This is the first post in a long, long time.

The Oroonoko Project: Black/White/Red Encounters took place December 7-10, 2006 in Kittredge Theatre on the Warren Wilson College campus. It was a Warren Wilson Theatre production.

Here is a link to some photos of the production.

8/15/06 Possible scenario for 1st half of piece:

THE OROONOKO PROJECT: SCENARIO (8/15)


PRE-SHOW:

Possible tables and performances in lobby (invite outside groups?); live music, food

After inspecting lobby, audience enters house via breezeway side entrance;

Audience free to wander among several areas in which different things are happening simultaneously; for example, some possibilities might be:

1) an area (center?) where some actors are preparing, getting into costume & makeup;

2) an area where a clown "professor" is offering a power-point presentation on history of race construction (use one of the video monitors built into throne?);

3) an area where sideshow barker is luring people into a peep-show (inside are 18th-century drawings of slavery, new world encounters, etc.--shown on one of the video monitors built into throne?)

4) an area where stage hand is demonstrating props to be used in the play (especially giant quill pens with microphones) and inviting audience members to try them out;

5) an area in which another "professor" is offering a presentation on the visit of the Four American Kings to London and is discussing Iroquois culture, particularly the tradition of the condolence council (video monitor?);

6) an area where audience members are asked to "buy" (barter?) lottery tickets and explaining that lots will be drawn to determine which audience members get to portray the Four American Kings;

During this preshow, music should be playing (Soundtrack: ??); the atmosphere should be loud, cacaphonous, and festive.

At a certain point, the audience is encouraged (voice-over?) to take seats on either side of the stage, and the stage is cleared of pre-show props, etc.


SCENE ONE:

The lights dim. (Soundtrack: ?? )Two actors in costume and make-up (Lucy, Welldon) take their places on the platform center stage. Lights come up and actors begin to play scene I.i (Oroonoko):

[text]

After scene gets underway, shouts from the audience (actors as plants, encouraging audience members to join in): "We want the Kings! Give us the Kings!" Shouting continues until Theatre Managers enters and begs them to stop, but in vain.

Suddenly lights change, actors on stage freeze, and a voice-over announces that lots will be drawn to determine who gets to play the Kings; two stagehands bring ticket stubs in a container on, and, with great fanfare, the four numbers are read out; the lights change again and the actors and Theatre Manager bring four audience members onto the stage, give them plastic headdresses and tomahawks (?), make them up with warpaint, and place them on the four thrones (Soundtrack: ??).

As they are seated on their thrones, the video monitors come on, the lights change, and the actor portraying Mrs. Behn (in white stocking mask) appears at a microphone reading from the dedication to her Oroonoko (p. 37) (soundtrack: ??). As she reads, the actors portraying Lucy and Welldon, now with white stocking masks, take their places and begin the scene again:

[text]

SCENE TWO:

At the end of the previous scene, lights change (Soundtrack?) and the two actors onstage are replaced by two other actors (Governor, Blanford), also in white stocking masks, who begin Scene I.ii:

[text]

Perhaps: As Oroonoko and the slaves proceed across the stage (represented perhaps, by puppets attached to a chain that Oroonoko and Aboan carry, one at either end) (Soundtrack:??), Mrs. Behn appears at her microphone and speaks a section from her story: "He was pretty tall . . . Illustrious Courts." (pp. 43-44)

Also: Oroonoko's voice may be read into a microphone by a Reader; it might also be that, from the moment the Four Kings are placed on their thrones, all actors' voices are spoke by readers into microphones. Another possiblity: From the moment of Oroonoko's entrance, all characters' voices are miked (read), suggesting the added difficulty of communication when encountering the Other.


SCENE THREE:

As the previous scene ends, the Theatre Manager enters the stage and announces that, as an entre' acte and particularly for the pleasure of the Four Kings (and most particularly to demonstrate the superiority of the English over the Spanish), the theatre will present a scene from Mr. John Dryden's The Indian Emperour:

[text of V.ii, Dryden] (Soundtrack: ??)

SCENE FOUR:

(Possible transition by Theatre Manager)

Actors portraying Oroonoko and Blanford take their positions and begin II.ii:

[text]

At line 77, spot up on Mrs. Behn, who reads excerpt from p. 42 of her Oroonoko, either speaking over the other actors or in a pause. They continue with the scene. At line 82, Mrs. Behn again interrupts, describing Imoinda (p. 44). As the scene continues (Oroonoko speaking with Mrs. Behn?), two figures appear, dressed and moving identically: Black Omoinda and White Omoinda. They exit when Oroonoko describes her being sent "far, far off" (line 109).


SCENE FIVE:

Action continues (II.iii). Black Omoinda watches as White Omoinda plays scene with Governor. When "the scene is drawn", two songs follow (1st & 3rd); scene should be reminiscent of "plantation scenes" from old movies (show clips on videos?) with all available actors in black stocking masks; if actual children could "sing" (probably sung by readers), 'twould be great. (Soundtrack: ??)

Indian attack: (Soundtrack: ??) Indians enter wearing red stocking masks. At one point, Oroonoko and Imoinda (just White? both Black & White?) are only cast members not playing Indians, and Oroonoko kills them all. They disappear to return as White characters.

As Oroonoko plays reunited scene with White Omoinda, Black Omoinda looks on--perhaps this is the last time we see her.


INTERMISSION HERE?

(I lost everything on my hard drive when it died, so some ideas didn't make it to the blog.)

