Saigon with whom I spoke believed that Mackintosh and the other producers treated them with fairness and respect. 4 7 ~ v aResnikova suggests that the implication of a fruitless worldwide search might have been "calculated ambiguity on the part of the casting director" (54). Many of the Asian American actors I talked with cited the claim of a fruitless worldwide search for an Asian actor to play the Engineer as one of the most troubling aspects of the controversies (see also Chang; Balletta). Eric Breindel exemplifies the use of the "fruitless worldwide search" claim against actors of color; he cites Liff's erroneous assertion-that the producers had tried to find an Asian to play the Engineer-when accusing Chuck Patterson of hypocrisy, saying that, though the CRE chair called only for equal opportunit!; he refused to accept that no qualified Asian actor had been found and in fact "\mnted an Asian to be given the part. Period" (Breindel). 48M. Rothstein reports that "The vote of the Equity council . . . was reportedly very close, either 2 3 or 22 to 18, with only about half of the 79 council members taking part" ("Producer Cancels" C l 5 ) . 4 9 ~ i a(125-126) and Hwang ("Worlds Apart" 51) note that Papp himself had been embroiled in controversy in the 1970s when the Shakespeare Festival he led cast White actors in "ethnic" roles. Papp reacted to these objections by involving the protesters in planning subsequent productions and seeking to create opportunities for minority actors and playwrights, a move that contributed to the careers of figures such as Hwang. jO1t should be noted that some support for Equity (e.g., Finkle's article and support from the AFL-CIO) appeared after the union reversed itself. My remarks on support for Equity in the press serving Asian conlnlunities are based upon a survey of coverage of the controversy in Asidn Week and of articles by Wayman Wong and Ying Chan in the [New York] Daily News. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all Asian Americans automatically supported Equity and the Asian American actors' demands for more roles on Broadx\ray-columnist Arthur Hu, for example, argued that the percentage of Asian Americans finding employment already equaled the percentage of Asian Americans in the US population; most Asian American journalists, however, argued that the issue involved more than literal numbers of actors on stage. O n support for Equity in Asian American communities see M. Rothstein, "Equity Panel Head" C17. 5 1 ~ o l l yHill, theatre critic for the Samford, Canada, Advocate, testifying before the New York City Commission on Human Rights, contended that coverage of the controversy in the New Yolk Times "was 75% for Mackintosh" (NYC-CHR, "NYC Commission" [ l 11). Porter Anderson linked the general support Mackintosh received with the economic attractiveness and political clout of the musical, noting that the bias in Miss Snigon's favor persisted after the controversies were resolved, so that, a year after the debates, "The movie in Yankees' minds is a show about Saint Jonathan Pryce slaying the dragon Equity . . . and then things dissolve into impenetrable fuzziness" (Anderson 30).
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See also "Acting Silly About Color"; Greig and Birrell; Cavett; and Rich, "Jonathan Pryce." One even discovers near-ethnic-slurs in the press coverage of the debates, such as Clive Barnes's comment, "Two Wongs (or even a Wong and a Hwang) do not make a right. . . ." ("Equity Missing Point"). Articles, editorials, or letters printed after Pryce was reinstated include: Winfield; Holly; Sun; and Bartlett et al. In an exception, the New Yo~lz Times published a letter from Tisa Chang and Donlinick Balletta of Pan Asian Repertory prior to Equity's reversal. j 2 0 n Dinkins's meeting with CRE members see Flamm. Dinkins also wrote to Equity just before it voted to rescind its ban on Pryce, expressing his "deep understanding of the concerns of the Council of Actors' Equity" and his "respect for the important issues that have been raised about acting opportunities for talented people of color," saying that he hoped "that an agreement that addresses the concerns of minority actors can b e reached in a spirit which will allow the production to come to New York" ('"Saigon' application" 6 ) . j 3 ~ i b b o n sreports that inlrnediately following Equity's initial decision to ban Pryce, "Petitions requesting AEA to reconsider are posted backstage before the Wed. matinee at P~elzrde to 11 Kiss, Cdts, Aspects of' Love, A Few Good Men, Les Misembles, and Phantom" (144). It not unreasonable to suppose that Mackintosh or his aids might have encouraged the posting of petitions at his productions, though I discovered no evidence of improprieties (as would have been the case had Mackintosh threatened to fire actors who failed to sign). j 4 ~ h i l enot providing a vote tally, M . Rothstein ("Equity Reverses" A l ) reports that this vote included 59 of the 79 Council members. When I asked Alan Eisenberg why Equity didn't call Mackintosh's bluff, since clearly Mackintosh needed a New York production as much as New York needed Miss Saigon, Eisenberg responded that it didn't appear that Mackintosh was bluffing, since he had ordered that construction on t he scenerv cease. Eisenberrr nointed out that Mackintosh could have reached the New York market through other avenues, such as a Canadian touring production, so the power lay on Mackintosh's side. The economic importance of the musical to New York and other cities where Mzss Silzgon would tour was noted by Christiansen, "'Miss Saigon' canceled" 1, and by Porter Anderson (who puns that Miss Sdigon bvas an economic "dezrs ex Mackintosh" swooping into an economically troubled theatre world). William Wong of Aszm Week noted that Mackintosh benefited from the publicity provided by the controversy (24 August 1990 column).
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j51 say that "a number" of Asian American actors cooperated to form APACE. It is difficult to know how large any activist organization was, particularly one that operated in several cities at once. I note, however, that minutes of meetings of the Los Angeles chapter of APACE list about 2 5 participants in attendance (APACE, Minutes, courtesy of APACE archives). j 6 ~ h e r eare several reasons that Asian American actors formed an activist organization independent of AAPAA. Though APACE began on the Viest Coast, it quickly became more active in New York, where AAPAA was less active (Wu, Interview). Additionally, some AAPAA members felt APACE was too activist and, conversely, some Asian American actor-activists felt AAPAA, which originally evolved out of the Oriental Actors of America protests of the 1970s, had become too staid (Honda, Interview, 1992; and Haru '"Miss Saigon'-So What Else"; for more on XPACE see Walsh). j7111 an effort to address the concerns of actors of color following the adoption of the "Statement of Mutual Understanding," Eisenberg and Equity's Equal Employment
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Opportunity Business Representative held meetings with representatives from advocacy groups of actors of color ("Council Oks"). Equity News ("Council Oks") mentions specific meetings with actors of color in New York on September 2 4 and in Los Angeles on September 27-110 specific outcomes are mentioned in the article, but it does relay the Asian American actors' grievances. j 8 ~ h eS m Franc~scoforum WAS '~dvert~sed 111 Asun Week 7 September 1990: 27; APACE, "Cameron Mackn-~tosh Busts" records the October program at the Public Theatre; the November event WAS covered by Huff. j 9 ~ q ~ 1 i twas y of the opinion that Mackintosh had promised in the "Statement of Mutual Understanding" not to cast Salonga (though the document did offer the producer a loophole). When the union published the document in Equity News, for example, it ran an introduction stating that, though the union had made concessions to Mackintosh's demands that he be allowed two foreign performers to play Kim, "the Equity team was ultimately able to restrict such employment to the Broadway production only for a limited period and specifically excluded the enlploynlent of Lea Salonga" ("Statement of Mutual Understanding,"). The assertion in the text that actors and union officials viewed as offensive to American female actors Mackintosh's claim that Salonga alone could play IZim derives from G. Evans, "Actors Shun," and my interviews with Eisenberg and Lunn. 60~tar-statusand unique services are the two qualifications Equity accepts as justification for producers hiring foreign performers-in personal interviews Eisenberg and Lunn argued that Mackintosh's assertion that Salonga offered "unique services" was tenuous since she had shared the role in the London production (i.e., how can someone offer unique services and also share a role?). Nor could Mackintosh offer an exchange between the US and UIZ Equit!; since Salonga was not British (G. Evans, "Actors Shun"). Collins also ruled against Equity during arbitration in the case of Will Roge~sFollies, and Equity did not renew its relationship with Collins when his contract expired (Eisenberg, Interview; "Union Protests Racial Discrimination"; Walsh; and "Equity files grievance"). 6 1 ~ h i sissue constitutes an ongoing debate among both scholars and Asian American theatre practitioners; indeed, it forms a portion of a larger debate regarding the role of Asian Americans in nlainstreanl culture versus their creation of a cultural identity. In the academic realm, James Moy suggests that some Asian American theater personal participate in stereotypical depictions of Asians, lending these images renewed credibility (128). Others suggest that Moy places too much of the burden for changing stereotypes on the shoulders of practitioners (see Ping 1.51); see also IZaren Shimakawa (374), who expresses skepticism regarding playwright Frank Chin's rigid definitions of "authentic" versus "fake" Asian American identity. 6 2 derive ~ the quotation in the text from an anonynlous cornmentary in the Economist entitled, "Only Blonds Can Play Hamlet?" For further examples see Bronski. The argument that Asian American actors were demanding an absolute parity between role and race was made both by conlrnentators writing in mainstream publications and by actors writing to theatre publications (see Cavett; Kissel, "The Color"; and Wagner). Mackintosh alluded to it, saying that he wanted the part to remain open not only to Asians but also to "black, Hispanic, Caucasian, or Native American" actors-a sornewhat disingenuous comment since it appears that only a White actor was considered prior to the New York controversies (M. Rothstein. "Producer Demands . . ." C121. , Euuitv CRE member Bernard Marsh offered a different perspective on the racial parity argument, pointing out that, in the eyes of Equity's CRE, Miss Silzgon was an ethnzc show (i.e., one that by design features numerous parts for actors of color)-Marsh told me that it was not as if the CRE was "trying to tell then1 to integrate Olzl'~homn!" (Marsh, Interview). It is also inlportant to 1
,
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note that the media were hardly neutral players in the oversimplification of the Asian actors' demands: ~ e d u c t i oad nbswdztnz makes for not only effective political strategy but also snappy copy 63~ss~~ regarding es whether persons from one ethnic group ought to play roles representing another group are not relevant solely to theatrical casting; these issues go to the heart of what "race" means, and how racial categories serve to shore up the power of donlinant groups, but also offer a sense of cohesion to oppressed communities. See Morrison; and Richards, "Caught" 44ff. O n Phong Truong, see IZoehler.
64L1 few individuals did demand that, for instance, only Vietnamese actors play Vietnamese characters. During an APACE meeting one person noted that some in the "Vietnamese community would be against casting anyone other than Vietnamese" (Asian Pacific Alliance for Creative Equalit!; Minutes). A comment published in the Los Angeles Tzmes years after the controversies pointed to the fact that some in the Eurasian community felt ostracized by both Whites and Asians, and therefore denlanded close parity between actors and role; Jean Miao ( 8 7 ) wrote, "If the character is Eurasian, both white or Asian castings are equally incorrect. Amerasians are pulled to either side for our support when needed, then discounted as not being really Asian or really white." 6 5 ~ l a nEisenberg also argued that Asians suffered discrimination in the theatre not felt by White actors, telling the NYC-CHR, "Jews have always been able to play Italians, Italians have always been able to play Jews and both have always been able t o play Asians. Asian actors, however, almost never have the opportunity to play either Jews or Italians and continue to struggle even to play themselves" (Eisenberg, Testimony 337-3381, It is also worth noting that the actors were asserting an Asziln identity, not a specific cultural or racial identity (such as Japanese or Chinese)-one Asian American actor pointed out that Asian American actors frequently play different Asian ethnicities and tend to avoid criticizing each other for playing such roles, even when they personally feel that, say, Japanese roles should be played by Japanese actors. Ironically, the same argument-that in an ideal world actors could play any part but in reality Asians were the victims of discrimination-was made twenty years earlier by Alvin Lum, speaking for Oriental Actors of America, suggesting that even then Asian American actors had to contend with the reduction of legitimate questions to simplistic fornlulations (Ching 65). 6 6 ~ q u i t y also created language regarding the casting of actors with disabilities (Eisenberg, Testimony 332). Equity's contract with the League of American Theatres and Producers includes provisions that require attention to equity in casting. These clauses allow for monitoring of scripts by Equity's Racial Equality and Women's Committees, and r e q ~ i r equarterly nleetings to discuss inlplenlentation of these clauses. The clauses also, however, prohibit interference with the producers' artistic discretion, relying therefore upon incentives rather than sanctions (NYC-CHR, Untitled and Unpublished Draft 16-19; the report primarily refers here to testimony by Jacobs and Eisenberg). 6 7 ~ ~ color-blind ~ch casting must be conducted with care and can cause problenls if one does not attend to the meanings imparted by the race of actors. Consider the implications of a hypothetical director casting Cordelia with a White actor, Goneril with an African American performer and Regan with an Asian American actor-the apparently "blind" casting could, in fact, perpetuate Western association of "Whiteness" with purity and innocence and "darkness" with perversion and inscrutability 6 8 ~ o n - t r a d i t i o n acasting l was the subject of debate prior to the Miss Silzgon controversies precisely because the concept placed actors of color in "traditionally" White roles. Many ethnic actors took exception to the semantics of the term, arguing that it took the
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history of Western casting as the "tradition"; others took exception to the practice itselfArniri Baraka, for example, cornnlented that "It's still the great books with colored covers," arguing that, rather than creating new work by African American playwrights, nontraditional casting simply restores "classics" (Dubin 68). O n the other side of the debate were aesthetic conservatives who saw the practice as disrupting Western tradition. Some of the most notorious cornnlents on non-traditional casting were made by New Yo~lzmagazine drama critic John Simon, whose analysis bordered on outright racism. At one point Simon argued that no American actor had the training to perform in Shakespeare, "But with blacks it's even worse. Many of them are too proud to even learn honky speech" (Horwitz 30). For more analysis of non-traditional casting and its limitations see Gibbons; Newman, "Holding Back"; and Deboo. 6 9 ~ o b e r Brustein t took the Mzss Siligon controversies as an opportunity to savage the concept of non-traditional casting as "reverse racism" in an article called "Lighten Up, America," a title that could be read with considerable irony For an example in which a report assumes that the casting of Pryce constitutes non-traditional casting, see William Henry 111, who wrote in Time that a production of Richmd III starring Denzel Washington "opened on the same day that Actors' Equity ended the biggest controversy about nontraditional casting on Broadway in decades." Washington as Richard I11 and Morgan Freeman playing Petruchio in another production constituted two examples cited frequently as proof of non-traditional casting's prevalence. Mackintosh himself asked rhetorically if Asian American actors would "condemn Morgan Freeman's interpretation of Petruchio . . . ? O r is American Equity's concept of 'equal racial opportunity' a one-way street designed to curb the very heart of the actor's craft?" (Witchel, "Actors' Equity"; see also Rich, "Jonathan Pryce"). Yet, the very fact that these two examples appeared so often exemplified a more general lack of opportunity for actors of color, (as noted by a number of commentators, see Garnett 116; Bronski 11; Eisenberg, Testimony 336-337; and IZrieger 84.5). For other stated or implied references to Mzss Saigon and non-traditional casting see "Lost Courage, Lost Play"; "Acting Silly About Color"; Rich, "Jonathan Pryce ..."; and Kissel, "The Color."
70L1 letter to the New Yolk Times exemplified the n~isapprehensionthat Mackintosh practiced non-traditional casting, stating that "The show's producer has demonstrated his conlrnitrnent to nontraditional casting, treating actor selection in an unbiased, nondiscriminatory fashion" (Edelman). As I pointed out above, Mackintosh had, in fact, considered only Pryce for the role. Confusion surrounding the concept of non-traditional casting also caused problenls for another organization, the Non-Traditional Casting Project (NTCP), a not-for-profit advocacy group not affiliated with Equity During the controversy surrounding Pryce, officers of NTCP critiqued the casting of Pryce but also objected to Equity's decision, viewing it as an abridgment of artistic freedom (see Sharon Jellsen analyzing the casting of Pryce [Horwitz 261 and Joanna Merlin conmlenting on Equity's decision, [M.Rothstein, "Producer Cancels . . ." C171). Supporters of Mzss Saigon drummed this complex stance into the service of their wholesale condemnations of Equity (see Barnes, "Equity Missing"). The events surrounding Miss Snigon appear to have contributed t o existing tensions between NTCP and some members of the Asian Anlerican theatre community who saw the organization as tied too closely to conmlercial interests (see the testimony of Tisa Chang before NYC-CHR [171-172, 179-1811 and Sharon Jensen's response [191, 1961). It is also important to note that NTCP has worked to resolve these differences, and that members of the Asian American theatre community state that they have strong personal and professional ties to the organization (Miyori, Interview; see also Deboo). 71~xpressingthe anger this Catch 2 2 provoked in actors of color, Chuck Patterson told the NYC-CHR of a production of The \Viz in which Dorothy was played by a White actor:
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"They have . . . taken the term and tried to use it against us. . . . they called that nontraditional casting. You see, that's a way of slapping you in the face with it and saying not only do we not believe in what you are talking about and think it's nonsense, we are going to use it against you" (Patterson 421). 7 2 ~ e n m rS ~ t Ambush o of the Oakland Ensemble Theatre critiuued "color-blind" casting prior to the Miss Silzgon controversies, saying that the concept implies "that whoever you are-Asian, black, Hispanic or what not-it doesn't matter, we're all human beings, we're all universal, we're all the same . . .," therefore, "what colorblind casting means is to be absorbed into a white aesthetic" (qtd. in Gelb, "Searching" 28-29), and Ellen Holly ( 2 7 ) explained, "Racism in America today is nothing so crass as mere hatred of a person's skin color. It is rather an affliction of so many centuries' duration that it permeates institutions to the point of becoming indivisible from them. Only when the darker races attempt to break out of the bind-and inconvenience whites in the process-do whites even perceive racism as an issue. Only when a white is asked to vacate a role on racial grounds does the matter become a front-page issue." 73Morrison ( 6 ) links debates regarding Western aesthetics with anxieties regarding miscegenation and racial inter-mingling. White Americans' fears of intermarriage have also always been closely tied to labor issues; see Moy and Kiln. It is worth remembering that previous casting controversies dzd revolve specifically around fears of miscegenationZelda Fichandler (21) reports that actors in the 1960s production The G ~ e n White t Hope had to change their telephone nunlbers to elinlinate harassment regarding the play's pairing of a White woman and a black man. 7 4 ~ nthe ad canceling Mzss Silzgon ("Miss Siligon Canceled"), the producers asserted that they found Equity's "position to be irresponsible, and a disturbing violation of the principles of artistic integrity and freedom" and in his press release announcing the cancellation Mackintosh declared, "Racial prejudice does seem to have triumphed over creative freedom. h sad statement on the current state of the arts in America" iBehr and Steyn 186; some Asian American actors charged that Mackintosh deliberately n~anipulated the rhetoric of artistic freedom, knowing that it would evoke a response both in public opinion and in the actors themselves [Ohnuma, "'Saigon' To Open" 101). For examples of conmlentaries linking the Miss Snigon debates with issues of artistic freedom, see "Txvo Stage Triumphs"; Brustein, "Lighten Up" 36; Resnikova 53; Rich, "Jonathan Pryce" C3. See also IZrieger 840, 866. 7 5 ~ i l l i a mWong, commentator for the San Francisco weekly newspaper Asian Week, related the Miss Snigon casting controversy to the backlash against affirmative action, saying that the debate's lessons "go far beyond Broadway. It is a rnicrocosnl of an America beleaguered by the legacy of [the] civil rights movement and still unsure how to handle the fundanlental shift in our power bases"; William Wong, Column 24 August 1990. Both B. D. Wong (Rennert 115) and David Paterson (107) also noted the nlainstreanl contenlpt for the idea of affirmative action. For examples of commentators who attacked Equity and Asian American actors' objections to the casting of Pryce as "reverse discrimination" see Bering-Jensen 55; Brustein, "Use and Abuse" 33; Breindel; Cavett; Resnikova; Rich, "Jonathan Pryce"; and Iyer. It is also worth noting that a few politically committed theatre artists saw the Miss Snigon debates as an opportunity to defend affirmative action (see Bartlett et al.). 7 6 ~ o ~ nscholars e might regard "discourse" and "resistance" as mutually exclusive. Foucault, often regarded as the founder of discourse theories, has been read as implying that all our lives are controlled by the machinery of discourse that not only pervades all social interaction by also has also been internalized by every individual in contemporary
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society. I disagree with such denials of agency, siding with those who see a dialectic between donlination and resistance both in culture and in individual action. See Foucault, Discipline m d Punish and Drewal's (30-33) defense of agency when applying discourse theory to the study of performance. 77John Gibbons (154),for example, comments that the protests at the opening of Miss Siligon "often had only minor connections with the original [casting] controversy" and suggests that many groups, such as those objecting to the musical's content, "seemed to avail themselves of this opportunity simply to promote their own cause." Similarly, Porter Anderson called the objections by lesbian-and-gay activists a "side spectacle" (30). 7 8 A ~ A formed ~ ~ in August 1990, beginning informally among Asian and Pacific Islander actors in Los Anpeles and takinp on more structure in New York. APACE's stance is evident in a mission statement that explains that the group "came together to combat employment discrimination in the performing arts and to support equal access and employment opportunity for i\sian/Pacifics and all artists of color" but goes on to say that the group wants to "press for changes in the American perfornling arts which reflect more truthfully the growing cultural diversity of contemporary America" (APACE, untitled mission statement, courtesy of APACE archives). In addition to this document, I base my conlments on interviews with Honda, B. D. Wong, and WLI (who all asserted that XPACE devoted its efforts to protesting employment discrimination) and upon minutes to APACE meetings. These meetings reveal a desire upon the part of some to address content-one actor asserted, "Fundamentall!; we all agree that the show itself is racist" (APACE, Minutes). It also appears that, after the casting controversies regarding Pryce were resolved, APACE took a more public stand regarding the qzr~~lit)~ of roles available to Asian American actors. For example, a draft of an informational package dated 4 December 1990 not only objects to casting discrimination and yellowface but also contends that "the Asian roles in Miss Snigon present play itself is demeaning to AsianlPacifics-The AsianlPacifics in roles which are stereotypical, subservient, and negative in their portrayals, characterizing the Vietnamese people as barmaids, whores, pimps and gooks" (XPACE, "Miss Snigon: Raising Issues"; courtesy of APACE archives; it is unclear whether this item became a part of any public copy). 79Blackface may not be as dead as XPACE nlenlbers asserted, though I think they are correct to say that yellowface raises fewer eyebrows. One fascinating example illustrates my point. Conservative columnist Arthur Hu, in an article criticizing the Asian American actors' objections to yellowface, pointed out that "Billy Crystal did a fine Sammy Davis [Jr.] without offending" ( H u 18). A few weeks after reading Hu's comment, I saw Crystal's blackface performance during a rerun of the television show Siltzrrday Night Live-he was perfornling a send-up of Sanlnly Davis, Jr., in a scene with the guest host for that evening, none other than civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson! This juxtaposition tends to support APACE's point, not Hu's assertion: though admittedly bizarre, the fact that a prominent African American politician would appear with a White actor made up to appear African American signals that such depictions are the exception, not the rule. The fact that Crystal did the part at all was part of the joke, an act of audacity that had to be perceived by most viewers if the scene's humor was to be understood; in Miss Snigon, on the other hand, very few observers remarked initially on Pryce's difference from the role he played. (It is also worth mentioning that Crystal played a recognizable caricature of an actual celebrity while the Engineer, though a fully developed character, only existed within the narrative of the musical.) $ O ~ h expansion e of APACE's attention beyond the casting controversies is exemplified in vol. 2 #1 of the group's newsletter, which includes both congratulations to various members of the Asian American theatre community and a segment called "media watch"
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(APACE newsletter, courtesy of APACE archives). Miss Saigon and the issues the controversies had raised continued to interest members of the Asian American theatre community, however. For example, David Henry Hwang attempted to build a farce from the issues raised during the debates; the resulting pla!; Face Value, received poor reviews during tryouts in Boston and closed in previews on Broadway (see Hwang, "Facing the Mirror"). 81~
8 2 composed ~ this summary of the content protests from interviews with participants; documents preserved by the participants (courtesy of APACE, Asian Lesbians of the East Coast, Gay Asian and Pacific Islander Men of New York, and The Heat is on Miss Sdigon Coalition archives); reports in the press, especially newspapers, such as OzrtWeek [szc], that served the lesbian-and-gay community; and from Yoshikawa's article in Aguilar-San Juan. 83My characterization of ALOEC and GAPIMNY derives from interviews and from archival materials provided by these organizations. My sources, including members of APACE, ALOEC, and GAPIMNY, as well as documents they provided, identify ALOEC and GAPIMNY as the lead organizations in the Heat is on Miss Sdigon Coalition; Reyes similarly identifies these groups as spearheading the protests. Zia (131-132) identifies the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) as the leader of that coalition. There are explanations for the discrepancy. First, Milyoung Cho was a leader in ALOEC but worked for CAAAV, which may have led to confusion. Second, my experience in activism leads me to note that different people have different impressions of which groups lead a coalition. ALOEC constituted an activist organization prior to the Miss Snigon controversies: it hosted gatherings where New York Asian and Pacific American lesbians could meet one another. but it had also sourrht to teach its members and others about the historv of Asian lesbians, and had staged activist campaigns decrying stereotypes of Asians and lesbians (see Carlomusto et d ' s video Not Just Passing Thozrgh). Note that, at the time of the Miss Saigon controversies, ALOEC was concentrating on its roles as a network for Asian lesbians and as an educational organization, and was not engaged in direct actions (Cho, Interview). I nevertheless consider the group an activist organization because its genesis, its previous engagement in direct action, and its mission were consistent with the character and conventions of activist social worlds. GAPIMNY functioned primarily as a social organization before the debates, providing its members with a safe enviro~mlentin which to interact with other AsiadPacific gay men. One might argue that GAPIMNY was an activist organization because its very existence challenged homophobia, and because some of its members maintained ties with activists in groups such as ALOEC and ACT UP. I expect, however, that the activists with whom I have worked would say that GAPIMNY becdnze an activist organization only when it joined with ALOEC and other activist groups to protest Miss Sazgon.
