Posted by Diana Taylor on April 22, 192003 at 22:44:32:
From The Archive and the Repertoire:
Diana Taylor, Duke UP, 2003
Denise Stoklos: The Politics of Decipherability
I. The stage at La MaMa’s annex theatre space is flat, white, and almost bare. Upstage center, a forest of thick ropes hangs from the ceiling. Upstage right, we can barely see the clothes horse under a heavy fur coat. And off on the opposite side of the stage a small simple clothes rack and chair complete the minimalist effect of this stark setting. Eight TV sets hang suspended above the entire front of the stage, initially hidden by a black partition. The futuristic, gnawing strings of the Kronos Quartet ring out just as the flood of flat white light washes the stage. Off in the corner, poking out from the simple white curtain, we see a black booted foot. In slow-motion, s/he walks on stage in exaggerated, giant steps. [Figure 1, Denise Stoklos walks slow-motion onstage with exaggerated, giant steps in Civil Disobedience. 1999. Photo by Denis Leão] Wearing a tuxedo, complete with vest and top-hat, her look is enigmatic, androgynous. The suit is male-ish for a woman, though the curved lines and frilled shirt of the tuxedo make it feminine-ish for a man. Red lips prepare us for the mass of blond electric hair with the signature black roots that she sets free as she bows to the audience, removing her top hat. Half Thoreau, half ring-master, she ushers in her own performance, minimalist in staging, maximalist in the intensity of the corporeal images that fill the space. Using mime, she writes illegible letters in the air. So begins this inquiry into trans-national decipherability by Brazil’s most renowned solo performer, Denise Stoklos.
Civil Disobedience: Morning is When I Am Awake and There is an Aurora in Me based on texts by Henry David Thoreau as written, directed and performed by Stoklos, explores the possibilities of freedom—political, individual, sexual, artistic—in a society that keeps people needy and confined. Then—Thoreau’s 19th century New England—and now, in the throes of rampant capitalism at the end of the 20th century, this performance shows people weighed down, cramped, tormented, even driven to the point of madness by society’s imperative for compliance. “The twelve labors of Hercules,” Stoklos quotes Thoreau, “were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end” (47). The narrative, like the clothes horse, serves as a minimalist structure on which to hang her performance. Thoreau’s/Stoklos’ move to the woods (the forest of ropes bathed in green lighting) was meant as a temporary withdrawal from civilization in order to test those elements of life that were in fact “essential.” [Figure 2, 3. Thoreau’s/ Stoklos’s woods—a forest of ropes—is transformed into a jail cell in Civil Disobedience. Photo Denis Leão] S/He withstands the pangs of loneliness for civilization only to be carted off to jail (again, the ropes, now transformed by red lighting) for not paying taxes. Upon release against her/his will the following day s/he understands that s/he is as ‘free’ in society as out in the woods. The ropes, as both nature and jail, occupy the same mental space. Images of freedom, in Latin America as elsewhere, only exist in proximity to the reality of oppression. In a variety of registers, ranging from humor to poetic introspection to longing, Stoklos’ words and body language ask two recurring questions: what is essential to human happiness? How can we communicate with each other? The questions are urgent: Denise Stoklos performs against the clock. She has come, she tells us, to welcome the new millenium. The countdown, made visible on all eight TV sets, makes her hurry to get her message out, “while there is still life.” [Figure 4, Eight T.V. sets count down to the millennium as Denise Stoklos hurries to get her message out “while there is still life,” in Civil Disobedience. Photo Denis Leão]. Theatre, for Denise Stoklos, is neither about recreation nor entertainment: “It’s to gain time.”