Successive thoughts and ideas up to 7/28



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7/28 New & revised ideas

David's idea for representing race: Instead of stocking masks, masks over makeup; the masks could be changed and would represent specific race, but the makeup (not seen till the end?) would look as if the skin had been peeled away leaving the red musculature underneath. So race could be "taken off" but only by literally peeling away the face.

REALLY INTERESTING. POSSIBLE?

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7/28

Changes after meeting with Don & Bev:

Definite: build out apron only to 2nd row (level with stage) and move audience risers upstage so that more of the acting area is on the stage (but still get two sections of audience facing each other.

Possible: costumes would all be built (since we don't have much appropriate to pull) and would use only red, black, and white as colors; basic undergarment might incorporate those colors but with different patterns for each actor.

Costume add-ons and props could be oversized (parody)

Possible: thrones might incorporate video monitors, perhaps above and behind Kings' head to suggest that the image is what they are seeing; another possibility: Kings are effigies, seated in thrones, with video heads.

Possible: a wireless microphone is built into a large prop (an oversized quill pen?) which would amplify the voice of whoever held it; this person would have The Voice and other would not. Voice = power. Voice = literary power. David's point: someone writes the accounts of what happens (the victors write the histories). Those deprived of voice are forgotten (black Omoinda).

What if white characters could speak (and their race was represented by white, white makeup) but black and indian characters wore stocking masks and their voices were read by "readers"?

And what if the Readers brandished enormous quill pens?

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7/26 IDEA:

1) performance opens with Lucy/Welldon scene "played straight" (makeup, no masks)

2) scene interrupted by shouts from audience for Kings

3) Manager appears, begs for silence; then, either (1) 4 Kings in costume brought from audience and placed on thrones; or (2) total break in action and 4 audience members invited up from house (raffle idea) and given costume bits and war paint, then placed on thrones

4) scene begins again, but this time characters are wearing white masks

rationale: we're seeing the action from here on out through the eyes of the 4 Kings; images are "strange" and skin color is prominent

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7/26

OROONOKO PROJECT: Preliminary (simplified) character list/breakdown
as of 7/26

Cast size: 15 men & women (in any proportion)


Queen's Theatre characters:

Manager
4 Indian Kings (either dressed similarly to Verelst portraits or (if audience members) given cheesy
"Indian" headdresses & tomahawks, warpaint, etc.
possible: entertainers for musical interludes/acts (3 men, 3 women?)


Coffeehouse (and other) characters:

3 London gentlemen
Aphra Behn
possible present-day "readers" (4?)



Oroonoko characters:

female: Lucy (young Englishwoman)
Welldon (Lucy's sister disguised as a man)
Widow Lackitt (older Englishwoman planter)
White Omoinda (Oroonoko's wife from Africa, enslaved: Southerne adaption)
Black Omoinda (Oroonoko's wife from Africa, enslaved): Behn original)

male: Oroonoko (African prince, enslaved: sometimes dressed as English gentleman)
Aboan (Oroonoko's lieutenant, enslaved African)
Governor (English gentleman, planter)
Blanford (English gentelman, planter)
Captain Driver (slave trader)
Planter 1 (English gentleman, planter)
Planter 2 (same)
Planter 3 (same)
Stanmore (English gentleman)
[Jack Stanmore (Stanmore's brother)] optional

various African slaves (3 men, 3 women?)
various American Indians (6 men?)



Macbeth characters:

Macbeth
3 Witches
Banquo
Line of English kings (represented either by actors or video imagery)
Line of Indian kings (same)


Indian Emperour characters (very tentative):

Cortez (Spanish conquistador)
Aztec princess
Montezuma
Spanish priest
Pizarro (conquistador)

NOTES: costumes need not be complete; layers reflecting different periods (present-day, 1710, period of play being presented)
possible present-day layer (men and women): white tights, black bike shorts, red long-sleeved tee or turtleneck

faces covered by appropriate-colored stretchy fabric (stocking or tights): red, black, white
possible mouth-hole cut out

PROBLEM: African slaves and attacking Indians should be nearly naked. How do we represent them? Cover shirt and tights with black (or red) shirt & tights?

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7/25

SUGGESTED OROONOKO SET ELEMENTS:


extended thrust (25’wide, extending to about row 6-7; raked upward?)
10’ X 10’ X 9” platform on thrust for smaller scenes
audience risers on apron
4 tall “thrones” on thrust
2 platforms on apron (r & l of risers)
possible escape ramp off apron to aisle
possible drapes from 2nd cat (audience enter breezeway door)
possible small 2D scenic elements illustrating location in 18th century scenic manner
possible video monitors suspended over center of acting area (facing each section of audience)

Rationale:
extended thrust combines with audience seating on apron to push playing area into middle of auditorium; proscenium house becomes a “room” with action in the center; upsets audience expectations of either proscenium or audience-on-stage presentation; accommodates those audience members who wish more comfortable seating

smaller platform on thrust provides elevation, enhances “demonstration” quality of certain more intimate scenes (possibly other actors not in scene watching action); puts certain characters “on a pedastel”; suggests slave auction block

audience in risers on apron effects a “confrontational” seating arrangement, with one block of audience members facing another; reinforces “encounter” theme of production

main acting area surrounded by audience reinforces concept of performance as demonstration rather than creation of illusionary space

thrones for “4 Kings” reinforces performance as specific historical event, audience watching exotic royalty watching performance; we simultaneously see performance through their eyes (performance as “strange”) and are cast as 18th century Londoners watching exotic American Indians.