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8 4 0 n e example of criticisnl of the content protests in the press occurred when a column in the Vozce ("Cameron Crow") referred to the objections to the Lambda benefit as "more-p.c.-than thou gay bashing," a cormlent the activists found particularly destructive since in implied they were not a part of the lesbian-and-gay cornnlunity (Cho, Interview; see also Yoshikawa 287). A hint of accusations that activists were hurting other Asians appears in Mackintosh's cormlent regarding the impending protests against the musical; the producer remarked, "I wish they would see the show before they picket to see how wonderful [sic] the Asians perform on stage" (Chan, "'Miss Saigon' misspeaks"). Not only does this statement shunt criticism away from the musical's content, it also inlplies that the
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Actors and Activists
activists have failed to investigate the issue adequately and that their protests would harm other Asians. Instances of opinions on both sides appeared in articles and letters in OutWeeR [sic] between February and April of 1991. 850trtWeelz [sic] reports that 14 people eventually acted upon this offer and that Lambda withheld an additional 300 tickets as a result of the objections to its fund-raiser, selling approximately 800 (A. McDonald, "Mzss Saigon a Financial Success"). 8 6 ~ a m b d ahad written to Equity at the time of the controversies supporting the union's decision to bar Pryce. This fact was, I suspect, interpreted differently by Lanlbda and the activists-the activists felt that Lanlbda should have recognized a contradiction in patronizing a show after having objected publicly to its casting process. Lambda officials, I surmise, would argue that their initial letter showed good faith towards the Asian American community. 8 7 ~ h o ~ ~Lambda gh tried to mend fences, it also continued to provoke tensions. For example, when Tom Stoddard resigned his position as director of Lambda, he was replaced by another White man, which the Asian American activists saw as further disregard for the issues that their protests had raised (Yoshikawa 293). 8 8 ~ o an r account of the denlonstration protesting the Lanlbda benefit perfornlance of Miss Snigon, see Yoshikawa. Though it is always difficult to estimate the number of people who attend a protest, it is appears that more than 300 people participated. Yoshikawa says about 500 people protested; two other participants put the number at 400 people (Pressley and Cho) and a letter to the Voice ("Concerned 'Miss Saigon' Protesters") asserts that "over 300 people marched in front of the theatre." Regardless of the exact number of participants, my survey of the press and my interviews, along with my own experience with activism in Chicapo., leads me to believe that this was a fairlv, laree motest. The allegations of police misconduct also merit further explanation. The activists alleged that, although their protests were non-violent, the police treated them with excessive force, arresting six men during the protest and allegedly beating two men of color ("Concerned 'Miss Saigon' Protesters"; Cho, Interview; Yoshikawa 276, 294112). This alleged violence imbedded itself in the memory of the gay communit!; as evident in Bronski's (11) mention of the allegations a year later. The activists were incensed not only by the violence they perceived, but also by the fact that Lambda had forewarned the police. Lambda director Stoddard later admitted that his group contacted the police prior to the previem; warning then1 that they expected demonstrations, arguing, "We called the police to prevent violence. The worse alternative would have been to surprise the police. We deplore the alleged police brutality" (A. McDonald, "Miss Snigon" A Financial Success"). The activists, however, held Lanlbda responsible for the alleged violence and interpreted Lambda's action as further evidence that the organization saw Asian American protesters as outside the mainstream lesbian-and-gay community ("Concerned 'Miss Saigon' Protesters"). <>
L,
L
89My account of the opening night protest is based on Yoshikawa and interviews with participants. The Heat is on Miss Saigon Coalition may have attempted at the April 1 1 protest the same sort of activist-produced performance that I discussed in an earlier chapter; a Coalition flyer read, "Come join the protest against Mzss Saigon on opening night. Street theater planned-you can watch or take part-Come dressed as an Asian or other stereotype" (Heat is on Miss Sazgon Coalition, "No more Asian stereotypes!" courtesy of APACE archives); coalition members with whom I spoke could not recall whether or not this street theatre actually took place. 90~everalof the actors in the Miss Snigon cast with whom I spoke said they found the characters they portrayed to be subtle and sympathetic. Several cast members (White and
Theatre Insiders and Politics
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Asian; male and female) justified the musical's preoccupation with prostitutes and pimps by asserting that the nlusical depicted accurately social conditions in Vietnanl during the war (i.e., the actors said that the musical presented Asian women as prostitutes because "that's how it was in Vietnam"). 9 1 ~ a s oMa ~ (identified by another actor as one of the more outspoken members of the cast) told me that during a cast meeting he tried to describe the plight of Asian actors to members of the conlpany who saw the protesters as out to ruin the show; M a was pleased to find that director Hytner responded to his comment by pointing "out that there were no good guys and bad guys in this situation; everybody is doing what they believe is right. [Hytner] supported me in what I said." 9 2 ~ does t not appear that APACE was involved in these subsequent protests. Professor Dorinne Icondo of Ponlona College told me that playwright Ken Choy nlounted interventions targeting performances of Miss Saigon in the Twin Cities (see also Icondo's Abozrt Face); on protests in Seattle see Beers; on Toronto demonstrations see R. Fung; Donnelly; and Murray. Though these protests concentrated upon the musical's representation of Asians, casting issues did persist in some areas-one Miss Sazgon cast member reported, for instance, that the protests in Seattle revolved around both objections to stereotypes and to the perceived lack of Vietnanlese actors in the show (Iwamatsu, Interview). Nor did objections to the musical abate with time. The Stal. Trzlmne of Minneapolis reported that Asian American artists staged a revue, Missed Sigh Gone, to counter the return of Miss Saigon to the Txvin Cities in 1999 (J. Meyer). 9 3 ~ h e r ewere 110 clear "winners" or "losers" in the debates. Even Actors' Equit!; the group that made the most public concessions, weathered the controversies (Alan Eisenberg, in response to my inquiry as to the detrimental effects of the controversy to Equity, stated that the dispute had not hurt the union's power to utilize collective bargaining, pointing to successful resolutions to casting disputes following the controversies). Rather, most participants argued that it was important that the issues were raised (a statement that meant different things to different people); moreover, the controversies marked an important and memorable incident in both theatre and social history. A comment by Eisenberg suggested the debates' importance in theatre history; during an interview in 1992, he told me, "[It's two] years later and all you've got to say is, 'Miss Sdigon,' and the whole issue goes around [again]." Journalists covering the production as it toured the country frequently mentioned the protests, at least in passing (Berson, '"Miss Saigon' is back"; and IZoehler constitute two examples from 1999). The controversies also became a watershed event for Asian Americans. Earlier, I noted that images of the protests were used to symbolize Asian American activism generally. Yoshikawa (27.5-276) and Cho iInterview) confirmed that the Drotests a ~ a i n s tthe musical were a rnaior event in Asian American activism (Cho, for instance, noted that people traveled to New York from other cities to participate in demonstrations at performances of Miss Saigon). See also Icondo, About Face; Lu; and Zia. 9 4 ~ a m e sJaewhan Lee offered an example of the impact of the Miss Sdigon controversies within the gay con~munity-he stated that "a development director for a gay organization commented t o somebody in . . . GAPIMNY that . . . the Miss Saigon issue . . . marked a point in time where the job of developnlent directors became more difficult because they had to start looking at content of materials that they were trying to use as fund-raising material" while prior to the debates they would not necessarily examine the racial or gender politics of a potential fund-raiser (J. J. Lee, Interview). Also, the protests increased awareness of lesbian-and-gay issues within the Asian and Asian American conlmunities (Chan, '"Miss Saigon' sparks").
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9 5 ~ e f o r ethe controversles broke, several of Pryce's successors In London were W h ~ t e (APACE'S chronolog!; "Cameron Mackintosh Busts," reports that Pryce left the London production of Miss Snigon in August of 1 9 9 0 and the part of the Engineer was played temporarily by White actor Nick Holder, after which another White actor, Hilton Macrae, assumed the role; the only Asian performer involved with the part was Filipino understudy Junix Inocjan; see also IZaye). There \\rere reports that Miss Snigon's producers talked to US actor Joel Grey about taking over the part in London (which also suggested that he might later have appeared in US productions); see Shirley F18. After the controversies, Miss Snigon's producers cast Asian American actors in the role; as B. D. Wong put it in a personal interview, "I don't think they'd put Stacey IZeach in that part [the Engineer] if they could get him free . . . Because I think they figured something out." While tempering optinlisnl with an understanding of the sporadic history of equitable casting, others also noted change. Shortly after the controversy Mackintosh expanded his efforts to cast roles in productions other than Miss Silzgon with actors of color. Although Mackintosh and his associates had cast a few actors of color in his productions prior to the Miss S ~ ~ i g oconn troversy (e.g., Robert Guillaunle played the Phnntonz of the O ~ ~ T Lthe I ) new , opportunities for ethnic actors in Mackintosh shows following the disputes were read as a direct result of the debates (See "Cameron Crow"). In addition to altering Mackintosh shows, several of the actors I spoke with felt that the controversies had raised the issue of employment discrimination and led to some increase in the hiring of Asian actors throughout the country (though the f~mdarnentalproblenls of discrimination remained). 9 6 ~ u n n who , was elected to Equity's Council just as the Mzss Siligon controversies began, points out that performers with disabilities face many of the same prejudices that lead to discrimination against minorities and women as well as additional challenges, especially the fact that many theatres, though accessible in the house, do not have stages that are accessible to people with disabilities. For another treatment of this issue, see "i\ccess, Activism & Art" (a special section of the April 2001 issue of A m e ~ i w nTheilt~e). 9 ' ~ y contentions that most of the participants consisted primarily of younger actors and that they had little previous experience with activism are based on interviews with APACE members Carol Honda, IZim Miyori, and B. D. Wong (in an interview published after the controversies, Wong noted that "I've always been quite apolitical. . . . [But if] our generation doesn't speak up, then we're going to be forced to deal with all the same prejudices that our parents and their parents have had to deal with," [Rennert 1141).As I note in the text, some Asian American theatre professionals do see themselves as combining art and activism-David Henry Hwang, a vocal participant in the controversies, states, "The struggle to balance art, commerce, and political activism has preoccupied me throughout my career as a playwright and screenwriter" (Hwang in Aguilar-San Juan x ) . Similarly, some older actors who had engaged activism prior to Miss Saigon participated, to some degree, in the controversies. Alvin L L ~who , protested against the casting of Lovely Lddies, Kind Gentlemen in the 1970s, was a member of Equity's CRE when that committee initiated sanctions against Pryce. Similarl!; Sumi Haru ("Rope's End") discusses the Lovely Ladies protests and says, "Twenty years later I'm still on the battlefront . . . ." 9 8 ~ ist not clear when APACE went dormant, but the group was still operating in 1992 when I met with Honda (for an earlier interview). 991t is inlportant to note that actor-activists' tensions were not the only ones to concern the activists-ALOEC and GXPIMNY also dealt with internal tensions as they began to cooperate (see Yoshikawa).
CHAPTER 4
Artist-Activists and Blurring Boundaries Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller
Art and politics interact, overlap, and blur. Political activists with no investment in performance institutions not only self-consciously use theatrical techniques in their organizing, but also interact directly with theatre professionals. Conversely, theatre world insiders-even those working in mainstream, commercial forms-not only self-consciously adopt activist conventions to confront injustice within their art world, but also connect these issues to larger political struggles and work directly with political activists. The final element in the equation connecting art and politics is to recognize that the same individual may function as an insider in both worlds. In this chapter, I analyze the political and performance work of four postmodern performance artists-Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller-who work in an "avant-garde" art world characterized by challenges to the boundaries of art and of the relationship between art and society. Performance art nevertheless constitutes an art world in the constellation of institutional performance: not only does it represent a network of individuals who share an understanding of how to proceed with a characteristic sort of artistic work, but performance art shares conventions, personnel, and resources with other art worlds. The activist work of performance artists raises important questions that may also be asked of activist-artists working in more mainstream worlds, such as: how does a professional performer work as an insider in activism, can performances created by activist-artists function as activism even when produced in mainstream art venues, and what tensions and benefits do individuals encounter as they negotiate insider status in the worlds of art and activism? Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller are now known as the "NEA Four" (or the "Defunded Four") due to denial of grants to them by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In 1989 the NEA came under fire from religious and political conservatives who attacked the agency for
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funding exhibitions of photography by Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe-they claimed that Serrano's iconoclastic use of religious imagery and Mapplethorpe's depictions of gay sex were immoral and that Federal funding of the exhibition of the works was an abuse of taxpayers' money. In this climate, John Frohnmayer, then chair of the NEA, refused to approve grants to the four performance artists, apparently due to pressure from the Bush administration.' The performers were singled out because their work dealt frankly with issues of sexuality (especially gay sexuality), the AIDS crisis, religious hypocrisy, and other politically charged issues such as abortion rights. The four filed suit in 1990, alleging that the NEA had denied the grants due to political pressure and that NEA officials had violated the agency's procedures. In the same year Congress included a requirement that the NEA consider "general standards of decency" when awarding grants, and the four, joined by the National Association of Artists' Organization, added a constitutional challenge to this language in their suit. In 1993, the Justice Department settled the portion of the case relating to the vetoed grants, paying the artists the grants, monetary damages for breaches of their privacy, and court costs. The government, however, appealed federal court rulings that the decency standard was unconstitutional, and, in 1998, the Supreme Court overturned these rulings. Even if they had not been censored, analysis of work by Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller would contribute to a study of art and politics because each of the four performers, to varying degrees, engaged politics generally and political activism specifically prior to the NEA controversies (although few writers, myself included, would group the performers as a unit were it not for the NEA controversy). The work of Finely, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller, along with their censorship by the NEA, offers a case study of individuals who negotiated the relationships among institutional performance, political activism, and national political discourse. Each artist-activist's work, the NEA controversies, and the larger cultural contest in which they played out, are all worthy of (and have been the subject of) entire studies. I do not intend to survey comprehensively the work of the NEA Four; likewise, I do not pretend to present an all-encompassing history of the NEA debate^.^ Rather, after briefly characterizing the performance art world and its connections to politics, I concentrate on the activism of the NEA Four and the political dimensions of the performance work they created during, and just prior to, the NEA controversy. Finally, I consider the NEA Four's suit against the NEA, and the connections it reveals between art world issues, activism, and the future of the idea of a "public sphere."
Artist-Activists and Blurring Boundaries
The art world in which Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller work is notoriously difficult to define, or even name (Goldberg, Performance: Live Art; Mifflin 84). The term "performance art" gained currency in the 1970s and initially distinguished performance work undertaken by visual artists from that created by performers in the experimental theatre. By the end of the 1980s, however, these worlds had more or less merged, and in the 1990s the form was often simply called "performance" (Romin 119; Feingold, "Unreel"). Roman argues convincingly, however, that the disappearance of the term "art" from the genre's rubric allowed critics to denigrate it as lacking artistic merit. He also argues that distinctions between performance and theatre rest largely on venue and economic clout: solo performances by Lynn Redgrave or Anna Deavere Smith on (or near) Broadway are categorized as "theatre" while aesthetically similar work in the East Village by Holly Hughes and Robbie McCauley are not (Roman, Acts 122; see also 116-153). Howard Becker argues in Art Worlds that all distinctions among artistic genres derive from such social distinctions. That, of course, does not diminish the fact that semantics may be used to dismiss a whole form. Roman shows that such divisions are inherently political, noting that, in the mid-1990s, Congress forced the NEA to cease offering grants to solo performers while theatre institutions continued to garner funding (Romin, Acts 124).' In a similar vein, Holly Hughes contends that gay and lesbian solo performers are particularly vulnerable to exclusion from "the theatre" and identifies herself as both performance artist and playwright precisely to assert performance art's rightful place in "mainstream theatre."' Roman and Hughes don't appear to argue that performance art is the same as Broadway theatre, but rather that spectators, practitioners, critics, scholars, consumers, and funders need to broaden the conception and economic structures of "theatre" to include forms that have been relegated to the "fringe." I retain the term "performance art" (as opposed to simply referring to the world as "performance") for the sake of clarity, not to divide postmodern performance from theatre. Nevertheless, one can, I suggest, challenge the performance art versus theatre binary Roman and others critique, but still recognize that performance art constitutes a world with its own histories, conventions, networks, training systems, and critics.' As I've argued throughout this study, no art world is an island unto itself but rather a constellation that overlaps related worlds. One must, therefore, recognize that the performance art world constitutes a part of the constellation of theatrical worlds I call institutional performance. Performance art is as difficult to characterize as it is to define; I suggest, however, that its distinguishing attributes lie precisely in its flexibility, its emphasis on experiment, and its manipulation of the conventions of other art worlds. The training of performance artists illustrates its eclectic quality.
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Although some universities and art spaces offer training in performance as a discipline apart from theatre or visual art, most performance artists, their support personnel, and their consumers teild to come to performance art from other art worlds, especially visual art, theatre, dance, music, or literature. In addition, many performance artists have little, if any, formal artistic training (a trait not unique to avant-garde art worlds-witness the prevalence of "outsider" artists in the visual arts). The interdisciplinary nature of the performance art world's networks of artists, support personnel, and consumers leads to the acceptance of a broad range of activities as "art," and performance artists therefore work in a wide range of media and venues. Works by performance artists may appear in art galleries before audiences accustomed to viewing visual or performing arts, in arenas before thousands of people, in private rooms with no witness except a camera (if that), and in public spaces with little or no frame differentiating art from experience. The content of the works may highlight aspects as diverse as the creation of conceptual art objects, the autobiography of the performer, or a narrative fiction. As the examples mentioned above suggest, the conventions used in performances often (though not always) manipulate, depart from, parody, or overtly violate conventions from other art worlds. When Laurie Anderson modified a violin, replacing the strings and bow with taperecorder heads and recording tape, she was not (merely) seeking to create a new instrument, but appropriating a convention from the world of classical music.9imilarly, in December of 1974 Linda Montano created a performance in which she served as a bell ringer for the Salvation Army; though her performance was indistinguishable from the behavior of other bell ringers, she marked the event as art by deploying the visual-art-world convention of sending announcements to friends (Juno and Vale 57). Because it tends to challenge and put into play (literally) conventions strongly associated with other, established or "mainstream" art worlds, performance art often meets with misinterpretation. This is not to say that all performance art is so obscure that one must be an insider to understand it; rather, like all other art worlds, interpretation requires some degree of familiarity with the world's conventions. Outsiders unfamiliar with (or unwilling to accept) performance art's conventions of experiment may deride a performance work, particularly when a work challenges conventions from another world, as becomes evident when one examines reviews of performance art by theatre critics.' Though performance art tends to define itself in opposition to established (and especially commercial) forms of art, one finds evidence of direct exchange with other performance worlds. Holly Hughes notes, for example, that her piece, The Well of Horniness, which was created as a performance art work and performed by the author and her colleagues at W O W CafC (a women's performance art venue in New York), went on to
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be produced on numerous occasions throughout the country by actors in "open runs"; it is, according to C. Carr, "now a classic in certain circles" ("No Trace of the Bland" 67, see also 69). Similarly, John Fleck works not only as a performance artist but also as a stage and screen actor. Even Karen Finley, who identifies more with the world of visual art than with theatre, has worked in other performance worlds: she wrote a stage play, entitled Theory of Total Blame, and played the role of a doctor in the mainstream film Philadelphia.' Of course, Finley may only have had the desire and opportunity to pursue a role in a Hollywood film due to her notoriety following the NEA controversy; nevertheless, the fact that she performed a role in a mainstream film marks a blurring of the boundaries between performance art and commercial performance. Performance art, then, embraces the interdisciplinary and rejects or plays with established artistic standards; it nevertheless engages in exchange with more "mainstream" worlds and constitutes a part of the constellation of institutional performance. What, then, is its engagement with politics? A comprehensive history of performance art's links with politics (and a history of the form generally) lies beyond the bounds of this study. A brief discussion, however, demonstrates that this art world frequently engages politics, including activism, overtly.' While performance art can be described as having antecedents as far back as the court masques of the sixteenth century, the form's most apparent lineage derives from the avant-garde movements in Europe during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries (including Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, and Absurdism)."' Often, the avantgarde was overtly political only in that it constructed itself in opposition to prevailing art forms and the bourgeois society these forms represented (although the criticism, arrests, prosecutions, and riots that greeted various avant-garde performances indicate that audiences and authorities took such challenges seriously [see Goldberg, Performance Art]). Indeed, some avant-garde art reinforced dominant ideologies (as exemplified by the Futurist Filippo Marinetti's simultaneous denouncements of conventional art and pronouncements in favor of warfare and nationalism [Goldberg, Performance Art 131). However, much of the work of the avant-garde was overtly political and even activist." In the US, performance art coalesced in the 1960s from movements in experimental art and theatre, whose influences included the left-wing theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, the work of Bauhaus artists who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, the performers, artists, and dancers with whom they worked at Black Mountain College in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Beat movement of the 1950s; performance artists also came from and drew upon traditions of community-created art (see Roman, Acts 119). While it would be foolish to oversimplify the diversity of approaches taken by the performance artists of the 1960s, one can discern two similar but distinct
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impulses. O n the one hand, formalist and conceptual artists (e.g., Allan ICaprow) sought to confront and explore the individual psyche, to question the nature of art and creativity, and to explore the limits of human endurance. O n the other hand, the counter-culture, resistance to the war in Vietnam, and other movements inspired artists (e.g., Carolee Schneemann, Julian Beck, and Judith Malina) who sought to engage the audience in a direct and shocking experience in order to transform their consciousness and change the world.12 Artists following both trends tended to emphasize "real" experience and therefore rejected conventions associated with mainstream theatre, especially characterization and narrative.'' By the 1970s, the various currents in experimental art, theatre, dance, poetry, literature, and music tended to be referred to collectively as performance art. During this period established cultural institutions (e.g., the Whitney Museum) hosted performance art and new venues formed specifically to host performance (e.g., New York's Kitchen and Franklin Furnace), though performance artists continued to perform in non-art venues from nightclubs to street corners (see Goldberg, "Performance, The Golden Years," and Performance Art 121-151). Though the socially engaged stream of performance art persisted, the formalist/conceptualist current dominated. This formalism, however, ran the gamut from Chris Burden's endurance-based art (see Goldberg, Performance Art 159; and Sayre 2-6) to Robert Wilson's operatic spectacles. A second generation of performance artists developed in the 1970s; this cohort of performers coexisted with its predecessors and was "not so much concerned with dismantling the previous generation's attitudes, as with absorbing and embellishing them" (Goldberg, "Performance, The Golden Years" 73). Though formalist anti-theatre persisted, cl~aracterizationand other qualities associated with conventional theatre gained acceptance in performance art. Monologists, such as Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray, and experimental artists, like Laurie Anderson, used character, narrative, and other theatrical conventions to reflect on psychological and social issues. Though some of these artists (e.g., Anderson) reintroduced direct commentary on political events into their work, many others (e.g., the Wooster Group) concentrated on dissecting the possibilities of communication (either between individuals or within an individual's consciousness) in an age dominated by technology and mass-media. The self-reflexive nature of postmodern performance has often been interpreted as apolitical, a view refuted by Philip Auslander (Presence and Resistance; see also "Toward a Concept"), who argues instead that postmodern performers moved from creating transgressive spectacles to staging resistant acts in order to confront a postmodern, mediated culture. In the 1980s, a series of social developments encouraged the next generation of performers, which included artists such as Tim Miller, to take an actively political stance.14These events included: the election in 1980 of
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Ronald Reagan; the rise of the religious Right; a renewed spirit of jingoism and a stepped-up arms race; conservative Supreme Court decisions abridging civil rights and reproductive freedom; and the AIDS epidemic and the galvanizing effect fighting the disease had on the gay and lesbian communities. The new political movements based upon social identity and cultural difference that coalesced in US society during the 1980s also influenced performance artists, inspiring them to address political issues and to seek clarity of coinmunication. As Tim Miller states: I think a very interesting thing happened a iluinber of years ago, largely out of the multi-cultural discussion. Suddenly [there was a movement toward] communication, clarit!; acltnowledging that we all speak different languages, and that the more arcane your language the less likely [it is that] you may be able to actually communicate with people not similar to yourself, much less be able to create political or cultural coalition with them. . . . [During] my training and my youthful period in New Yorlt that was not considered important at all: people haying any idea what the piece was about. (T. Millel; Interyiew)
A few more established artists, such as Rachel Rosenthal, had been including overtly social content in their work for many years. For the 1980s generation of performance artists, however, political engagement became the norm, rather than the exception (see Schneider, Rev. of O n Edge 153; Breslauer, "Art = Activism"; and D. Davis). Performance artists in the 1980s explored a plethora of social issues: Tim Miller dealt with disarmament and gay rights; Rachel Rosenthal connected environmentalism and US intervention in the affairs of foreign nations; Robbie McCauley explored the racism and sexism encountered by women of color; Karen Finley anatomized violence against women; Holly Hughes played with lesbian identity and lesbian sexuality; Linda Montano and Annie Sprinkle explored gender and celebrated women's sexual experience; and Guillermo Gomez-Pefia and Coco Fusco analyzed the tensions of race and representation that arise at borders and at meetings of indigenous and colonizing peoples. By the mid-1980s, the AIDS epidemic added a new sense of urgency to politically engaged performance art." The disease ravaged arts communities and intensified homophobia from the Right and in US society generally-but it also gave rise to media-savvy activist groups such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), which not only inspired performers but also numbered performance professionals among its founders. Performance art, then, constitutes a multi-disciplinary form with a history of artists challenging received aesthetic and social standards generally, and many artists engaging politics overtly. Indeed, performance art has a great potential for overt political engagement, not because of its aesthetic properties but because of its relative lack of institutional barriers. The performance art world is characterized by a relative lack of bureaucratic
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structure that creates space for artists representing marginalized groups and encourages overly political performances.'~hisquality of the performance art world, however, constitutes a potential, not an automatic reality. Performance art institutions and networks embody many of the problems manifest in more "mainstream" worlds. For example, as Holly Hughes notes, those few performance artists who have "made it" have tended to be White middle-class men such as Gray and Bogosian (H. Hughes, Interview; see also her introduction to 0 Solo Homo). 11. THEACTIVIST PERFORMANCE OF THE NEA FOUR Ironically, the first Bush administration singled out performance artists who aptly represent the diversity of contemporary performance and its engagement of activism. The NEA Four differ in terms of training and style: Fleck works as a professional actor and uses more theatrical technique than the other three; Finley follows and modifies the ritualoriented performance tradition of the 1970s; Miller and Hughes employ a mix of lyricism and accessible, autobiographical narrative.'' The four performers also exemplify diverse approaches to art and activism. In previous chapters, I described the exchange between activism and institutional performance as a continuum from indirect exchange (in which insiders to one world use conventions from another) to direct exchange (in which insiders in the two constellations of worlds work together), noting that distinctions between indirect and direct exchange often blur. O n one level, the question of direct versus indirect exchange becomes moot when one considers artist-activists who, almost by definition, personify direct exchange. Yet, the work of the NEA Four still raises issues of "directness" and the ways in which individuals negotiate the blurring boundaries of social worlds. In particular, the artist-activists' performance practice offers an opportunity to address the perennial issue of whether work created in art venues constitutes activism. Performances staged in art world venues do not necessarily constitute activism, even when they contain overtly political themes. John Fleck, for instance, creates explicitly political performances, but makes few if any claims to activist status for his work. Yet, art venues constitute public spaces that exist in society, and performances staged in theatre spaces connect with the worlds of activism (in Chapter 2, for instance, I described activists who not only engaged a mainstream production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist as a fund-raiser, but viewed the play as accomplishing activist work). Finley, Hughes, and Miller see their onstage work as part of a larger political project, one with direct ties to the worlds of political activism: Miller and Hughes both told me that they regard their performance work as a form of activism, and Finley's projects and public comments also indicate that she views her art work as
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a c t i v i ~ m . 'Holly ~ Hughes explains, for instance, that the resistance to compulsory heterosexuality that she stages in art venues constitutes activism. "The performance work I do is activist," she says, "if in no other way than in making lesbian experience visible-and that is a profoundly political act" (H. Hughes, Interview). Hughes's claim rests on more than the text of her performances; it is borne out by the social context in which they occur. Furthermore, the content of and audiences for Finley's, Hughes's, and Miller's performances demonstrate connections to activist social worlds. Many of Miller's performances, for instance, speak directly about and to a politically aware and activist audience. Miller's narratives contain codes and cues that require some knowledge of activist culture and conventions. In My Queer Body, for instance, he fancifully describes himself as a newborn baby slipping into "my 'Action=Life7 Huggies [and slithering] into my 'We're-Here-We're-Queer-Get-Used-To-It' jumper" (313). This passage introduces into Miller's performance art slogans chanted by himself and other activists during demonstrations. Similarly, the humor of the image depends, in part, upon the juxtaposition of baby clothing with the common activist practice of wearing apparel bearing political slogans.1yThe fact that the audiences laughed at these lines on the nights I saw Miller perform further indicates that Miller's work, even when housed within the art world context of a performance space, nevertheless constitutes an activist occasion (I also offer my own observations of audience composition-when I saw Miller in Chicago I recognized activists with whom I had worked among the members of the audience). While not every overtly political performance work constitutes activism, Miller's, Hughes's, and Finley's work (and, to a lesser degree, Fleck's as well) may be considered activist because the artists relate their work to organizing, constitute insiders in activist organizations, and seek to merge activism and art. The performers participate in what Jan Breslauer describes as "an emerging vanguard of artist-activists, a generation of women and men, many from marginalized communities, who have been politicized around gay rights, AIDS, racism and reproductive rights issues" (Breslauer, "Art = Activism"). Finley, Hughes, and Miller (and Fleck, to a degree), negotiate a complex occupational identity: they are professional performers, but view political speech and political action as part and parcel of the artist's work. Tim Miller articulates this sense of professional identity, saying that "I'm primarily an artist, but the vast majority of my energy goes toward cultural organizing. . . . It comes from the artist-ascitizen model-which has been degraded [in the US], just as it's been respected in Central America and elsewhere" (Breslauer, "Art = Activism"). In addition to their professional identification as artists, Finley, Hughes, and Miller constitute insiders to the worlds of political activism, and their performance art actions frequently blur distinction between the worlds of activism and institutional performance. This blurring manifests itself in a
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variety of ways (a few of which I will detail later in this section): as explained above, Finley, Hughes, and Miller view their performance work itself as activism; in addition, they undertake public art projects outside art venues, help create activist organizations, participate in the planning and execution of political actions, contribute activist performances to actions (in the same manner as the activist performers discussed in Chapter 2), and bring activist issues into performance spaces. This is not to say that the artist-activists erase all distinctions between activist and art worlds. The performers themselves would not argue that every work they create constitutes activism (nor that all their activist activity constitutes art). Also, when commenting on their activist-art activities, they sometimes rely upon ideas cultivated by the world of activism and sometimes repeat cherished concepts of art worlds. Such shifts do not constitute confusion or hypocrisy. Instead, the negotiations these artists undertake to manage their dual identity offers another indication that their work constitutes exchange between two social worlds. This section details the art-activism of the NEA Four, describing their radical performance practice, their connections to activist worlds, and their negotiation of insider status in two social worlds. First, however, I describe the strategies artist-activists use to communicate overt political meaning in their work.