What makes this performance so compelling, aside from the urgency of the questions, is Stoklos’ conceptual magic act—she juggles signs, images, words, gestures keeping them all in the air at the same time. Pulling all sorts of modes out of her hat—circus, mime, vaudeville, Brechtian gestus and distanciation, strip-tease, philosophical declamation, clowning—she creates her own corporeal and verbal system of signs that spin in humorous counterpoint to each other. [Figure 5. Denise Stoklos turns herself inside out in front of the mirror to a ferocious tango in Civil Disobedience. Photo Denis Leão]. The text is a composite of Thoreau, Gertrude Stein, Paulo Freire, and scatological passages parodically attributed to the “Guide to Bodily Fluids.” As Thoreau, she pays tribute to his civil disobedience, even as she mimes the walls getting smaller. She calls her hilarious reading of Gertrude Stein’s story, Miss Furr and … an example of acrobatics for the tongue: “they were gay there—not VERY gay, just gay there… She was gay and that was it!” Gaily, she unmoors signifieds from their frenetic signifiers. She saves her rhapsodic voice for the reading of the pseudo-questionnaire asking us in which social situations we allow ourselves to fart. Now she is Elis Regina, the late Brazilian singer, urging us leave a message inside a bottle in this shipwreck of a civilization. Now she is a socialite, turning herself inside out in front of the mirror to a ferocious tango. Her face transforms into a series of masks, each more grotesque in her efforts to beautify herself. [Figure 6-8, Denise Stoklos transforms her face into a series of masks, each more grotesque in her efforts to beautify herself. Photos by Thais Stoklos Kignel] An eyebrow pokes up, an eye seems to pop out, the top teeth protrude, the chin disappears in this face that contorts as easily as the body. She mimes adding make-up, then more make-up. She squeezes, prods, and pushes herself into her dress; her body crumbles under the weight of necklaces and rings. Her tormented face in the mirror growls: “Be Careful. Be Careful.” The ‘meaning’ of the words has so little to do with their performative utterance. The whole performance, in the spirit of Pina Bauch, breaks down gesture, word, image, sound to its most essential unit—repeats, reformulates, and rehearses it in another key, another movement—always with the single purpose of establishing communication.
But it’s not just these rhythms—corporeal, vocal, and textual—that intersect, converge and move apart. The Portuguese inflection of the English texts sends the words spinning off in yet another direction. Stoklos widens the distance between the “natural” and “acquired” language to further disrupt notions of normativity. Stoklos’ prefers to perform in the language of the audience—in Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Ukrainian—to facilitate communication. There is always another language co-existing within the language one hears. She has no English script for the performance—she translates as she goes along. In part, this is circumstantial: up until two days before opening Stoklos believed she would perform in Portuguese because the Annex is controlled by Equity, the actor’s union that prohibits foreign actors from performing in English. But circumstances aside, she has long cultivated both the alienation and freedom produced by speaking in a foreign language. In voluntary exile in England in the late 1970s when she composed her first solo piece, she found English offered her “lightness,” one more means for transporting herself from the “vision and vicinity of torture and dictatorship” of the Brazilian military regime. When she performs this text in Portuguese, we hear her translate Thoreau’s English into her speech. Her ability to perform in these various languages in itself signals the history of migration, exile, and re-location common shared by many Latin American artists.
Double-ness, then, is as much strategy as a circumstance. Nothing is transparent. We know each other, if at all, only in translation. In multiple registers, her work performs the obstacles to communication that she constantly alludes to. In one scene, she stages an encounter between two people by using only body language and two metal chairs. In a dance, holding the chairs at arm’s length, she moves through a sequence of motions and spaces. She then repeats the sequence with language. The language adds some clarity, but it too leaves much to our imagination. “Sometimes,” she concludes, addressing us directly, “we achieve communication. Sometimes not.” This reflection is followed by a long pause that speaks volumes. [Figure 9, 10. Denise Stoklos struggles to achieve communication. Photos by Denis Leão] Language, thus, serves simultaneously as a means of communication, an obstacle to communication, and one more signifying system. As the word ‘HONRA’ (Honor) pops up on all eight TV screens it both re-iterates what Stoklos is saying—“Honor your words, your voice, your communication”—but it also becomes a visual object in a different communication system. Communication depends on making connections, however ephemeral and haphazardly, through this semiotic maze, through this society of the spectacle that produces not clarity but confusion. Sometimes the message arrives, in the face of overwhelming odds, intact in the bottle. Sometimes not. Like the repeated gesture, the words too caution us against believing in completion. One sequence tells of the Chinese Emperor’s bathtub, adorned with the mandate—renew yourself. With the humor that characterizes the entire piece, Stoklos’ spasmodic dives into the tub remind us that the mandate needs to be performed again, and again, and again.
And through all of this, she looks at us squarely, addresses us directly, questioning our role in the meaning making process.