platforms off thrust provide for scenes set outside action of play(s): coffeehouse commentary, Aphra Behn reading from her text, other contemporary non-dramatic texts performed, possible location for voice actors during some scenes; important that these areas not be outside audience circle

escape ramp and drapery from 2nd cat would contain audience area while providing exit to offstage area for actors other than passing over apron; increases staging and entrance/exit possibilities; might require audience to enter from side door (breezeway) which would enhance transformation of the space

small 2D scenic elements (similar to groundrows?) would suggest 18th century scenic conventions, enhance non-realistic and historicized style; could also add to sense of parody in certain scenes

video monitors would allow for several effects, such as: contemporary (commercial?) imagery juxtaposed with period scenes; live feeds of extreme closeups, particularly of skin of actors; negative effects, reversing white to black, etc.; imagery of audience watching performance; alternate versions of scene being performed.
--------------------------

7/15


OROONOKO PROJECT: INITIAL IDEAS FOR SET & COSTUMES (7/15)


SETTING: The setting of the performance is non-fictional: Kittredge Theatre, fall 2006. At the same time, we're at a performance in the Queen's Theatre, London, 1710 seeing a performance set in the British colony of Surinam in the 1660s (Oroonoko) as well as one set in feudal Scotland (Macbeth) and--possibly--one set during the conquest of Mexico in the early 16th century. (However, all to these plays are performed as they would have been seen by the 1710 London audience--sort of.) In addition, we may have scenes set in an 18th-century London coffeehouse and in the present day.
The look of the performance needs to be fragmentary, a juxtaposition of elements and periods, illusion and reality: for example, visible microphones, layered costumes, scenery (if any) as "scenery." Signs Another way of thinking about it: the elements of the performance are displayed upon a visible scaffold or armature (I'm not talking about literal scaffolding). That idea leads me to visualize a "rough", simple look overall, with contrasting, highly theatricalized elements (maybe).

performance is based on an event in London (1710) in which, at a performance of Macbeth in the Queen's Theatre the audience demanded that the four visiting "Indian Kings" be seated on the stage where they could be seen, the setting might include some references to that location an period. At the same time, we should take care not to try to create the feeling of being in that theatre at that time, but possibly
Audience relationship--create an arena-like arrangement but in the house rather than on the stage, turning the auditorium into a "room" for performing, allowing audience members to sit in cushioned seating if they wish; would enhance a sense of performance as display, audience as "crowd", disrupt conventional proscenium seating expectations more than by putting audience onstage by putting stage in audience. Also would keep much of stage free for classes, etc. (although acting area could include part of apron to minimize discomfort for those sitting in first few rows); would entail some audience seating in risers on stage/apron.

Acting area--would need to be large enough for 10-12 actors to be surrounded by audience (in the house); would also need slightly raised platform large enough for 4-5 actors where scenes/actors could be "displayed" more prominently.

Four "thrones"--



-------------------------

STRUCTURE:

listening to director of Robt. Wilson film talking about "triangular" structure of her film: present to past to where they meet. What shape should this piece have?


triangular: present > past > present meets past
actors on a stage as themselves trying to encounter each other (must be mixed races)
1710 and plays, etc.
contemporary actor meets character or contemporary actor meets self as character

or: student stuck trying to decide where to sit in cafeteria (present)
1710, etc.
dance of trying to get out of skin


linear/broken: framework is Oroonoko plot; interrupted by

---------------------------------------

7/9 Thoughts

Just read this op-ed piece in the NYT on the "Black Legend" portraying the Spanish in the new world as particularly brutal and rapacious (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/opinion/09horwitz.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). Thinking again about whether to work Dryden's Indian Emperour into the piece--how to integrate it--and the key seems to be to focus on the scene as a clear English attempt to paint the Spanish "black" in order to justify their own imperial ambitions. Inheriting the mantle of civilization that the Spanish no longer deserve. I immediately visualized the torture scene staged in such a way (or context) as to make clear that it depends upon and promotes a view that we enthusiastically inherit: conquestidors as rapacious murderers. But it's not my favorite scene--how might I work in the Cortez seduction scene? Or should I?

-------------

Idea for opening play & audience involvement:

1) when enter, audience given raffle number and written instructions to shout "We want the Indian Kings" when prompted

2) prologue speech (epilogue?)--possibly cast assembles onstage

3) opening scene from Oroonoko begins (way to introduce Behn version, too? possibly begin Macbeth?)

4) scene interrupted almost immediately by shouts from audience: "We want the Indian Kings" (plants in audience start shout, encourage audience to throw things? riot?)

5) S.M. stops performance, explains that in 1710 a London audience stopped a performance because the four visiting Iroquois sachems couldn't be seen; they were subsequently placed on the stage. SM then announces that a drawing will be held and four audience members holding the winning tickets will get to personify the four indians, and gives those not wanting to be chosen time to give their ticket to someone who does; four winners are placed on four "thrones" on the stage with suitable pomp--maybe dressed in cheap headdresses and "warpaint" and given tomahawks?

6) Scene then allowed to continue

Why? to generate audience involvement and upset expectations and provide a bit of fun; to provide information about historical context (necessary?); to give the audience an opportunity to view their representatives viewing the play; most importantly, to personify the Indian Kings in such a way that the performance is seen through their eyes and other performers are "made strange" (all other performers wear stocking masks throughout).

Possible scenes:

from Behn's Oroonoko:

from Southerne's Oroonoko:

from Davenant's Macbeth:

from Dryden's Indian Emperour:

from Spectator:

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7/5 Thoughts on themes

An attempt to clarify, specify, and choose a primary theme for Oroonoko Project:

"Race" is the overarching theme. But getting at it (under it?) is the problem.