Tools of Politically Engaged Performance An examination of the political strategies employed by performance artists is necessary not to prove that their work can cause change (as I have argued throughout this study, such cause-and-effect lines between culture and social change rarely exists), but to offer a model for considering the professional artist's and her or his audience's engagement of overtly political performance. Earlier in this study, I offered the jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for the audience's reception of political elements of performance: different audience members link "pieces" derived from a performance with other pieces in their political puzzle. I suggest a similar metaphor can offer a flexible explanation of how performers create political meaning: rather than use a single strategy, performers develop a toolbox of techniques, deploying various methods to construct the puzzle pieces that spectators use. Certain performers, of course, have a predilection for certain tools, but understanding the diversity of overtly political performance requires consideration of a variety of approaches. I discuss the work of the NEA Four in terms of four specific strategic tools I believe performers use to enact a politically engaged performance practice: overt political commentary, transgression, resistance, and performances of community. The most obvious tool is overt political commentary. Performers deploy this tool when they refer to a social movement, make expressly political
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arguments, or mention political figures (e.g., the gay rights movement, advocacy of abortion rights, and comments on Jesse Helms, respectively). Calls to political action within a performance also constitute overt political commentary. Overt commentary may also consist of autobiographical monologues and similar anecdotes that personalize issues or reveal the political qualities of apparently quotidian affairs. Holly Hughes argues that much solo-autobiographical performance "is rooted, consciously or not, in a particularly American tradition of testifying, of witnessing history in the first person. It's a tradition that's entwined with this country's social change movements. Two prime examples: the testifying in African American churches, where the modern civil rights movement was born, and the consciousness raising that was central to second-wave feminism in the sixties and seventies" (Hughes and Romin 2-3). Hughes's comment is vital not only because it links autobiographic narrative to political speech within performance work, but because she articulates an intermingling of that work and political activism. Overt political commentary, however, constitutes only one possible component of politically oriented art. One must look beyond content to the strategies performers use in their attempt to create a politically engaged performance. Transgression might be considered the hallmark of the historical avantgarde. Since the late-nineteenth century, avant-garde performers have sought to cross boundaries and violate taboos. Some performers transgressed social mores, aiming t o upset bourgeois society, while others transgressed the boundaries of the body, often seeking to disrupt the art market. By the 1960s, troupes such as the Living Theatre relied upon the "presence" of the live actor to lead the audience through transgressive acts, such as taking off one's clothing, that sought to establish a new social order by changing consciousness (Auslander, Presence and Resistance; "Toward a Concept"). Several commentators on performance and politics critique strategies based solely on transgression. Jon Erickson points out that transgression can degenerate from strategy to shock for the sake of shock, and that, in either case, transgression may serve not to overthrow a hegemonic ideology so much as to offer "a challenge to that ideology to increase the scope of its power over such divergent ideals and their representations" (Erickson 233; 236; see also Schuler). One should not automatically assume that "shock-for-its-own-sake" is apolitical-even transgression born of narcissism may disrupt dominant ideologies. One cannot ignore, however, Erickson's second point: the dominant order may react to shock by tightening its grip on power. Philip Auslander, citing Hal Foster, offers a similar critique of strategies based on transgression, arguing that the avant-garde, with its tradition of transgression, no longer challenges contemporary, postmodern societies capable of containing and commodifying even acts of transgression and presence. Auslander argues that postmodern performers have shifted from strategies based solely on
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transgression to tactics of resistance that seek to expose the mechallisins of power ("Toward a Concept"; Presence and Resistance, esp. 22-23). One cannot, however, dismiss transgression entirely. Rebecca Schneider responds to Foster and Auslander: Though Foster's analysis of the limits of transgression is important and compelling, I nevertheless find it telling (as have many before me) that the avant-garde and the option of "shoclz" that it championed should die just as women, artists of color, and gay and lesbian artists began to make critically incisive political art under their own gender-, race-, and preferencemarlzed banners. (Schneider, Explicit Body 4)
Schneider points out that transgressive acts by woinen remain politically potent (noting that "to say that nothing shocks anymore is certainly curious in an age of conservative right-wing anxiety over the 'appropriate' cultural limits of aesthetic expression"), and suggests that female transgression constitutes "almost a double shock" (4). Finally, Schneider cautions that, historically, men have been permitted to transgress, while woinen have been taught to resist, so privileging resistance over transgression may merely reinforce gendered power relations. While I cannot pretend to solve the tension between transgression and resistance, I suggest that, if one views these strategies as tools rather than mutually exclusive practices, transgression can persist as an element in postmodern art, working in tandem and even in tension with resistance. As its prominence in debates regarding transgression suggest, resistance constitutes a key term in the analysis of the politics of representation with regard to postmodern performance art. (Resistance is also a key concept for contemporary political activists, such as those I worked with in Chicago, as organizational names such as "Pledge of Resistance" illustrate.) Jeanie Forte, writing specifically about the political potential of postmodern feminist performance, traces contemporary understandings of resistance and representation to the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Forte states: Foucault characterizes strategies of resistance as struggles which question the status of the governized individual, sim~iltaneo~isly asserting the right to be different and resisting the destruction of community. These strategies oppose the privileges of Itnowledge, secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people. They are a refusal of abstractions, of economic and ideological ~ i o l e n c ewhich ignore who we are or determine who one is: "the main objective of these struggles is to attack . . . a technique, a form of power." Women's performance art is a powerful manifestation of this struggle, as a resistance to the economic and ideological violence done to women. (Forte 264-266, ellipsis in original)
For Forte, women's performance art resists dominant ideologies particularly in its examination of female sexuality and women's bodies (for another discussion of the history and strategies of women's performance
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art, see Schneider, Explicit Body 3 ) . Women performance artists foreground a sexuality and a voice that the dominant culture has sought to repress, thereby simultaneously refusing to be silenced and engaging in the creation of community (or at least the potential for community). The same can be said, as I will argue below, for the performance practice of artists such as Tim Miller, who represent gay male sexuality, and, in so doing, simultaneously address gay communities and resist dominant cultural norms that seek to closet or eliminate gay men and lesbians. Resistance, moreover, aims to disrupt systems of power. Whereas transgression involves the crossing of a border, resistance calls into question the authority and exposes the tactics of those who enforce the boundaries. Of course, in some instances, crossing a border (whether geographic or social) leads to a challenge to the authorities that uphold it, so transgression and resistance can function together. Resistance, however, also has its limitations. Randy Martin notes that the idea of "resistance" cedes the idea of action to those in power. He advocates that scholars and practitioners of postmodern political performance shift to a terminology of mobilization (R. Martin, "Performance & Mobilization"). Similarly, Forte's conceptualization of resistance entails the articulation of community. I argue that some postmodern performance artists do indeed seek to mobilize the audience through strategies appealing to a sense of community. The idea of "community" is at once vague and socially potent; it may impose a sense of harmony where none exists, or it may espouse both unity and difference. Kirk Fuoss analyzes theories that view community as "imagined" (that is, beyond one's personal interactions, unified "communities" exist as ideas, not as actual groups); moreover, Fuoss argues, ideas of community circulate through performance (Fuoss 191-121; for further discussion of the idea of community, see Chapter 1). Adapting Fuoss's ideas, I refer to performers' self-conscious deployment of the tool of "community" as performances of community. Performances of community draw upon performance's potent ability to create scenarios in which members of a marginalized group may envision power-moments that depend not upon ritual fervor (the "presence" Auslander critiques) but mobilize a united awareness of a common cause. This strategy assumes a number of forms: some performances address issues of particular concern to members of a specific community, while others speak in a more inclusive "we," welcoming all audience members who agree with a pl~ilosopl~y into a political vision of community. The tactic of constructing community, like the other strategies I have discussed, carries with it complexities and limitations. Just as Erickson argues that transgression may do little more than alert enforcers of dominant culture to areas where the social walls they seek to maintain need reinforcement, so too Peggy Phelan argues that preoccupation with
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advancing a community's "visibility" can simply make the group a target (Phelan, Unmarked). Also, I note that speaking about a community can imply (or be misinterpreted as implying) that that community is l~omogeneous,erasing actual conflicts and differences within that group. Similarly, creating a sense of community for one marginalized group can potentially slight another. For instance, Peggy Phelan, while expressing solidarity with Tim Miller's politics, argues that his M y Queer Body focuses too exclusively upon gay men, noting that lesbians enter the piece only as tangential figures in fantasy sequences, not as central players in Miller's world-view (Phelan, "Tim Miller's"). Conversely, performers whose work is closely identified with a particular community sometimes face criticism if they seek to appeal to an audience outside that community. Holly Hughes began her career working in the lesbian-oriented club W O W Cafe. When Hughes began to stage performances at non-lesbian venues and broach non-lesbian issues, such as bisexuality, lesbian critics voiced concerns that her celebration of lesbian sex would be appropriated by the dominant, heterosexual culture (Carr, "No Trace" 68; Schneider, "[An interview]"; Davy). There are, then, pitfalls inherent in each of the strategies deployed by postmodern performers. Yet, if one regards these various strategies as tools performers use on various occasions to accomplish different tasks, one can conceive of a deep political potential in postmodern performance. The various strategies of overtly political performance need not be pitted against one another as mutually exclusive categories. This is not to erase the important distinctions, such as those Auslander draws between the historical avant-garde's use of transgression and the postmodern performer's attitude of resistance, but rather to argue that postmodern performers have adapted these strategies to new ends. Indeed, as the performance and textual analysis that follows demonstrates, it is often difficult to discover where one strategy leaves off and another begins. I now discuss the career of each of the NEA Four, focusing upon the radical strategies of each artist's work (as evidenced by her or his use of the "tools" describe above), then describing their involvement in activi~m.~" I begin with Fleck, the artist among the four least likely to define himself as a "political artist" (though he does consider politics to be an aspect of his work); I then discuss Finley, Hughes, and Miller, all of whom engage politics overtly in their performances.
J o h n Fleck Among the NEA Four, John Fleck is the least likely to identify his work as having a specific political aim, though he does view it as socially engaged. He works in the metaphorical (as opposed to narrative) traditions that developed from the experimental theatre and performance art of the
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1960s. He combines overt political commentary with transgressive acts to comment simultaneously on psychological and social issues. Fleck moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Art. He first became involved with performance art when he participated in a workshop led by Rachel Rosenthal. In addition to pursuing a career in conventional theatre, he began training with Rosenthal and, in the early 1980s, began appearing in the performance art club scene. His performance art works, which include I Got the He Be She Bes, Psycho Opera, BLESSED are all the Little FISHES and A Snowball's Chance in Hell, are characterized by a campy examination of popular icons aild social mores. They deal with a plethora of issues, including violence, the media, consumerism, and sexual identity, as Fleck indicates in his deposition in the NEA case, stating that "It is my intent, through my work, to confront cultural, environmental, and psychological issues-to demythify cliched notions of masculinity-femininity, AIDS, death, birth, religion, capitalist consumption and mass media; to name but a few. . . . [My] work seeks to challenge certain socially accepted attitudes and values" (Fleck, "Declaration"). When I spoke with Fleck in 1993, he stated that he would not have labeled himself a "political artist" prior to the NEA controversy and that, even following the controversy, "I don't think of myself as a political artist. That's part of it. But I'm all things. Sometimes I'm political and sometimes I'm just sloppy-poetic" (Fleck, Interview). Likewise, although he had been in a relationship with a man for a number of years, Fleck stated that he was disturbed by what he perceived as the media's propensity for consigning people to pigeonholes. During our conversation, he contended that the media referred to the NEA Four as "Karen Finley and the three gay performance artists," as if the sexual orientation of the artists meant that their work ought to be lumped together (Fleck, Interview). He asserted that his work concerns the ambiguity of gender rather than gay issues per se. Fleck's work dealt more clearly with social issues as performance art became more politicized in the mid-1980s, as Jan Breslauer recognizes, noting that "the AIDS crisis and the influence of activist performers such as Tim Miller, have inspired Fleck with what he calls an increasingly 'political' awareness" (Breslauer, "Apostle"). Similarly, the NEA controversy forced Fleck to reconsider the political implications of his work. Althougl~when I spoke with him he still did not embrace the label "political artist," he did believe "my work has always been political to some degree, I didn't think of it as political because I wasn't finding resistance. Now that I've encountered resistance it seems to become more political." His ambivalence regarding the label "political artist" notwithstanding, overt commentary does appear in Fleck's work. At times, Fleck stages sequences that border on overt political rhetoric. In the second act of the
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perforinance he undertook at the time of the NEA controversy, BLESSED are all the Little FISHES, a character mined "John" delivers a inonologue asking a series of questions related to social and personal problems: -[Our] society is sick because our families are sick. And our families are sick because we're living by inherited rules none of us ever wrote . . . So who wrote these rules and why is it so hard to change them? [ . . . ] I wanna Itnow where are all these garbage bags goin'? And where am I gonna go? I'm being evicted-they're tearin' my rent-controlled place down to build a condo. And I'm so afraid I'm gonna end up homeless. Where are they gonna go? Where's the 2,000,000 more people they're predicting that are m o ~ i n gto this city in the next few years . . . where are they all g o m a go? [ . . . ] Where are all the pregnant women gonna go if they pass this antiabortion crap? Where are all the babies gonna go? I wouldn't wanna he a kid now. (Fleck, ELESSED, 189-190, ellipses in brackets added)"
Fleck juxtaposes the personal and the political (e.g., connecting "sick families" and "sick" social "rules"). Some segments of his work allude to individual or social phenomena (e.g., this speech and others in the work both evoke and satirize self-help movements), while other passages refer directly to political issues or figures (e.g., the anti-abortion movement critiqued in the lines above). In addition to commenting overtly on social problems, Fleck's work transgresses conventional boundaries of acceptable behavior through the use of camp and unconventional suggestions of violence. A scene in BLESSED are all the Lzttle FISHES in which Fleck acts out an alcoholic's relationship with a toilet bowl illustrates Fleck's use of transgression of social mores to confront both political and psychological concerns. According to the published script, the scene begins with Fleck portraying a drunken character called "Man" who vomits and laments his loneliness. He asks why God stopped loving him, and a disembodied voice replies, "I NEVER STOPPED LOVING YOU" (180). After the man realizes that, "Holy shit, I'm having a fucking miracle in my toilet," the toilet transforms into a shrine: flowers rise from the tank, the seat lowers exposing a picture attached to the lid depicting Jesus walking on the water, and Fleck lights birthday candles attached to the seat (181). He then takes a microphone shaped like a cross from the tank and starts singing. According to the stage directions, "he is transformed into a preacher somewhat resembling Jimmy Swaggart . . ." (181). As this pseudo-preacher reads from Genesis, "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life," he urinates into the toilet bowl (182). He then retrieves a goldfish from the bowl-an answer to his prayer for a miracle (the bowl was designed with several compartments to accommodate the action). As the piece continues, Fleck lavishes his blessed fish with love that slips into abuse: the drunken character stuffs loaves of bread into a goldfish's bowl until an actor planted in the audience comes on-stage and saves the fish (182-184).
