Disability, Public sPace Performance anD sPectatorshiP: unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley (2014)New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pp.,ISBN: 9781137396075
Reviewed By Margaret Ames, Aberystwyth University
This book is a rich and rewarding read as its analyses and provocations remain in the mind long after reading. Bree Hadley’s investigation into the territory occupied by artists with disabilities and their audiences produces unsettling questions. Challenging feelings were invoked in me as I learned about the works under analysis; I interpreted these emotions as parallel projections that mirror the actual works of art and their audiences who negotiated complex socially embedded encounters with performance through the live events. Hadley undertakes an account and interrogation of artistic practices by a wide range of artists who she describes as making use of daily social interactions that enforce a condition of permanent performance upon the person with a disability, and creating determined performance practices that counter domi-nant social discourses that continually regulate disabled bodies as a negative Other. It is a sign of both the power of the works discussed and their articu-lation in Hadley’s account and analyses that the reader experiences further ripples of social and personal disquiet, challenging any assumptions via the text. The engagement with the text positioned me in another form of second-ary audience, the phenomenon that Hadley examines as part of the extended process of public performances often created with and around unsuspecting audiences.
Hadley offers an overview of the western social and political circum-stances that determine daily discourse for people with disabilities, introduc-ing key disability theorists and artists and the field of analysis, which seeks to define and resist systems, reification and subjugation. Inscriptions on and into the bodies of people with disabilities reveal a dominant social logic of failure, strangeness and the only half hidden trope of what constitutes a viable
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life: the assumption of able bodies and minds. Critical discourses of ableism and Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s term ‘normate’ (1997) resonate here as part of the resistant critical discourse that seeks to illuminate political and social constructs serving to exclude and Other certain kinds of people. The presumption of able bodiedness is the dominant discourse that produces pity, fear and unconscious responses that mobilize social actions that are intended to cure, alleviate and manage people with disabilities. People with disabil-ities are then merely tolerated, and always problematized within the social construct of the normal.
The work of a selection of critical works by international artists with disa-bilities is foregrounded. These artists develop their practices from experiences of being Othered, and from the construct of disability as personal problem. Their works are provocations that destabilize these social scripts and roles. The power of this book lies in Hadleys’ descriptions and analyses that repro-duce the unsettling demands made by the artists. Central to her argument is the conjoining of the audience and the artist, the non-disabled spectator and the disabled artist. How the artist produces from the unconscious reactions of the non-disabled spectator, a dawning consciousness of non-disabled assumptions and dismantles that certainty born of dominant logic of normal-ity, is the aim of the practitioners discussed and the work that the audience must undertake. Charting such actions and encounters between artists and audiences in public spaces Hadley positions her thinking in terms of the Other and places disability: ‘as the axial image or metaphor for all that is Other’ (7). Throughout the writing the ethics of encounters with self and Other are continually examined as central to each of the examples she discusses. Structured into four chapters that group particular artists and works around themes that concern embarrassment, cultural/social legibility, spectatorship on the Internet and the ethics of difference, she brings to the fore a wide variety of practices and individual artists and companies. Most, though not all, of these examples are works that take place in public spaces where popu-lations become unwitting audiences. They ‘interrupt the daily social drama of disability by commandeering the very spaces and places in which it plays out’ (76). Hadley provoked me via clear descriptions of the work and equally clear theoretical propositions drawn from her experiences with these works, to consider how I might react, manage and/or not manage such encounters. For example, Aaron Williamson’s and Katherine Araniello’s Assisted Passage (2007) where the two artists who make up The Disabled Avant Garde exag-gerate stereotypes and reductionist social attitudes that they encounter, and create encounters with the public. Assisted Passage is described by Hadley as, finding the two artists: ‘asking passers-by to sign a petition supporting an at first ill-defined cause – something to do with airlines’ (97).
Hadley describes how their actions become clearer as the spectator gets closer to the duo and it is revealed that: ‘In this case, disabled people are cast as needing help – albeit, in this case, help of a more controversial ilk […]’. Williamson and Arianiello are staging a protest that asks the pubic to support Araniello’s right to fly to Switzerland in order to carry out her assisted suicide. The public are encouraged to sign their petition. Hadley uses this example of, as she puts it, ‘guerrilla-style performance’ (96) to highlight the complexi-ties of social discourse where insidious violence is perpetrated against people with disabilities through social discourse that determines that it is reason-able to assume that disability means that life is not bearable. The dizzying effects on the passer-by who finds themselves engaging with such complex
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ethical issues in direct encounter with a person with a visible disability, and a tactic of engagement that appears proactive and resistant produce confusion, discomfort and confrontation with those hidden social rules of normality and viability. Hadley considers that the work was:
[…] to investigate – and creatively investigate – whether stereotypes about the disabled might potentially be dealt with differently in public spaces and places. A risky prospect for Araniello in particular, who worries that people might take her work on assisted suicide too seri-ously, as well as spectators who might seem foolish to anyone seeing the documentation of the work after the fact.