1) Fear of being replaced (fear of "surrogation"): Original black Omoinda is replaced by white Omoinda; Indians watching performance are doomed to be replaced by white Europeans; white colonists fear being "replaced by" attacking Indians they are--without knowing it?--attempting to replace; contemporary white Americans fear being replaced by dark-skinned immigrants (the whole culture will be changed, language as an indicator); "white race" fears being replaced/absorbed by dark races, whiteness is fragile and easily overcome by darkness ("whiteness" being skin color but also white culture and privilege); white man fears being replaced as sexual partner by more virile black man; white audience thrilled by seeing their fears of being replaced (especially sexually) presented on stage (hence replacement of black Omoinda by white Omoinda--shades of Othello!); individual fear of being replaced as expression of fear of dying--or: what's really scary about dying is that I'll be replaced and forgotten.


2) Fear of assimilation/absorbed: closely related (same as?) #1: fear of losing sense of self, who "I" am as indicated by skin color, speech, culture, etc.; acceptance of "other" is conditional upon the Other changing to become like the self (again, according to specific indicators of given historical moment); need to identify self as "not them" (insistence upon maintaining cultural standards, which could include fear/disdain of commercialism represented by Captain (slave trader) and "bad" planters; need to make Oroonoko and Imoinda the ideal of classical European culture (exemplars of values being dismantled by certain class of whites); "Governor's" attempted rape of Omoinda as prefiguring constant rape of black female slaves by white owners; contemporary reference include immigration debate, question of continued racism, continuing though diminished taboo against showing black/white sex, marrying outside group; fear of higher birthrate among "darker" races and declining birthrate among whites; loss of virility in white male.

3) Sex, sex, sex: all of the above fears find their most potent expression in images of sex; black man or woman ok as object of desire as look as they "look" white (contrast description of Behn's description of Oroonoko with images of contemporary black culture stars); thrill of seeing black/white sex then and now (contemporary images from film or live); question of whether race/difference disappears through sex (carnal knowledge); a place for scene from Indian Emperour?

4) Question of individual identity: are we all the same under the skin? attempts to remove white, black, red "skin"; attempts to "find" each other through the mask of skin color, especially through sex; skin color as constructed (and historically contingent) marker of identity/difference;


------------------------------------

7/4 Possible titles for "Whiteness" project:

Oroonoko, in Black and White and Red: An Entertainment based on Mr. Southerne's Adaption of Mrs. Behn's Novella Concerning the Enslavement and Death of an African Prince, as Performed on the Occasion of the London Visit in the Year 1710 by The Four Indian Kings from the American Colonies; With Additional Selections From Mr. Davenant's adaption of Mr. Shakespeare's Macbeth, also Played Before the Four Kings.

The Oroonoko Project: An Trans-Temporal Entertainment based on Mr. Southerne's Adaption of Mrs. Behn's Novella (Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave) Concerning the Enslavement and Death of an African Prince, as Performed on the Occasion of the London Visit in the Year 1710 by The Four American Kings; With Additional Selections From Mr. Davenant's adaption of Mr. Shakespeare's Macbeth "being drest in all it's Finery, as new Cloath's, new Scenes, Machines, as flyings for the Witches; with all the Singing and Dancing in it, Expressly For the Entertainment of the Four INDIAN KINGS lately arriv'd from the American Colonies."

[E]Racing Past Times; or, Whence We Came: An Enquiry into Certain Conceptions of Race

Oroonoko


Skin: An Inquiry

7/27 Thoughts: why am I doing this play? plus structural ideas


Why am I doing this play?
I am trying to understand my place as a white man in this fucked up country with its fucked up race relations
I am trying to take responsibility for my place in this country. I am trying not to pretend that black people (or Indians or latinos or or or) don't exist, though it is so fucking easy in my white (almost-all-white) enclave, in my white (almost-all-white) college, in my white (not nearly all white) city. I opened my eyes today and looked around--after telling some white newcomers to Asheville how segregated it was--and of course saw black people everywhere.
I'm trying to open my eyes.
--------------

OK, all that above is well and good and may help me to focus a bit, but not absolutely central to constructing this play.

Structure: Think of it in three layers:
1) the individual: I think it's safe to say that we all want to be seen for who we are; so--a person tries to make another person see them. Chaikin's question: what do you see when you look at me? A place to start, maybe. I can't take off my skin, it is me. I am strange to you; we're all strange to each other. What do I do about that if I want to be with you?
2) the social/historical/performative: How did we get to this place? Why and how did we make ourselves so white, in contrast (contrast!) to black and red? And how did we reinforce that identity(and express our fear of losing it)? By performing it! So: how did we perform our white identity and the problems that came along with it?
3) the intellectual/academic: where do I get the tools to take responsibility for this situation? One way is through interrogation, or academic discourse. Such as: white critical studies, the study of the construction of white identity.

Each of these layers can be represented visually:

1) moments between contemporary individuals (brief flashes? closing scene? opening scene?)
2) scenes from Oroonoko with interludes which include scenes from The Indian Emperour and Macbeth and scenes from a coffeehouse and Mrs. Behn reading from her novella; possibly orchestrated by a Theatre Manager
3) possibly spoken text (or projected?) from various sources commenting on white identity (???)