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This scene illustrates Fleck's performance strategy in the 1980s, which employed transgressions of propriety and of the sacred (peeing while reading the Bible) to siinultaneously address personal psychological crises (a moment of revelation for a lonely drunken man) and social concerns (the exploitation of religious imagery by tele-evangelists). The religious Right interprets the juxtaposition of urination and an image of Christ as blasphemy. Fleck offers different interpretations: The toilet is very suggestive, it transforms into many things. . . . I'ye been criticized for peeing on Jesus Christ, but I never did that. It was very innocent. This man [the character] really believed that Jesus was speaking to him through his bodily functions-through his vomit and his urine and while he was reading the Bible. . . . Another side is that I didn't do it innocently and you also have to be careful. In a wa!; this man was interpreting the Bible to suit his ends. . . . I created this during the Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, so there was some commentary on what they did with the Bible. (Burnham 19.5)
Fleck offers two readings of his own work, suggesting that it functions as both psychological exploration and social commentary. Another variation on strategies of transgression arises in the sequence, described above, in which Fleck's character abuses a goldfish that is "saved" by the audience. This scene participated in the performance art and experimental theatre traditions that sought to change consciousness by provoking individual audience members to react to the actor's actions. Once again, during the NEA controversies, Fleck argued that both personal and political dimensions appear in the scene, saying that it explores both the relationship between a man and his love-object and the interaction between performer and audience: the drunken character smothers the fish that he loves, but, on another level, the audience intervenes before the actual fish can be hurt (Fleck reported that when he first performed the scene, an actual audience member, rather than an actor planted in the audience, rescued the fish [Burnham 1951). The scene, then, functions not only as a comment on the blurred boundaries between love and destruction for dysfunctional individuals, but also as a parable of social responsibility staged in the style of the experimental theatre of the 1960s that aimed to provoke audience members into new consciousness. In addition to questioning the precise political nature of his work (even though it does clearly deploy commentary and transgression), among the NEA Four, Fleck was the least involved in direct-action organizing prior to the NEA controversies. During our conversation, he said his involvement in political activism had been limited to attendance at a few meetings and performing at benefits (Fleck, Interview). Nevertheless, Fleck, at times, stood in the common territory where performance art and activism overlap. Most notably, the NEA controversy forced Fleck to take an activist stand. Jan Breslauer, in a profile of Fleck published in the Los
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Angeles Times a few months after the defunding, described him as an "unwitting activist." The article continues, "Forced into a political identity he never intended, he's still uncomfortable with the part, as though he could lapse into a feather-boa aria at any moment" (Breslauer, "John Fleck's Radical" 5 ) . Fleck's negotiations of activism, then, have primarily emanated from his reluctant role as a public figure in the NEA debates and his participation in the four performers' subsequent lawsuit, though he has also served activist organizations by performing at activist functions. The other three performers who make up the NEA Four identify themselves as political artists and have worked with activist organizations. Karen Finley Like Fleck, ICaren Finley works in a style of performance art that evolved from the confrontational tactics of the 1960s and 1970s; to a greater degree than Fleck, Finley displays a clear political project, employing strategies of commentary, transgression, resistance, and performances of community in order to tell the stories of victims of violence and humiliation and to implicate individual and systemic perpetrators. Finley was born in 1956 and grew up in Chicago, attending the Chicago Art Institute's Young Artists Studio program (Champagne 57). She trained as a visual artist and was influenced by the performance art and happenings of the 1970s. Unlike her predecessors of the 1960s and 1970s, who often rejected theatrical devices, Finley employs scripts and characters in her work. She received a Masters of Fine Arts in video and performance from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1982. She performed with Brian Routh of the Kipper Kids (a non-narrative, transgressive performance art duo formed in the 1970s) in Europe and the US before beginning solo work. Her solo performances, which have included The Constant State of Desire, We Keep O u r Victims Ready, The American Chestnut, and Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman, have consisted of monologues, often spoken in a trance-like chant, interspersed with commentary delivered in direct address to the audience. In addition to solo performance, she has also written plays-notably The Theory of Total Blame-created visual art, and recorded and published her performance work and other writing. In her performances, Finley typically portrays un-named characters, usually speaking in the first-person; she sometimes speaks as the perpetrator of violence, but most often plays the victim or witness to violation in various forms. Her work usually involves monologues that at first seem "hysterical" but develop into lucid metaphors. Though Finley's work has always focused upon issues of victimization (which constitute political subject matter), as her career has developed she added to her depictions of abuse overt analysis of the systems of power that lead to abuse. She also expanded her palette to address issues including the
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fight against AIDS, homophobia, homelessness, and censorship (Mason). By the late 1980s, she was concerned not with representing violence itself, but with exploring the impact of violence on the victims, stating that she wanted to show "a day-to-day feeling of despair which I think many oppressed people live with in this culture" (Juno and Vale 43). Overt political references and rhetoric constitute the most obvious manifestation of Finley's political performance strategies. In T h e Constant State of Desire, for instance, Finley's unidentified character describes her experiences with political powerlessness and advocates direct action: after recounting a litany of failed attempts to "make something happen" through attempted suicide, sex, dieting, and mainstream electoral politics, she declares, "So I petitioned, rioted, terrorized and organized 'cause I'm gonna make something happen" (Finley, Shock Treatment 7). This piece was performed and published prior to the entire NEA controversy, so before being the target of censorship, Finley identified herself as a political artist, created work that spoke out against the structures of violence in contemporary society, and called for action to oppose this violence. This overt commentary also functioned as testimony, in the manner Holly Hughes sees as linked with social movements. In performance, it is as if Finley were a medium and through her the unquiet dead speak: an abused child, a victim of rape, a pathetic animal, or the ghost of a relative who died of an illegal abortion in the years before R o e v. Wade.2' These characters, and Finley speaking as "herself," testify regarding abuse of the oppressed by the powerful in contemporary society. Finley also uses strategies of transgression, articulating a relationship between breaking taboos and social commentary, as she makes clear in her deposition in Karen Finley et al. v. National E n d o w m e n t for the Arts et al.: "My work portrays discrimination against women, especially sexual violence, and other bias-related violence. I seek to portray these issues in the most dramatic way. For me, this often involves nudity or partial nudity, as well as street language and other means designed to challenge people's accepted norms and prejudices" (Finley, "Declaration"; see also Schneider, Explicit B o d y ) . Though Finley sees transgression of social boundaries (regarding clothing, language, and other norms) as a means to a political end, she clearly understands the danger Jon Erickson articulates: that transgression may became gratuitous or exploitative. Finley consistently argues that her manipulations of her body are neither pornographic nor exhibitionist; moreover, her claims did not arise merely in response to the 1980s controversies surrounding the arts (Carr, "Unspeakable Practices"; Mason). But Karen Finley does wish to disturb taboos in order to achieve political gains for women and other oppressed groups: in an interview with journalist Kiki Mason, Finley contrasted her view of the politics of transgressive language with that of a man she called a "'50s-style liberal," saying, "He doesn't believe that second-class citizens
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have a right to vocalize in the language that they are abused in. I use the language that we are attacked in. That's very threatening." Examples from We Keep O u r Victims Ready, the performance Finley toured just prior to her defunding, indicate that Finley's transgressive acts constitute a strategy within a radical practice. At one point in the performance, Finley displays a cake with little paper American flags for candles, which she proceeds to light, simultaneously destroying a sanctified symbol and referring to the then-current controversy surrounding the constitutionality of burning the flag. Finley's critics often neglect the sharp humor such transgressions employ. In another scene, she takes two containers of gelatin dessert (a quintessential US food), places one in each cup of her bra, and then parades around the playing space, calling attention to the common fetishization of large breasts and simultaneously tweaking the prohibition against "playing with your food." The most famous example of transgression in We Keep O u r Victims Ready occurs when Finley strips to her underwear and smears her body with chocolate. The simple act breaks taboos against wasting food and manipulating one's body in public. Furthermore, Finley clearly links the act to social and political issues. Finley scoops the chocolate from a red, heart-shaped box, alluding, perhaps, to the contradictory set of customs whereby women are expected to stay thin but are given boxes of candy as gifts. More explicitly, during the sequence Finley chants a litany evoking nightmarish rationalizations of abuses ranging from the psychological ("I shot myself because I love you. 1 If I loved myself I'd be shooting you."), to the physical ("I abused my children sexually because I didn't want someone else who didn't love them to do it.") to the systemic ("In commemoration of [the] St. Valentine's Day Massacre that / killed violently sixty years ago today / America commemorates this event by killing thousands / of its citizens"). In this scene, Finley offers a nightmare vision that conflates ideas honored by dominant ideologies with those society demonizes or abhors ("The first plan of death will be called/ THE YEAR OF THE CHILD / . . . all ten-year-old children will be required to sell crack to sponsor after school programs because of limited government funding"). By coating herself in chocolate during this speech, Finley embodies her ideas in an image of a woman covered in dirt or excrement, personifying the degradation she speaks of in the text (at one point Finley's persona literally says, "My life is worth nothing but hit").^; Finley intentionally chose chocolate for its varying significations and transgressive potential, stating that "I use chocolate [in the scene] because it's a visual symbol that involves eating as well as basically being treated like shit. . ." (Juno and Vale 49). Transgression as a strategy, however, carries with it the dangers of misinterpretation and backlash (Forte 268; see also Erickson). Finley has experienced overt and subtle harassment throughout her career due to her confrontational transgressions of conventional behavior, particularly when
Artist-Activists and Blurring Boundaries she has performed (or sought to perform) at clubs and other mainstream, non-art venues. She was banned from performing or selling recordings in London. According to C. Carr, police closed Finley's shows in Sail Francisco, clubs in Los Angeles told her "don't show your body," and punk rockers in New York city threw lit cigarettes at her on stage (Carr, "Unspeakable Practices" 18). And, of course, she lost a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Harassment and rumor tend to be cumulative diseases: they pile upon one another and may lead to further frustration of political intentions (not to mention artistic careers). The NEA defunding, resulted, in part, from media characterizations of Finley as nothing more than a "chocolate-smeared woman." Misinterpretations also put the performer in a defensive posture, trying both to correct factual lapses and defend the tactic of transgression itself. As Finley pointed out in an interview, while debunking a misrepresentation of Holly Hughes as masturbating on stage, "But the thing that is so difficult about this is, while she [Hughes] didn't do that, if she did, so what?" (Finley, "A Talk" 12). Yet, harassment and slander, while clearly dangerous to the performer, may indicate that the arrow of transgression has hit its target, not that it has gone astray. C. Carr concludes a summary of Finley's experiences with censorship and hostility with the argument that this history indicates that Finley exposes raw nerves in US culture. After relating the incident in which spectators at a club threw cigarettes at Finley, Carr states, "Obviously a man doing the same routine wouldn't be confronted like this-nor would the act have the same meaning." She continues:
X filthy woman (in any sense of the word) has stepped further outside social mores than a man can possibly get. Hard worlzing Inen get dirty. They're a common sight in soap commercials, taking their showers. But that lzind of dirt on a woman signifies "crazy" or "victim." N o positive meaning is possible. Just as obscenity coming from a Inan asserts a tough manliness, in a woman's mouth it signals a threatening femininity, a banshee. (Carr, "Unspealzable Practices" 18)
The hostility (or bewilderment) that greeted Karen Finley's performances may indicate she succeeded in transgressing mores, and also in staging resistance. According to Auslander, many postmodern performers resist hegemony by revealing the power structures that uphold it; Finley's performances in the 1980s and early 1990s accomplished this with direct simplicity: she refused to be contained within the spectacle she created. Finley's performances stage degradation within the context of unmitigated yet articulate rage-a refusal to remain silent and a resistance to the eroticization and consumption of violence. As Johannes Birringer (227) puts it, Finley's monologue style pushes "the exposed body . . . [to] where it perhaps can no longer be looked at, desired or penetrated or controlled . . . . In perverting the desire to watch her, Finley's body returns like a revenger . . . ."
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Similarly, Jeanie Forte detects strategies of resistance in the work of Finley and other female performance artists, suggesting that the "very placement of the female body in the context of women's performance art positions a woman and her sexuality as speaking subject . . . " (Forte 260). As Birringer and Forte argue, through her refusal to remain unseen and silent regarding the rampant abuse of people, especially women, in US society, Finley questions the governing of individuals, asserts her right to be different, testifies against economic, ideological, and literal violence, and targets specific forms of power. In other words, she skillfully employs tools of resistance. A final element of Karen Finley's political art strategy consists of performing community, appealing to the audience as a group with a common political sense, a move that appeared in her work shortly before the NEA controversies and departs from her cl~aracteristicallyconfrontational tone. Examples of appeals to a sense of community in the audience appear in W e Keep O u r Victims Ready. When I saw Finley perform this work, shortly after the denial of her grant, she seemed to assume that the audience supported her and not conservative members of Congress. When she stripped to her underwear in preparation for the by-then notorious segment in which she covers her body in chocolate, she paused, stepped forward, and said in direct address to the audience, "This is what they're afraid of." It is significant that Finley referred to the perpetrators as "they" (as opposed to saying, for instance, "This is what you're afraid of). That the audience is a "we" and not "they" becomes even clearer in the piece's final segment, "Black Sheep." In the version of the performance I saw, Finley washed away the food that she had coated herself with in earlier scenes and wrapped herself in a white sheet, then delivered the monologue sitting next to an empty bed. In the published text, after speaking of the experience of funerals for people who have died of AIDS, Finley declares, "We are the black sheep of the family . . . . We always speak our mind / appreciate differences in culture I believe in sexual preferences / believe in no racism / no sexism / no religionisin I and we'll fight for what we believe . . . ." (Finley, Shock Treatment 141). Lest these lines appear saccharine, remember that in performance Finley delivers the speech in her characteristic style: a trance-like, almost abrasive, rhythm. In this sequence Finley speaks t o audience members rather than a t them (as she does in other segments of the show), assuming their support for a variety of political positions. That Finley offers an inclusive vision of a community becomes clearer later in the piece, when she builds a vision of a separate society represented by the individuals attending the performance, saying: My brother says-I don't want you! But I have many brothers with me here tonight!
................................... My mother says-I
don't lznow how to love
Artist-Activists and Blurring Boundaries someone like you! You're so different from the rest! But I haye many mamas with me here tonight!
.................................... That's why we're hereto he around others like ourselves
. . . . (Finle!;
Shock Treatment 142)
Whereas her speaking from the position of a victim renders visible the problem of the violence of US society and its power structures, this inclusive voice articulates, if not solutions, at least a means for self-preservation and love among people marginalized by the "mainstream." Finley's use of commentary, transgression, resistance, and performances of community constitutes a politically engaged performance practice that blurs the boundaries between performance art and activism. Like many other postmodern artists, Finley has drawn inspiration for her radical performance work from activist groups; conversely, she has participated in the work of direct-action organizations, performed at activist events, and created public art that utilizes activist conventions. In an interview with Kiki Mason, Finley identifies the confrontational and media-savvy activist group ACT UP as inspiring her to augment her portrayals of abuse with overt political commentary. One sometimes encounters quite concrete examples of the influence of activism in Finley's work. In April of 1992 Finley performed at a massive pro-choice rally in Washington, DC (an event I shall describe in more detail below). In August of the same year, Finley premiered A Certain Level of Denial at Lincoln Center's "Serious Fun!" festival (see Feingold, "Naked Ambition"). At one point in this new piece Finley's character describes marching in a pro-choice march and meeting the ghost of an aunt, who died from an illegal abortion before Roe v. Wade (Finley, Certain Level). While I cannot prove that Finley's participation in the Washington march inspired this particular sequence, the similarities are suggestive. In any event, Finley's allusion to a rally within her work demonstrates that she draws upon her participation in activist events to inspire her performance work. Conversely, Finley has contributed her artistic skills to activist groups. She tells Andrea Juno, for instance, about "talking with WHAM [Women's Health Action and Mobilization]," an activist group that addressed issues of women's healthcare and followed ACT UP'S strategy of creating direct and spectacular actions (Juno and Vale 45-46). As these examples demonstrate, Finley (at times) merges activism and performance, traveling freely between the social worlds of activism and institutional performance (although she identifies as an artist first and foremost, as I shall discuss below). Indeed, it is difficult to label some of Finley's work as only art or only activism, a fact that illustrates the blurring of boundaries between these categories of human activity. Reporter Lucie Young identifies her as one of the participants in the Women's Action
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Coalition (WAC), an activist group addressing women's rights issues. WAC was founded by artists in New York City in January of 1992 in reaction to the treatment of Anita Hill by the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings for now-Justice Clarence Thomas (L. Young). This, then, was a group of artists using skills and conventions linked with the art world as tools to conduct activism. WAC chapters appeared across the country as activist groups not associated solely with artists, indicating that the New York women artists were adept enough at activism-and adequately initiated into activist social worlds-to create a group that appealed to people identifying solely with the world of activism. Another example of Finley's simultaneous participation in artistic and activist worlds arose out of her participation in the pro-choice March For Women's Lives in Washington, DC, on April 5, 1992. As noted above, at that rally Finley performed a monologue about an aunt who died from an illegal abortion in the years before Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure. I attended this demonstration and, while marching in the crowd of 500,000 activists, I suddenly heard Finley's voice over the sound system. Trying to confirm my impression, I asked a nearby marcher to identify the speaker; the activist replied, "I think that's Karen Finley." Though anecdotal, this experience demonstrates that Finley was well enough known as a public figure supporting abortion rights that she was included as a speaker in the march and was recognizable enough to activists that a person chosen at random from the crowd could identify her. Moreover, when staged on the political platform, Finley's performance blurred distinctions between artistic expression and political rhetoric. Based upon my attendance at the march, I believe Finley's performance corresponded to a section from We Keep Our Victim Ready called "Aunt Mandy," the published text of which reveals affiliations with political rhetoric; a portion reads: It's It's It's It's It's
my body not Pepsi's body not Nancy Reagan's body not Congress's body not the Supreme Court's body
.................................... IT'S N O T YOUR BODY (Finle!; Shock Eeatment 113; emphasis in original)
This passage and Finley's entire performance at the rally resembled speeches of testimony given by women at activist events called (in my experience) "speak-outs," speeches in which they attest to the suffering of women that preceded Roe v. Wade (remember, also, Holly Hughes's contention that solo performance and social movements participate in a common tradition of testimony). To marchers unfamiliar with performance art, this passage
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must have sounded like a political speech, due, for example, to its repetitious style and its use of images of a woman's ownership of her own body (a common trope among pro-choice activists). Indeed, under these circumstances Finley's performance was political rhetoric. But it also remained a work of art, created by an artist and rendered as art (in Finley's characteristic, chanting style). In addition to her solo performances and installations conducted in theatres and galleries, Finley creates political art in public spaces and brings the public into her political art work. In so doing, she follows activist conventions of seeking to act in public and mobilize the public. For example, in collaboration with the non-profit public art group Creative Time, Inc., Finley had the text of "The Black Sheep" cast on a bronze plaque and set in a "concrete monolith" on the corner of Houston and First Avenue in New York City, near a place where a number of homeless people lived2' Finley describes the intent and results of the work, saying, "In a way this was a memorial for the homeless, the outcasts and the artists living on the Lower East Side. . . . I wasn't sure what the response would be, but it's been really positive. The people who live there put flowers on it . . . . Also, a cottage industry started where people do rubbings and then sell them for a buck" (Juno and Vale 43). Finley turned her performance/poem into public sculpture with a political intent; she says that "I want to do public sculpture that really acknowledges social conditions rather than just presents 'form"' (Juno and Vale 43). Though Finley's public art does not evidence the direct connection to activist institutions manifested by her performances, it still engages in indirect exchange with the world of activism: her work injects politics into public spaces and attracts politically motivated people into artistic contexts. Although Karen Finley considers herself a political artist, creates politically engaged performances, and participates in direct-action activism, her career also reveals the tensions and negotiations occasioned by occupying the territory shared by activism and institutional performance. She recounts losing engagements because she violates conventional categories by talking about political issues in entertainment venues (Mason). O n the other hand, some of her actions and statements privilege artistic conventions over politics. In the spring of 1990, Catherine Schuler published an article analyzing Finley's growing notoriety that argues, among other points, that spectators at Finley's performances do not always recognize her political points. In a letter of response, Finley does defend the political potential of her work, but also states, "The notion that I may not be completely understood in my lifetime does not come as any new surprise to me. The idea that the public is slow to understand new concepts is a given. . . . It is a slow process, but it is part of the artist's life" (Finley and Schuler 10; see also Joseph; Schuler). The idea that cutting-edge artists "can't be understood in their own time" constitutes an art world convention: it is a
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cherished idea that offers struggling artists the hope of eventual recognition, but also tends to cultivate the traditional cult of individual genius2' That Finley responds to a challenge to her politics not with an activist rejoinder but by invoking such a sacred concept of art worlds exemplifies a tension between the standards employed by the two constellations of social worlds. Again, this complexity suggests not hypocrisy but a negotiation of insider status in two social worlds whose conventions sometimes conflict (but just as often mesh). Holly Hughes Like Karen Finley, Holly Hughes creates politically engaged performances through a combination of strategies of overt political commentary, transgression, resistance, and performances of community. Although Hughes sees herself as dealing with the same issues as Finley and expresses admiration for Finley's "Cassandra wail," she employs a more conversational style; while she does deal with similar themes of abuse, she's also concerned with articulating "sexual pleasure and what it could mean for women" (Schneider, [An interview] 181-1 82). Hughes, and Tim Miller as well, articulate a radical conception of pleasure, both sexual pleasure and the pleasure of performance (on the radical potential of pleasure, see ICondo, About Face; and McConachie, "Approaching"). Holly Hughes is a New York playwright and performance artist whose work "addresses issues of power, eroticism and women's sexuality, including lesbian sexuality" (H. Hughes, "Declaration"). She was born in 1955 and grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. After receiving her BA in painting from ICalamazoo College in the late 1970s, Hughes moved to New York and began working with the Feminist Art Institute (Champagne 5). She stopped painting, however, and discovered the lesbian performance scene at the New York club W O W Cafe, where she found "a whole different kind of approach to feminist performance than I had ever seen before" (Schneider, [An interview] 174). Hughes developed her performance skills at W O W and began writing plays and creating solo performances in the early 1980s. At WOW, she created a series of campy plays celebrating lesbian sexuality and parodying genre fiction such as the hard-boiled detective story (The Lady Dick) and the soap opera (The Well of Horniness)plays that have been revived by other companies. Hughes rose to prominence in the New York performance world with Dress Suits to Hire in 1987 (Schneider, [An interview] 171). Just prior to the NEA controversies, she performed World Without End, and shortly after the controversies she created Sins of Omission and Clit note^.'^ In the late 1990s she responded to the denouement of the NEA Four suit with Preaching to the Perverted. In all her work from the 1980s through the NEA controversies, Hughes employed camp traditions that used corny jokes and "tasteless"
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language to undermine pretensions; she also consistently created lyrical passages that considered childhood curiosity about sexuality and adult struggles regarding lesbian identity. As with the other members of the NEA Four, part of Hughes's radical practice consists of incorporating overt political commentary into her work. The work she was performing when she was defunded, World Without End, for example, contains denounceinents of people-especially men-who appropriate feminist ideas for use in oppressive campaigns for sexual Puritanism and against reproductive choice and free expression. At one point in the piece Hughes's uimained but clearly autobiographical character critiques men who claim to support equal rights for women, saying: But what's this antiabortion fever gripping the nation, huh? . . . Oh, I know what you're thinlzing. You're thinlzing there's women in the antiabortion movement. Well, that's what they want you to think! Those are not women. Nancy Reagan isn't even human, she's a hand puppet. (Champagne 24)
Hughes attacks appropriation of feminism by inen and women who speak from the Right. Not only does Hughes incorporate overt political commentary into her work, she includes discussioils of the relationship between politics and art in her overtly political art. Following the passage quoted above, Hughes comments, ironically: Oh, I know! This is not art! Believe you me, I wish I could be whipping out a haiku, or doing a little macrami demonstration. . . . O h I lznow the difference between politics and art! I went to art school . . . and the first thing they said when they saw me coming through the door was: "Holly, don't hit them over the head. Art is not supposed to hit them over the head!" Well neither are fathers. (Champagne 25)
Hughes then recounts an incident in which a newspaper columnist blamed an abused woman for failing to prevent the death of her daughter-rather than the father who killed her. "That's when I gave up on my macrame career," Hughes says (Champagne 25). So Hughes not only incorporates overt political commentary into her work, but also justifies this strategy to the audience. In addition to revealing overt commentary, the passage quoted above demonstrates Hughes's technique of shifting rapidly from breezy quips to outrage. In performance such moments are clearly confrontational but do not necessarily alienate spectators. Rather, as Hughes herself argues, she serves as a witness testifying to abuses both personal and systemic-a tactic she sees as linking solo performance and social movements (in my experience, such strategies of testimony were indeed part of the demonstrations,
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meetings, and other events coordinated by activists involved in social change movements). Hughes combines an accessible performance style with dramatic presentations of overt political anecdotes and arguments that create in her work a quality C. Carr identifies as "an undercurrent of dark comic rage" (Carr, "No Trace . . ." 67). She also has other notes in her range: when I have seen Hughes perform, she has always been passionate and engaging; her delivery is often self-deprecating and humorous, sometimes lyrical, and at pivotal moments, filled with glee or joy. Though Hughes fills her works with unapologetic commentary on political issues, she sees her performance work as political primarily because it renders visible lesbian sexuality (H. Hughes, Interview). In doing so, she deploys strategies of transgression and resistance. Indeed, when Hughes writes or performs lesbian sexuality and women's sexual pleasure generally, she exemplifies the ways in which a performer may combine tactics of transgression and resistance: to speak about or enact lesbian sexuality on stage, in public, is at once to transgress mainstream taboos against homosexuality and to resist pressures to remain silent about lesbian identity and women's sexuality. A central component of the politics of Hughes's transgressive style revolves around the appropriation of words describing sex or the female body that are conventionally thought to be derogatory (see also Willnot11 218). In Sins of Omission, for instance, she describes her girlfriend's breasts as "headlights," then notes that one isn't supposed to say words like "headlights" but only "breasts" (she intentionally mispronounces the word as "breaststs"). In a society where dominant ideologies seek to restrain sexual speech by women generally and lesbians in particular, Hughes speaks lesbian sexuality openly and outrageously. Hughes's tactics of transgression and resistance are not limited to disruption of "proper" language; her work also analyzes homophobia and discusses the need to resist public pressures to remain silent (this is especially true in her autobiographical solo performance). Here one might say that Hughes combines strategies of overt commentary and resistance, both calling upon the audience to resist certain dominant discourses and offering her own thoughts and experiences as a model. In Sins of Omission, she discusses the violence encountered by lesbians, as well as the shame they internalize. "I'm the lucky one," she says, "no one has said kaddish over my still living body while the dead go unclaimed," alluding to rejection of lesbians and gay men by their families and neglect surrounding AIDS (H. Hughes, Sins of Omission). In this piece, Hughes also discusses her fantasies of invisibility. She wishes her girlfriend and she could not be seen, since then they would be safe. But immediately she corrects herself, and discusses the violence that has befallen even those lesbians who kept quiet and inconspicuous. This frank discussion of the cruelty or indifference of mainstream society toward lesbians and gay men constitutes an important political statement: for Hughes, the act of
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discussing lesbian invisibility also works towards resisting and ultimately dispelling that invisibility. Hughes also employs strategies that perform a sense of community, though she does so differently in different works. Her camp plays tend to involve the audience in a sense of play. There is depth to Hughes's characters; as Carr suggests, they "are basically trying to understand their own identities in a world where they don't have a place" (Carr, "No Trace" 67). But the characters also violate the conventions of mainstream theatre, not simply playing to but also playing with the audience." Performed originally before all-lesbian audiences, these works played to an all-female community. Hughes has tried to ensure that subsequent productions continue to represent feminist communities by asserting that only woman should perform in the works. In the stage directions to The Lady Dick, Hughes explains that "There's a disturbing tendency to put men in my plays and since one of my motivations for writing is to create women's voices, this kind of takes the joy out of it for me" (The Lady Dick [introduction] 199). Like the actors and activists who protested against Miss Snigon, Hughes links on-stage representations with the employment of actors who represent a community. Hughes's solo performances, though still playful, perform community in a different manner. They tend to involve more personal and political commentary. In autobiographical pieces, such as Sins of Omission, Hughes is sometimes confrontational but also tends to be self-deprecating and inclusive, welcoming the audience into her private and sometimes idiosyncratic thoughts. This inclusive tone assumes that the audience can appreciate both her occasional diatribes and her celebrations of women's sexuality, especially lesbian sex. Like Finley's first person plural in "Black Sheep," Hughes's tone in her solo work appeals to the audience to behave as a community that shares her political vision. Hughes considers her sometimes-playful/sometimes-confrontational resistance to invisibility to be activism. She explicitly articulates an interconnection between the social worlds of art and activism, recognizing the blurring of these social boundaries. Describing her perception of her dual role of artist and activist, she says, "I . . . can't separate out being an artist, being a lesbian, and being an activist. To me they are as one. There are times when clearly I'm doing one or the other but they're really intertwined and interdependent" (H. Hughes, Interview). Hughes has activist "credentials" that support her analysis of her performance work as part of the weave of her art-activism. She has worked with activists groups, especially artist-activist organizations; for instance, like Finley, she has worked with WAC (H. Hughes, Interview). Hughes describes activism as both struggle for social changes and a means for retaining her own sanity in the face of a society hostile towards lesbians and gays and also apathetic regarding artists; she tells Andre Juno:
23 6
Actors and Activists I keep wondering what the strategies are so I can remain sane, haye an impact-hut not burn myself out. One thing I've done is join a group of about 10 people called GANG in New Yorlz. It's mostly lesbian and gay visual or performance artists including people who've spent time in direct action groups like ACT UP. We've been doing guerrilla pestering and some guerrilla performance, and it's been really exciting. (Juno and Vale 101)
Hughes describes an activist group comprising mainly artists, but artists with activist experience (participation in ACT UP)-a blurring of social categories. She describes GANG actions, which were aimed both at the public and at specifically art-world targets. One action consisted of altering a billboard ad for cigarettes to refer to the AIDS crisis. Another action that Hughes and other GANG members created (this time aimed at the art world) took place at the Bessies awards ceremony (the dance and performance art worlds' equivalent of the Tony Awards): When Hughes was called upon to speak, she did not appear; instead, a gay man and a lesbian came on stage and explained that this silence from a lesbian was what the Right wanted. The remainder of the art-action concentrated upon encouraging gay people in the audience to identify themselves as part of a community and calling upon all the spectators to recognize that gay rights constitutes a crucial issue. For example, at various points throughout the performance event the speakers asked that all the gay and lesbian spectators stand. Following a discussion of the manifestations of homophobia in the art world, the two speakers told a story about Danish resistance to the Nazis (according to this story, when the Nazis demanded that the King of Denmark force Jews to wear a yellow star, the King put on a star himself) and once again asked that everyone who was gay or lesbian in the audience stand up; according to Hughes, almost the entire audience understood the call to solidarity and stood. In part, this action was an attempt by artistactivists to organize their own profession (Juno and Vale 101-102). It was also, however, a crossing of boundaries: the interruption of an awards presentation with a political allegory constitutes an injection of activism into the art world. Discussing this action, Hughes expresses amazement that some people in the audience refused to participate in their call to stand up, saying "this is the arts community in New York City!" (Juno and Vale 102). Hughes's expectation that all dancers and performance artists in New York City would be receptive to such a statement indicates the extent to which (for Hughes, at least) art and activism are interwoven. Hughes found that activist work created community and a sense of immediate action; discussing GANG with Juno, she says that: [As] someone who has mostly done personal or autobiographical worlz, it's such a relief to worlz on something else . . . to sit around over coffee and collaborate and fight (in a really good and productive way) about projects with people you respect, and come up with something and then do it. (Juno and Vale 101, ellipsis in original)
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It is important to reiterate that this does not mean that Hughes abandoned solo performance (quite the contrary), nor that she no longer viewed such work as activism; rather, it reinforces my point that artist-activists occupy a dual role and must coilstantly recalibrate their position within the shared territory of art and activism.
