Performing Blackness

Enactments of African-American Modernism

Kimberley W. Benston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135078317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Performing Blackness offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority.
Artists covered include:
* John Coltrane
* Ntozake Shange
* Ed Bullins
* Amiri Baraka
* Adrienne Kennedy
* Michael Harper.
Performing Blackness is an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate about the vitality and importance of black culture.

Part I
Will the circle be unbroken?

Drama and the quest for communality

And it is time now
It is time
It is time
It is time
Now

Naomi Long Madgett, "The Twenty Grand
(Saturday Night on the Block)"

1 Sighting blackness

Mimesis and methexis in Black Arts theatrical theory

I

The Revolutionary Theatre must take dreams and give them a reality.

Amiri Baraka, "The Revolutionary Theatre"¹

Modern African-American drama — the beginnings of which we might heuristically locate in 1964, with the first performances in New York of Baraka's bracingly experimental plays Dutchman and The Slave and the writing alongside them of his explosive theatrical manifesto, "The Revolutionary Theatre"² — arises in the fluid space between dream and reality, measuring their distance as a mode of historical critique while seeking their reconcilation as a means of cultural realization. At once resistant to prescriptions of social circumstance — the is of experience as confirmed by inherited conventions of "truth" — and eager to refashion stage representation as a vehicle for insurgent desires — the must of a reconfigured dramatic praxis — the African-American theater movement that emerges under the aegis of Black Arts innovation vividly embodies the double economy that we have sketched in the contrast between Ellisonian and Barakan figurations of performative blackness. For modern black drama seethes with impulses both radical and recuperative, visionary and strategic, iconoclastic and redemptive. Such vectors of de- and re-constructive energy are, I hope to show, only seemingly contradictory, determining as they do a matrix of theatrical exploration that sets thematic passion — the "dream" of a liberated blackness - and formal purpose — the agency of a refashioned "reality" - into dynamic, dialectical partnership.

The increasing visibility and influence of drama among the African-American arts during the Black Arts Movement has a clearer etiology than is usual in aesthetic evolution. During a period of expanding black (self-) consciousness, historical awareness, and public assertiveness — a time in which the rhetoric of collective identity and aspiration was quickly translated into stunning, often violent action — the African-American artist naturally sought a mode imbued with the structure of communal, and efficaciously political, activity. Hence, in modern black poetry (of which, as we shall see in Chapter 4, the Coltrane Poem is exemplary) we find a subtle yet unmistakable shift from valorization of the written word as signature of an achieved liberty, from what Robert Stepto has called "the Afro-American pregeneric myth of freedom and literacy,"³ to privileging of the voice as both musical and oratorical instrument of rebellion. Hence, too, the appearance in African-American literary theory of overt ideological struggle and of the "black aesthetic" school with its emphasis on "extra-literary" values and opposition to the perceived formalism of academic criticism. Cognate with the emergence in African-American philosophy of what Lucius Outlaw terms an "antifoundationalist" quest for specifically "black theorizing" that is "itself a form of social praxis,"⁴ black aesthetic and expressive inquiry made purpose the measure of speculative insight, realization the touchstone of refiexivity. In such an atmosphere, the rapid development of theater, an extremely political, because preeminently social medium, was inevitable.

As black artists soon recognized, the very essence of theater is its immanently collective experience, and in very practical terms, its affirmation or challenge of the audience's codes of conduct, their mechanisms of survival, their shared necessity, outrage, and vision. Theater can tap and redistribute custom and ceremony; it can generate violent energy (the French Revolution is sometimes said to have really begun when the opening night audience of Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro reacted angrily to the depiction of aristocratic life) or neutralize the impulse toward action. In political terms, then, theater can, when skillfully employed, become a powerful weapon for regulation of communal values, or, conversely, for radical change. Unlike written literature, it makes no demands of literacy or privacy; as the impulse toward agitprop street events and the proliferation of community-center/theaters during the era of the Black Arts attests (The Black Arts Repertory Theater/School [BART/S] of Harlem; The National Black Theatre, or Sun People's Theatre, also of Harlem; Concept East of Detroit; East Cleveland Community Theater; La Mont Zeno Community Theater of Chicago; Watts Repertory Company of Los Angeles, to name but a few), theater may become an enlivened synecdoche and galvanizing site of the self-defining national culture envisioned by its practitioners.

The emergence of a dynamic, articulate, and prolific African-American theater movement during the mid-1960s has been duly and variously noted by many scholars. Apart from sharply focused comments on individual playwrights, this criticism has tended to be concerned with the drama's nationalist values⁵ or with the evolution and continuity of its moral and narrative ideas.⁶ As a consequence, some comprehensive, insightful images of modern black drama have begun to take shape: we now glimpse clearly its messianic, didactic, and mythical lineaments. If, in the critical pursuit of thematic understanding, the drama has been too often subject to facile Schematization or even distorting reduction, there yet exist now viable formulations of the black theater movement's basic ideological suppositions and effects.