(100)
This issue of the secondary spectator is compelling as I engaged with some of the works discussed as a secondary spectator, seeking out documentation online. Again I was drawn into the ethical and political ambiguities these artists provoke and it is clear that as Hadley argues: ‘[…] the full parameters of the work may, in fact, be clearer to secondary spectators seeing documen-tation of it than to primary spectators participating as co-performers in the initial public space action or interaction’ (26). The book parallels this phenom-enon as through it I was continually reminded of my own assumptions and tendencies, prompted to critique my reactions and to wonder, what would I do and how would I respond to the works described.
Ultimately this book tackles the ethics of engagement with others and frames this concern with Levinas, Lehmann and Conquergood. Levinas’ formulation of the Other to which we have an endless responsibility, not in terms of the power play of benefactor and beneficiary but in terms of ‘an encounter with each other’s Other’ (184) is central. The meanings that are made from such encounters in artistic practice constitute the ethical ground, which is of necessity unstable, and disorienting if the spectator is prepared to allow the questions raised by such works into their conscious encounter, and to remain with the persistent troublings the works insist upon. As Hadley states in her short conclusion: ‘I have indeed felt confused, uncertain and conflicted’ (185) and she succeeds in communicating a little of these feelings as I am prompted to consider my own interpellations into the apparent common sense of normality. I am provoked to reconsider, again, my own practice and relationship with both my colleagues with disabilities and creative practice in the wider context as Hadley prompts me to question and remain within this unstable academic and aesthetic territory.
reference
Garland Thomson, R. (1997), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press.
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Enacting naturE: Ecocritical PErsPEctivEs on indigEnous PErformancE, Birgit Däwes anD Marc Maufort (eDs) (2014)Brussels: Peter Lang (2014), 262 pp.ISBN-10: 2875741462;ISBN-13: 978-2875741462
Reviewed by Stephen Bottoms, University of Manchester
This rich and rewarding new anthology of essays runs a number of risks with its titling. To call a book Enacting Nature is to ask for pedants like me to quib-ble over semantics. If ‘nature’ is, by definition, that which lies beyond human-made culture, then it presumably ‘enacts’ itself. Either that, or it ceases to be nature at the point that it is appropriated culturally for ‘enactment’ by humans. The nature vs culture binary is, moreover, an entirely Western construct: ‘Non-Western cultures’, as Bruno Latour points out, ‘have never been inter-ested in nature; they have never adopted it as a category; they have never found a use for it’ (Latour 2004: 43). To associate ‘indigeneity’ with ‘nature’ is, thus, to run the risk of perpetuating the work of colonization, by reinscrib-ing the noble savage stereotype: seeing native cultures as more ‘in touch with nature’ is to risk treating them as always already backwards, always already beaten, in relation to the ‘progressive’, ‘developed’ west. It is also to disre-gard the historical and archaeological evidence that indigenous people too have wreaked havoc on their environments over the centuries (e.g. the disap-pearance of megafauna from North America, long before European settlers arrived, is thought now to have been a consequence of over-hunting by indig-enous peoples, possibly for sport).
All of this said, editors Däwes and Maufort are careful, in their co-written introduction to this volume, to challenge ‘the myth of the “Ecological Indian”’, and to insist that the performances analysed here are ‘often hybrid’, built of ‘an in-betweenness that enables the authors to forge unique ecological discourses’ (14). That is to say, the book is primarily concerned with contem-porary works of theatre and performance – works presented, indeed, in the colonizer’s language of English – whose makers seek variously to negotiate the tangled and conflictual relationships between tradition and modernity, between indigenous and dominant cultures. Perhaps most profoundly for the ‘ecological’ discussion, they also negotiate the complex sense of belong-ing or emplacement within particular geographic landscapes, within a modern cultural context that also permits transcultural and transnational mobility and migration. Indeed, Maufort’s concluding essay on ‘Aesthetics of ecology in contemporary indigenous drama’ goes so far as to propose that a kind of tran-snational indigeneous performance aesthetic has emerged: looking at plays by Tomson Highway (Canada), Andrea James (Australia) and Hone Kouka (New Zealand), Maufort argues that all three writers strategically utilize theatrical variants on ‘magical realism’ in order to associate the ecological with the spir-itual (using rivers, in particular, as a powerful metaphor), and thus to highlight the dangerous desacralization brought about through the historical impacts of colonization. Sophisticated as many of the analysed plays are, though, there is a persistent risk in this collection that the discourse will lapse back into a kind of default setting, whereby indigeneity and ecological virtue are treated as ‘naturally’ connected. Take for instance Yvette Nolan’s opening assertion
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about playwright Laura Shamas: ‘As an Indigenous artist (she is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw nation), she recognises the interconnectedness of the natural world and the way we live in it’ (105).
