Troubling Traditions

Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US

Lindsey Mantoan, Matthew Moore, Angela Schiller, Lindsey Mantoan, Matthew Moore, Angela Farr Schiller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000486384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Troubling Traditions takes up a 21st century, field-specific conversation between scholars, educators, and artists from varying generational, geographical, and identity positions that speak to the wide array of debates around dramatic canons.

Unlike Literature and other fields in the humanities, Theatre and Performance Studies has not yet fully grappled with the problems of its canon. Troubling Traditions stages that conversation in relation to the canon in the United States. It investigates the possibilities for multiplying canons, methodologies for challenging canon formation, and the role of adaptation and practice in rethinking the field's relation to established texts. The conversations put forward by this book on the canon interrogate the field's fundamental values, and ask how to expand the voices, forms, and bodies that constitute this discipline.

This is a vital text for anyone considering the role, construction, and impact of canons in the US and beyond.

Part I Costs of Canonicity

1 The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

Nadine George-Graves

DOI: 10.4324/9781003031413-1

Disciplining

There is a story (perhaps apocryphal) from my undergraduate days that comes to mind as I consider the future of the Canon (with a capital “C”) and acts of canonization through the professoriate. Apparently, Harold Bloom (“literally” the author of The Western Canon) was on his way to give a lecture and stopped off at Atticus, a local coffee shop (named after the now not-so-great white male savior of an arguably canonical novel). Upon leaving, he paused, lost in thought with his hat in his hand when a passerby put a quarter in it. He stopped the would-be good Samaritan and said, “Excuse me, madam, you’ve made a terrible mistake. I am the preeminent literary critic!” Of course, the exclamation point is mine and I can only surmise at his tone. Beyond the metaphor that one person’s preeminent literary critic is another person’s bum, I invite us to consider more deeply not only the question of who gets to decide what is “good” enough to enter the canon but also (and more importantly) why we think we need a canon in the first place. Why was his reproachful retort rooted in his job and position of power? Clearly, he was not the preeminent fashion critic, but he also seemed to be saying I don’t need your quarter, lady, because I tell people what to read.

In this chapter, I consider the practices, challenges, and ethics of the canon in theatre, dance, and performance. I also ask us to take a step further out and interrogate “canonical thinking” writ large and its consequences. The editors of this collection of essays asked us to think about the ways in which the next generation of scholars and artists are introduced to texts and the idea of the canon. I’ll admit that my first response was: asked and answered, move on. The death knell has rung for the canon by the paradigm shift in arts and humanities education away from “the good books” model to one of critical discourse. But, perhaps, the canon is dead, long live the canon. And perhaps the work of dismantling canonical thinking rooted in late-20th century academic culture war challenges is incomplete. To think through my position, I engaged in a number of conversations with others (scholars, artists, students, my kids, myself—a brutal interlocutor, and friends) around our work as professors tasked with providing knowledge about performance to undergraduates. Initial conversations with my OSU colleague Professor Hannah Kosstrin around the themes of this project for Dance Studies provided important foundations for my reasoning. These dialogues have led me to argue in this essay that while English and Literature manifest canonicity in disciplinary and disciplining ways, and while it is important to examine important works in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, what is more important is to entertain the idea of abandoning the canon, attempts at improving the canon (like expanding or pluralizing into “canons”), and the whole business of canonical thinking from our jobs altogether.