II So what does this magical juggling act communicate to spectators? And, of course, which spectators? Aside from the energy, the humor, and the corporeal and vocal dexterity of the performer, what else is in play? Being (for now) a creature of the new millennium in the U.S., I did what everyone else does: I polled my friends and acquaintances in New York City who had gone to see it. What did they think of the performance? One performer I know was very taken by the way that Denise Stoklos used the grotesque to challenge the social structuring of “white femininity.” Her face can twist into every imaginable shape. Some people loved her ‘cool’ hair. Others loved her, passionately, period. One student said her work lacked originality, but he admired the effort she put into it. Is she gay, another wanted to know? Others found her work too ‘European’ in the way it drew from traditions (mime, vaudeville, etc) or avoided any specific ‘Latin American’ references or issues. Others admired the extraordinary artistic rigor and richness of her performance. Some, including the reviewer from the New York Times, found her hilariously funny. A European colleague loved the interaction between Thoreau and Freire, and found it wonderful to hear a performer talk about education, poverty, taxes and other social issues. A friend found the performance “very Latin American,” and the English hard to follow. One of my colleagues asked me if Denise Stoklos sought/addressed a ‘local’ or ‘global’ audience.
The results of my home-ethnography test puzzled me. What struck me, of course, were those comments that automatically turned the event into an indicator of a subaltern difference, formulated in terms of too much/too little, and then judged it for failing or succeeding on that level. The subaltern artist, asked to bear the full burden of ensuring communication, was nonetheless denied originality. If commentators recognized the traditions that enabled communication, then the work lacked originality. But if there was something that commentators suspected they didn’t grasp, it was deemed excessive and untranslatable. What I had found remarkable about Stoklos’ performance was multi- marked-ness. Ethnically, sexually, politically, aesthetically, and linguistically she refused any simple marking. Stoklos’ studied plurality was, in itself an interesting artistic choice, in part because several of the best performance artists of her generation in Latin America-- Jesusa Rodríguez and Astrid Hadad to name two Mexican performers-- have chosen to play with and re-examine some of the most “Latin American” of icons. They work to subvert the stereotypical images that have regulated the formulation of gender identity for Mexican women (from sainted mother –the Virgin of Guadalupe or Coatilcue, the Mexica “mother” of all Mexicans [Figure 11, Jesusa Rodríguez’s version of Coatlicue, the Aztec ‘mother’ of all Mexicans. Photo courtesy of Jesusa Rodríguez]—to the macho woman with high heels and spurs [Figure 12, Astrid Hadad, in a tableau vivant of a Diego Rivera painting, is all in one: the girl holding cala lilies, the soldadera, the bejeweled Latina, and India with embroidered shirt and long black braids. Heavy Nopal, 1998. Photo Pancho Gilardi]. Hadad’s recent piece Heavy Nopal, suggests that the narrow grid provided by the stereotype which reduces and fixes a one-dimensional image serves only as a critique for those who are able to see the violence of the framing. Hadad, in a “tableaux vivant” of a Diego Rivera painting, humorously bears the weight of stereotypical accumulation and ‘anxious’ repetition. She is all in one: the Diego Rivera girl holding cala lilies, the ‘soldadera’ (or revolutionary fighter), the bejeweled Latina, loaded down with rings, bracelets and dangling earrings, the India with the hand-embroidered shirt, long black braids, and a bewildered look about her. The over-marked image of telegenic ethnicity signals the rigid structuring of cultural visibility. The parodic self-marking reads as one more repetition of the fact, one more proof of its fixity. Latin America is only visible through cliché, known solely “in translation.” Hadad plays with the anxiety behind these images of excess, pushing the most hegemonic of spectators to reconsider how these stereotypes of cultural/racial/ethnic difference are produced, reiterated, and consumed.
And yet Stoklos, who works with “western” texts and performance techniques and who explicitly aspires to some ‘universal’ message about communication is held to how much or how little she displays these same ethnic markings. When my friend said she found Stoklos “very Latin American” I knew that meant “excessive,” “emotional,” even “hysterical.” The comment “too European,” i.e. not Latin American enough, meant that the expectations created for the “exotic” or the “emotional” had not been met. My student’s comment about the lack of ‘originality’ (for using some of those ‘western’ techniques) carried with it the assumption that Latin Americans do not belong to the West. It also overlooks the troubled issue of ‘originality’ as applied to ‘Third World’ contexts. Colonialism strips the ‘original’ –as denoting cultural belonging and autochthonous expression—from the colonized and transfers it to the colonizer as a marker of cultural taste, privilege, and symbolic capital. Framing the argument in terms of ‘originality’ not only repeats the charge of colonial mimeticism, but it mistakes the cultural gesture of appropriation and transculturation that has characterized Latin American artistic and intellectual formation for an indiscriminate borrowing. ‘Originality’ in Latin American performance would have to be understood both in terms of autochthonous forms and the highly innovative ways artists appropriate forms that come from other cultural repertoires. The “very Latin American,” like the “too European” betrays a reductive notion of a naturalized cultural and group identity in/for Latin America—as if there were a Latin American way of being or performing. The degree to which performers resist or take on expectations renders the performance transparent (too European) or untranslatable (too Latin American). Thus, the “Latin American,” as I heard it, suggested a way of closing down, rather than expanding, the field of cultural recognition.