Enacting Nature is very much ‘a game of two halves’. Though not formally separated into sections, the first half of the book deals with work by Native North American artists (United States and Canadian), while the second half deals with performances made in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, New Caledonia). In addition to their co-written introduction, editors Däwes and Maufort also bookend the volume with individual essays of their own – thereby creating the impression (rightly or wrongly) that Däwes has taken primary responsibility for editing the North American ‘half’ of the book, which she initiates, and that Maufort has helmed the Oceanian half, which he rounds off. Certainly, the two halves of the book give the impression of having been guided by rather different editorial hands. The North American chap-ters are almost all concerned with analysing individual plays by indigenous playwrights: thus Maryann Henck examines Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Berlin Blues (2007), Yvette Nolan looks at Laura Shamas’ Chasing Honey (also 2007), Nicholle Dragone at Eric Gansworth’s Re-Creation Story (2008), and Ginny Ratsoy at Kevin Loring’s Where the Blood Mixes (2009). The curiously tight historical grouping of these texts is given variation by Jaye T. Darby’s beautiful essay on Lynn Riggs’s Out of Dust – which failed to make it to Broadway in 1949, despite the input of legendary set designer Robert Edmond Jones. Yet the only essays that break from the one-play-per-chapter pattern are Däwes�s own (which juxtaposes plays by Marie Clements and Yvette Nolan, within a critical framework built around initial consideration of a video installation by Finnish artist Eija Liisa Ahtila) and Ric Knowles’ consideration of the ancient, earthworked mounds that pepper the landscape of North America. Knowles’s intriguing essay eventually resolves into a discussion of an as-yet-unfinished, collaboratively created play (or ‘research/creation project’) titled Side Show Freaks, for which Knowles is serving as dramaturg. The single-show pattern is thus restored, but Knowles’s key suggestion is that the mounds should them-selves be seen as ‘performances with a very clear relationship to the rhythms of the natural world from which they emerge’ (51). He draws on a range of sources in support of this argument, including Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe (one of the creators of Side Show Freaks), who theorizes that such mounds were built to enact indigenous understandings of ecological forces; ‘the performers tell the story by collectively sculpting the earth’ (quoted 51).
Knowles’s chapter, by invoking a broad-spectrum approach to perform-ance studies, to discuss ancient earthworks as well as contemporary theatre-making, thus stands out determinedly from the chapters around it, in which theatre is treated largely as a matter of dramatic literature. Indeed, the ‘ecocriti-cism’ of the book’s subtitle is defined on the first page of its introduction as ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environ-ment’ (Cheryll Glotfelty, quoted 11). The fact that theatre, as an art form, takes place within physical environments of one sort or another is ignored by this slightly abstracted definition – and in my view the book’s subtitular invo-cation of ‘indigenous performance’ is in need of further qualification, at least as it relates to this first half of the book. It is only in the second, Oceanian half that a sense of performance as a set of embodied practices comes more clearly to the fore. The chapter by Lisa Warrington and Daniel O’Connell, for example, looks at the New Zealand-based performance collective The Conch, whose work has appeared at the Te Papa museum in Wellington, and
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which blends multilingual texts with physical action and dance, and an atten-tion to the materiality of objects and fabrics. Richly rooted in traditional prac-tices, this work also uses contemporary methods and media to highlight and even celebrate a sense of cultural hybridity. Similarly, Rachel Swain looks at ‘Dance, history and country’ in Australia, but her treatment of ‘dance’ is not restricted by western disciplinary definitions, and extends to the consideration of contemporary aboriginal land-painting and storytelling practices. Maryrose Casey considers Australian Aboriginal traditions, and the way they function to dramatize a sense of belonging, in relation to playwriting examples – such as Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea (2000) – that negotiate a sense of tension between European cultural influence and indigenous locatedness in the land. Hilary Halba compares and contrasts plays by three Maori playwrights in rela-tion to questions of landscape (and indeed waterscape). Only Diana Looser’s chapter on Pierre Gope’s La Parenthèse (2004) follows the one-chapter-one-play model of the book’s first half, but her discussion is so richly contextual-ized within an analysis of the specifics of New Caledonian history, and of the island’s cultural politics, that it never seems abstractedly literary. I do not mean to imply that the essays in the second half of the book are necessarily ‘better’ than those in the first half: indeed most of the essays, throughout, are individually of a very high standard. My sense, though, was that the critical questions of ecology, location, place-making, belonging were in general better served by those essays in which there is a clear attention to the physical proc-esses of performance, alongside the analysis of playwriting.