The most well-rehearsed criticism of the canon is that the power to define the parameters for inclusion and to “allow” works into the canon rests in the hands of too few—historically old, white men in elite English departments. This is certainly true but, I argue, the power underlying acts of canonization is dangerous in any hands and should not be the pedagogical work of university professors. The conferring of canonical status is a kind of speech-act—a saying that does. It is a beatification like the Christian dubbing of knighthood and the Catholic canonization of saints. As such, the ideology underlying the canon is not benign and is always part and parcel of our deceptively smaller educational practices. This is also not just a matter of semantics, with “canon” being interchangeable with “list,” “personal opinion,” or some other less controlling exercise. Canonicity is rooted in beliefs about the Western concept of the primacy of a shared origin, the universal acceptance of the values therein, the ritualistic rehearsal (through preaching or teaching) of these ideologies, and the maintenance of consistent unalterable messaging. Canonizing sanctifies, often with extreme hubris and prejudice, and it is a mistake to dismiss or underestimate these underlying foundational tenets from the past even as we look to the future. As such, we need to attend to this ideology as distinct from acts of curating materials to examine in class, making lists of works that belong to a category, or recognizing works as part of (or even emblematic of) a particular tradition. List-making can be useful, canonizing can be dangerous. Canons make works and people sacrosanct and untouchable. I argue that if one goes about organizing a body of materials to examine under the mindset of, or with the mandate towards, creating a canon, one necessarily subscribes to the hegemonic, imperial occidental systemic power structures that are inextricably linked to the original concept of The Western Canon, even if one works towards improving the ideology of canonical thinking. The argument that more voices from more diverse perspectives are needed is valid, though under-realized in nearly all endeavors. Yes, all lists should be rich, diverse, and inclusive. Yes, a diverse pool of judges, with varied points of view, and a wide range of definitions of “good” promises to yield a broader range of winners for any accolade. But this issue is more complex than attempts to “fix” an imperfectly “fixed” system. Canons of the good are necessarily exclusionary and will never attend to all definitions of the good. Yes, syllabi, reading lists, references, etc. should be well-defined, diverse, equitable, and inclusive. But they should not be canonical.

The Western Canon is considered to be the body of high culture that is the most valued thereby attaining the status of classic (read “best” and sometimes read “universal”). In The Western Canon, Bloom defends the canon of western literature by discussing the 26 central canonical writers according to his definition of literary merit. He condescendingly defines academic modes of inquiry that complicate his criteria by attending to things like race, class, gender, politics, or social awareness as “Schools of Resentment” (Bloom 1995: 4). Relatedly, attempts to expand the canon for broader representation and attempts to question those works included in the canon on grounds of social morality should be rejected out of hand, according to him and others. As if caring about the world renders one incapable of recognizing good art. This logic is also a declaration that things like racism, classism, sexism, and anything that might be politically or civically problematic have no place in the criteria for assessing canonical merit. Therefore, the critique of the canon for its lack of diversity in representation is simultaneously valid and invalid. The canon lacks diversity because it was made that way—literally. Allowing Toni Morrison in doesn’t really solve the problem. (For the record, I think Morrison was a brilliant author. I’m glad she was recognized and so was she. But this is not the point.) The tactic of upholding canonical thinking by recognizing a few non-traditional examples can become a complicated trap.

As long as the canon exists, yes, it should be diverse but it is important to recognize the potential costs of these moves. Diversifying canons through representation like the race, gender, or ability of the creator usually maintains definitions of “good” that still tend to reject primary aesthetics from other populations. When examining these moves towards diversity and inclusion, we must interrogate the underlying disciplining in at least three ways. 1. Moves towards diversity and inclusion do not necessarily address assumptions about the aesthetic criteria of the canon. For example, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in The Sun is a canonical play in part because it mainly adheres to Western definitions of a “well-made” realist play. 2. Token diversity and inclusion in the canon can also be used as an argument to suppress calls for equity and justice as Robert Brustein accused August Wilson of having a “failure of gratitude” in his call for more opportunities for Black artists in American theatre. (Wilson, Brustein 1996) 3. This conferring of canonical status can lead to more attention to the original tenets of the canon like white male privilege. Again, A Raisin in The Sun, couldn’t just be a canonical Black play. It took some time, but Bruce Norris managed to firmly insert whiteness into one of the few Black plays to “make it” into the canon. I’ve written about this elsewhere (George-Graves 2018), but for my purpose here, I’ll add to that argument that Clybourne Park was so highly praised precisely for its work disciplining a Black example of the theatrical canon. A Raisin in The Sun is fiction (though based on Hansberry’s real experiences) but our investment in this family is real. With the success of Norris’ demonstration that white men have access to everything, the play adjusted our pathos for a Black family. A Raisin in the Sun is the play that always moves some white undergraduate students to approach me after lecture wanting to talk about how much they “identified” with the characters. White people really want in. With Norris’ intervention, white students can have their way “in” by identifying with the white characters.