6/13 Reactions to The Accidental Activitist

OK, so I just watched this dvd, The Accidental Activist, an expertly produced video of a one-woman show by one of the woman who conceived "The Lysistrata Project". My reactions are mostly negative but I want to analyze them a bit. As a solo theatre piece, the form was predictable and mostly boring, the usually "this is the story of me" business; as acting, it seemed to me to be utterly false (except occassionally when she was playing someone other than herself, which is interesting), a real example of "look at me, I'm acting, oh, look at me now, I'm feeling really deeply" (only it was all indicated); as a political statement, it seemed difficult to argue with, strong, and, in the end, sentimental--which undercuts most of the good stuff, to my mind. I'm probably being more critical and negative than the piece deserves, but it makes me made and makes me cringe, all at the same time, because it wasn't about the war and the victims of war, it was about her.

Of course, what have I done?

On the positive side, I guess you could say that the piece was actually completely honest, because she was absolutely demonstrating herself. She is that showbizzy actress (I guess). Well, maybe not, maybe she was characterizing herself, because in the two extended scenes in which she played other women, she actually seemed like quite a good actor, if in a quite conventional sense.

But the paradox that I really want to get at is the fact that, as she demonstrated herself and "re-stored" or reproduced behavior from her stories, the style seemed to me to rob the event of authenticity. She wanted us to believe that she was really talking to us, that something was actually happening at the moment, but it wasn't. Somehow, not even the reproduction (storytelling) was actually happening (granted, this was a video of a live performance). Her talking to us was supposed to be real and wasn't; her acting out of other characters (when it was developed) was far more authentic because it was clearly artificial. In other words, the same old paradox.

So I think part of the lesson, as far as creating a performance piece, is this: heighten the artificiality and avoid any suggestion that the fictional event is "really happening". Only then will it be real. I need to remember this the next time I try to write a scenario. And avoid sincerity at all costs. It's only the most basic idea in theatre, the one I pretend I've been trying to teach all this time.

Oh, and one more thing about her piece, the "content" part that really spoke to me: She satirized herself as only able to describe the result of the piece she wanted to make, what it would do to the audience, but utterly unable to describe what it actually would be. That seems to be pretty much where I am with this current piece.

6/13 Thoughts...

I made one abysmal attempt at a scenario last night. Awful on almost every level. But here's a thought: If the piece is "really" about how we learn and perform our racial identities (and maybe it isn't), then that idea should be conveyed through the performance style, not in a direct way. No scenes about "learning to act white"; no putting on white/black/red masks. Every moment is contrived, artificial, indirect. The performance style should be one in which the artifice is always on the surface, never hidden behind a mask of natural behavior or "authentic" acts.

But won't the result be like SITI's MND? Disembodied actors looking "dancey" and performing technique rather than really reproducing behavior? (And that's assuming I could teach student actors to commit themselves fully to reproducing behavior--technically a huge challenge.)

So the question is: What is it that the actors are trying to do?

Maybe they are trying to be fully present to each other and to the audience while maintaining their artificial poses, and that's where the tension of the performance lies. And the point is, that's what we are all trying to do, and our poses are composed of the behaviors--cultural/racial/social-hierarchical--that we have learned to reproduce. We're caught in a trap, because we are our poses, they aren't masks we can drop, they are us, and yet we desperately need to touch each other in spite of them. And maybe being "like" each other (group identity) is the best we can do, the closest we can come. Or at least our tendency to define ourselves with/against others is driven by that need.

Back to the performance.

Steal an idea from Wooster Group: action is interrupted by dances/demonstrations/lessons?

Another idea: scrap the whole 18th Century business instead of trying to force it to say something it doesn't? No, because I still think the Indian Kings visit will still serve as a structure, an armature. But that's all it is, it's not what the piece is "about". The piece is "about" each of us trying to reach each other when all we have to work with is this behavior we invent which makes it impossible to reach each other.

So maybe what I need to do for the actors is make them want to really reach each other (be present to each other) and then set up real obstacles. And teach them not to play the obstacle but to play the action. And then frustrate them more.

Suddenly I'm worried that I'm just reiterating a big, simplistic cliche: We can never really know each other. Which is almost the same as saying, we're all really the same under the skin, isn't it?

But no: I want to find out if I believe that a) there is a real self that can communicate to another real self if we can just drop theses poses and masks that differentiate us from each other; or b) that we can't drop these poses and masks because they are what we are made of (they are the products of our cultural histories and we have learned to perform from infancy) and cannot be laid aside no matter how much we try or want to--and furthermore, the idea that there's a "real" self under my surface is a consequence of my refusal to see myself as white, that if everyone stopped wearing masks they would look and act like me.

If (b) is true, as I suspect it is, then is there any way that we Americans can transform the virulent racial cauldren our history has produced? More to the point, is there any way that I can escape it? Well, yes, because even if difference between individuals and groups will always exist, the signifiers of that difference (currently skin color, eye and nose shape, vocal inflection, mannerisms, etc.) are shifting according to economic and social status and power. So it's always in flux, even if change happens slowly.

So is there a question? Or have I already reached my conclusions and want to teach them to the audience?

Right now, my most pressing question is: At this moment in history, in America, can I really know a person of another race in the same way that I think I can know someone of my own race? Put that way, the questions seems as silly as the answer is obvious: Of course I can, depending on circumstance, how much I want to, and how much the other person wants to. On an individual level, those things are within my control. Or are they? Isn't the real question whether I am consigned to be a racist by virtue of my white identity, and my wishes have little or nothing to do with it? Whether history (and not just history but the present socio-economic setup) decrees that, for now at least, there will always be a gulf between myself and any African-American or American Indian that no amount of good will can bridge?