RefeRence
Latour, Bruno (2004), Politics of Nature, Harvard.
Playing for Time: making arT as if The World maTTered, LUcY neAL (ed.) (2015)Oberon Books, London, 466 pp.,ISBN: 9781783191864, p/bk, 16.99 GBP
Reviewed by Aaron Franks, Queen’s University
Intended as an inspirational and practical resource to catalyse change, Playing for Time ‘joins the dots between … 64 artists and activists who have crossed the threshold of action to reimagine what’s possible for themselves and their communities and the world’ (4). In an early section titled Drivers of Change, a selection of keystone essays makes the case that a confluence of massive overconsumption, depleted fossil fuel stores (‘peak oil’), climate change and social atomism has led us to a socio-ecological catastrophe requiring immedi-ate and full-spectrum action, not least by community activists, artists and arts facilitators.
At 466 pages, the assembled text is a testimony of faith in people’s ability to adapt and create solutions to these complex dilemmas, and in particular the
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leadership role of artists in catalysing these abilities. It features the works and reflections of 64 contributors, who are in effect a community tied by multi-ple shared practices and, to borrow a phrase from arts-activism collective and contributor Platform, an ‘organogram’ of professional and personal relation-ships. Given the geographical, cultural and artistic relationships apparent among many contributors, the book almost functions as an almanac for this particular creative community, with Neal as local witness and scribe.
This almanac quality has both positive and difficult implications for the text. Like any almanac, it feels of a singular time and place, and its impact will depend on the relationship of the reader to that social and emotional geog-raphy. For example, can Playing for Time be considered a practical survival manual? Yes, it is a generous ‘how to’ guide for community arts practition-ers wishing to effect positive change. Is it a record of community concerns and preoccupations? It can certainly be read in this ethnographic way, a ‘how does …?’ this community link these aesthetic, social, economic and ecological challenges. Is it a scrapbook, a green-hued treasury of inspirations? There is the feel of the treasure chest, a trove of UK community, performance and ‘eco’ art, poems, pictures and essays. Or, is it best treated as a work of community art in itself, the product of a ‘Playing For Time Project’? Well into the book, in the section The Practice, we are indeed shown the creative process behind the book, taking place over multiple invited workshops and gatherings. It was only after thinking of the book as an ‘almanac’ that I noticed the range of descriptions used on the cover – a ‘handbook’, ‘cornucopia’, ‘anthology’, ‘salmagundi’, and indeed ‘almanac’ too.
How is such a full-to-bursting tome composed? Quite complexly. Neal’s introductory essay makes clear that the personal is political, and shares with us her fears for the biosphere, her epiphanies and aesthetic encounters that motivated this project. The central tenets for a ‘transitional arts practice’ are loosely established, namely the Promethean promise of play (‘how artists engineer time to allow our imaginations to flourish’ [6]), the centrality of empathy and cooperation, and the forceful assertion of an ethic of service into art through the very specific coupling of art- and community-making.
Neal’s most formative encounter is her deep involvement with the Transition Movement in her home of Tooting, South London. Oft-present in Playing for Time as the medium that joins art, activism, and community, for Neal ‘[f]rom a dominant culture of identity as consumer, Transition fosters “intrinsic” cultural values that transcend self-interest’ (8). In addition to describing transitional arts practice, Neal discusses how the book was created in keeping with such practice, ‘co-authored by 64 artists, creators and agents of change. A core group of artists built the core of the book’s stories and prac-tices with myself as main author and from this core, the rest grew’ (10).
The Introduction establishes the book’s ethos and intent, Chapter 1 (‘Drivers of change’) the rationale, and key sections on core transitional arts practice principles and the Transition Movement itself set up Chapter 2 (‘The practice’). The book’s leader – core – contributor model is reflected in the thematic subsections (e.g., Home, Water, Body) which are written by Neal, introduced by ‘an artist or creator associated in some key way with that area or element’ (112), and studded with examples of other contributors’ creative work. Chapter 3, ‘Recipes for action and tools’, follows through on each of the themes from Chapter 2 with ‘recipes’ inspired by specific projects that ‘comprise more “a how others did it”, than “a how you should do it”’ (325); ‘Tools’ are more generic and applicable across projects and campaigns (e.g.,
facilitating, blogging), in the tradition of other UK DIY activist movements (e.g., Trapese 2007).
