Performed Imaginaries

Richard Schechner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317601562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

In this collection of essays, performance studies scholar and artist Richard Schechner brings his unique perspective to bear upon some of the key themes of society in the 21st century.

Schechner connects the avantgarde and terror, the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s/70s and the Occupy movement; self-wounding art, popular culture, and ritual; the Ramlila cycle play of India and the way imagination structures reality; the corporate world and conservative artists. Schechner asks artists to redeploy Nehru's Third World as a movement not of nations but of like-minded culture workers who must propose counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire.

With characteristic brio, Schechner urges us to play for keeps. "Playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge", he writes.

Performed Imaginaries ranges through some of the key moves within Schechner's oeuvre, and challenges today's experimental artists, activists, and scholars to generate a new, third world of performance.

Chapter 1

Can We Be the (New) Third World?

I sit here this morning (does it really matter which morning?) trying to be optimistic. I want to write how performance studies and the performing arts can save the world, or at least help to save the world. I am typing while rockets and bombs are exploding in Gaza and Israel; Egypt is in turmoil, Syria in the throes of civil war; M23 rebels are closing on Goma in the Congo, putting a million people under threat; suicide bombings and assassinations continue in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Somali civil war is ongoing. Sunnis and Shias have warred against each other since the martyrdom of Hussein in 680 CE; in India, Hindus murder Muslims and vice versa; anti-Semitism is rife in many places; and not long ago Catholics and Protestants were murdering each other in Northern Ireland a few centuries after religious wars decimated Europe. The Shoah is not ancient history.

I am more than halfway through my seventy-ninth year. For seventy-one of those years, the USA has been at war. Big wars, small wars, long wars, short wars, good wars, bad wars, just wars, greedy wars, invasions, incursions, missions, actions in Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa. From World War II and the Korean War to Grenada (“Operation Urgent Fury”) and Lebanon (twice, 1958 and 1982–1984); from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan; from Serbia to Libya. And: Panama, Cambodia, El Salvador, Colombia, Liberia, Egypt, Zaïre, Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Yemen, the Philippines, Congo, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras. … And where America has not sent troops it has sent arms, trained soldiers, created alliances, and supported proxy armies. Sometimes with grotesque paradoxes such as helping Saddam Hussein invade Iran, precipitating a bloody stalemate from 1980 to 1988, a half-million dead, and then, barely three years later, turning against Saddam with “Operation Desert Storm,” and after that, in 2003, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” where the USA led the “Coalition of the Willing.” (Who’s kidding who?) Plus untold covert actions and wars waged by surrogates with American “advisers”; the “dirty wars” in Latin America fought in the name of anticommunism; the Cold War with its nuclear buildup still not substantially dismantled. What about the close calls from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the US Seventh Fleet “patrolling” the strait between mainland China and Taiwan? The continuing “showdown” against North Korea and Iran over their nuclear arms programs? The US Congressional Research Service, in its “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad” reports that from 1950 to 2006 there were 153 occasions when American forces went on missions outside the borders of the USA. No year was without its particular military excursion; many years had several. Yes, some were for just causes or humanitarian reasons; but most were applications by force of US policy. In addition to active armed intervention is the US “presence” (troops stationed in bases around the world) and multiple covert operations. Covert means “classified,” secret, kept from public view and accountability – even in a self-professed “open” society with its “free press.” Who knows how many secret actions there have been and how many continue today? These “operations” (surgery?) involve “intelligence” (what a weird name for spying and dirty tricks), terror, and torture in camps such as Guantánamo and secret “black sites” around the world. Even the seven years of peace, my infancy and early childhood, from 1934 to 1941, were gloomed by the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland in 1939, and the preparations for the USA’s entry into World War II. And what about the wars within American borders – “war” being used only partly metaphorically? The House Un-American Activities Committee (1938–1975), the anticommunist “witch hunt” led by Senator Joseph McCarthy (in the 1950s), the violent responses to the African-American Civil Rights Movement and gay liberation, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs … the list goes on and on.

American society and culture – and, through their influence, global societies and cultures – have been deformed by a plague of wars, threats of war (national wars, civil wars, insurrections, “actions,” “operations,” … the war family has plenty of members). Continuous war both creates and requires a political-cultural-social-educational-economic paranoiac system underpinning weapons research and testing, large standing armies, and a spidery stealth apparatus. In the USA, we are bombarded (yes, I am aware of the metaphor) by messages telling us that we can enjoy the benefits of (un-)peace – consumer goods, leisure, an open society – while waging (note the metaphor) wars or, rather, crafting on a “volunteer army” to fight for us (in quotation marks because economic necessity and, to some degree, racism and sexism determines who volunteers). The message is disturbingly schizoid: Live “normally,” but “if you see something, say something.” This specific War on Terror slogan-instruction is posted everywhere in New York, and elsewhere I suppose; it is displayed and uttered in a soft voice and reinforced with omnipresent signage and surveillance cameras. Surveillance has been normalized, the panopticon has arrived. Go on vacation, but take off your shoes before passing through the metal detector. The war machine needs both jingoism (America is the best, the greatest, the freest) and paranoia (America is under attack, our “way of life” threatened, “they” are crossing our borders actually and figuratively). The military-industrial complex and its concomitant “disastrous rise of misplaced power” that General and then President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his 1961 farewell address has come to pass. The universities are not exempt but are closely knit into the fabric.