Nevertheless, it is striking that — as has too often been true in interpretation of black literature generally — so little regard has been paid to the structural dimension of the playwrights' interrogation of ideology's implication in performative style and decision. It is its detractors who most consistendy call attention to the drama's form; by them, it has been made to appear 'instinctive' or 'audacious' in the most reductive sense — unshaped, fragmented, unreflexive, and indulgendy improvisational, centered only by reliance upon stereotyped action and tendentious narrative.⁷ Sympathetic observers have, until recendy, done very little to correct this image, for they, too, seem to believe that modern black drama is something that, formally, simply happens, oblivious or perhaps deliberately antithetical to shaping concerns of aesthetic and imaginative design, as befits its antipathy to oppressive systems and reified structures.

This inattention to the crossing of iconoclasm and formal experiment is indeed ironic for, as is the case with African-American music, the self-conscious development of organizing principles in black drama is the very essence of its visionary quest. Such undervaluing of structural factors may be understandable when one considers that exegesis of black drama, even more than that of black poetry and fiction, has been forged in a climate of polemical strife, marked by immediate demands of elucidation or affirmation, and hence has too frequently limited itself to a narrow conception of ideological issues.⁸ But beyond pressures of occasion, most particularly the drama's intrinsic exposure to instantaneous public scrutiny,⁹ modern black drama's disavowal of conventional theater's disposition to aesthetic distance — a resistance that, we shall see, is constitutive, yet various and supple — has understandably evoked in its readers a corresponding resistance to formalist inquiry that isolates the subject in space, removing it from historical context. Following the drama's own rebuke to alienated, or disinterested, observation (the choice of Marxist or Kantian terms being itself a matter of perspective upon varieties of Eurocentric estrangement from engaged enactment), criticism has perhaps confused empathetic involvement with a call to interpretation governed by thematic, characteriological, or prepositional concerns. Scrutiny of the playwrights' own struggle to define terms for the new drama, however, reveals a continuous, complex effort to imagine theatrical forms capable of containing "revolutionary" content, to clear ground for a topos of performance that dissolves stark distinctions of vehicle and tenor, modality and meaning.

Abiodun Jeyifous, in an historical, fundamentally thematic, critique of black writings on African-American drama conducted in the twilight of the Black Arts Movement, acutely defined the change in the modern (post-1963) era as a shift from the commentary of "Negro Sensibility" — a blend of "western bourgeois esthetic criteria and a sentimental racial awareness" — to the advocation of black "consciousness" — an avowed synthesis of dramaturgical and ideological presuppositions.¹⁰ As Jeyifous suggests, this desire to unite a radical theatrical idiom with a new political vision caused the modern playwrights to direct their theoretical as well as their practical efforts toward developing what Arriiri Baraka first termed a "postwestern form." It is into this still comparatively untravelled and uncharted territory of theoretical form —what might be accurately termed the "self-staging of black theatrical consciousness" — that we must travel in our exploration of black theater during the Black Arts era, for an analysis of the modern black theater movement's major speculative documents will reveal just how intimately (and necessarily) intertwined have been ideological and formal innovation in the drama's search for a revolutionary mode of collective enactment.

Such scrutiny of disquisitions by theatre practitioners on the nexus of concept and medium serves not just as prologue to the next chapter's exploration of the era's staging of philosophic and political vision in three singular yet representative dramas — Ed Bullins's Clara's Ole Man, Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers, and Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. It is itself a way of attending to the dialogic and contestatory enactment of that vision, as these treatises themselves constitute one of modern black art's most effective performance genres. For the Black Arts theater manifesto employs strategies of voice, characterization, and rhetorical presentation that self-consciously dramatize alternative aesthetic and political positions. Particularly in their shifting constructions of audience and styles of address, these texts — by turns meditative and exhortatory, descriptive and lyrical, prescriptive and celebratory - conjure the performance dynamic that they champion, evoking the adversarial and participatory possibilities central to the envisioned drama's mise-en-scène. By becoming themselves crucibles of cultural postures that inflect alternative theatrical values, modern black theatre manifestos seek deliberately to compel a response of repudiation or embrace that makes readerly performance not merely an effect but the essential aim of their tactics. As such, these texts stage their general conceptual ambition of enfolding theory and praxis through the generative agency of performative meaning.