T i m Miller Tim Miller's work epitomizes the blurring of boundaries between performance and activism. Describing his work in a deposition for the NEA suit, Miller alludes to the political foundation that underlies his activist performances: My work as a solo performer has consistently tried to explore the connection between my personal story as a gay person and social events and activism. Jumping off from autobiography, I look for connections between text and gesture, between my life and the world around me, between myself and my audience. My art cannot be divided from my identity as a gay person and AIDS activist. I seek to shake things up and create community through my weird and exciting medium of performing. I believe that my role as a solo performer is to g i x witness to this time; to g i ~ e voice to my community; and to challenge our society. (T. Miller, "Declaration")
Miller was born in 1958 and grew up in Whittier, California (Leabhart 123). When he was nineteen he moved to New York "to do the big white man postmodern art dance thing" (T. Miller qtd. in Breslauer, "Art = Activism"). He became frustrated with the formalism and messageless spectacle of conceptual performance art and began creating overtly political work, such as Postwar (1982), a piece that blended political commentary with a family-history narrative concerning Miller's father's service in World War I1 and Miller's experiences as a young gay man in conservative Whittier (Leabhart 128). In 1980 he co-founded Performance Space 122 (PS122), which became a premier performance art venue in New York City. In the 1980s, Miller returned to the Los Angeles area and, in 1989, he and Linda Frye Burnham launched Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica (Mifflin 87). Miller became an active member of ACT UP when the AIDS activism group reached Los Angeles in the late 1980s (it was founded in New York in 1987 [Crimp and Rolston 27ffl). Long before the advent of ACT UP, miller had incorporated discussion of the AIDS crisis into his work (Breslauer, "Art = Activism"). By the time of the NEA controversies, then, Miller's performance art melded activism, autobiographical stories of gay identity, imaginative narratives, poetic evocations, and overtly political commentary on AIDS, homophobia, censorship, and repression. In 2000, Miller stepped down as artistic director of Highways in order to devote all his time to art-advocacy for gay
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and lesbian rights, including a personal struggle to keep his long-time Australian partner in the US (T. Miller, "End of the Rainbow"). As Miller's biography suggests, he, like the other members of the NEA Four, unapologetically incorporates overt political commentary into his work. Miller's explicit references to politics run a gamut of styles, from impassioned denouncements of homophobia to humorous passages, such as a scene in My Queer Body, a piece he created shortly after his defunding by the NEA, in which he imagines the moment of his own conception. He describes himself as a sperm cell out-running other, homophobic sperm (including one that looks like Jesse Helms) until he can "power share" with a "willing dyke ovum" (T. Miller, My Queer Body 310-311).'8 At other points, Miller elucidates the politics that underlie apparently personal activities. In My Queer Body, for instance, Miller analyzes gay survival strategies when describing his first date in high school, during which he and his boyfriend watch Franco Zefferelli's film of Romeo and Juliet. "Now, what is going on when a coupla fag teenage boys hold hands and watch Romeo and Juliet at the L. A. County Museum of Art?" Miller asks, continuing, "There is a survival technique about how we manage to see who we are. Sure, we enjoy all the cute Italian boys stuffed in their tights and bulging codpieces. But we also project ourselves into the film. Take in the images. Become them. Use them" (My Queer Body 317). Through analysis of a personal story, Miller exposes the politics that underpin an apparently apolitical moment and articulates a history of gay male survival tactics. Miller's title for the piece itself carries an overt political reference, using the word "queer," a term loaded with political significations. Like Hughes and TWAT Team (discussed in an earlier chapter), Miller participates in a tradition of appropriating pejorative words and turning them into emblems. In the mid-1980s, gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists, prompted by the AIDS crisis and the homophobia of the Right, rejected the idea that gays ought to assimilate into mainstream culture and instead advocated a "queer politics" that celebrated gay identity and sexuality as unique and valid. Miller's title participates in this queer movement. Throughout the piece, Miller affirms his identity as a gay man in the face of external homophobia and internalized shame, declaring, "I am a queer and it is good and I am good and I don't just mean in bed" (My Queer Body 329). The use of appropriation suggests that Miller also uses strategies of transgression. In My Queer Body, for instance, Miller not only strips naked, but walks out into the audience and sits in someone's lap, rupturing a myriad of socially constructed barriers including those separating the Moreover, performer from audience and the naked from the clotl~ed.~' Miller calls attention to the boundaries as he crosses them; when he sits in an audience member's lap, he says, "This is the most nervous part of the performance. Here, feel my heart. I see my face reflected in your eyes. I am
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here with you. I a m here with you" ( M y Queer Body 326, emphasis in original). This breach of both social mores and theatrical conventions constitutes a characteristic example of transgression, illustrating Auslander's point that transgression functions as a tactic for calling attention to the actor's physical presence as a means to transforming the audience's perception. Miller, however, does not stop here, but also disrupts the impact of his actorly presence; for example, in one sequence he describes his dexterity at storytelling but punctuates the scene with the comment, "I still feel more of my friends slip away so what good is it?" ( M y Queer Body 326). As a postmodern performer, Miller uses tactics of transgression, appropriation, and actorly presence, but deploys them critically in order not merely to transgress but to resist. Resistance constitutes an ever-present strategy in Miller's work. As with Hughes, it is difficult to say where Miller's tactics of transgression leave off and those of resistance begin, since his method of speaking in graphic detail about gay male sex simultaneously violates taboos mandating heterosexuality and resists the power structures that uphold this dominant ideology. For example, Miller's work features calculated fantasies of sexual-political revolution. The final scene of M y Queer Body consists of Miller's imagined history of the future. After taking a moment to put his clothes back on, Miller imagines a future in which, early in the twenty-first century, a black lesbian is elected president of the United States. She appoints Miller "performance art laureate" and commissions him to compose a "symphonic homoerotic performance art cantata that will exorcise homophobia and bigotry from our land" ( M y Queer Body 330). Miller's performance of this imagined event occupies the final fifteen minutes (approximately) of M y Queer Body and consists of a graphic, humorous, and celebrative description of a gay sexual encounter, set to Ravel's Bolero. Miller, therefore, caps his performance with a public manifestation of precisely that thing that society renders taboo and conservatives find utterly threatening: sex between two men. US heterosexual culture has incorporated lesbian sex scenes into pornography produced for men; gay male sex has remained anathema to the mainstream, however, since it threatens the masculine image that men use to maintain power (see Browning; this is not to say that gay men are somehow "more oppressed" than lesbians, but only that mainstream heterosexual cultures patrol gay and lesbian sex in different ways). Miller includes graphic descriptions of gay male sex in his performances not only to celebrate gay life but also to achieve political ends, simultaneously defying and calling into question the taboo against public discussion of gay sex. At one point in M y Queer Body, Miller reveals these political intentions, interrupting his description of sex to ask, "Now what's the problem here? Is this [the] love that dare not show up on network TV? Is this the sex that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Washington? Is this the buttfuck that put the bees in the bonnets
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and tent poles under the cassocks of cardinals in Columbus?" (My Queer Body 335). Moreover, Miller links gay male sex, art, and politics-remember that, within his narrative, Miller frames his sexual fantasy as an art event at an inauguration. In Miller's imagined future, politics and art coalesce in an act of aural sex.;" Miller's work also aims explicitly at performing community among gay men. The sexual monologue framed within a fantasy of revolution described above functions not only as a personal act of resistance on Miller's part, but also as a collaboration with the audience. As Miller begins the sequence, he asks the spectators to help him "create a little alternative reality" (My Queer Body 329). His fantasies offer the members of the audience (who tend to come from queer communities) the opportunity to explore the possibilities of power. Lest Miller's imaginings be mistaken for wish-fulfillment, rather than a rallying cry, it is important to note that Miller marks his imaginative history of the future as alternative reality. Scholar David Romin analyzes the political position of a similar fantasy in another Miller performance, Sex/Love/Stories, in which a gay orgy in a holding cell following a civil disobedience demonstration leads to a peaceful anarchist gay restructuring of the world. Romin states: [While] the spectator may find direct identification in the fantasies (both the sexual and utopian), Miller refuses to allow any cathartic release. This is, after all, an imaginative retelling of an event that can only possibly be rendered as "real" from the perspective of the future. What is important in t e r m of politics of representation is how AMillerrefuses assimilation as an option and posits direct usurpation as the fantasy or the not )'et real. (Rom511, "Performing" 2 16-21 7, emphasis in original)
Miller frustrates complacent acceptance of an ideal, using fantasy sequences instead to define an agenda. Deriving immediate satisfaction from the fantasy is not the only point; rather, the fantasy serves as a means of solidifying a sense of a queer community the members of which reject the closet and assimilation into mainstream US culture. Miller, who reenacts political demonstrations (real and fantasized) on stage and creates activist-performance actions, epitomizes the artist-activist negotiating the intersection of these two social worlds. To a greater extent than the other members of the NEA Four, Miller cultivated very close and public ties with a single activist group, ACT UP, and included extensive references to this activism in his work on stage. David Romin points out that the community of lesbian-and-gay rights activists with whom Miller worked in the 1980s and 1990s viewed theatricality as a central tactic. He states that "current gay, lesbian, and AIDS activist movements (Queer Nation and ACT UP) have adopted performative measures in order to engage a wide spectrum of reactions toward their public demonstrations" (Roman, "Performing" 213-214). It is important to note that Roman describes performance as a consciously selected stmtegy, not a "trait" inherent to gays and lesbians.
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Not all of Miller's activism depends, however, on maintaining ties with ACT UP and other queer direct-action groups." Like Hughes, Miller views his performance art work as activism, arguing that it resists homophobia by presenting positive, visible images of gay communities. For example, when I talked with Tim Miller, he argued that his work does constitute activism, saying, "Hopefully the work supports [an activist] context. Especially in some of the places I go where there is no highly visible activist voice." Moreover, Miller asserted that "In a country that has degraded the idea of a political culture, anything that creates in a small way the idea that a political culture exists and that there's a way to be politically acculturated as a citizen [has value]." Miller also noted that his work can function as activism for a community in "practical waysn-raising funds and mobilizing a community. He said, "often I'll go in places and raise lots of money for organizations or help coalesce energies around a local issue. If you're in a city for a week, or five days, you're effectiveness in any but a symbolic way is probably pretty limited-but symbols are very powerful." Sometimes Miller is invited into a community by activists wishing to address an issue; the "practical" activist function of his work also arises out of his work as a professional performer. As he tours the country making a living as a performance artist, Miller establishes and maintains contacts with activists in gay communities throughout the country. Miller's career, then, blends activist and artistic activity. As with the other performers I have discussed, Miller's status as an artist-activist suggests a blurring of boundaries separating art and society, a quality that permeates his performances. O n stage, Miller combines artistic and political expression to a remarkable degree, staging performances at political demonstrations and incorporating events surrounding political activism into the plot and imagery of his art. Most of his pieces from the 1980s and early 1990s include descriptions of gay rights demonstrations, such as discussions of encounters with the police due to planned civil disobedience or unplanned harassment. In Stretch Marks, the piece he was performing at the advent of the NEA controversy, Miller gives a detailed description of a 1989 week-long vigil at Los Angeles County Hospital which called attention to lack of facilities for people with AIDS. Miller does not simply report the event in the past tense, but also re-stages his role in the rally for the theatre audience. He describes the scene at the Hospital to the audience, saying, "Now it's my turn. I come out from the group, approach the stage and begin." He then gets up on a soapbox and announces "THE WEEK OF THE AIDS COALITION T O UNLEASH POWER (ACT UP 1 LA) VIGIL AT LA COUNTY GENERAL HOSPITAL WHERE T H E FREEWAYS MEET I N BEAUTIFUL EAST LA T O DEMAND PROPER CARE, PROGRAMS AND AN AIDS WARD HERE AT THE BIGGEST HOSPITAL I N THE WORLD" (T. Miller, Stretch Marks 162). Miller then breaks off, describes further details of the demonstration for the audience and then steps back into the character of
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himself-as-orator, saying, "People have passed seven days and seven nights in front of this building together . . . soup has been made . . . stories been told . . . performances been done . . . TV cameras been pointed . . . sex been had (thank god for those two [perseverant] dudes in that pup tent over there . . . wobbling and shaking . . . and I say unto you now that if Boy Scouts had been like this I would have made it past Tenderfoot)" (T. Miller, Stretch Marks 164, ellipses in original). Miller mixes description of the demonstration with his political speech. His on-stage performance work even includes detailed discussions of the goals and significance of direct action activism. In the middle of the political speech cum performance in Stretch Marks he asks, "now . . . what has actually happened here," and continues: [Has] all this stuff made County General Hospital rise from its foundations and fly away. . . trailing rotten plumbing. . . sadness . . . and a thousand IV tubes doing a slow anti-viral drip as it disappears to some utopia beyond the barrio??? No. That has not happened. But maybe it will make some other things happen. [ . . . ] LIKE MAYBE . . . a new kind of community is being born. [ . . . ] LIKE MAYBE . . . we fags and leshos can become a model for how Americans can stop forgetting and holding in and avoiding and feeding off of a lot of suffering in this world and off the world herself [ . . . ] BECAUSE. . . BECAUSE. . . BECAUSE BECAUSE . . . silence actually does equal death BECAUSE . . . action actually does equal life . . . these are not metaphors or gym weac (T. Miller, Stretch Marks 165, ellipses not bracketed appear in the original)
This rhetoric is at once poetic and powerful, offering gay-and-lesbianactivist spectators insight into and affirmation of their work, and explaining the value of that work to non-activists (e.g., arguing that gay and lesbian action offers a model of community to the nation). The speech also melds activism and art. It's never entirely clear what portion of the speech is addressed to the stage audience and what part is a recreation of the performance before the crowd at the demonstration. Miller brings his skills as a performer to demonstrations, then brings the demonstration on stage, positioning the spectator at the vantage point of radical queers and their supporters in front of County Hospital. In doing so, he blurs boundaries between activism and performance. The interdependence of performance and activism in Miller's work becomes even clearer if one considers the impact on spectators of his restaging activist events. The sequence could serve as a radical moment for both gay and non-gay spectators. Yet, both in his addresses to the audience and in his reconstruction of his speech, Miller clearly speaks to a gay audience, although he recognizes that non-gay-people are likely to attend
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both the performance and the demonstration." I speculate that, for audience members who were part of the gay activist community (and had attended or knew about the original demonstration, or similar demonstrations), the speech described above served as both celebration and documentation-important things for groups that rarely see their activity lauded within the mainstream. The recapitulation of a demonstration onstage offered Miller the opportunity to tell this community specific things: that they were a community, that they ought to identify with other marginalized groups, and that their struggles could serve as a model to change US society generally. Like Finley and Hughes, Miller had to negotiate the demands of participation in two social worlds. In a 1993 interview, while reiterating his commitment to progressive politics, Miller stated that he felt the need to explore poetic and creative issues. Miller explained that personal explorations in some works, such as an imagined journey into the volcano of his own psyche in M y Queer Body, indicated, in part, that "my mistrust of my doctrinaire side is strong at this point." Miller stated that M y Queer B o d y "feels very post-NEA, in many ways post-ACT UP." This is not to say that Miller was no longer involved with ACT UP, but rather that he questioned his celebrity as the "ACT UP poster boy." In our conversation, he explained that he had become suspicious of certain "ways that I positioned myself as an ACT UP cheerleader-which was genuine. But there were certain ways that it wasn't really feeding my deepest impulses as an artist, at this point. It did at one point." Miller went on to explain that any "socially contexted artists" must determine how much energy to devote to communal struggles and how much "metaphorical currency" one spends exploring one's "most personal idiosyncratic needsx-a dynamic Miller found fascinating even as he negotiated it. During our interview, Miller asserted his belief that the tension between art and politics is productive and that, "if you stay with it, it can be very powerful and exciting and keep changing your work with the pull between your personal creative process and a kind of public service" (T. Miller, Interview). Indeed, despite his renewed emphasis on confronting personal demons, activism was by no means absent from his work or his life when we conversed. In the same interview, he noted that "once a year or [so] I put a significant amount of energy into a street-guerrilla theatre project of some sort." Likewise, since our conversation, Miller has continued to identify himself as a "gay artistlactivist" (e.g., in his 1998 denouncement of the Supreme Court's decision in the NEA Case, "Supreme Drag") and has continued to use activist performance as a means to confront injustices that are at once personal and political. For instance, Glory B o x constitutes a protest against the impending deportation of his partner of seven years and the discriminatory US immigration laws that prevent gay and lesbian people from foreign countries from staying with their partners in the US (T. Miller, "End of the Rainbow").
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Postmodern performance artists negotiate and often blur the boundaries between art and politics, as the work of Fleck, Finley, Hughes, and Miller demonstrate. Many such artists maintain insider status in activist organization; they use tools including overt commentary, transgression, resistance, and performances of community to build politically engaged performances that offer spectators pieces of an ever-emerging political puzzle; they stage these activist performances in direct actions and on stage; they themselves negotiate the roles of professional performer, political activist, and citizen. Finally, they and their work participate in national political discourses, as the NEA controversies demonstrate. 111. ARTIST-ACTIVISTS AND NATIONAL POLITICXL DISCOURSE: THENEA CONTROVERSIES When the spotlight of controversy fell on Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller, the performers were greeted by misrepresentations of their work and accusations that they were undermining the NEA. A review of the NEA debates reveals, however, that the defunding of the Four constituted a component of a number of national political discourses. In particular, the attacks on the NEA itself and the NEA Four by conservative religious and political figures formed a part of more general assaults on civil rights and the public sphere-attacks the artists recognized and responded to through their activist performance. Prior to and following their defunding by the NEA, Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller, though they had numerous defenders, were widely reviled as exhibitionists, spoilers, and elite shock-artists (these public pronouncements were shadowed by anonymous harassment-ICaren Finley, for instance, reports that she experience stalking and death-threats over the course of the eight-year suit; T. Williams). These charges came not only from conservative politicians, but also from the ostensibly neutral media and from art world insiders. Prominent members of the media and the government, whether through ignorance or malice, misrepresented the performers' acts and belittled their goals. C N N reported inaccurately that "John Fleck urinates on a picture of Jesus ChristX(Battista);conservative commentators Rowland Evans and John Novak wrote an article that created (or, at the least, cemented) the stereotype of Karen Finley as the "chocolate-smeared woman" (Hughes notes that Pat Buchanan conflated this image with her own performance when he called Finley a "chocolatecovered lesbian"; 0 Homo Solo 10); and David Gergen (later a Clinton aid) claimed that Holly Hughes's "performance on stage includes a scene in which she places her hand up her vagina" (Gergen 256). These misrepresentations fused outright inaccuracy (Hughes did not masturbate on stage; Fleck did not pee on Jesus) with misinterpretation (for instance, Finley was covered in chocolate during a scene in We Keep Our Victims Ready, but
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the reduction of the entire performance to this image belittled the content of her work, a devaluation similar to the misinterpretation of Asian Americans' denouncements of casting discrimination through the question "can only blonds play Hamlet?"). Many art world participants were loath to challenge this public impression of the performance-artist-as-freak; indeed, some blamed the NEA Four and other controversial artists for the crisis in arts funding. During the NEA controversy, the established arts communities often supported the NEA by arguing that controversial grants represented only a tiny fraction of the work of the Endowment. They implied, and sometimes stated outright, that the NEA had made some "mistake" in funding art that became coi~troversial.~~ Other art world participants went further, accusing performance artists of undermining the NEA. Drama critic John Heilpern, for example, supposed that Karen Finley "has done more to close down the National Endowment for the Arts than Senator Jesse Helms could have wished for in his wildest dreams. . ." (Heilpern 184). (Even some critics on the Left suggested that the attention devoted to defending the NEA and a few controversial artists actually strengthened oppressive institutions and distracted the Left from larger social issues, a stance that tended to skirt the fact that the attacks on the NEA formed part of a larger backlash against civil rights.)" Before the truth could get its boots on, Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller-indeed all performance artists-were widely viewed as freaks at the fringe of the art world or subversive perverts masquerading as artists to score political points on the public dime. While the overview of the artistactivists' work in the preceding section offers some sense of the power and complex politics of the NEA Four's work, assertions of the "actual quality" of their art cannot explain their role in the NEA controversies. One should view the performance artists as neither "freaks" nor passive victims of censorship. Rather, they participated in a longer history of arts controversies and in ongoing cultural contests regarding civil rights and the future of the public sphere, as a history of the NEA controversies reveals.