The global outcome of all this is that billions of people live on less than $1 per day; billions have no clean water or adequate sanitation. Twenty years ago, people in the top 20 percent of the world’s population were thirty times as rich as those in the bottom 20 percent. Now they are seventy times as rich. Of the 1,233 drugs developed in the past decade, only eleven were for treating tropical diseases and, of these, five cured livestock, not humans. The richest three persons in the world have more wealth than the GDP of the forty-seven poorest nations; the richest fifteen persons have more wealth than the combined GDP of all sub-Saharan Africa, 550 million people. The Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA became famous for pointing out that the top 1 percent of Americans earned more than 20 percent of total income.

All the military “engagements” (married to war?) cost plenty. The expenditure for arms can be averaged out to $330 billion (in 2012 dollars) a year from 1940 to the present. That adds up to about $23.5 trillion ($23,430,000,000,000). Can you even imagine such a pile of gold? What it would buy if put to constructive uses? Health care, education, public works, arts, housing? Maybe it doesn’t make sense to unilaterally disarm. But neither does it make sense to be the world’s number one military spender for years, decades, generations, forever. Not since Rome – and remember what happened to Rome, from republic to imperium to decay – has an empire so extended-expended itself. And the cost is not just dollars. The cost is cultural, personal, and spiritual.

So what is it about war? Is it all greed and power? No, culture – deep culture, historically reinforced – loves war. Think of it: the foundational Indo-European and Middle Eastern myths are war stories: the Iliad, Odyssey, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Gilgamesh, the Old Testament. Yes, there’s a lot happening that is not war, but the core narratives celebrate battle, conquest, and heroism – more the glory than the gory of war. These myths admire and even worship the warlike person or deity, male usually but not always because ferocity and valor in battle trumps gender – think Athena and Enyo, Durga and Kali. The Old Testament is warlike, from the Plagues (God’s war against Pharaoh) to the tumbling down of Jericho’s walls, from the ethnic cleansing of Canaan to David’s bloody expeditions, and more. In the realm of literature, the Greek theatre brings against war the claims of women: witness the Oresteia, Antigone, The Trojan Women, and Lysistrata. But heroism is always honored, and war is sometimes celebrated as in The Persians. Shakespeare is no pacifist, nor is Milton, Hemingway, or even Joseph Heller. Pop culture from video games to contact sports is driven by violence and saturated with metaphors of war.

When leaders want to focus people on a task, war is a chosen metaphor. Not only the jihads and the War on Terror but also the War on Cancer, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Violence, etc., etc. World War I was “the war to end all wars.” War is what people do, along with sex, death, and taxes. Can we change this? Competition for land, hierarchy (power), reputation, honor, mates … overlapping each other … drives human action and, some say, all of nature. Ironically, even the opposite of competition – generosity, sharing, and “love” (in quotation marks because the concept is so malleable) – often is a rivalry of who or what can do the most good. Is war natural, is it cultural – or what mix of both?

There is a counter-narrative to this history of violence. In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker deploys impressive statistical and social analysis to show that for centuries violence has declined globally, and continues to do so. Violence in terms of war, genocide, terror, murder, torture, slavery, capital punishment, domestic mayhem, infanticide, and child abuse. He attributes the decline to a set of interwoven causes: the rise of civil societies, democratization, decline in superstition, global trade and affluence, and, decisively, the increasing power and influence of women, what Pinker terms “feminization,” where “female-friendly values” prevail over the “manly honor” of violent retaliation – on individual, family, tribal, and national levels, where contraception allows women to determine if and when to have babies. In summary:

The declines we seek to explain unfolded over vastly different scales of time and damage: the taming of chronic raiding and feuding, the reduction of vicious interpersonal violence such as cutting off noses, the elimination of cruel practices like human sacrifice, torture-executions, and flogging, the abolition of institutions such as slavery and debt bondage, the falling out of fashion of blood sports and duelling, the eroding of political murder and despotism, the recent decline of wars, pogroms, and genocides, the reduction of violence against women, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the protection of children and animals. […] All these developments undeniably point in the same direction.

(Pinker 2011: 672)

How can Pinker be right, given everything I asserted previously? There are two ways of understanding Pinker’s data. As statistics, trends, and overall developments, clearly the proportion of violent acts – individual, societal, national, international – has declined relative to the number of people alive. But the absolute numbers of people who suffer or die has not decreased because there are so many more people alive today than previously – and the world’s population will go up a lot more before it levels off or declines. To put this another way, humans may be regarded as parts of a group – the statistical person, relative to all the others – or as absolute individual “souls,” or “beings,” each endowed with her or his own particular self. From the perspective of unique beings, the number of individuals who suffer or die has increased, even as the proportion of these relative to the whole population has declined. Second, violence is not limited to what happens between and among people. Violence is also done to animals and plants, lands and seas – the world as “Gaia,” a unified living thing. This violence against species and habitat, against the planet, is definitely approaching the level of – what words do I need? – specicide and globacide. We are presently living through earth’s sixth great extinction, driven by homo sapiens, us.