Like tiles in a mosaic cemented by Neal’s central text, artist contribu-tions come in several shapes and colours. The predominant form is the many short photograph and text essay pairings, like Nic Green’s reflection on her performance Fatherland (116–17), or Deirdre Nelson’s textile installation Birdyarns (263–65). There are maps both detailed (Fruit Routes, 346–47) and expressive (Land Journey, 330), and posters and pamphlets from many projects and events (The San Francisco Seed Library, 188; Platform’s Delta Project, 227). But the book emphasizes writing, ideas and relationship-making them-selves as art, and it’s heart is found in the text. In spite of the presence of so many images, there is a curious lack of attention to the visual in itself; there is no equivalent to the Artist’s Pages format in a journal such as Performance Research (or in this issue of Performing Ethos), for example.
The almanac quality – offering that feeling of being of a time and place – does place limits round Playing for Time as well. The precepts of Transition, while evolving, are not universally shared, with some seeing the potential for withdrawal and exclusivity. The same is true of the Dark Mountain Project, which shares a somewhat interlocking membership with the personalities and ideas here. For an international readership, this Brit-centricity should be acknowledged as this perspective on landscape, aesthetics and what is ‘wild’ influences how alternative, sustainable eco-social relationships are explored. From a post/colonial perspective, I would offer that a diversity of locations does not necessarily mean diversity of class perspectives and world-views. And there is a tension in the instrumentality of transitional arts practice as an approach to catalytic art too (Phillips 2015). There is little room to consider deep time or multiple times. Time after all is at the heart of the book. What if we reverse the title: ‘Playing for the world: Making art as if time mattered’? In this vein, while there is much power in the celebratory which Neal advo-cates, does such a practice based on proximal connections still allow for ‘the raw tenderness of absence and of resonances of coexistence … that are bigger than we can comprehend’ (Phillips 2015: 63; see also Morton 2012)? These too might help us live ‘as if the world mattered’.
If, having made its stake with transitional arts practice, Playing for Time is somewhat short on critical dialogue (or unsettling provocations), it is also enormously generous and will provide innumerable points of departure for a wide audience of arts practitioners, activists and community organizers. It is a truly compelling experiment in ‘pioneer[ing] an era of the arts in service to life, accountable to the time in which we live’ (14). This desire for accountabil-ity and responsibility pulses throughout the book; I would wish for a bit more in the form of cultural reflexivity and critical dialogue as well.
references
Morton, T. (2012), ‘Guilt, shame, sadness: Tuning to existence’, Volume, 31, Spring, pp. 16–18.
Phillips, P. (2015), ‘Artistic practices and ecoaesthetics in post-sustainable worlds’, in C. Crouch, N. Kaye and J. Crouch (eds), An Introduction to Sustainability and Aesthetics: The Arts and Design for the Environment, Boca Raton, FL: Brown Walker Press, pp. 55–68.
Trapese Collective (eds) (2007), Do it Yourself: A Handbook for Changing our World, London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press.
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Performing indigeneity: global Histories and ContemPorary exPerienCes, Laura r. Graham and h. GLenn Penny (eds) (2014)Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 431 pages ISBN 978-0-8032-5686-6 (paperback), $36 USD
Reviewed by Virginie Magnat, University of British Columbia
This anthology investigates historical and contemporary representations of Indigeneity produced through various forms of performative cultural prac-tice in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ecuador, Brazil, Scandinavia, Germany, France and Japan. The editors historicize the legal and juridical category of Indigeneity as having emerged during the Cold War era along with human rights discourses and growing concerns about environmental degradation. Graham and Penny contend that Indigenous cultural performances and displays have since become essential to the articulation and substantiation of the concept of Indigeneity (1). To counter potentially primitivist, essentialist or otherwise naturalizing interpretations, Indigeneity is envisioned as an emergent identity shaped ‘through perform-ances that often entail deeply contextualized and historically contingent creative acts’ (2). Emphasizing agency and reflexivity, which they relate to recognition, self-determination and cultural sovereignty, the editors refer to Schechner’s (1985) and Butler’s (1990, 1993) respective articulations of ‘the reiterative power of embodied action and discourse’, which enables them to argue that ‘Indigeneities’ are materially constituted through performance (3–4, original emphasis). When pointing out that ‘Indigenous participants build on traditions that are much older than most scholars assume’ (4) – and necessarily rooted in culturally specific world-views – Graham and Penny implicitly acknowledge that they, as with ‘most scholars’, are bound by their own distinctively Euro-American intellectual tradition, as exemplified by the array of seminal western theorists whom they enlist (from Plato and Aristotle to Bakhtin, Goffman, Austin and Turner, along with Schechner and Butler) to assist them in conceptualizing the lived experiences of Indigeneity that are pivotal to their analysis. One may therefore ponder the extent to which such a potentially neocolonial theoretical framework might be engaged in the production of the global discourse on Indigeneity that it purports to investigate.