History of the NEA Controversies The controversies that embroiled the NEA beginning in 1989 were unique in their scope, the public attention they received, and the vitriol conservatives directed at the E n d o w ~ n e n t .The ~ ~ controversies did not, however, constitute the first debates involving the NEA specifically or government-funded arts programs generally. The founders and leaders of the US Federal government (who, until the twentieth century, almost exclusively represented European traditions) consistently have greeted Federal funding of the arts with ambivalence. They have recognized that the "world's great societies" have been remembered for their cultural productions and, more specifically, have hoped to compete with their European contemporaries. Yet, strong ideologies of Puritanism and
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individualisin have led US leaders to be suspicious of art, which they have viewed as lacking practical application and even leading to undignified or immoral situations (Cuinmings 31-79). Arts controversies early in US history revolved around such issues as the price and propriety of public art works cominissioned by Congress and the probity of accepting a posthumous gift from a foreign citizen in order to found the Smithsonian Institution (Cummings).The first broad, national arts programs sponsored by the US government arose during the New Deal. Despite the well-known success of these programs-many post offices still house WPA muralsthey were hampered by accusations that the work was subversive (indeed, the Federal Theatre Project was terminated after only four years, perhaps as a sop to conservatives intent on destroying the entire New Deal; see 07Reilly-Ainandes 47; see also Melosh). As with the NEA, WPA administrators' attempts to preserve their programs sometimes led them to interfere with artists and projects, as the famous case of The Cradle Wzll Rock demonstrate^.>^ Though most controversies surrounding public funding of art during this period derived from the mood of rabid anti-Communism that gripped the US from the 1930s through the late 1950s, controversies also arose out of anxieties surrounding sexual expression." After the demise of the New Deal arts programs at the advent of World War 11, the US did not have another official arts agency until the founding of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in 1965. The NEA and NEH grew out of a variety of political and social initiatives and conditions, including coordinated lobbying by private and state arts organizations, a strong economy, and a perceived need to protect artistic "heritage" from budget shortfalls prompted by inflation (Galligan, Levitt). The NEA quickly became an imprimatur for established forins of art. To cite only one example of the NEA's influence, Arthur Levitt, Jr., writing in 1991, reported that "every Pulitzer Prize-winning play since 1976 received its premiere production at a nonprofit theater, with NEA support" (Levitt 22, emphasis in original). The arts advocates who founded the NEA sought to shield the endowment from the governinental meddling that had interfered with previous attempts at Federal funding (Levitt 29). The NEA, therefore, followed European models that sought to insulate the people making decisions about specific grants from direct contact with the political process. The NEA exists as a two-tiered structure: the initial screening of applicants being made by a myriad of Peer Review Panels staffed by experts in a given field (e.g., a painting panel includes painters and art critics) who pass their recoinmendations on for approval to a small National Council on the Arts, the members of which are appointed by the president. The NEA's enabling legislation also authorized block grants to any state that established a state council for the arts (as most soon did). In order to "safeguard" this process, the NEA and NEH are subject to yearly appropriations by Congress and to
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reauthorization (initially every five years). Though ostensibly insulated against electoral politics, the NEA was always political because it was a Federal institution making decisions regarding the use of resources. Despite the desire of the NEA founders that the Endowment be sheltered from electoral politics, the organization had to weather numerous small public squalls and a few political thunderstorms prior to encountering a hurricane in 1989. In 1972, for instance, Erica Jong acknowledged NEA support in her book exploring women's sexuality, Fear of Flying, prompting objections to NEA funding of the project by, among others, first-term Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) (Brookman and Singer 333)." Although the agency expanded under the Nixon and Carter administrations, in 1981 the NEA absorbed a 1 0 percent budget cut after Ronald Reagan proposed a 50 percent cut-aides thought it would not be politically feasible to eliminate the NEA altogether (Brookman and Singer 335). At this time, the NEA began changing its programs in response to political pressure." Similarly, conservative legislators called for content restrictions on grants during the Reagan years (Brookman and Singer 337). This history demonstrates that it is absurd aild perverse to blame the artistic controversies that bloomed in 1989 upon the artists themselves: objections to NEA projects and to the NEA as a whole began at least as early as the first years of the Reagan administration, and many of the same individuals who were part of the debate in the 1990s (e.g., Helms) had been working against the NEA for years. One may nevertheless ask why the NEA became the center of controversy in the late 1980s. Even prior to these debates, some critics on the Left charged that the Endowment lacked an effective base of support, contending that the Endowment concentrated its funding on mainstream institutions, failed to engage adequately members of the general public, and even alienated the grassroots membership of various art worlds (Arian; Galligan 153)."' While this critique of a failure to achieve cultural democracy explains, in part, the NEA's vulnerability, one must look at additional factors to understand an attack on art and artists that encompassed far more than the arts agency. Many observers note that the rise of the arts controversies coincided with the collapse of communism in Europe, arguing that artists-especially gay and lesbian, female, and other minority artists-offered a "new enemy" conservatives could target in order to preserve their own power (H. Hughes, Interview; Tucker). The latter explanation points to the central factor in the NEA debates: the rise of a powerful and visible political and religious Right in the US during the 1980s. During the 1980s ultraconservative ministers such as Donald Wildmon, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell organized (or expanded) powerful political lobbies. Their efforts were matched by conservative politicians within the Reagan administration, as indicated by the hearings held on pornography by Attorney General Edwin Meese (Heins). Likewise, at the time of the NEA controversies conservatives had
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introduced or intensified a variety of attempts to regulate culture, particularly cultural expression that challenged dominant ideologies. Legislators and right-wing activists working on the local, statewide, and national levels sought to ban books from library shelves, prevent the burning of the US flag, and prohibit staffs in clinics receiving Federal funding from dispensing information about abortion, to cite only a few concurrent rightwing initiatives (see Dubin, Arresting Images). The details of the NEA debates reveal its character as a cultural contest. Although one cannot choose a moment of origin for such contests, the best date at which to begin a discussion of the NEA debates that eventually embroiled the NEA Four is April 5, 1989, when long-time conservative Christian organizer Rev. Donald Wildinon called the attention of members of Congress and the media to the NEA's indirect role in funding Andres Serrano's photograph Piss Christ, a relatively formalist photograph of a crucifix submerged in amber fluid, revealed by the title to be urine, which Wildmon declared an intentional affront to Christiai~s.~' On May 18, 1989, Senator Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY)was the first to make a statement before Congress decrying the use of Federal funds to support the work of Andres Serrano and objecting to Piss Christ in particular. Other legislators soon answered the call to investigate the supposedly nefarious dealings of the NEA. O n June 8, Representative Richard Armey (R-TX) led more than one hundred members of Congress who sent a letter to the NEA criticizing the endowment's support of a retrospective entitled Robert Mapplethorpe: T h e Perfect M o m e n t (which contained a number of frank images depicting gay sex). This rapid shift of attention from alleged blasphemy to denunciations of gay sexual expression reveals one of the most startling aspects of the NEA debates: the ease with which conservatives linked "homoeroticism" and "~bscenity."~'Conservatives constructed a formula that permeated debates about public funding of the arts through the mid-1990s: gay art = immoral art = political art = bad art. The controversies quickly grew, becoming part of the history of cultural contests of the late twentieth century. Days after the Armey letter became public knowledge, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, canceled plans to exhibit the Mapplethorpe show. Appropriations hearings in Congress led to symbolic cuts in the NEA budget and the now-infamous Helms Amendment; though the actual "anti-obscenity" code imposed on the NEA was not as restrictive as Helms had wanted, it constituted the "first time Congress has mandated content restrictions for NEA grants" (Brookman and Singer 348). Hoping to avoid further controversy, NEA chair Frohnmayer stated that the NEA would "voluntarily" make grant recipients sign a form saying that they would not use NEA funds to create "obscene" work^.^' This action met with a legal challenge from the Bella Lewitzky Dance Foundation and the Newport Harbor Art Museum, and a federal judge ruled that the NEA's "obscenity oath" was unconstitutional
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(see Bella Lewitzky). Meanwhile, in response to a suit by artist David Wojnarowicz, a judge ruled in August of 1990 that Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association was required to redistribute a pamphlet that had reproduced and criticized Wojnarowicz's work out of context and without the artist's consent, but awarded Wojnarowicz only $1 in damages (Cole, Untitled Article). During the same month, the Contemporary Art Center (CAC) in Cincinnati and the museum's director, Dennis Barrie, were charged with displaying child pornography and pandering obscenity when the museum hosted the Mapplethorpe exhibit. Though acquitted in October 1990, Barrie was fired a year or so after the trial-as was Amy Bannister, another CAC administrator-inaiilly due to the costs incurred during the controversy (according to Northwestern University art historian Larry Silver in conversation with the author). Also in October 1990, the rap group 2 Live Crew was likewise acquitted on obscenity charges in Florida, although, in unrelated cases, their records were banned in some parts of Florida and a record-seller was arrested and convicted for selling them. O n June 29, 1990, John Frohninayer announced the denial of NEA grants to Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, leading to their suit, which resulted in the return of their grant money plus damages, but failed to overturn a new "decency" provision attached to the NEA's reauthorization by Congress. Controversies regarding the NEA continued during the course of the NEA Four's suit, and the patterns that emerged do not inspire confidence in the future of arts funding in the US. When the Republicans took control of Congress, as a result of the 1994 midterm elections, the NEA experienced radical budget cuts and restructuring. Its budget fell from $162.3 million in the 1995 fiscal year to $99.5 million in 1996, and, as of the 2000 fiscal year, has declined slightly each year since.44Congress also forced the NEA to lay off staff and cease making grants to individual artists, except fiction writers. In a few cases, such as the 1992 presidential elections, the conservative attack on spending tax dollars on art may have backfired (in the short term) if for no other reason than that while conservatives beat their breasts about "moral decline," most people were beginning to worry about their jobs." Nevertheless, controversy continued to swirl around the NEA in the years following the NEA Four's defunding. In the summer of 1994, for example, highly distorted reports surrounding a performance by Ron Athey rekindled conservative attacks on the NEA (the accounts erroneously stated that Athey and an assistant had dripped HIV-positive blood on the audience; see D. Davis 39-41; Cash, 99-100; Romin, Acts 149ff). Similarly, NEA administrators and Council members continued to overrule decisions made by peer panels regarding controversial artists; these cases achieved less prominenence than the NEA Four defunding and led to no legal action because NEA administrators were careful not to violate the agency's policies, as Frohnmayer allegedly had done (M. W i l ~ o n ) . ~ ~
Actors and Activists The NEA Four and Their Suit The details of the NEA Four's defunding and subsequent suit merit description, particularly since they reveal that the performers were not picking a fight with the NEA, but rather that, as artist-activists, they sought to combat attacks from the political establishment. Though NEA officials claimed they had chosen to fund only work of the highest artistic quality, the evidence bears out the artists' claims that they were denied grants under direct pressure on the Endowment from the Bush administration. NEA Chair Frohnmayer received a memo from an aid who Frohnmayer believed was taking orders from the Bush administration identifying the four performers' grant applications as "potentially explosive"; Bush's Chief of Staff John Sununu told Frohnmayer not to fund "political art"; and Bush himself sent Frohnmayer a note saying "he didn't want a dime of taxpayer's money going to art that was 'clearly and visibly filtl~."'~'The NEA Four were singled out as "potentially explosive" grantees because of their exploration of politics and sexuality. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Frohnmayer accepted these arguments and denied grants to the four performers. It appears that Frohnmayer was sincerely concerned with preserving the integrity of the NEA, and was willing to save the agency at the expense of new and controversial art." In February of 1990, the Performance Artists Program Peer Review Panel of the NEA unanimously recommended that 18 of 90 applications they had reviewed receive grants, including those of Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and miller.^' O n May 4, John Frohnmayer, responding the pressure described above, asked the Peer Review Panel to reconsider the recommendations for Fleck, Hughes, and Miller (the plaintiffs stated that a friend of Frohnmayer's had vouched that Finley's work was not obscene). The Peer Review Panel conducted a telephone conference along with Frohnmayer and the NEA's staff, and again unanimously recommended funding. O n May 11, 1990, conservative commentators Evans and Novak published their article (the one that identified Karen Finley as the "chocolate-smeared woman") in the Washlngton Post, advocating that Frohnmayer veto controversial grants under consideration-the article itself increased the pressure that he do so (Evans and Novak 27; Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive, 155-156). Karen Finley was the only artist mentioned by name in the article, and she asserted that portions of the article quoted her grant application, thereby breaching the legally guaranteed privacy of her application. O n May 13, 1990, the National Council on the Arts that runs the NEA and has final say over grants deferred consideration of fellowships in the Performance Artists Program until its August meeting, in order to gather further information on the "controversial artists." In June of 1990 Frohnmayer began polling Council members by telephone in order to resolve the issue prior to the August
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meeting. In their suit, the NEA Four alleged that in so doing Frohnmayer failed to gather a quorum and violated NEA procedures. On June 29, Frohnmayer announced his decision to fund only 1 4 of the 18 grants recommended by the Peer Panel. After appeals of the denial of their grants were denied by the NEA, the four performers filed suit against on September 27, 1990, charging that their grants had been revoked for political rather than aesthetic reasons, that John Frohnmayer had deviated from requisite NEA procedures, and that the NEA had violated the artists' privacy by leaking information from their grant applications to the press."' The history of the NEA Four's suit divides into two parts: its success in regaining their grants and its failure to overturn "decency" codes imposed on the NEA by Congress. O n June 4, 1993, the Justice department settled with the NEA Four regarding their grants. Each artist received $6,000 in compensation for the violation of their privacy in addition to a settlement in the amount of their grant requests: $5,000 for Fleck and Miller and $8,000 for Finley and Hughes. The NEA also paid $202,000 to cover the artists' legal fees (Haithman). Linking the settlement to the arrival of the Clinton administration, Hughes quipped that the Four had received everything they demanded "except Hillary" (qtd. in Gelb, "Duchess"; on settlement see "NEA will Pay"). C. Carr ("Artful Dodging") points out that Frohnmayer's violation of procedures gave the administration an out (implying that the Clinton administration could claim that it simply did not wish to lose in court, thus settling the case and satisfying the arts community without goading conservatives). The NEA Four's suit, however, failed to overturn the "decency" clause in the NEA's reauthorizing legislation. In October of 1990, Congress had reauthorized the National Endowment for the Arts (for three years instead of the usual five). Efforts by Jesse Helms and others to include explicit content restrictions were defeated, but part of the legislation stipulated that applications be judged on merit but should also "[take] into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public" (20 U.S.C. 954 [dl [I988 Ed Sup 11, 113189-1/2/91, page 6011). After the passage of this legislation, the NEA Four were joined in their suit by the National Association of Artists' Organizations; the plaintiffs broadened the suit to charge that the "decency" provisions of the reauthorization legislation exerted a chilling effect on their First Amendment rights. On June 9, 1992, Judge A. Wallace Tashima ruled on the "decency" clause, declaring it unconstitutional (Karen Finley, et al. v. National, "Memorandum Opinion"). The Justice department appealed Judge Tashima's decision-surprisingly after Clinton took office-arguing that content restrictions were permissible under Rust v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court Case that restricted clinics receiving Federal funds from discussing abortion." Subsequently, the Ninth Circuit appeals court upheld Judge Tashima's finding that the law was unconstitutional,
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and the government appealed to the Supreme Court. On June 25, 1998, the Supreme Court overruled Tashima and the Ninth Circuit in an eight-to-one decision; only Justice Souter dissented. The Court's opinion argued that "considering" decency as one among other factors did not constitute discrimination or abridge the First Amendment (despite the fact that, in practice, such a vague "consideration" clearly could be used to excuse discrimination). It also accepted the government's assertion that the NEA had complied with Congress's decency requirement simply by ensuring that panel members represented and recognized diverse communities. The only silver lining for arts advocates and supporters of politically engaged artwho viewed the decision as an enormous defeat-was that the Justices declared that the government could not use restrictive language, such as decency clauses, to discriminate against certain points of view, and that future cases based on such discrimination would raise serious constitutional questions (National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley)." The details of the NEA Four's suit reveal that the artists were neither irresponsible spoilers rocking the art communities' boats (e.g., their suit hardly targeted the NEA, but rather sought to redress the denial of their grants due to meddling in the NEA's process by the Bush administration), nor were they passive victims of the Right. Instead, their art practice and activism in the 1980s and 1990s, including their suit against the NEA, constituted participation in contests within culture regarding representation (tangling with the same issues regarding the "slippage" of the senses of representation encountered by Asian American actors protesting Miss Saigon). The performance artists' work and their participation in the NEA controversy reveals connections between art, activism, and national political discourse.
The NEA Four and National Political Discourses Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller, along with their lawyers and fellow plaintiffs, participated in a variety of discourses, and examination of their experience reveals links between art world issues, activism, and cultural contests. Perhaps the most prevalent discourse surrounding the NEA Four's defunding and the larger NEA controversies of which they formed a part has entailed rhetorics of "free expression," "free speech," or "artistic freedom." These issues certainly were central to the debates, but they tended to become containing discourses: patterns of rhetoric upholding established points of view. The discourse of free expression allowed mainstream arts advocates to defend the right to speech in principle while avoiding or even suppressing the content of that speech: calls for gay and lesbian rights and frank discussions of sexuality, especially gay, lesbian, and women's sexuality. Holly Hughes, for instance, asserted in my conversation
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with her that even progressive arts advocates asked that she limit her reaction to the denial of her grant to arguing for free speech and that she not discuss the homophobia exposed by the NEA controversies (apparently fearing that confronting homophobia overtly would alienate mainstream support).ji The NEA Four and their suit entailed far more than a debate over artistic freedom. Both the variety and the potency of discourse surrounding arts funding become clear when one considers the conservative discourse, prevalent during the debates, which conflated issues of economics and morality to frame the issue in terms of "the taxpayers' values." Defenders of the dominant order saw the suit-and even the performers' initial application for Federal funding-as audacity. David Gergen wrote disparagingly in a1990 article of reports that Tim Miller created political art encouraging acceptance of gay men and lesbians, saying, "They [Miller and other members of the NEA Four] want to engage in wanton destruction of a nation's values and they expect that same nation to pay their bills" (Gergen 255). Similarly, Judge Andrew Kleinfeld, in his dissent of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal's decision to side with the artists (the step prior to the case's appearance before the Supreme Court), declared, "When a democratic government pays artists to stick their thumbs in the public's eye, the public naturally becomes annoyed and attempts to exercise its ordinary authority in a democracy to control through Congress how tax monies are spent" ("Supreme Court to rule"). The bias in such arguments is clear: does speaking out against sexism or in favor of gay rights constitute poking the "public" in the eye; indeed, are not gay men, lesbians, and artists part of "the taxpayers" and "the nation" and "the public" ? The discourse of "taxpayers' values" exposes attacks on the arts as part of a larger ultraconservative agenda that has both discursive and pragmatic elements: conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s sought to define morality in their terms, and to use this moral discourse both to raise funds and consolidate power. For example, Holly Hughes contends that the Right both espoused l~omopl~obia and discovered that it could organize constituents by promulgating homophobia (H. Hughes, Interview; her claim finds support, ironically, in the memoir of the man who denied her a grant: John Frohnmayer suggests that he was shocked by the vel~einence and openness of homophobia among some conservative members of Congress; Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive 93-94).j4Like critical theorists and activist-performers, contemporary conservative activists perceive links between representation and power. Attacks on the NEA Four constitute part of the Right's discourse of "culture wars" that serves as an effective tactic in a variety of ways. Conservatives can profit from attacks on disenfranchised populations, no matter how absurd (Buchanan's denouncement of the public television show Teletubbies for including an ostensibly gay character comes to mind). First, such attacks force minority populations to
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expend energy rebutting attacks. Second, mainstream administrators in government, the media, and the rest of the private sector may respond to such attacks by shying away from now "controversial" material, or by seeking to appease the Right by offering to "balance" their programs by airing right-wing views. Finally, these attacks offer conservatives "no lose" scenarios: should their discourse take hold in the public mind (as it did in the case of the "chocolate-smeared woman"), conservatives frame the course of debate; should their view be ridiculed, the faithful find confirmation of a liberal conspiracy." While one must be wary of indulging conspiracy theories oneself, analysis of the NEA controversies and their context do reveal a series of cultural contests underway in the US regarding the future of the public sphere. The struggles stemmed from two interrelated phenomena. First, as Jan Cohen-Cruz summarizes, "Public space has shrunk as private enterprise has taken it over for commercial purposes" (2). During the period when the NEA controversies played out, the corporate world not only continued a decades-long process of globalization, but also became the revered model of collective action in the US (e.g., some conservatives became so emboldened as to call for an end to non-profit corporations). Second, as the discussion above of Gergen's and Judge Kleinfeld's dichotomy between the artists and "the public" indicates, the NEA Four and their supporters contested a conservative movement that sought to reduce the scope of the "public sphere" and redefine the very idea of a public.'" Conservative campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s sought to eliminate, restrict, reduce, or redefine public education, public welfare programs, public land, public protest, public broadcasting, and public funding of everything from art to abortion services. Though affiliates of the Right tended to lead this movement, Centrists often contributed to it (recall Tipper Gore's campaign to regulate the music industry and the widespread support on both sides of the Congressional aisle for the "Defense of Marriage Act" that denies public recognition to same-sex marriages). Summaries of some of these campaigns reveal a clear attempt to control both the use and the discourse of "the public" (as well as obvious rhetorical links to the NEA controversies). Conservative educational "reforins"-voucher programs at the secondary level, coupled with attacks on affirmative action, multiculturalism, and feminism in higher education-epitomized an attempt to dismantle both the substance and the spirit of public institutions. Similarly, in the 1980s and 1990s, conservatives fought to regulate public protest, working, for instance, to establish a constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the US flag. Legislators fought to enforce "decency" on the Internet. Conservative groups campaigned to regulate profanity in music broadcast on "public" airwaves-an initiative that had clear racial overtones given the popularity of rap music created primarily by African Americans. Recognizing that
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individual conduct cannot exist apart from politics and the public sphere, conservatives deployed a discourse of "family values" that demonized those marginal populations that did not conform to the conservative construction of "normality," especially single mothers and gay men and lesbians (on the illusory nature of the "normal" or "traditional" nuclear family see Coontz). The Right also manipulated the idea that "cultural elites" govern US media in an attempt to eliminate various public programs, such as public broadcasting, on the grounds that they did not serve the entirety of the US population." Links between the NEA debates, national political discourses, and the impoverishment of the public sphere sometimes appear in quite institutional, and oppressive, forms. David Cole, one of the lawyers representing the NEA Four, points out that the Justice department used Rust v. Sullivan as its justification for appealing the decision in the NEA case. This case, upheld by the US Supreme Court, held that the Federal government could restrict clinics receiving Federal funds from discussing abortion with their patients.'Tole argues that the case "may have set the stage for our government to engage in activity the critics have long decried in Communist regimes: indoctrination of the citizenry" (Cole, "Big Brother's New Weapon"). Government funding pervades US society, contributing to everything from the arts to the mail to the streets. Therefore, Cole argues, if the government can place severe content restrictions on any sort of Federal funding, as the Justice department believes it can under Rust, then the government can curtail all speech that does not suit its ideological agenda, targeting specific dissenters (e.g., denying postal service to a magazine critiquing an administration) or banning whole forms of expression (as in the gag rule). Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s did not attack "art" in isolation, rather, they sought to regulate or privatize a wide variety of persons, identities, and activities situated in the public sphere. Though the Right skillfully deployed discursive strategies in an effort to maintain power and enforce their ideologies, they did not control discourse omnipotently. Just as Asian Americans articulated discourses of resistance during the Miss Saigon controversies, so too artist-activists saw their struggles as confrontations with dominant cultures. As artists and citizens, Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller perceived their suit not as a personal quest for funds but as activism confronting discrimination and homophobia. ICaren Finley, for instance, stated that she "felt it was my social responsibility to be involved in a lawsuit" (Harris 30). Likewise, following the Court's decision Tim Miller released a statement linking the decision to other issues of discrimination within US society (T. Miller, "Supreme Drag"). Nor were the NEA Four alone in articulating their suit as activism; during conversations with activists in Chicago, I found that the defunding of the Four was seen as a typical instance of a larger trend of discrimination. Despite its mixed results, then, the suit was not only the
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negotiation of a conflict within the networks of an art world, but also an act of resistance that offered potential benefits to people beyond the artists themselves. In addition, the artist-activists' and their supporters' reactions to the arts controversies reveal attention to social change and a blurring of art and activism." On stage and in public protests, supporters of the arts created performative protests denouncing discrimination and articulating their own vision of a public sphere. Many of these actions, performances, and public statements deployed the same tactics found in the activistperformance practice of the NEA Four; they deployed direct commentary, transgressive acts, resistance that exposed the tactics of authorities, and they performed a sense of community-an assertion in the face of conservative rhetoric that oppressed communities would not disappear. Performance and protest merged throughout the course of the NEA debates. The Corcoran's cancellation of the Mapplethorpe show sparked a protest attended by approximately nine hundred people. During the demonstration Mapplethorpe's images were projected onto the side of the Corcoran, a performative act that transgressed boundaries (revealing that which had been hidden; superimposing the radical, censored image onto the semi-public building; conflating art and protest) and resisted the museum board and Congress's attempts to suppress homoeroticism. In a similar act of both performative and literal resistance, Tim Miller and other artist activists were arrested during civil disobedience at the Los Angeles Federal Building "when artists in prison uniforms put on a guerrilla theatre trial convicting the government of crimes against the First Amendment" (Breslauer, "Art = Activism"). Art actions such as these not only connected censorship to other issues (in this case, challenging homophobia), but also performed community: the group of protesters asserted themselves as a public community that refused to be rendered invisible. The performer's activist-art likewise addressed their experiences as "the NEA Four," linking their suit to broad social issues. John Fleck saw his 1992 A Snowball's Chance in Hell as commentary on the media misrepresentation of his work, "a primal response to the NEA and the . . . media's manipulation of the truth" (Fleck, Interview). In 1998, just as the Supreme Court decision in the NEA Four case was released, Karen Finley staged The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman, which combined new material with a reprise of earlier work, including scenes that had prompted her defunding. Following the release of the opinion, Finley incorporated elements of the Court's press conference into the performance (Feingold, "Unreel"; T. Williams). In Preaching to the Perverted, Hughes similarly documented her experiences with the Supreme Court via performance, linking them to larger social issues and seeking to expose the discursive strategies underpinning the Court's authority. The stage was decorated with miniature flags, bunting, and cardboard boxes, out of
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which Hughes retrieved props (a row of little yellow plastic ducks stood in for the Supreme Court Justices). In the course of the performance, she moved from an ironic comparison of participating in a Supreme Court case with being in a hit show (her lawyers informed her shortly before the hearing that they could only guarantee her a few tickets), to an analysis of the oppressive, even Foucauldian, architecture and rules of the Supreme Court. According to Hughes, the stairs leading into the building are so ill-proportioned that you must always look down and watch your step, assuring that you enter the Court with your head bowed; once in the chamber, spectators and the parties involved may neither talk nor write. Hughes compared the hearing to high school detention, noting that the atmosphere implies that if you're there, you must have done something wrong. The work, furthermore, articulated relationships between Hughes's experiences and larger political issues (she argues, for instance, that the word "decency" is a sign flashing "no queers"). As artist-activists, Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller substantially blurred distinctions between institutional performance and the worlds of activism. They created activist performances, negotiated insider status in the worlds of professional performance and political activism, andthrough their suit against the NEA and the first Bush administration-challenged dominant ideologies relating not only to public funding of the arts, but to a wide swath of social issues, including homophobia, sexism, and the future of the idea of the public itself.
l ~ n l e s sotherwise indicated, "the Bush administration" refers to the first Bush administration. The evidence suggests that NEX Chair Frohnmayer rejected the NEA Four's grants under direct pressure from the administration; e.g., both court documents and Frohnn~ayer's memoir show that Bush and Chief of Staff Tohn Sununu contacted Frohnmayer regarding the performers' grants. Frohnmayer's memoir, Lenz~ing Town Alive: Confesszons of an Arts W a r ~ i oconstitutes ~, an important primary source due to his inside look at the workings of the NEA and the Bush adnlinistration during the cultural controversies of the late 1980s and 1990s. Frohnmayer's confessional tone in the book, however, suggests an effort at recuperating his image. The best commentary on this agenda appeared in C. Carr's review, in which a caption puns on the book's title, dubbing Frohnmayer "the arts worrier" (see Frohnmayer's Leaving Town Aliz~e;C. Carr, " A r t f ~ ~ l Dodging"; and Dubin, "Tongue Untied"). 2 ~ u b l i s h e dscripts by Fink!; Fleck, Hughes, and Miller are listed in the bibliography under the artists' names. h fair amount of critical work has appeared on each of the N E h Four (though less has been written about John Fleck)-a few prominent works are listed here. Hart and Phelan's collection Actzng Out: Fe~nznistPe~fomancescontains several important essays on Finley and Hughes by Hart, Carr, Davy, and others. O n Finley, see also Erickson; Fuchs; Schuler; and the epistolary exchange among Schuler, Finley, and
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others in the letter sections of TDR 34.2 and 34.4. O n Fleck see Breslauer, "Apostle" and "John Fleck's Radical"; and Burnham. O n Hughes see Davy, "Reading Past the Heterosexual Imperative"; Dolan, "Building a Theatrical Vernacular"; Erickson; Hughes and Rorngn; Savran; Schneider, Explicit Body; Schneider's interview "Holly Hughes: Polyn~orphousPerversity and the Lesbian Scientist"; L. Miller, '"Polyn~orphousPerversity' in Women's Performance Art"; and Wilmoth. O n Tim Miller see Durland; Romdn, "Performing All Our Lives"; Phelan, "Tim Miller's My Queer Body"; Miller and Romdn; and Wallace. For discussion and history of public funding of the arts written in light of the NEA controversies see Benedict; for conlprehensive surveys of the NEX debates and other cultural controversies of the 1980s and early 1990s, see Dubin, Awesting Inznges; and Bolton. Also note that I did not coin the terrn "artist-activist"; it appears in a number of discussions of performance history (e.g., T. Jones xi; Breslauer, "Art = Activism"; Greenrvald). - ? ~ o m d (Acts n 123ff) also notes conflicting approaches to the terms "performance art" and "performance," arguing that some critics see distinct histories behind the terms, while others conflate them to create a binary opposition with conventional theatre. 4 ~ u r i n ga presentation at the conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Chicago, IL, 8 August 1997, Hughes argued that performance art is a form of theatre and that separating the two marginalizes performance artists. She notes the vulnerability of gay and lesbian performers in Hughes and Roman ( a ) , where she also critiques the attitude of those who disnliss performance art, saying, "There's a pejorative connotation to the terrn 'performance art,' a sense that it is a junior achievement art form, a warm-up to making real art, or just a phase some of us had to go through." > ~ u g h e sand Rorn6n argue convincingly that the performance artltheatre binary furthers discrimination. Yet, one should also note that many perfornlance artists enter the art world from disciplines other than theatre (dance, music, visual arts, and so on) or from outside any art world (e.g., Annie Sprinkle), and that these artists may eschew association with "theatre." Indeed, many performance artists would view the subsuming of "performance art" into "theatre" as an appropriation of the cutting edge by an establishment form. Such appropriation, however, is clearly the opposite of the broadening of theatre that Hughes and Ronldn seek. 6 ~ e c k e rargues that a musical instrument does, in fact, constitute a convention, since it is the physical repository of a variety of joint knowledges, ranging from what an instrument ought to sound like to how it should be constructed (Ayt Wo~lds40-67). For a description and discussion of Anderson's recording-head violin performances, see Auslander, Presence and Resistance 119ff. 'As an example of the clash of perfornlance art and mainstream theatrical conventions, witness the frustration with which John Heilpern, drama critic for the New Yo~lz O b s e l v e ~ ,greets Karen Finley's apparent ineptness in The A m e ~ i w nChestnut: "When something goes wrong during a Karen Finely performance, it is and it isn't part of the show. It doesn't bother her, but it bothers me . . . . it's just a little sloppy, that's all, to forget your costumes, nlisplace a few props . . . and blow the opening of your show. . . . [The Anze~icanChestnut] was first seen two years ago at the American Repertory Theater . . . Are we entitled to wonder why she doesn't know her own script by now? We are entitled" (Heilpern 18.5). The rub is that Finley's tactic in Ame~icanCbestnzrt is to stage incompetence. Heilpern acknowledges that Finley is unconcerned with polished performance, but fails to recognize her gaffs as a challenge to the conventions of the theatre world. Christopher Hawthorne reports 011 the same lapses that vex Heilpern, but notes that they constitute Finley's "conspic~~ously self-conscious performance style." Hawthorne notes that the perfornlance of incompetence grates on some audience members, but also reports,
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"Finley is not sloppy or grumpy, argues Vzllage Voice critic Michael Feingold; rather, in a brilliant mix of Brecht and postmodern feminist theor!; she 'eschews technique, with its tactics and duplicities."' (I should note that Hawthorne is noncommittal as to his own opinion of Finley's techniques, though, unlike Heilpern, he recognizes them as technique.) 8011 Finley's identification with visual arts as opposed to theatre, see McCracken. T h e o ~ yof Total B h n e was first performed at the Kitchen in New York City in 1988 (see L. Hart, "Motherhood").