Sitting on the subway with my daughter one day, we noticed a woman carrying a bag with her school’s logo. Maya asked why she didn’t know her from school and they figured out that the woman taught at the high school. (Maya was in middle school at the time.) Maya asked her what she was teaching at the moment and the white woman beamed about teaching the “sequel” to A Raisin in the Sun and how wonderful the story was. She went on and on about the white characters (notably not the few Black ones) and I bit my lip. I talked to Maya when we got home. The fact that this high school teacher thinks Clybourne Park is a sequel, the fact that it is sometimes taught without teaching A Raisin in The Sun, and the fact that other plays written by Black playwrights in response to the Black canonical text will never receive the same amount of attention is only part of the reason to trouble the argument around the ameliorative actions of diversifying the canon. If I can’t persuade us out of canons and folks are still convinced that diversifying the canon is the way to go, know that there will always be a catch because hegemony finds a way. Diversify lists. Abolish canons.

Performing arts academic disciplines attempt to replicate the logocentric thinking of English and Literature departments by willing the primacy of Western classical music recorded in scores, text-based theatre traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the royal roots of ballet for concert dance. Even the most embodied performing art, dance, maintains written systems of notation, albeit less recognized than scores and scripts but equally rooted in Western ideology. A number of important scholars and artists have contested these assumptions and contribute to the troubling of canonical enterprises. Diana Taylor (2003) challenges the dominance of the text/archive (dramatic literature and written history) in theatre by showing that the repertoire (embodied performance and history-keeping through scenarios, instead of plays) is ignored by performance scholars who only value text-based definitions of theatre and performance to the detriment of knowledge. It is not a coincidence that the repertoire is mainly humanist artistry in the Global South vs. Western play texts. The canon does not recognize the repertoire. Saidiya Hartman (1997) models a scene-based historiography that allows us to analyze the power dynamics at the root of privileged narrative history writing. bell hooks repeatedly challenges us to first decolonize our minds. Abandoning canonical thinking and championing other pedagogical foundations for our work is part of that project. Phenomenologists, affect theorists and even cognitive theorists investigate the importance of embodied knowledge—the stuff of theatre and dance. These are profound yet under-researched areas in which theatre and dance can offer valuable insight from a non-text-based perspective. Regrettably, neither discipline has fully embraced the ways in which scholarship that is not text-based (and is less interested in disciplining audiences’ aesthetic preferences) are important epistemological matrices. Because both theatre and dance have inferiority complexes in the academy, the replication of traditional models, including championing the canon, holds sway. Parts of Performance Studies attempt to undo these systems but the subfield has even less influence in the academy. All of these deeply embodied fields fall short of the promise of the body’s challenge to the mind in the production and dissemination of knowledge in higher education. We still hold on to the idea that dramatic literature is theatre’s best bet for ascending in intellectual status and respect.

Dance, a discipline that was later to the academy, coming of age at the same time as Bloom’s “Schools of Resentment,” has been led primarily by white women, many of whom define themselves as feminists. As such, it had the greatest potential to trouble the institution in terms of rejecting old models, including the idea of the canon. Instead, the lure of academic prestige resulted in the advocacy of dance as equal in aesthetic import to literature, fine art, music, and even theatre by building the field on analogous examples of the good. The championing of white ballet, modern, and postmodern dance traditions as part of the larger western canon became the path to success in the academy. Despite the discipline coming of age during a time of critical discourse, canonizing dance works and artists according to labels of good, bad, and ugly persist. Conversations in dance departments are still rooted in definitions of what is aesthetically “good” dance defined by narrow (though widening) standards. Predictably, this leads to a general resistance to adopt more diverse, equitable, and inclusive histories and technique classes and willful incomprehension of the necessity to cut previous examples in order to make room for other discussions. In order for students to learn about a wider range of artists, traditions, techniques, and definitions of good art, they might not learn about a white person currently on the syllabus. This is the nuanced sticking point that no number of lists of “other” examples can fix, not until canonical thinking is addressed. Although it seems obvious, it bears stating that thinking that white artistic traditions are the best (or even better) is part of white supremacy. Pretending white traditions aren’t about identity politics is racist. We can’t maintain white supremacy and practice actual diversity, equity and inclusi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Troubling Traditions
• PART I: Costs of Canonicity
• PART II: Remixing Traditions
• PART III: Fluid Approaches
• PART IV: Departures and Re-visions
• Index