It didn’t have to be this way. I won’t speak about nations other than my own, the USA, but I know that blame also belongs elsewhere. However, the USA has been the leading entity – the “American Century” and all that – economically, militarily, and, after the collapse of the USSR, ideologically. Think for a moment where the world might be if the USA supported the Cuban revolution, opposed the military regimes of Latin America and embraced the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende (instead of being complicit in his murder). What if the USA helped Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, worked to overthrow apartheid in South Africa and instituted an African Marshall Plan enabling the continent to recover from the horrors of colonialism? What if the USA refused to take up the cause of defeated French colonialism in Vietnam, worked for the peaceful reunification of Korea and demanded a just settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict? What if the USA recognized sixty years ago that dependence on Middle Eastern oil distorted American foreign and domestic policy and therefore launched an all-out moonshot-type effort to develop non-fossil energy sources? What if, instead of automobile mania, big industry and government collaborated in constructing networks of bullet trains and local mass transit? What if the USA rejected McCarthyism and the hunt for “un-American activities,” which continues under the auspices of the PATRIOT Act? Some things have been accomplished, but not nearly swiftly or thoroughly enough: an end to racism, sexism, and homophobia; comprehensive health-care reform. Other urgent items await action: immigration reform, because millions of undocumented are an exploited underpaid underclass; real protection for the environment, the fisheries, the water supply; meaningful support for education and the arts. Meanwhile, corporations gain more power, increasing the wealth imbalance, keeping or transporting millions to poverty (exactly what the Occupy Wall Street movement protests).

“What if?” is a loser’s game. However, I am not dreaming when I say that all the possibilities I’ve just listed were on the table in America, supported by a considerable number of people and debated in more or less mainstream media (as well as by progressives and radicals). Why were these programs and reforms not successful? Why were those who actively supported progressive policies wiretapped, hounded, imprisoned, shot, and ground to dust? I am not a conspiracy-theory-type thinker. I don’t believe American policy-makers are being controlled by a cabal. I do think that policy-makers didn’t fully comprehend the world they were shaping when they made the decisions they made – and continue to make. What they wanted was and is to stay in power in Washington and to expand the new American corporate empire. Even scarier, some American leaders – like the colonialists of former times – believed they were and are doing good. How Brecht would wince and then laugh.

Sometimes clichés and platitudes are useful. So here’re some: Ignorance is the plague. Xenophobia is the plague. Hatred of others is the plague. Greed is the plague. Disrespect for nature is the plague. Eradicate the plague. Performances are – or at least can be – model utopian societies. Workshops are ways to destroy ignorance; rehearsals are ways to creatively relate to others not by submerging or ignoring differences but by exploring differences as the group devises a generous common way forward; performances can hold up to public view the outcome of such active research. The broad spectrum of performance studies offers critical lenses to understand societies, groups, and individuals who embody and enact their personal and collective identities. Performance studies develops from the axiom that we live in a performatized world where cultures are colliding, influencing, and interfacing with each other and are hybridizing at a swift and increasing rate. These collisions are not always politically correct or pleasant. Populations and ideas are on the move, pushed by ideologies, religions, wars, famines, disease, hopes for improvement, government intervention, and global trade. The outcome, if there is to be “an” outcome, of all this circulation is neither clear nor certain. Some argue that change will be radical, stemming from the list I just listed and from almost unimaginable technical progress – robots, nano-computers, colonizing the moon and Mars; others see a new medieval epoch of circulating stasis. I myself shuttle between these alternatives – and all the stops in between.

Performance studies is a particular response to this global circumstance. Performance studies arises from the premise that everything and anything can be studied “as” performance. The tools of performance studies are drawn from other disciplines and have not yet coalesced into a coherent singularity. Perhaps that’s good – it keeps performance studies practitioners alert to what’s happening around us. Some of the disciplines that performance studies borrows from, steals, adapts, and makes use of in our own way include the social and biological sciences, history, gender studies, psychoanalysis, social theory, critical race studies, game theory, economics, popular culture studies, theatre, dance, film and media studies … and more: performance studies is wanton, promiscuous, and bold – even as we try to get organized and arrive at consistency and coherence.

There is a problem at the heart of all this. If anything can be studied “as” performance, if any tool can be used (performance studies being the ulti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• A Foreword Looking Back
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Can We Be the (New) Third World?
• 2 The Conservative Avant-Garde
• 3 The 1960s, TDR, and Performance Studies: From a 2009 interview by Ana Bigotte Vieira and Ricardo Seiça Salgado, revised in 2014 by Richard Schechner
• 4 9/11 as Avant-Garde Art?
• 5 Performed Imaginaries: The Ramlila of Ramnagar and the Maya-Lila Cosmos
• 6 Self-Inflicted Wounds: Art, Ritual, Popular Culture
• 7 “Points of Contact” Revisited
• Index