9 ~ x c e p twhere otherwise indicated, I base my history of performance art upon Goldberg, Pe~fonnanceArt, Goldberg, "Performance: A Hidden History," Battcock and Nickas 24-36; Sayre; and Henri. Goldberg argues that many artistic movements which are now known primarily for their visual works (such as Futurism, Dada, and conceptual art) began by utilizing performance to challenge conventional notions of artistic expression ("Performance: A Hidden History" 26). 1 0 ~ l ~ exactly at constitutes the historical avant-,marde and where it was located is a matter of debate. At one extreme, Wellwarth ( 2 ) states, rather broadly, that "Avant-garde drama has always been with us. . . ." O n the other hand, IZistenberg (28-30), citing Andreas Huyssen, argues that the historical avant-garde x\ras nlostly limited to Europe and died out before World War 11, and that the US ferment in the 1950s and 1960s appeared to be new mostly because the US ignored the historical avant-garde. Of course, many proponents of the avant-garde emigrated from Europe to the US as a result of World War 11, so one could view the post-war US activity as a successor to, rather than an imitator of, the historical avant-garde. The legacy of the avant-garde likewise prompts debate. Jarneson ("Reflections" 146) argues that the techniques of the historical, nlodernist avantgarde (specifically Brechtian alienation) have, in the postnlodern era, been transfornled into mainstream standards. Rebecca Schneider articulates the ambivalence with which contemporary cornnlentators view the concept of the avant-garde in her reference to "the ever-cutting edge of what we, the 'nth' generation, refuse to let ourselves continue to call the avantgarde [sic]" (Rev. of On Edge 152). See also Schechner, Future of Rztzral 5. O n masques and performance art, see Di Felice; and Goldberg, Pe~fbwzanceAT^ 8-9. l l s a y r e ( 8 ) argues that the formalist impulse represents only one aspect of the historical avant-garde and that nlodernisnl "has always had an 'other' side." He refers to the subversive potential of much of the work created by the historical avant-garde, and argues more specifically that postmodernism grew out of the work of participants in performance-oriented rnovenlents within the avant-garde, movements that were shunned by other e offers several examples of activist modernists (Sayre 9-13). Goldberg, P e ~ f o ~ m a n cArt, avant-garde art, such as the Blue Blouse Group's use of avant-garde techniques to celebrate the revolution within the Soviet Union (46). 1 2 0 f the figures nlentioned in the text, Schneernann is the least well-known outside the visual art and performance worlds, possibly because she was a wornan working in a maledominated period and dealing explicitly with sexuality. She negotiated the fine line encountered by IZaren Finley and others in the 1980s: her work advocated resDect for women's exoerieke. an end to' male violence. and an end to sexism. but it also affirmed a wornan's right to sexual pleasure through explicit representation of the body and of sex. See Schneider, Explicit Body; Sayre 99-100; and Schneemann. 13Many formalists of the 1960s rejected any association with theatre: Michael Fried, for instance, wrote that "Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre," believing that true art ought not be dependent upon a spectator (Sayre 6-7). This attitude constitutes a permutation of the "antitheatrical prejudice" articulated by Jonas Barish. See also Birringer (441, who discusses 1960s performers' rejection of mainstream theatre.
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1 4 ~ h return e to overt politics and "art/activism" among performance artists in the 1980s ireactinrru to the relative dominance of formalism in the 1970s) is documented in a number of sources: Auslander, P~esenceand Resistdnce Iff (citing Andy Grundberg); Schneider, Rev. of O n Edge 153; Breslauer, "Art = Activism. . ."; and D. Davis (esp. 38-39). lSThe list in the text merely hints at the diversity of performa~lceart in the 1980s and 1990s. Texts by some of these performers appear in Champagne. Interviews with some of these artists can be found in Juno and Vale and in various issues of TDR. For a consideration of Sprinkle's deployment of her body in performance, see Schneider, Explzczt Body 52ff. Schneider (Rev. of On Edge 154) notes that the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the world of perfornlance art casts an ironic and grim light on the endurance art of the 1970s (in which artists endured pain voluntarily and [usually] under controlled conditions). I6A comment that arose during a telephone conversation between NEA chair Frohnmayer and the solo performers' peer review panel (convened by Frohnmayer, who asked the panel members to defend their support for Fleck, Hughes, and Miller) offers ironic evidence of the relative freedom the perfornlance art world offers artists. Frohnmayer reports that some panel members argued that the solo performers program was "perhaps the Endowment's most volatile program, where we were dealing with single artists with no institutional obligations or restraints" (Leming Town Alive 153). 1 7 ~ n l e s sotherwise indicated, biographical infornlation and perfornlance analysis throughout this section is derived from attendance at performances, newspaper and journal articles, interviews conducted by myself and others, and upon the NEA Four's descriptions of themselves in depositions to the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles (listed in the bibliography under each artist's name). 1814iller and Hughes asserted that their work was activist in personal interviews. Karen Finley declined a request for an interview, citing her busy schedule, but her actions and her statements to journalists suggests that she, too, views her art as activism (e.g., Juno and Vale 41-49); Fleck, on the other hand, recognizes that his work has a strong political impact but eschews the term "political artist" (Fleck, Interview). 191 don't suggest that wearing apparel bearing political slogans in and of itself constitutes activism (indeed, the "mainstream" frequently appropriates and commodifies initially political apparel). However, appreciating such apparel and understanding commentaries referring to it require an understanding of the codes of activism and therefore suggest knowledge of activist conventions. 2 0 ~ h epotential for exploitation and appropriation exists whenever a person associated with dominant cultural groups, such as myself, writes about people deemed Other in donlinant ideologies. The problem is particularly acute in the case of the NEA Four since their work deals explicitly with their position as members of marginalized communities. I recognize these dangers, but the alternative is to exclude discussion of the four artists' perfornlance practice from my consideration of their activism and def~mding. 2 1 ~ n l e s sotherwise indicated, throughout the study ellipses indicate my omissions from quotations. Brackets surround ellipses only in quotations that contain both original ellipses and my omissions. 22My analysis of Finley's work is based upon script analysis and attendance at We Keep OUTVictims Reddy in Chicago in 1990 and A Ce~tainLevel otDenidl in Chicago in 1995. Finley has described herself as functioning as a metaphoric medium (Erickson 231).
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261
2 3 ~ u o t a t i o ~in~ sthe text appear in the published poem "St. Valentine's Massacre" (Shock Eeatment 116-121), but I heard them (or similar lines) when attending of a performance of We Keep OUTVictims Ready. A spectator might also construe a racial signification or a reference to blackface in this image of a White women embodying degradation by coating herself with brown paste, although that reading does not appear to be supported by Finley's text, which does not mention racial issues at all in this sequence. 24~inley'smonument was installed from May of 1990 through April 1991, and is discussed in Juno and Vale 43; I also found discussions of the piece in Finley's program browsed 6/1/00. notes to We Keep O U TVictzms Ready and at \v~\~~\~.creativetime.org, 25My arggunlent that art worlds cultivate "cherished ideas" derives from Beck's "Inglorious Color" and Becker's Ayt Wodds. It is important to note that all social worlds function through the use of such sacred ideas. 2 6 ~ o t ethat the back cover of 0 Solo Homo identifies Hughes as a "founding member" of W O W Cafe, though in the book itself (477) Hughes says she "stumbled into" the venue; in any event, Hughes was clearly a central participant in the Cafe's activities. The title We11 of Hornzness is a vun of The We11 of Loneliness. Radclvffe Hall's 1928 novel Carr describes Hughes's plaiwritinb as "gleefully inventof repressed lesbian sexuality. ing a genre with little precedent . . . the timeless, tasteless world of 'Dyke Noir"' (qtd. in the program notes for Hughes's Szns of Omisszon); for more on "Dyke Noir" see Carr, "No Trace" 68. Note that Hughes's work has been performed by people other than herself; see, Carr, "No Trace" 69. I attended Hughes' performance entitled Szns of Omisszon, which I believe Hughes revised, changing the title to Clzt Notes (no doubt a pun on the popular study guides, Cliff's Notes); see H . Hughes, Clit Note.
6.
2 7 ~ h eLady Dick, for example, ends with a literal con. Garnet McClit pronlises to show the audience a trick if someone will give her a dollar bill, pulling out a deck of cards to imply that this will be a magic trick; someone (a plant) gives her a five dollar bill, which she proceeds to stuff in her bra-that's the trick (The Lady Dick 215). 2 8 ~ h o u g hI quote from the published text, I saw Miller perform this piece twice: in St. Louis in October of 1992 and in Chicago in April of 1993. I also attended Miller's performance of Naked Breath in Chicago in June of 1994. I should also note that performance scholar Peggy Phelan expresses reservations about My Qzree~Body, including this scene, in a review (Phelan, "Tim Miller's"). Phelan points out that Miller's presentation of himself as already embodied in a sperm-however lighthearted-sounds a note similar to that of anti-abortion activists who "speak for" the "pre-born." Phelan's point is well-argued, though I wonder if Miller's image could actually serve to disarm the absolutist rhetoric of the Right through appropriation and humor. For a response to Phelan's review (though not to this point), see Wallace. 29Miller did not plant people in the audience to accommodate the action of sitting nude in an audience member's lap, although sonletirnes he "chose [the] friendly lap" of an acq~~aintance (Gussom; "Being Gay"). Also, though the piece speaks primarily to gay men, Miller did, at times, sit in a woman's lap. -?Owhilethe analysis here is my own, I a m indebted to others who have also analyzed Miller's use of fantasy. Richard Runkel shared with me his paper on Miller's use of fantasy; see also Roman, "Performing." It also bears repeating that Phelan, in the review cited above (Phelan, "Tim Miller's") supports Miller's politics but expresses the reservation that his fantasy of gay male community tends to envision lesbians as mere supporting characters.
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Actors and Activists
- ? l ~ i l l e rlike , Finley, uses his artistic tools to serve conlrnunities in ways not directly associated with a particular activist group. He conducts service work in the Los Angeles gay community, performing regularly at a progressive church a ~ l dconducting performance workshops for gay men that aim at establishing a sense of identity and community. 3 2 ~ one t point in the passage described in the text, Miller coyly acknowledges the minimal participation of straight men in gay activism, calling for unity among "homos . . . people of color . . . the undocunlented . . . fenlinist ecologists . . . crazed global performance artists . . . AND ALL YOU STRAIGHT WHITE GUYS TOO! !! BOTH OF YOU! !! !" (T. Miller, Stretch M i l ~ k s166). 3 3 ~ o l l yHughes identifies Alex Baldwin as arguing that controversial grants were "mistakes" (Savran 83). Christopher Reeve similarly accepted the conservative definition of controversial work as offensive and defended the NEA on the grounds that such work constituted only a fraction of the agency's grants (Bolton 244-252). See also Frohnmayer. 3 4 ~ h ecriticism of the N E h Four from liberals and Leftists requires further explanation. For a consideration (and rebuttal) of the liberal accusation that attention to cultural politics (such as that found in the work of the N E h Four) distracts the Left from "real" politics, see E. Willis 16-34 (but note that she uses the tern1 "progressive" in a different way than I do). h notable example of a Leftist critique of the attention devoted to the N E h Four is Sarah Schulman's 1990 article "Is the NEX Good for Gay Art?" published in the lesbian and gay publication OtrtWeelz [sic] (reprinted in Bolton 257-259). S c h ~ ~ l m a n , while acknowledging that the defundings of the NEA Four and other artists were unjust, questions the role these artists played in the mainstream art world's "reward system." She argues that those few minority artists who enter the reward system function as tokens (it should be noted that she includes herself in the category) and that White gay men have participated in the exclusion of lesbians and minorities from art worlds. While one cannot deny that the art world encompasses elite practices ("the art world" is, in fact, a diverse collectio~~ of overlapping social worlds whose participants range from activist-artists to conservative aesthetes to art-savvy investors), the argument that defending controversial art merely supports conservative institutions skirts the fact that the attacks on the NEA composed part of a general attack on the disenfranchised. While not wishing to defend the elitist practices of mainstream art worlds, this issue raises the same question I asked regarding the accusation that Asian American actors fought to play stereotypes: can progressives afford to abandon entire fields of representation, even those that are "mainstream"? Another component of Schulman's conlplaint is that censored artists in the 1990s became representatives of gay and lesbian communities. It is important to note that Miller and Hughes reject the idea that they represent the entirety of the gay and lesbian conxnunities and recognize the institutional discrimination that occurs in the art world (personal interviews; see also Wilmoth; H. Hughes and Elovich). Margaret Spillane's concurrence with Schulman's critique offers another example of a left-wing criticisnl of the NEA Four; Most it is important to note that Spillane's article contains serious ~llisi~lterpretatio~~s. notabl!; Spillane accuses Finley of indirectly accepting "n~ultinationalfunny money" from, among other corporations, Philip Morris. While I cannot prove that Finley never received funding via Philip Morris, three months prior to the publication of Spillane's article Finley refused to act as co-host for the Bessies Awards because Philip Morris was the sponsor (Dunning), suggesting she is more aware of the complexities of funding than Spillane acknowledges. 3 5 ~ o rcomprehensive considerations of the history of arts controversies or the NEA debates of the late 1980s and 1990s, see hrian; Bolton; Benedict; Cummings; Dubin; Galligan; Heins; Larson; S. Smith; Vance; IZamerman et al.; and the author's Politics 2nd otherwise indicated, the history that follows is based 011 these P e ~ f o ~ n z m c eUnless . sources.
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Artist-Activists and Blurring Boundaries
3 6 ~ h eC ~ ~ l dWill l e Rock-a radical nlusical celebration of labor created under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project (FTP)-was about to open in June of 1937 when the Works Projects Administration (WPA) banned all openings prior to July 1, an act the producers and many would-be spectators perceived as censorship. Barred from a performance space and lacking musicians (whose union did not want to challenge the ban), directors John Houseman and Orson Welles found another space; since Equity refused to let the actors go on stage, several actors performed from the house (so that they were not technically on stage), and the show's composer provided music from a lone piano (Himelstein 114-15). The incident became a part of theatre lore; Tim Robbins's 1997 film The C ~ n d l e Will Rock constitutes a re-telling of this episode. Robbins's version conflates a number of historical events-his own subtitle to the film admits that it is only "a (mostly) true story." More disturbing than his toying with history is his tendency to take at face value the motives articulated by persons during this controversy, a move that makes the banning of the show appear as something of a mishap (see Klawans). Larson notes that the Minnesota branch of the FTP was suspended due to 3 7 ~ a r y0. a controversy that erupted because "an out-of-work exotic dancer [was] hired along with other perfornlers to provide some Christmas entertainnlent at Civilian Conservation Corps camps. . . ." (Larson xii). It is not clear from Larson's account whether the dancer, Ruby Bae, performed erotic dances in the FTP program, or whether the controversy issued from the mere fact that she had been associated with transgressive sexuality previously. In either case, this example illustrates that issues regarding sex and politics influenced arts funding prior to the NEA controversies. 3 8 ~ h eearly 1980s also witnessed a furor surrounding the somber tone of the design chosen for a Vietnanl Veterans Memorial in an NEA-funded national competition. This cultural contest offers, perhaps, a silver lining: the Menlorial has become one of the most visited monuments in Washington, suggesting that some works greeted initially with anger in some quarters may eventually be accepted by critics and the public alike (see Reich). 3 9 ~ n1983, for instance, NEA chair Frank Hods011 vetoed a peer-review-approved grant submitted by the New York groups Heresies Collective and PADID that " w o ~ ~ have ld supported a series of public forums featuring politically oriented artists Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Suzanne Lacy, and critic Lucy Lippard" (Brookman and Singer 33.5). 40A particularly cogent argument that the NEA had not fulfilled its mission to democratize the arts appears in Edward Arian's Unfirlfilled P~onzise.The timing of Arian's study, however, was ironic. H e notes that the NEX had called upon advocates of progressive reform to show unity with the Endowment in the face of the Reagan administration's hostility. Arian states, "Now that the danger has passed and no significant change of policy has taken place, this widespread but dispersed dissatisfaction is ready for organization into political channels" (125).Arian's study went to print in 1989, the year that saw the advent of the most heated disputes over arts funding since the founding of the Endowment.
.
41A color reproduction of Pzss Cbrzst appears in Dubin, A~restzngImages, f.1.' Ling page 214. Serrano produced this and other works in a series exploring the visual potentials of bodily fluids with a $15,000 fellowship from the Awards in the Visual Arts (AVA)program administrated by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) of WinstonSalem, North Carolina, which had received NEX funding. Piss C h ~ i stoured t as part of an exhibition of AVA winners; its appearance in Richmond, Virginia, apparently offended some viewers, who contacted Wildmon. Serrano claimed that his concerns were purely fornlal and denied that he had sought either shock-value or political commentary (Fwsh Azr Interview).
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Actors and Activists
4 2 ~ e i n snotes that, during the 1980s, secular and religious conservatives wrapped very concrete campaigns in the cloak of "values"; she also points out that their message "was not merely that t h e i ~views on sexualit!; women's rights, reproductive freedom, and religion were correct, but that other views should not even be heard" (Heins 122). See also Frohnmayer; and Meneilly. 4 3 ~ nhis memoir, written after leaving office, Frohnmayer asserts that he required grantees to sign a "decency oath" specifically to draw attention to restrictive language in hopes that it would be overturned in court (Leaving Town Aliz~e69ff; 136). The substantive difference between the Helms Amendment and the language Congress passed is that, where the Helms A~llendmentforbids funding for any image that "promotes obscenity," the final law technically only reiterates already accepted legal prohibitions against obscenit!; particularly the standard established by the 1973 Supreme Court case Mzller v. Calzfornza which states that works with clear artistic, political, or educational aims cannot be deemed obscene (see Vance; Public Law 101-121 304a, 1 0 3 stat. at 701, 741). The Miller standard itself constitutes a restriction of previously permissible (or at least not overtly prohibited) speech. The 1989 no-obscenity clause's legal life was short lived, since appropriation bills are yearly affairs, but, in the realm of cultural contest the Helms Amendment had a grave impact, as it revealed to the NEXs supporters, its conservative opponents, and other concerned observers (such as gay rights activists) that Congressional conservatives had the power to articulate their perspective of morality in the letter of the law. 4 4 ~ ~ ,budget \ appropriations figures, rounded off in my text, appear at
\I-\I-\l:nea.gov/learn/FactsihpprHist.pdf, browsed 23 June 2000. Other changes to the NEA were documented by H . Hughes, 0 Homo Solo; and A. Green. 4 5 ~ thas been argued, for instance, that the Republican party hurt George Bush's chances for reelection when it gave Patrick Buchanan center stage on the first night of the 1992 Republican National Convention because his speech revealed the intolerance of Bush's far-Right supporters and simply because Buchanan filled a space that should have been occupied by more explicit attention to economic anxieties (Lewis; Cronin). 46111 1994, for example, the Endowment denied grants to three photographers-Merry Alpern, Barbara DeGenevieve, and Serrano-working in contested cultural territory. hlpern's images examined the sex-trade; DeGenevieve's work explored an empowered female sexuality through a combination of explicitly sexual language and imagery. See Storch 21. 4 7 ~ r o h n m a y e r(Leaving Town Aliz~e148) charges that NEX Senior Deputy Chairman Alvin Felzenberg was taking orders from the Bush administration; Frohnmayer's book is also the source for Sununu's comment (123) and Bush's note (161). The memo in which Felzenberg calls the NEA Four grants "explosive" also became an exhibit in the NEA Four's suit ( K a ~ e nFznle): et 171. v. Natzonal, "Declarations and Exhibits . . . ," Volume I1 Exhibit 20). Frohnmayer even admitted publicly to responding to political pressure: just prior to issuing his veto on the NEA Four's grants, he spoke before a group of arts professionals in Seattle and informed them, according to the New York Tzmes, that "certain political realities made it unlikely that some theatre grants recommended by the Endowment's peer panels would recelve the Endowment's support" (Gnmarek~nn, "Frohnmqer Said"). See ~ l s oMasters. 4 8 ~ e a the r conclusion of a telephone conference on May 4, 1990, in which he asked Peer Review Panel members to defend their unanimous support for the performers, Frohnmayer asked, "If in the very short political run, the question were: is it more
Artist-Activists and Blurring Boundaries
2 65
important to fund one or more of these people, or to have the Endowment continue in some sort of recognizable form, what do I do?" (Fink)) z. NEA, Exhibit 22). On Pat Robertson's 700 Club, he declared, "What's really happening here is that you're crying that the house [i.e., the NEA] is on fire; the fireman has arrived, and you're hurling bricks at the fireman. . . ." (Bolton 182). Frohnmayer, a moderate Republican trial lawyer and "Washington outsider" from Oregon, admits that, when he arrived in Washington, he had too great a confidence in his own abilities to negotiate with NEA opponents, whom he later recognized were concerned with their own agenda, not the quality of the NEX (see, for example, Leaving Town Aliz~e50). Frohnmayer tended to vacillate while in office; most notabl!; he bowed to pressure to deny a grant to Artists Space in New York City and then g Aliz~e75-89). Although he states that he came to reversed his decision ( L e ~ n ~ i nTown believe more strongly in absolute protection for First Amendment rights over the course of his tenure at the NEA (Leilvzng Town Alzve 33jff), evidence suggests that he continued to maintain a distance from controversial art; for example, in his nlenloirs he states that government interference not only has a "chilling effect" (a cornnlon phrase used to describe a person's avoidance of a certain activity for fear of reprisal) but also a "heating effect" whereby slighted artists seek to be as confrontatio~lalas possible (Leaz~ingTown Aliz~e 117). This comment, in nly viem; indicates that Frohnnlayer does not fully appreciate the position of artists from marginalized communities. Consider also Frohnmayer's comments on the NEA Four specificall!; especially Leaz~ingTown Alive 176-177, where he cornnlents on Finle!; "Just as it would be hard to appreciate the skills of a fellow pugilist who was flailing your face into steak tartare, it was difficult for me to recommend a foul-mouthed, self-indulgent actor who x\ras offensive by design." 4 9 ~ h epeer review panel consisted of theatre professio~lalsPhilip Arnoult, Wickham Boyle, Vince Anthon!; Kim Fowler, Ariel Ashwell, Bill George, and Ron Jenkins. Except where otherwise indicated, I base the summary in the text primarily upon the "First Amended Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief and Damages" in Fznley v. NEA, which was filed on March 27, 1991 (the original Complaint having been filed on September 27, 1990). I have correlated this complaint with the defense's "Answer to First Amended Complaint" and examined documents and newspaper stories to confirm that the plaintiffs' presentation of the facts is accurate. Documents from the case are listed in the bibliography under Killen Finle): et 171. v. Natzonal Endowment for the Arts, et al., with the exception of the depositions of Finle!; Fleck, Hughes, and Miller, which are listed under the respective artist's name. jO1ll 1991, during the next grant cycle and while Frohnmayer remained chair of the NEA, Hughes and Miller did receive NEA grants, and the IZitchen perfornlance space in New York City received a grant to commission a work by Karen Finley and composer Jerry Hunt. At the time, a variety of explanations for the reversal presented themselves. Hughes speculated that other artists "whose identities are controversial-their race, their gender, their sexual orientation-are just going t o be weeded out" (Gamarekian, "Arts Endowment Reverses"). Frohnmayer claimed the record of support for the artists was clearer in 1991 than it had been in 1990. Reporter William Honan noted, however, that the 1990 veto took place when the NEA was under great political pressure, whereas the 1991 announcement came shortly after the NEA had passed an appropriations hurdle in Congress-though conservatives still denounced the 1991 grants ("Endowment Gives"). jllll part, the Justice Department's initial decision to appeal may have been made by holdovers from the Bush administration; C. Carr notes that, while Clinton slogged through "Nannygates" before succeeding in appointing an Attorney General, the Justice Department was led by Stuart Gerson, an assistant Attorney General under Bush and a proponent of content restrictions, a fact that also delayed settlement of the suit (Carr, "Artful Dodging" 30-31). This argument, however, fails to explain the persistence of the
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Actors and Activists
appeal through the 1990s. One wonders if the Clinton administration simply felt it had more to lose by defending controversial artists than by abandoning the arts and civil rights communities, whose members were unlikely to vote Republican regardless of the Democrat's actions regarding the arts. j 2 ~ o t that e the title of the case "flipped" on appeal, since the NEA was now the plaintiff and Finley et al. were, in terms of the appeal process, defendants. An example of the arts communities' perception of the case as a loss appears in C. Carr, "Brief Histor!;" in which she reviews important moments for the avant-garde, concluding with "1998: The NEA Four go to the Supreme Court-and lose." For examples of those who view the decision as a loss but are heartened that the Justices left the door open to future suits to challenge instances in which the decency clause is used to discriminate, see David Cole's comments in Biskupic; and IZastner. Ironically, the same day the court released its decision, five Republican members of the House-apparently frustrated with the GOP leadersvoted with Democrats to fund the NEA for the upcoming year (Pianin). j 3 0 t h e r gay rights advocates dealing with art controversies (unrelated to the NEA controversies) report a similar tendency for advocates of the mainstream to "side-step the issue of sexuality" in favor of defenses "grounded in 'freedom of speech' rhetorics" (IZukki. and Shah 134).Ironicall!; those who use "free speech" discourses to sweep more controversial issues under the rhetorical carpet suppress the very areas where speech is most potent. In an essay on "discourse," Foucault identifies speech dealing with sex and politics-precisely those types of speech around which the NEX rnaelstronl revolved and which the mainstream seeks to evade-as the sites of contest in contemporary society He observes, "It is as though discussion, far from being a transparent, neutral element, allowing us to disarm sexuality and to pacify politics, were one of those privileged areas in which they exercised some of their more awesome powers. In appearance, speech may well be of little account, but the prohibitions surrounding it soon reveal its links with desire and power" (Foucault, "Discourse" 149). 5 4 ~ r o h n m a y e r(Leming Town Aliz~e 93-94) describes a meeting of conservative members of Congress to which he was invited where one member railed against the "moral degradation" of the country by "international faggotry"; Frohnmayer concludes that "The enthusiasnl with which this group pursued hon~osexuals and espoused moral purity hinted at an exorcism of personal demons."