6/13 NOTES ON PROCESS:


Go back and read all the notes I’ve made;

Re-read Southern’s Oroonoko and decide whether to use it as a focal point, and, if so, what scenes to use;

Read as much of the original texts that I’ve accumulated as possible;

Think again about what the central question of the piece is;

Check emails for recommendations of additional sources, but try to avoid going after new stuff;

Get Queen Anne’s Indian Kings from ILL (again);

Make another stab at writing a scenario;

Make a list of possible rehearsal exercises;

5/23 THOUGHTS WHILE RE-READING ROACH: "FEATHERED PEOPLES"


Roach says that any remembering (memorializing) also entails forgetting, and in the instance of performances which are symbolic representations of the encounter of African, Amerindian, and European peoples, "one of these parties seems fated to disappear from the selective memory of another." The reason being that the "dominant trope: that of geneological succession, imagined as a stately procession" is threatened by interruption or usurpation; that is, threatened by mixture, influence, being changed by encounter. And the most threatening (because most fundamental) of these changes is that "blood will be mixed": "The fear that blood will be mixed, a fear that intensifies the ritual expectation that blood must be shed, haunts these representations like a vengeful ghost: the specter of future generations threatening to be born." (p. 122)

Furthermore: It is in the images of violence that these fears are expressed. So, what happens if I focus on these "images of violence" in Oroonoko, Macbeth, and The Indian Emperour?

"Representations of these encounters show how Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, real or imagined, acting in one another's presence, real or imagined, repeated their special rites of surrogation." (p.122)

Also: The fear that Roach is describing, the fear of being replaced by something different, something of a different color, is not an artifact of the past. It is what is driving the current frenzy about immigration, and also--of course--what sustains institutional racism. Do I have to spell that out in a performance??

So: 1) if performance is restored behavior in service of remembering and (of necessity) forgetting; and
2) if it's necessary to maintain the myth of an unbroken succession, the idea that things will continue as they have been, and if these plays enact the desire and the threat to that succession (but how, exactly?); and
3) if the reason for this necessity is that a sense of racial and cultural identity is based on this sense of succession, because the fear is that those others, especially the "future generations threatening to be born," are going to erase "us"; then
4) is it possible to get at that fear, and make it the center of the performance, rather that "the performance of whiteness"? and
5) if so, how (in relation to these texts)?

Questioning my assumptions: Am I just being taken in by Roach's rhetoric? How, really, is it possible to make a connection between these performances during that moment in history and our lives right now? And is the issue really "white identity"? I keep assuming that the problem is that white people don't accept their role as recipients of "white privilege" and that I can create a performance which somehow addresses that problem. I THINK THIS IS A MISGUIDED WAY TO APPROACH THIS PRODUCTION.

It would be more productive to focus on the fear of being replaced:

"Whenever the sweet desire to assimilated or to be assimilated curdles into the fear of being replaced, the moment is propitious for the performance of waste." (Roach, 173)

---------------------

I keep remembering that Roach cites the "psychoanalytical truism" that anxiety is the longing for that which we fear, and that he says these plays reflect that longing. He then connects that idea to "the fear of superabundance." If he means, by superabundance, those generations waiting to be born, or if he means the vast wealth waiting for the English as a result of their growing commercial empire (replacing Spain and inheriting her empire, in a sense); then I can understand it, I guess. Or is he also talking about sexual longing, as reflected in the longing for Omoinda? Or the fascination the crowd shows for the Kings?

But how

5/16 Questions for Carol (revised):




QUESTIONS FOR CAROL (4/26)


-- I'm trying to understand the differences in attitudes (toward empire, colonialization, non-white peoples) between when these plays were written (1660s-80s) and 1710 when they were presented for the "Four Kings". What has changed? Doesn't`o audiences see these plays differently in 1710? Help!

-- Why did Southerne make Imoinda white (a change which was criticized at the time)?

-- Surely the fact of King Philip's War (1675) changed how English viewed Iroquois, and how they viewed Indians. ["The war proved a critical turning point by destroying the interdependent world constructed jointly by white colonists and Native Americans and replacing it with a new culture in which native peoples were marginalized and the white settlers were dominant." (Wikipedia entry)]

Doesn't this view contradict Roach's idea of negotiation between "equals" (visit as Condolence Council) and an alliance against the French? Or does it?

-- In Southerne's Oroonoko, no one seems upset by the fact of a white slave (Imoinda). Why not?

-- How is the tension between aristocratic (Tory) contempt for mercantilism and greed (especially regarding slave trade) and desire for empire/pride in British identity playing into view of Africans/Indians and identity as White/English? In other words, what values are associated with English/White identity? As represented by whom? Is this tension between the idealistic and pragmatic/commercial values something that has been bequeathed to us today in terms of White identity/privilege? (duh!) Who won? Am I oversimplifying? (again: duh!)