I should make clear from the outset that these documents together describe an arc of development that, as the focus of our exploration, belies descriptions of the Black Arts Movement as a static, homogenous, and monologic formation. Restive and textured, black theater manifestos comprise diverse images of dramatic intention that cohere as a dialogue on presence and mediation, authenticity and signification. Specifically, the path of modern black drama's self-staging describes a curve which moves dialectically from quasi-naturalism and a defining obsession with Euro-American institutions toward the shaping of uniquely African-American mythologies and symbolisms, flexibility of dramatic form, and participatory theater within the black community. Spiritually and technically, this movement is one from mimesis, or representation (whether of a condition, ideology, or character), to methexis, or communal "helping-out" of the action by all assembled. It is a process that could be alternatively described as a shift from display, the spectacle observed, to rite, the event which dissolves traditional divisions between actor and spectator, self and other, enacted text and material context. And through this process, the black beholder has been theoretically transformed from a detached individual whose private consciousness the playwright sought to reform, to a participatory member of communal ceremony which affirms a shared vision.

At the same time, these contrasts of mimesis and memexis, exposition and ritual, can function only as strategems for denoting relative emphases and provisional directions within the movement's self-articulation. For modern black theater, considered as a collective endeavor, seeks ultimately not to jettison but to transmute mimesis, liberating it from its association with coercive reproduction — what Derrida terms the "mimetologism" anchored to a Platonic regime of the "proper" that is stabilized by refusal of revisionary play¹¹ — and redeploying its potential to organize a Scene of Instruction from which supplementary, even insurgent, images of 'the real' can be fashioned. In one sense, this 'thinking through' of mimesis, posited as the basis for dramatic representation from Aristotle to Benjamin, signals a kind of 'end to theater' as conventionally understood: where mimetic modes of action and perception founded that theater's purchase upon presence and consequence at the price of submission to an 'originary' (thus offstage) authority, modern black drama would rupture this metaphysical closure to forge transformative mechanisms of identification and meaning-production. Like the feminist "mimetisme" explored by Elin Diamond,¹² it seeks to displace white mythology's "scene of representation" by piercing its normative boundaries with alternative instruments of legitimation.

In this regard, modern black theater shadows antinnmeuc urges familiar in Euro-American dramatic (post)modernism, which likewise threaten to dissolve stage traditions in the interests of a broadly emancipatory protest. Yet where antithetical veins of enactment within Euro-American drama (be it Artaudian, Absurdist, or even Brechtian in inspiration) represent a discursive struggle within western canons that often pits defamiliarization against custom, culture against freedom, along lines dictated by the self-disabling logic of the avant-garde,¹³ African-American modernist performance works to align disruptive play with cultural reconstruction, resituating rather than deconstructing the subject as an agent of historical ferment. Most particularly through an effort the renovate vernacular expression as a mechanism of ideological critique and communal revaluation — but not least in its insistence that annulment of the distance between stage and audience serve reconception not abrogation of the project of culture — modern black theater diverges from its Euro-American counterpart in retaining commitment to remembrance and history even as it annuls inherited mechanisms of social reproduction. Its refiguraton of mimesis, and the concomitant espousal of postnaturalist presentational techniques, seeks not an exit from history but a means of remaking historical consciousness: the urgency of that revisionary demand in turn yields novel images of theatrical space, expression, and perception. In effect, modern black drama asks whether mimesis cannot be reconsistuted outside the closures of rnimetologism, such that its passage toward strategies of methexis can be seen as a quest for a reformed mimesis.

Considering the long-observed will to self-enactment embedded in African-American life and traditional art — the "poise for drama"¹⁴ displayed in minstrelsy, the dozens, toasts, the call-and-response pattern of musical and religious performance, and the signifying improvisations of the street — we might have expected an untroubled flowering of dramatic innovation set in motion by contemporary political exigencies. However, given the need to articulate a radical contemporary vision of ideal-become-practice, the problem of form for the black dramatist is not so simple, the translation of dissident idea to dramatic action not immune from the sometimes ironic pressures of mediation. Though freer than the prose writer from the restrictions imposed on black vocality by the silent finality of a fixed text, the playwright must still face the task of creating a black theatrical idiom with the materials proffered by various dramatic conventions, each of which retains sedimented histories of stylistic and thematic implication. The modern black drama movement emerges, even in the space of specifically African-American theater, as an intricate encounter, by turns appropriative and antagonistic, with an inherited theatrical tradition in which audience and performer are kept distinct, narrative develops with sequential clarity, and character is explored as either exemplification or mockeiy of an historic investment in individual destiny. Such drama, whether it be that of a neoAristotelian liberalism (vide Hansberry) or its emblematic mirror in what Genevieve Fabre terms "the theater of experience"¹⁵ (vide Hughes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: performing blackness
• PART I Will the circle be unbroken?: drama and the quest for communality
• PART II Blow into the freezing night: expressive agency in Coltrane and the Coltrane Poem
• PART III Find the self, then kill it: scripts and scores of self-enactment
• PART IV I was myself within the circle: vernacular and critical paradigms of expressive agency
• Epilogue: re:presenting blackness
• Appendix A: Coltrane Poems
• Appendix B: sermon transcripts
• Notes
• Index