--
3"~oseph Roach explains the ideological mechanism underlying politicians' deployments of empty moralisms to attack marginalized people, arguing that "The strategy is to assert a strong but unspecific claim on cultural normality-in support of 'family values,' for example, or in opposition to 'crimes against nature,' all of which, values and crimes, remain only vaguely defined (though I don't imagine that the crimes against nature include clubbing baby seals to death for their fur or dumping PCBs in the creek). In service of this strategy, the tactic is then to raise a great stink about tax dollars used in support of so-called 'anti-family' works of art. This has the effect of galvanizing a constituency which feels itself threatened-c~~lturally as well as econon~ically-by a rising tide of social difference" (Roach, "Normal Heartlands," 3 8 1 ). j 6 ~ h econnection between the NEA controversies and attacks on the le,macies of activist movements and Great Society social programs has not gone unnoticed by commentators; see, for instance, C. Carr, "Artful Dodging"; and Storch. Likewise, many critics have perceived a crisis in the public sphere; see Said, Cultwe 2nd Impe~idlisin 282-303; Cohen-Cruz; and Cole, "Big Brother's."
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267
j 7 0 n the idea of the "cultural elite" see Galloway, who notes that James D. Hunter, a scholar who forwarded the term "cultural elite" shortly before it became a part of political discourse (it is unclear whether he directly inspired the conservative trope), argues that the "cultural elite" includes all people-from professors to television producers to politicians-who derive their livelihood from the production and distribution of information and knowledge, be they "liberal" or "conservative." j8president Clinton overturned the gag rule by executive order within days of taking office, but George W. Bush could reinstate the ruling. Moreover, Rust zJ. S z d l i z ~ mremains a precedent allowing the government to regulate speech by entities it funds, even to a small degree. jgwhile Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller found that their time was consumed by the NEA controversies as they played out, and while for years to come they continued to confront their defunding and the issues of discrimination and censorship raised by the decision of the Supreme Court, they have neither become obsessed by the controversies nor portrayed themselves as martyrs. Indeed, Tim Miller has stated that other crises, such as the AIDS epidemic and the potential deportation of his partner due to discriminatory immigration laws, loomed larger in his life than the N E h suit (Personal Interview; "End of the Rainbow" ).
Conclusion
Recognizing art as intermingled with politics and social interaction offers possibilities and challenges to performers, scholars, and activists alike. Conservative assaults against overtly political performance are not likely to subside, a fact that in and of itself demonstrates that art exists within cultural contest. Likewise, those who stage and study politically engaged performances cannot escape the barnacle-like attachment of perennial, unanswerable questions to their work: Can performance cause social change? Does overtly political art merely preach to the converted? Do explicitly political artists subordinate aesthetics to their "message"? Advocates of a social view of the arts can, however, reply that these sorts of questions misrepresent the boundaries between art and politics. For example, while one may sometimes reasonably ask if a particular performance aims at too easy a target, many of those who demand general proof that "political art" achieves "efficacy" beyond the "converted" not only assume a homogeneous audience but also imagine a category of "apolitical" art that somehow neither is influenced by nor affects the rest of society. (The "efficacy" debate also demands of explicitly political art a direct causal link between action and change one rarely discovers even in the realm of activism.) In fact, art always entails politics, and permeable membranes, not stone walls, separate artistic and political networks. Works by contemporary critical theorists, performers, and symbolic interaction sociologists-from Trinh T. Minh-ha's assertion that "categories always leak" to Guillermo Gomez-Pefia and Coco Fusco's border crossings to Howard Becker's studies of art worlds enmeshed in society-reveal connections between artistic and socio-political actions (Trinh qtd. in Conquergood, "Rethinking Ethnography" 184). My study has sought to contribute to these discussions and communicate the power and excitement that occurs at such intersections.
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Actors and Activists
Specifically, I have argued for an understanding of performance and politics as a process of social exchange. Rather than seek a definitive genre of political theatre or attempt to seal off the radical from the "mainstream," I have suggested an umbrella term, institutional performance, that can encompass but not confine a variety of ever-changing performance practices. Focusing upon institutional practices allows one to account for "alternative," non-profit, and commercial performance worlds that maintain distinct networks and conventions, but also inevitably interact. In proposing this term, I intended neither to privilege mainstream theatre nor to dismiss the vibrant scholarship in performance studies that stresses performance as a mode of human behavior. Rather, my aim has been to acknowledge the power of performance as both a cultural process and a set of institutional practices. To that end, I have offered a model of politics and performance as a process of exchange among participants in separate but overlapping social worlds. Exchange may be indirect when insiders to one social world self-consciously use conventions associated with another (e.g., when political activists call their demonstration-performances "theatre"), or exchange may be direct when individuals from one world work with people in another. Furthermore, distinctions between indirect and direct exchange, like the lines between social worlds, ultimately blur. This model of art and politics as social exchange helps one consider: 1) the manner in which a given activity functions as both part of social interaction (something done by many people in the practice of everyday life) and as a vocation (a craft people train for and practice either to earn their livings or out of a sense of "calling," or both); 2) the process of negotiation through which insiders to different social worlds engage one another (negotiations that may be productively tense, fraught with appropriation, or relatively harmonious); and 3) the ways in which these intersections of social worlds participate in contests within culture. I have sought to support and flesh out my approach through an examination of the exchange among insiders to the worlds of institutional performance and progressive political activism. Political activists with whom I worked-insiders to social worlds with no particular investment in theatre institutions-not only knowingly staged performances in the course of political organizing, they also frequently referred to these performances as "theatre." These activists created performance-based actions and standing activist-performance ensembles. Such activities constituted indirect exchange with performance worlds. Moreover, progressive activists in the 1990s engaged institutional performance worlds directly: they viewed some performances staged in mainstream venues as contributing to activism, they worked with performance professionals as they created activist performances, and some of them worked as performance professionals themselves. Exchange in the other direction became evident during the Miss Snigon controversies. The musical's producers appropriated the
Conclusion
2 71
conventions of political activism to create a "universal" tragic melodrama. In a quite different vein, professional actors-many who had not previously identified themselves as activists-self-consciously used the conventions of activism as they organized against the casting of the musical. These actors articulated relationships between their lack of demographic representation in the musical's cast and the stereotypical representations of Asians on stage, thereby engaging a variety of national political discourses. Asian Americans inside and outside the theatre world viewed these protests as a watershed event in contemporary Asian American activism. Moreover, as the controversies progressed, professional actors engaged in direct exchange with community activists, not only navigating the shared territory between artistic and activist worlds, but also negotiating their own personal and professional identities. ICaren Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller undertook similar negotiations, blurring artistic and activist identities. Finley, Hughes, and Miller worked as insiders in both the worlds of activism and performance throughout their careers, and Fleck engaged activism as a result of the denial of NEA grants to the four performers. These artists worked in both art worlds and activist organizations, created activist performances on stages and in political demonstrations, and engaged the fray of cultural contest to protest the denial of their grants as an act affecting not only themselves but entire communities. These cases show that a model of art and politics as a process of social exchange links otherwise disparate phenomena: the broad cultural categories of "art" and "politics" (that cannot, in fact, be separated from one another); the occupational practices of those who work as "political people" or "theatre people" or both; and the politics of representation whereby cultural categories and occupational practices slip and slide together on the cultural stage, influenced by and affecting the ways in which people think about, talk about, and interact with one another. Stressing the relationship between art and politics as a process of social exchange offers a number of insights into performance practice and social interaction. By forwarding this model and the cases studies that illustrate it, I seek to add to the vibrant literature on politics and performance. In addition, I add my voice to those who call for a broader understanding of performance-its histories, theories, literatures, and contemporary practices-that includes not simply European and US theatre history but incorporates as central elements: an understanding of performance as a type of human activity; the use of performance as a research method; nonEuropean performance practices; and the histories and literatures created by persons excluded from "traditional" history (my list of approaches that function to broaden the study of performance derives from Roach, "Mardi Gras Indians"; see the passage quoted in the Introduction to this study). Obviously, many of these topics have been excluded from the idea of "performance" due to discrimination against a performer, genre, or concept
2 72
Actors and Activists
based upon social classifications of gender, race, class, or other difference from the mythic norm (to use Lorde's term). In addition, however, my study raises the need to include in the narratives of performance history and the analysis of performance practice the on-stage work of non-theatre people and the off-stage service of theatre professionals. Too often, the performance work of non-professionals has been denigrated as "amateur." This has been especially true of performances created outside conventional venues, but even theatre world hits like activist Barbara Garson's MacBird or the union-member-staged revue Pins and Needles have been regarded as incursions, curiosities, or propaganda pieces that do not meet the standards of "dramatic literature." Instead, scholars and performers alike should regard these instances where outsiders engaged performance practice as pivotal, since they manifest ties between performance worlds and the rest of society, and because these border crossings affect performance worlds profoundly (as the Schacht v. United States case that I analyzed at the beginning of this study demonstrates). Conversely, conventional theatre history has viewed performers' off-stage service as ancillary to their careers. Consider Frederick O'Neal, who (along with Abrain Hill) co-founded the American Negro Theatre in 1940, served as president of Actors' Equity from 1964-1973, and also served as vice-president of the AFL-CIO in 1969. H o w did this service relate to his theatrical career (see O'Neal; see also "O'Neal, Frederick")? I do not mean that figures such as Garson or O'Neal have been ignored entirely (indeed, my study depended upon scholarship concerning connections between performance and social change); rather, I argue that scholars and practitioners may discover interesting questions when we attend to connections between performance professionals and participants in other social worlds. Recognizing institutional performance as a constellation of social worlds opens avenues for research regarding theatre and society not specifically tied to activism (although one must bear in mind that performance always entails politics). Consider, for instance, the case in which the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an organization addressing medical mistakes, included in its annual conference a performance of the Off-Broadway play Charlie Victor Romeo, in which actors reenact the conversation in airplane cockpits during several crashes, based upon "black box" transcripts. The medical organization brought the theatre personnel from New York to California to perform their play as a means to analyze similarities between responses during airline emergencies aild medical crises. In addition, the drama aided in the development of reenactments of medical emergencies by a team at Overlook Hospital in New Jersey (the report on Newshour from which I derive this information does not make it clear whether the play inspired the idea of reenacting medical mistakes or simply contributed to an existing practice, though I suspect the latter; see Dentzer). Here one observes the intersection of various performance forms: "workplace
Conclusion
2 73
performance" (the act of doing a complex occupational task, such as medicine or aviation); reenactment as a means of professional training; and institutional performance in the form of a scripted play performed by actors. This example supplements the analysis presented in this study, which argues that two components required to address the crisis many perceive in performance practice and scholarship are a broadening of the concepts of "theatre" and "performance" and a recognition that much of the future of institutional performance worlds lies in exchange with other social worlds. Realizing more fully the potential for exchange between performance and other social worlds requires a change in ideas about what institutional performance is, how it is created and interpreted, and whom it serves. Many performers and scholars, of course, already seek exchange with other segments of society. Nevertheless, the project of fostering performance's connections with the rest of society faces a number of challenges. Many theatre practitioners and critics persist in denying a connection between performance and politics, which in turn often means that their work continues to depend upon and perpetuate oppressive discourses. Commercial theatre presents a particular crux to those advocating socially engaged performance. New York City, for instance, remains a venerated "center" for mainstream theatre (including corporate ventures such as Disney's Lion King), drawing upon a steady supply of would-be actors willing to work-often for little or no pay and sometimes under poor conditions-for the opportunity to perform and for the possibility of fame. Engaging in commercial theatre presents the hazards of appropriation, misinterpretation, and exploitation. Yet, to eschew commercial theatre entirely and to denounce it as irrevocably corrupt is to abandon an influential field of representation. Such a dismissal would also uphold the idea that social barriers are absolute, when these boundaries are in fact porous. Even in non-commercial worlds such as performance art, university theatre, or regional theatre, one discovers, on the one hand, vibrant possibilities for engagement with other worlds, but, on the other, the threats of funding cuts, shrinking audiences, and aesthetic or political backlash. A final problem is that ostensibly progressive artists may engage in work that does cross social borders and does engage in overt politics and yet still perpetuates dominant ideologies (see Harshaw). One approach to these vexing issues lies (as many scholars suggest) in viewing the terms of debate-commercial and non-profit; "conventional" and "postmodern"; "mainstream" and "alternative"; cosmopolitan and regional; professional and community and university; activist and status quo-as continuums, rather than binaries. In addition to offering possibilities for broadening performance practice and scholarship, the potential for exchange between art and public life, discussed here in terms of politics and performance, has important
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Actors and Activists
implications for social change beyond art worlds. First, of course, performance worlds-even the most esoteric or aesthetically conservative theatre forms-exist in society, not apart from it. The struggles within and among performance institutions affect, are affected by, and exemplify political and cultural contests in society. Second, in an era when the public sphere is crumbling under the weight of conservative campaigns and multinational capitalism, the connections negotiated between actors and activists suggest that cooperation among persons involved in various social worlds offers a means to address systemic problems. Mainstream theatre is not the only world imbued with a sense of crisis; participants in any world predicated upon action in public-including political activists-confront daunting questions of how best to pursue their goals in the shadow cast by mass communication, technologies of surveillance, and an ever more frenetic culture. In fact, a sense of "crisis" pervades postmodern society. Exchange among worlds offers one solution to the problems of the shrinking public sphere and political action in postmodern society. Sharing information and cooperating across socially constructed borders offers a means to work more effectively both within social worlds and in public life. Moreover, the act of engaging in exchange across boundaries that dominant ideologies attempt to define as impermeable constitutes an act of resistance in and of itself. Social border crossings may expose a specific border and those who patrol it, or they may call attention to the general quality of all boundaries and rules as constructed rather than "natural." One finds evidence that exchange challenges authorities and ideologies of "the way things are" in the hostile reactions encountered by people who combine art and activism, such as the NEA Four, or challenge social world conventions, such as the Asian Americans objecting to Miss Saigon's casting. So general cooperation among insiders in different social worlds can constitute a political act. In addition, performance worlds offer particular strategies to all those who oppose dominant ideologies and the decline of the public sphere. Holly Hughes makes this point regarding performance art spaces, declaring lyrically, "They're like little cracks and holes in the culture where something wild and strange can take root and bloom" ( 0 Homo Solo 478). Performance worlds offer specific strategies that establish a public presence and challenge opponents. Of course, conservative activists as well as progressives may avail themselves of performance strategies. The adjectives "wild and strange" aptly describe not only the ingenuity of postmodern performance art, but also the spectacle of the year 2000 election, in which George W. Bush began performing himself as president (e.g., creating a "transition" team) practically from the moment it became evident the election results were in doubt. Yet, at the risk of appearing sentimental, I suggest that the strategies offered by performance worlds tend to favor the disenfranchised challenger over the powerful
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defender of the status quo. Joel Schechter, for instance, notes that when politicians "set themselves up as artists" by staging performances that seek to mislead the public, they become susceptible to satire (Satiric Iwzpersonation 3-4). Progressive activists, on the other hand, seek out the conventions of and participants in performance worlds not to conceal issues but because performance offers tools that reveal ideas publicly. As Jan Cohen-Cruz says of the performance world she documents, radical street performance, "When one needs most to disturb the peace, street performance creates visions of what society might be, and arguments against what it is" ( 6 ) . In Chapter 4, I described strategies cultivated in performance worlds-several of these strategies offer precisely the sort of challenges to power Cohen-Cruz articulates. Overt commentary exclaims against present abuses, while performances of community enact "what society might be." In addition, strategies of transgression (crossing borders) and of resistance (exposing power structures) form a continuum that disturbs not simply a literal peace, but the complacency of dominant ideology (the mainstream's illusion that "the way things are" is the "way things are meant to be"). Finally, activists engage performance worlds because they offer activists another subversive resource: fun. Many activists and scholars (among them May, members of the TWAT Team, Kondo, D o h , McConachie, and Schechter) articulate the political importance of pleasure. Fun, of course, does not constitute the sole province of organized performance, but activists do adopt performance conventions and work with performance professionals, I suggest, because these conventions and performers help them deploy fun strategically. Such strategic fun allows one to enliven a demonstration, to make one's point creatively, to inspire optimism and action during prolonged struggles, and to simply enjoy one's self-perhaps the ultimate challenge to dominant ideologies that demand that one "behave in public." Exchange among insiders to art and political worlds offers benefits to performers, activists, and society. Fostering connections among performance institutions and other social worlds constitutes a daunting task. Yet, as my research on the use of performance by activists, the activism within institutional performance worlds by Asian American professional actors, and the art-activism of Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller demonstrates, such connections arise frequently and successfully. Performers and performance scholars find that engagement with activist worlds broadens and strengthens institutional performance activities. Activists not only seek out performance as a set of cultural practices, but work directly with performers, who offer them strategies for change. Furthermore, in the age of the shrinking public sphere, interaction among actors and activists offers a paradigm for constructive engagement across social boundaries.
Appendix Chronology of Major Events Pertaining to the Cases
The following chronology highlights key events that influenced the exchange among performers and activists detailed in the chapters. It is not intended as a comprehensive overview of every event in each case nogas a review of all controversies that occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s.'~ April 1989
Rev. Donald Wildinon of the American Family Association begins to agitate against the NEA, calling attention to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ.
18 May 1989
Senators Alfonse D7Ainato (R-NY) and Jesse Helms (RNC) denounce, on the floor of the Senate, Serrano and NEA funding of an exhibition of his work.
8 June 1989
Representative Richard Armey (R-TX) and more than one hundred other members of Congress send a letter to the NEA denouncing the funding of exhibitions of the photographic retrospective Robert Mnpplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, which depicts gay sexuality. The Congresspersons' actions prompt the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, to cancel plans to display the exhibition.
20 September 1989
Miss Snigon opens in London.
October 1989
Though defeating the more restrictive Helms Amendment, Congress places content restrictions on the NEA for the first time, attaching a provision to the NERs fiscal year 1990 budget requiring that artists not use grants to create "obscene" art. In January of 1990, a suit filed by dancer Bella Lewitzky and her company leads to the overturning of this provision.
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Appendix
29 June 1990
NEA Chair John Frohnmayer announces the rejection of grants to ICaren Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller.
2 August 1990
Iraq invades Kuwait, setting the stage for the Gulf War, which becomes a focal point of activism in 1991.
7 August 1990 Responding to complaints by Asian American members, US Actors' Equity denies Jonathan Pryce permission to perform the role of the Engineer in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon.
8 August 1990
Cameron Mackintosh cancels Miss Saigon.
16 August 1990 Equity, under intense pressure from the media and many members, reverses its decision. Mackintosh, however, soon announces that, in his view, Equity has poisoned the atmosphere in which he would work, and refuses to reinstate the production. He and Equity officials eventually agree to meet. August 1990 and thereafter
Asian American actors react to Equity's retreat by creating activist organizations, notably the Asian Pacific Alliance for Creative Equality (APACE), that organize grassroots campaigns challenging the inequities the actors perceived in Miss Saigon's casting process. The actors also object to the general lack of dignified roles for Asians in US theatre.
1 7 September 1990
Equity's Council approves the "Statement of Mutual Understanding" negotiated with Miss Snigon's producers.
1 8 September 1990
Mackintosh reinstates Miss Saigon.
2 7 September 1990
The NEA Four file suit against the NEA, charging that Frohnmayer vetoed grants recommended by peer-advisory panels due to political pressure and without following NEA policy. They also assert that the NEA violated the confidentiality of their grant applications.
2 7 October 1990
Congress reauthorizes the NEA for three years rather than the customary five. The legislation includes provisions that grantees observe general standards of "decency." In response, the National Association of
Appendix Artists' Organizations joins the NEA Four's suit, with all the plaintiffs charging that the "decency" clause constitutes a breach of the First Amendment.
11 December Equity rejects Mackintosh's petition that Lea Salonga play 1990-7 January Kim on Broadway (viewing the claim that she offers 1991 "unique services" as a slight to the Asian American acting community); Mackintosh seeks arbitration and wins the right to cast Salonga. 1 6 January 1991
A US led military coalition begins bombing Iraq, prompting protests in the US and throughout the world.
1 9 January O n successive weekends, thousands march in Washington, and 26 Tanuary DC, voicing opposition to the Gulf War.
28 February 1991
Iraq retreats from Kuwait, ending the Gulf War.
6 April 1991
The Heat is on Miss Saigon Coalition, a group of community activists and actors led by two grassroots Asian American lesbian-and-gay rights organizations, stages demonstrations at a benefit performance of Miss Snigon for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a major national gay rights institution. The protesters charge that the musical's casting process was unfair, that the musical depicts derogatory stereotypes of Asians, and that Lambda was insensitive to its constituents of color when it chose the show as a fund-raiser.
11 April 1991
Protests by a coalition of Asian American actors and cominunity activists greet Miss Snigon's Broadway debut. The demonstrators assert that the show's producers discriminated against Asians when they cast Pryce in an Asian role and also charge that the musical depicts derogatory stereotypes of Asians.
2 June 1991
Hinton Battle, Jonathan Pryce, and Lea Salonga receive Tony awards for their performances in Miss Snigon.
22 February 1992
John Frohnmayer announces that he will resign as NEA chair, apparently at the behest of the Bush administration, which is under pressure from the presidential bid by conservative Patrick Buchanan.
280
Appendix
5 April 1992
During the March for Women's Lives, hundreds of thousands of pro-choice activists demonstrate in Washington, DC. The rally features a performance by Karen Finley.
9 June 1992
Federal District Court Judge Wallace Tashima, presiding in the NEA Four case, rules that the "decency" clause is unconstitutional.
November 1992
President Clinton is elected, signaling an end to twelve years of conservative Republican administrations. At the same time, however, voters in Colorado pass Amendment 2 to the state constitution that repeals existing gay rights legislation in three cities and prohibits all Colorado municipalities from creating similar laws. Though immediately blocked by court injunctions, Amendment 2 is perceived by gay rights activists as symbolic of a growing hostility towards gay men and lesbians throughout the US.
May 1993
Protesters picket the Toronto production of Miss Saigon, charging that the show perpetuates stereotypes of Asians.
4 June 1993
The Justice Department settles with the NEA Four; each artist receives an award in the amount of their original grant request plus $6,000 in damages. The government also pays $202,000 to cover the artists' legal fees. The Justice Department, however, continues its appeal, initiated in April 1993, of the June 1992 decision declaring unconstitutional the requirement that the NEA "take into consideration general standards of decency" when granting funds.
March 1995
A Seattle production of Miss Snigon meets with protests objecting to the musical's depiction of Asians.
25 June 1998
The Supreme Court, in an eight-to-one decision, sides with the Justice Department and declares constitutional the requirement that the NEA "take into consideration general standards of decency" when granting funds.
'' I compiled this chronology from a wide variety of documents cited in the chapters. For colnprehensive sources on artistic controversies in the US during the 1980s and early 1990s see Broolanan and Singer, "Chronology," Bolton 33 1-36.3; and Dubin.
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. "Tim Miller's M y Queer Body: An Anatomy in Six Sections."
3 05
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Bibliogmphy
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