In her influential book Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith remarks that while claiming essential characteristics has been a useful strategy in the struggle for the recognition of Indigenous rights, the notion of essence is related to Indigenous concepts of spirituality that posit ‘spiritual relationships to the universe, to the landscape and to stones, rocks, insects and other things, seen and unseen’ (74). As noted by Smith, Indigenous world-views pose considerable challenges for western systems of knowl-edge, and the intellectual rigour with which non-Indigenous contributors to this anthology respectfully and ethically examine Indigeneity is therefore particularly noteworthy. Given the necessarily limited scope of this book review, however, I have chosen to highlight three chapters that engage with Indigenous expressions of cultural, spiritual and political sovereignty written from specific Indigenous perspectives.
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In ‘Living traditions: A manifesto for critical indigeneity’, anthropolo-gist Bernard Perley, who self-identifies as Wəlastəkwi from Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada, observes that within the colonial context of higher education, ‘cultural expectations render Indigenous experience and lives in analytical terms such as “performance” and “Indigeneity”’ through the lens of contested postcolonial studies and decolonization programmes (35). Perley argues that the ‘contemporary discursive descrip-tors’ employed in such analyses reflect ‘the complex, conflicting, and contra-dictory daily practices of social relations between Indigenous Peoples and colonial/settler societies’ (35–36). Having reminded us that the four colonial states of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States consider the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to be a non-binding, ‘aspirational document’, Perley foregrounds the ongoing oppression, aliena-tion and disempowerment of Indigenous Peoples in contemporary regimes of colonial power, and posits that Indigenous strategies for survival belong to a ‘shared global Indigenous struggle’ (32–33). Significantly, Perley asserts in his manifesto that ‘critical Indigeneity is not an Indigenous-only experience’ but an everyday practice designed to empower people against oppressive state regimes and neo-liberal interests through storytelling, humour, and art (51–53). In contrast with the more academically conventional contributions to this volume by fellow anthropologists, this chapter’s engagingly dialogical and self-reflexive style constitutes a particularly effective form of Indigenous performative writing, for lack of a more appropriate descriptor. Two other chapters stand out through their authors’ commitment to strategically posi-tion themselves within their research: Maori scholar Brendan Hokowhitu’s provocative investigation of haka as both a form of cultural appropriation and an Indigenous expression of embodied agency in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Ty P. Kawika Tengan’s insightful exploration of Hawaiian masculinity, warriorhood and nation.
Foregrounding the political stakes of gender and cultural performance in Hawaii, Tengan asks ‘what is gained and lost’ when Hawaiian men link ‘claims of masculinity to those of sovereignty’ through the ritual perform-ance of the Hale Mua, and argues that this embodied expression of iden-tity enacts ‘both the possibilities and the limits of decolonization’ (108). Emphasizing that their participation in the Hale Mua provides Hawaiian men with a ritual space in which they can safely engage in ‘an active remember-ing of community’ (214), Tengan suggests that the pervasive association of physicality with violence ‘born of hurt, pain, and lack of cultural identity’ can be transformed by the Hale Mua into a more productive form of energy (223). He further contends that this traditional ritual practice has the poten-tial to reconfigure hetero-settler patriarchy’s hypermasculinist and homopho-bic representations of ‘savages and bloodthirsty male warriors’ by providing Hawaiian men the opportunity to engage with Indigenous male identity in ways that ‘restore courage and discipline, not violence’ (219). Tengan care-fully underlines, however, that when decolonization is articulated in terms of ‘hegemonic manhood’ associated with sovereignty, self-determination and nation-building, the resulting gender imbalance dangerously diminishes the authority of Indigenous women (232–33). Having interviewed Hawaiian males who turned to Hale Mua as a source of cultural healing and restora-tion, Tengan infers that such a self-reflexive traditional practice produces ‘embodied discursive actions’ (214) that effectively contribute to decolonizing Indigenous masculinities as long as practitioners resolutely promote a healthy
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balance and complementarity between male and female Hawaiian leadership models in their communities.