-- What about this idea of the threat posed by colonists changing sense of identity reflected in plays? Image of slave trader and planters, for sure; otherwise?
The fear is not that the barbarous colonial renegades and
criminals will come home to England, but rather that the primitive
tendencies already loosed in Surinam and Virginia are emerging in
England, spurred on by the seventeenth century’s multiple rebellions
and many emergent, subversive theories of political obligation.
Visconsi's "A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter" on file)

Such a conclusion is crucially important to the development of
early modern English nationhood. Instead of a naturalized or intrin-
sic racial quality, geographically determined barbarism was an oner-
ous and regrettable aspect of the English past which could be
expunged from the national character through the rigorous applica-
tion of political, social, linguistic, and epistemological civility.20 Thus
the process of English civilization was fashioned as heroic and
exceptional by its triumph over the rather cumbersome burden of a
“barbaric” geography. The process of civilizing England, as Helgerson
argues, was conducted with direct reference to the primitive north-
ern past: “sixteenth-century national self-articulation began with a
sense of national barbarism, with a recognition of the self as despised
other, and then moved to repair that damaged self-image.”21 By the
beginning of the seventeenth century, English culture had been
regulated, civilized, and refined as a response to the barbaric past—
(Visconsi)

-- Reading The Indian Emperour, I was really struck by the scene (4.1) in which Cortez is imprisoned and in chains and Almeria comes to murder him but cannot in the face of his absolute equanimity; instead, she falls in love with him. What a strange scene! Cortez does nothing but lie there and say, "I cannot feare so faire an Enemy," and Almeria is stopped in her tracks. She asks, "Whence can thy Courage come?" and he answers only, "From innocence." He is absolutely virtuous.
Along these lines, I'm wondering if there is something in the nature of Dryden's heroes, and in their connection to the libertine, which could be central to the developing sense of English identity during the Restoration (I sound like I know what I'm talking about...) I'm getting this from the introduction to John Dryden: Four Tragedies (1967, Beaurline and Bowers, eds.) in which the editors say that Dryden adapts the earlier English and continental hero "... to Restoration times and [depicts] him as a natural man who prized his freedom and self-respect above all things. That strain of primitivism was woven through contemporary libertine thought, and it was manifest in comedies of the age." They go on to cite contemporary ridicule of Dryden for making gallants into heroes. Then--I'm happy to say, because I read this after being knocked out by the prison scene--they discuss Cortez and the prison scene, and conclude that the virtue he shows in this scene (by remaining true to his first love, Cydaria, and honest with Almeria in the face of both his imminant death and her professed love) is repeated in subsequent scenes until "He wins both power and beauty, demonstrating that independence and truth to an inner code of natural virtue are finally consistent with power and public virtue."
So: Does Dryden's portrayal of this kind of hero (and the continued popularity of this and similar plays) reflect an attempt by the English to justify all the benefits gained through what they also seem to perceive as rapacious colonial mercantilism? Is it their attempt to have their cake and eat it too? How are our attempts to justify (and/or be blind to) White privilege similar to these earlier attempts? Are we doing the same thing, and, if so, are we re-producing, re-performing, the same behavior? Or am I being entirely too simplistic?

-------------------------------------

LATER QUESTIONS:

Is this idea any good at all? Does some kind of look at London, 1710, Indian Kings visit, plays being performed--does that really have anything to do with the construction of white identity? Is that period a particularly good time to examine the question?

I like the idea that the Enlightenment, the Scientific Method, the need to categorize all life according to its outward, surface appearance led to the idea that skin pigmentation is the prime signifier of cultural difference. Is this idea valid?

Do these plays--Oroonoko, The Indian Emperour, The Widdow Ranter, Davenant's Macbeth, and whatever the heck was going on at Powell's Puppets--provide a reasonable window into how whiteness, or English or European identity was being constructed? Especially since the issue isn't race as much as the idea of a commercial empire based on trade in Africans among other things.

Should I try to work in Philip's German angle? It certainly enriches the mix by reminding us that Germans were "other" white people in British America. And the encounter (sort of) with the Kings--and subsequent Iroquois/German relations--is intriguing. Also the idea that the English are struggling with the question of immigrants and naturalization and citizenship (topical!) as the Kings are visiting. (If the structure of the play is a series of digressions, well, such a structure could accomodate including the Germans.)

Is there a link between the (Tory?) idea that English culture is vulnerable to the "degeneracy" of planters and other colonials and the fear that the white race is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the dark races? (see Visconsi's "A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter" on file)

Why were these plays (Oroonoko, Indian Emperour, Widdow Ranter) being revived in London at this time? Were they just part of the repertoire and constantly revived? Even if that's so, what is the reason for their constant popularity, given that they were written as reactionary attempts to sway the public to the Royalist causes? Was it that the Tories were back in power? but more than twenty years had past?

5/16 Ideas

IDEA FOR SCENE 1.2 FROM OROONOKO

(Oroonoko's first appearance)

Whites portrayed as puppets (puppet bodies attached to actors' bodies w/ elastic, actual face and hands)

Curtain upstage of puppets parts for Oroonoko's entrance, showing lifesize actor on platform in chains, a lá King Kong

(thinking of Mabou Mines DollHouse)
-----------------------------------------


What if the play is structured associatively, like my reading? It starts with the India Kings, but before that thread can get too far, we have to go back and look at the North American colonies in 1710. But before we can do that we have to look at King Philip's War. Which makes me think of Bacon's Rebellion down in Virginia. Which take us to The Widdow Ranter playing in London in 1710. Which takes us back to the Indian Kings' visit. Which might take us to the German ships heading out as the Kings are heading in. Which takes us back to New York. And so on.

Like surfing the net.

------------------------------------------

After meeting with Carol, Philip, Ron, and David P.:

Discouraged. Good, long conversation, but I failed to interest them in my idea, such as it is at this point, because, I guess, I'm so damned inarticulate--or because the ideas are lousy--or because I'm just a poor, misunderstood, but brilliant theatre artist. Not likely.

I stubbornly want to push ahead even if I can't see at this point how to make sense of what I'm doing. I know that I need to create a structure for this material, but Ron's suggestions in that direction seemed not to my taste. He had some good warnings: sounded like I was trying to stage research, which would make a performance of ideas--not theatrically exciting. Once again, it's clear that the project tends to grow out of control. Also: the "present" point of view is implied by the fact that it's a performance, so that doesn't need to be put on the stage (Phil's point, I think). I see that, and I know I tend to try to stage the obvious, but I'm still drawn to the idea of two students looking at each other trying to deal with racial difference (????).

