5/12 Thoughts
"Dido comes at the threshold of this book because the multiple versions of her story challenge the notion that history had to happen the way it did, or that it did happen the way any single textual or nontextual source of information suggests that it happened. Dido's stories thus dramatize the existence of competing histories in what counts (for some) as the cultural literacy of the West."
-- Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido's Daughters, Prologue, p.2
I'm attracted to this statement because of the idea of "competing histories" and the idea that history didn't have to happen the way it did seem to be helpful ways of looking at what I'm trying to do with creating this performance piece (and because it helps me to recognize that I've always wanted to find a way to set a number (two at least) of competing and contradictory stories onstage at the same time). I set about trying to find and tell a story about how we came to see ourselves––and to perform ourselves––as the particular kind(s) of white people we are, and I hit on the idea of using the visit of the "Four Indian Kings" to Queen Anne's court in 1710 as a way of doing that. And then I got lost in the thicket of stories. Stories about Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter; stories about the Triangular Trade; stories about the Restoration and the emerging British Empire; stories about the slave trade and different attitudes towards it and toward commercial success in any "trade"; stories about skin color and its importance or unimportance in determining who we are by deciding who we are not; stories about the difference between attitudes in London and attitudes in colonial New York or Jamestown or Surinam or Boston; stories about two ships passing each other, one inbound to London carrying four Iroquois sachems and one outbound to America carrying wandering German refugees; stories about slaves after the American Revolution wandering to Canada, to London, to West Africa; stories about people reading The Spectator aloud in London coffeehouses; stories about tragic and heroic lovers and noble savages and beautiful African women who turn from black into white as they move from the page to the stage; stories about celebrity Indians at a performance of Davenant's adaption of Macbeth being made by the crowd in the galleries to sit on the stage so they could be seen during the performance.
So is there a story, or competing stories, in all these other stories about how certain people (in London, in America, in Asheville) came to see themselves as white and therefore as somehow privileged (or privileged and therefore white), and then to see that whiteness and that privilege as so much the norm, so much the natural and inevitable way of things that the idea of "whiteness" or "privilege" somehow disappeared? And does it make any kind of logical or psychological or theatrical sense to link those stories to what happened in London in 1710? And if so, how do I do it?
Another way of thinking about it: Somehow, over time, people figured out how to act––how to talk, how to stand, sit, walk, carry themselves, how to dress, how to carry a certain set of expressions on their faces, how near or far to put themselves in relation to other people depending on who or what those other people were––in ways that would say to themselves and to others, "This is who I am," and "This is what I think is normal," and "This is me being important." All of these behaviors couldn't exist in a vacuum. They all had to be performed in relation to something else and someone else, someone who was different and less important than they were. The point was to distinguish oneself from others in the way one behaved. And it was important to carry an image in one's head of what it was that one was trying so hard not to be. The clearer that negative image was, the more positive one could be about how to embody a sense of who one was. At one time, the clearest and most significant negative/positive dichotomy was "heathen/Christian"; eventually it turned into "black/white" (which had the advantage of being obvious, on the surface, on the skin). The more successful one was in life--success being measured in different ways but almost always in terms of the accumulation of wealth and privilege--the more the particular way of behavior was seen as desirable and as "normal".
So that's a nice story, nice because it's simple. But of course the point of this all is that no story is simple and there isn't just one story. All those words I've just used in the paragraph above are problematic, are contested, are capable of multiple meanings depending on who's talking. So how do I stage that.
Maybe one way is to take those "stories" I listed (incompletely) in my first long paragraph, think of them as scenes, moments, episodes, or emblems, and throw them together in different ways without worrying about what the "whole story" of the piece is. Seek out contradictions. Let the spectators decide what the story is.
"Dido comes at the threshold of this book because the multiple versions of her story challenge the notion that history had to happen the way it did, or that it did happen the way any single textual or nontextual source of information suggests that it happened. Dido's stories thus dramatize the existence of competing histories in what counts (for some) as the cultural literacy of the West."
-- Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido's Daughters, Prologue, p.2
I'm attracted to this statement because of the idea of "competing histories" and the idea that history didn't have to happen the way it did seem to be helpful ways of looking at what I'm trying to do with creating this performance piece (and because it helps me to recognize that I've always wanted to find a way to set a number (two at least) of competing and contradictory stories onstage at the same time). I set about trying to find and tell a story about how we came to see ourselves––and to perform ourselves––as the particular kind(s) of white people we are, and I hit on the idea of using the visit of the "Four Indian Kings" to Queen Anne's court in 1710 as a way of doing that. And then I got lost in the thicket of stories. Stories about Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter; stories about the Triangular Trade; stories about the Restoration and the emerging British Empire; stories about the slave trade and different attitudes towards it and toward commercial success in any "trade"; stories about skin color and its importance or unimportance in determining who we are by deciding who we are not; stories about the difference between attitudes in London and attitudes in colonial New York or Jamestown or Surinam or Boston; stories about two ships passing each other, one inbound to London carrying four Iroquois sachems and one outbound to America carrying wandering German refugees; stories about slaves after the American Revolution wandering to Canada, to London, to West Africa; stories about people reading The Spectator aloud in London coffeehouses; stories about tragic and heroic lovers and noble savages and beautiful African women who turn from black into white as they move from the page to the stage; stories about celebrity Indians at a performance of Davenant's adaption of Macbeth being made by the crowd in the galleries to sit on the stage so they could be seen during the performance.
So is there a story, or competing stories, in all these other stories about how certain people (in London, in America, in Asheville) came to see themselves as white and therefore as somehow privileged (or privileged and therefore white), and then to see that whiteness and that privilege as so much the norm, so much the natural and inevitable way of things that the idea of "whiteness" or "privilege" somehow disappeared? And does it make any kind of logical or psychological or theatrical sense to link those stories to what happened in London in 1710? And if so, how do I do it?
Another way of thinking about it: Somehow, over time, people figured out how to act––how to talk, how to stand, sit, walk, carry themselves, how to dress, how to carry a certain set of expressions on their faces, how near or far to put themselves in relation to other people depending on who or what those other people were––in ways that would say to themselves and to others, "This is who I am," and "This is what I think is normal," and "This is me being important." All of these behaviors couldn't exist in a vacuum. They all had to be performed in relation to something else and someone else, someone who was different and less important than they were. The point was to distinguish oneself from others in the way one behaved. And it was important to carry an image in one's head of what it was that one was trying so hard not to be. The clearer that negative image was, the more positive one could be about how to embody a sense of who one was. At one time, the clearest and most significant negative/positive dichotomy was "heathen/Christian"; eventually it turned into "black/white" (which had the advantage of being obvious, on the surface, on the skin). The more successful one was in life--success being measured in different ways but almost always in terms of the accumulation of wealth and privilege--the more the particular way of behavior was seen as desirable and as "normal".
So that's a nice story, nice because it's simple. But of course the point of this all is that no story is simple and there isn't just one story. All those words I've just used in the paragraph above are problematic, are contested, are capable of multiple meanings depending on who's talking. So how do I stage that.
Maybe one way is to take those "stories" I listed (incompletely) in my first long paragraph, think of them as scenes, moments, episodes, or emblems, and throw them together in different ways without worrying about what the "whole story" of the piece is. Seek out contradictions. Let the spectators decide what the story is.
posted by Graham at 2:18 AM
1 Comments:
Really amazing! Useful information. All the best.
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