In his critical examination of New Zealand’s nationalist appropriation of the Indigenous cultural practice of haka and its ensuing global commodifi-cation, Hokowhitu similarly addresses gendered colonized physicality and considers alternative ways of reclaiming Maori agency as a form of embod-ied sovereignty. Over the last decade, Indigenous imagery has been instru-mental to the branding of the All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby team, whose sensationalist rendition of the haka is supported by global corporations through marketing campaigns ‘selling the exoticism of “traditional” Maori masculine culture’ (274). Hokowhitu foregrounds the disavowed ‘connotations of feminine power and protection’ (176) linked to the original epistemology of this Indigenous cultural practice, and contends that the All Blacks’ spec-tacular appropriation of haka expresses masculine patriotic fervor in support of ‘the modernity of a synthesized nation’ (177). Historicizing this ‘power-ful neocolonial symbol’, he shows that colonial domestication of Indigenous physicality led to the recuperation of this cultural practice’s subversive power, which was gradually assimilated into ‘the service of imperialism itself’(283). Moreover, in western colonial discourse ‘savagery’ was signified by androgyny while civilization entailed clearly delineated sexual differentiation enforced by distinctively prescriptive gender roles (285). Hokowhitu asserts that ‘the mimicry of colonial masculinity by Indigenous men’ resulted in the produc-tion of the hypermasculine, violent, and heterosexual Maori male subject, whose gendered performance of the haka epitomizes the pervasive neoco-lonial constructions of ‘authenticity’ informing contemporary expressions of Indigenous identities (286).
Echoing Tengan’s insistence on the importance of gender balance and complementarity in Hawaiian cultural practices, Hokowhitu points to the silencing of ‘the subversive, constructive, creative, typically feminine voice of Maori men’ and deplores the ensuing void and ‘embodied anger of colonization […] that resonate most vividly through haka as a gender construction’ (289). Building upon Spivak’s and Gilroy’s critical interventions in postcolonial stud-ies, he demonstrates that haka has nevertheless become pivotal to the ‘stra-tegically essentialized ontological construction of postcolonial Maori identity’, which has positively fuelled struggles for Indigenous rights (292). Hokowhitu infers that Indigenous embodied sovereignty must be defined beyond western masculine expressions of mind–body dualism so that the ‘thinking body’ may be conceptualized as ‘a material producer of thought’ (296–97).
Graham and Penny’s collection provides critical insights into the different strategies employed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to investi-gate the relationship between the contested terms of Indigeneity and perform-ance. As highlighted above, the Indigenous contributors to this anthology cogently argue that Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies can offer productive ways of moving beyond the tension between constructivist and essentialist conceptions of identity that continue to characterize dominant Euro-American theoretical approaches, and propose to articulate the expe-rience of Indigenous sovereignty in relation to the immediate materiality of contemporary Indigenous cultural practices rooted in traditional ways of being and knowing.
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salmon is everything: community-baseD theatre in the klamath WatersheD, tHeresa May, suzanne Burcell, KatHleen Mccovey and Jean o’Hara (2014)Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 188 pp.,ISBN: 9780870717468, p/bk, $19.95
Reviewed by Will Weigler, Ph.D.
I first encountered Theresa May writing about her theatre project Salmon is Everything in Kuppers’ and Robertson’s 2007 anthology The Community Performance Reader. In her chapter, May offered a peek at the complexities that emerged and the vision she aspired to achieve during the collective creation of a community play centred on a high stakes conflict among people living in the Klamath Watershed in Northern California and Southern Oregon. When I first read it, I hoped that Dr May would be able to expand her engaging short essay into a full-length book. She has, and it does not disappoint. The rich text eloquently articulates her struggles with some of the core challenges in the practice of community-based/applied theatre, while the structure of the book itself embodies the spirit of the project, reflecting May’s own sense of what constitutes best practices in the field. It is an illuminating case study of a remarkable endeavour.
At the heart of the story is a collision of priorities that led to the sudden deaths of roughly 34,000 chinook and coho salmon on the Lower Klamath River in the autumn of 2002. A drought the previous year in Eastern Oregon had led farmers and ranchers upriver to divert the flow of the Klamath to meet their needs. Native scientists among the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa Valley and Klamath Indian Tribes, and scientists working for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Marine Fisheries Services all agreed that the resulting lower water levels downstream, higher water temperatures, and toxic levels of algae due to agricultural overuse were inevitably going to lead to a catastrophic die-off of the fish. The EPA took heed, and issued a ruling to stop the diversion of river water. But then, following an outcry from farmers and ranchers who feared loss of their economic security, the federal government reversed its position. The farmers and ranchers got their water and the salmon population collapsed on an unprecedented scale.