5/16 EXCERPTS FROM Visconsi's "A Degenerate Race: English Barbarism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter"


The fear is not that the barbarous colonial renegades and
criminals will come home to England, but rather that the primitive
tendencies already loosed in Surinam and Virginia are emerging in
England, spurred on by the seventeenth century’s multiple rebellions
and many emergent, subversive theories of political obligation.
(p. ??)

Such a conclusion is crucially important to the development of
early modern English nationhood. Instead of a naturalized or intrin-
sic racial quality, geographically determined barbarism was an oner-
ous and regrettable aspect of the English past which could be
expunged from the national character through the rigorous applica-
tion of political, social, linguistic, and epistemological civility.20 Thus
the process of English civilization was fashioned as heroic and
exceptional by its triumph over the rather cumbersome burden of a
“barbaric” geography. The process of civilizing England, as Helgerson
argues, was conducted with direct reference to the primitive north-
ern past: “sixteenth-century national self-articulation began with a
sense of national barbarism, with a recognition of the self as despised
other, and then moved to repair that damaged self-image.”21 By the
beginning of the seventeenth century, English culture had been
regulated, civilized, and refined as a response to the barbaric past—
(p.?)


Even when confronted with native people in America or
Africa, English merchants and colonists relied first on class as a
means to comprehend and sort the people they met. While theories
of racial superiority were current and powerful, in most cases they
were secondary evaluative indices, as Karen Ordahl Kupperman has
argued in her study of seventeenth-century English interpretations of
native Virginians.26 (p. 8)

Oroonoko’s position as an advo-
cate for slavery looks deeply ironic to us. There seems to be a conflict
between Oroonoko’s status as a chattel slave and his embrace of
natural slavery. But the text does not share this ambivalence, endorsing
the right rule of natural superiors like Oroonoko while decrying the
unnatural authority of a degenerate race of colonial rapists, thieves, and
barbarians. Thus the novella suggests a modified Aristotelian view of
natural class status in which a benevolent and paternalistic master-slave
or monarch-subject relationship stabilizes the household and the state.
(p. 16)



Oroonoko's blackness:

Behn uncharacteristically refrains from lightening Oroonoko’s skin to make
him more palatable to an European audience. But Oroonoko’s
blackness carries with it much ideological freight—as Gallagher
points out, black skin meant, above all, that a person was subject to be
exchanged as a commodity.45 It is precisely that blackness which
allows Behn to point out the depraved and wrongheaded priorities of
Whig capitalism. There are two models of value mapped onto
Oroonoko’s body—one of commercial value, the other of political and
moral value. The commercial system within which Oroonoko circu-
lates repeatedly demonstrates these competing models of value,
forcing its agents to choose between them. Either Oroonoko is to be
treated as a man of honor and an exemplary monarch, or he is to be
treated as chattel, as a valuable commodity to be exchanged and
employed for financial gain. Not surprisingly, from the slave trader’s
duplicity to Byam’s and Banister’s cruel barbarism, in every case
Oroonoko’s value to the agents of commerce is exclusively financial.
Oroonoko’s blackness, his value as chattel, trumps his value as an
intrinsically noble and gracious monarch within the acquisitive and
debased moral calculus of Whiggery.
(p. 18)

Margo Hendricks has argued that the play [The Widdow Ranter] uses the threat of a
barbaric, potentially miscegenous Indian other to stabilize and re-
unify the English colony in Virginia and ratify the genocidal aims of
the imperial project. While Hendricks is quite correct to point out
the genocidal implications of the colonial project, as well as Bacon’s
own deep involvement in such ideology, she misreads the play’s
central threat. The barbarians at the gate are not Indians but tailors,
panders, and pickpockets. The few representations of Indians in The
Widow Ranter are almost all positive from a royalist perspective
(p. 20)

While it seems that Bacon is a second Oroonoko, his suicide is the
result of a misreading of the battle, and in the context of a tragicom-
edy it is at least partially ridiculous that the victorious general kills
himself after his forces have won. Bacon is hardly the transparent
vehicle for absolutist ideology that Oroonoko is—his insistence on
the points of honor is overwrought, making him look either foolish or
tendentious. (p. 20)

As a propagandist, Behn argues that the moral calculus of Whiggery is
corrupt and politically irresponsible, for it privileges exchange value
over virtue, commerce over justice, violence and barbarism over
stability, and the rule of the wild and ignorant people over the rule of
the educated and just. These American texts, which are so critically
concerned with forms of government, are not primarily warnings
against colonial dissolution, miscegenation, or imperialism. Rather
they represent Behn’s more local warnings tuned to a fever pitch; for
the barbarians are at the gate in England, and popular rule means that
the project of English civilization has failed and chaos is come again.
(p. 25)
-----------------------------------
See Laura Brown, “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in
Slaves,” in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Brown (New
York: Methuen, 1987), 41–61. See also Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The
Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1995); Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race,
Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the
Early Modern Period, ed. Patricia Parker and Margo Hendricks (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 209–24; Judith Andrade, “White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism
and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko,” Cultural Critique 26 (1994): 189–214; Anita
Pacheco, “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” SEL 34 (1994): 491–
506; and Richard Frohock, “Violence and Awe: The Foundation of Government in
Aphra Behn’s New World Settings,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 8 (1996): 437–52.

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.