May, who is now an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Oregon, was then in her first year of teaching at Humboldt State University in Northern California, not far from the mouth of the Klamath River. In the aftermath of the fish kill, a university conference was organized to examine the underlying issues and causes surrounding the catastrophe. She attended the conference to learn more about what had happened. While she was there, she witnessed Native elders present, but saw that their voices were not being heard. She writes that she felt compelled to consider how she might use her ‘position of power and privilege as an academic and an artist to help amplify those voices’ (5). May initiated what would become Salmon is Everything, a three-year project to co-create an original play with stakeholders from throughout the watershed. Her hope was to leverage the power of theatre to convey to local audiences the deep personal, cultural and spiritual significance of salmon in the lives of the people in these tribal communities.
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What is particularly admirable about this book is its multivocal struc-ture. The script of the play forms the centrepiece, but the rest of the chapters contributed by May herself and by her collaborators are like a strong ensem-ble of players in a show that has no star. Each chapter adds another layer, another perspective that enables the reader to glean a robust appreciation of the intention and experience of the project. This is, of course, just as it should be in a book that celebrates different viewpoints as a source of strength.
In his foreword, Gordon Bettles sets the stage with an Indigenous person’s account of the relationship with salmon that his people have cherished and relied upon since time immemorial. May’s introduction grounds the reader in the geography of the watershed and its inhabitants: the salmon in the river and the people on the land. She tells the story of her own encounter with the events of 2002 and her impulse, even as a newcomer to the region, to step up and get involved. In the introduction she gives a brief nod to Iris Marion Young’s notion of the distinction between deliberative and communicative democracy. It is a philosophical foundation that appears to have profoundly influenced May’s work; it forms the basis of her chapter in Kuppers’ and Robertson’s anthology.
Suzanne Burcell tells her story from the perspective of a Karuk person running an Indian Education program at Humboldt State. She relates the feelings of trauma and outrage she witnessed welling up in the other Native people she knew and describes how her curiosity was piqued when a woman from the theatre department came across campus to see her with an idea about inviting Native students to co-create a play in response to this crisis. Burcell’s chapter and the chapter written by Karuk elder, Indigenous envi-ronmentalist and community leader Kathleen McCovey, both offer insightful perspectives on how the experience of forming partnerships between theatre practitioners and communities are perceived and navigated by non-theatre artist stakeholders.
The script of Salmon is Everything is credited to Theresa May and the Klamath Theatre Project and it is made clear that this is a collectively devised work. In compiling the record of the script, May has demonstrated a way to attribute co-authorship though a series of notations that acknowledge the source material for some portions of the dialogue. They are shown as derived from research findings, from adaptations of published material and from tran-scriptions of stories told in conversations. Embedded in the script are instruc-tions on how to respect cultural protocols involving use of traditional or ceremonial objects, music and songs in the production.
May’s own chapter is an account of her experience of the project, replete with stories of self-described missteps, the important lessons she learned, and a few cautionary tales. She tackles the big questions. Who ultimately owns the stories or the script in a collectively devised work? Who has authority over deciding what the show should look like? Where are the boundaries when taking creative licence with stories about the lives of real people? How are we to negotiate inclusion among people with points of view that are at odds with one another? What is involved for an artist with ‘outsider’ status to learn and abide by local cultural protocols and to be mindful of the ethics of cultural appropriation? Can theatre actually make a difference and, if so, how? Surely it is when community-based artists are working in exceptionally fraught terrain that the implications of asking these questions are most sharply illuminated. James Thompson’s analysis of his own learning when he co-creates theatre
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with people living in war zones comes to mind as an example of this. Theresa May writes with very much the same quality of vulnerability and critical self-assessment that makes Thompson such an engaging and valued writer.
Jean O’Hara served as recorder and actor during the devising phase of Salmon is Everything, and then become co-director of the original produc-tion. O’Hara completes the series of essays with a fresh overall view on the project, written from her perspective as a non-Native, Irish American theatre professional.
This book could be read simply as a case study: a record of what was accomplished. It is far more than that. May and her co-authors model for the reader what is required for a new kind of intercultural dramaturgy designed to serve the needs of theatrical collaborations between Native and non-Native communities and theatre artists in the twenty-first century. In building this play, they forged a way of working that was dedicated to the inclusion of a plurality of voices and a commitment to fostering respect across difference. To paraphrase the memorable words of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, they made the road by walking. This is a model worthy of emulation.
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