III The power and originality of Stoklos’ work, to my mind, lies in the humor and intensity with which she transforms the most disparate artistic and political traditions into a forceful and highly personal performance project. In her thirty years as an artist, she has explored the quirky mix of Brazilian militarism and postmodern alienation (Casa, 1990), responded to the ongoing effects of colonialism (500 years—a Fax from Denise Stoklos to Christopher Columbus, 1992), reflected on the torturous political and personal pulls on women—as political leaders (Denise Stoklos in Mary Stuart) and as mothers (Des-Medéia, 1995)—and examined the political options facing citizens at the end of the 20th century (Civil Disobedience, 1998). [Figure 13, 14, 15, 16. Figure 13, Denise Stoklos explored the quirky mix of Brazilian militarism and postmodern alienation in CASA, 1990, Photo Jay Isla. Figure 14, In 500 Years—A fax from Denise Stoklos to Christopher Columbus, 1992, Stoklos responded to the ongoing effects of colonialism, Photo Bel Pedrosa. Figure 15, Denise Stoklos in Mary Stuart, 1987, a piece reflecting on the tortuous pulls of political power. Photo Jay Islas. Figure 16. Des-Medéia, Stoklos’ 1995 performance in which Media chooses not to kill her children. Photo Sergio Divitis] Each of these performances draws from the repertoire of artistic traditions that I allude to in relation to Civil Disobedience—mime, vaudeville, Brechtian epic theatre, juggling, and other recognizable forms—to convey a message that is uncompromisingly her own. Stoklos makes it a point to cite the traditions that formed her as an artist—thus she always includes a short mime sequence. However, she rejects the political neutrality of mime, and uses it only to further her own project, with is firmly positioned and committed. Denise Stoklos’ address to Columbus, as the title indicates, is absolutely personal, direct, and contemporary. She explores the role of the artist, the intellectual, the theatre, and the audience in the tragic history of her country. “Read it,” she says, “it’s all in the books.” Later, once the audience fully comprehends the magnitude of her critique, she has the house lights turned up: “The doors of the theatre are open for those who want to abandon this ship in flames.” Denise Stoklos, through her own body, explores the ways in which gender, sexuality, power, and familial bonds pull and push in a woman’s flesh. Can we undo the historical trajectory of killings and opt for life-affirming strategies—be they ideological, political, or personal/familial? Stoklos’ work is polyvalent, allowing for unusually divergent readings.
In Brazil, her audiences recognize her fierce engagement with national politics. A production of hers is an event that receives national attention. At a recent festival of her work in São Paulo that I attended, the audiences of mainly university aged Brazilians were deeply moved by each of her performances. Every show was sold out, and every night brought a thunderous standing ovation. The theatre was plastered inside and out with wall size photographs of Stoklos’ facial expressions, taken by her daughter Thais Stoklos Kignel. [Figure 17, In 1999, Stoklos’s work was featured, as it so often is, in a Brazilian theatre festival. Inside, wall-size photographs of Stoklos’ facial expressions taken by her daughter Thais Stoklos Kignel surrounded the audience members in the lobby. Photo Diana Taylor]. Even the floors and elevators reflected her presence.
Denise Stoklos’ status as a national icon stems, in part, from her innovate artistic work. She is the first solo performance artist from Latin America, in the way commentators tend to think of solo performance in the U.S. at least. Her precursors there might be the vaudeville artists and cabaret stars of the 1950s and 1960s—Elis Regina, Chavela Vargas, La Lupe, Chabuca Granda. Her book, The Essential Theatre, outlines her project of using minimum resources—“gestures, movement, words, wardrobe, scenery, accessories and effects” (5) to maximum artistic and political effect. [see insert on “Essential Theatre.”]
In opting for solo performance, Stoklos went against the prevailing political and artistic style of the late 1960s and the 1970s. The Cuban revolution had promoted the ethos of collectivity, a concept that organized everything from neighborhoods to theatre groups. Many of Brazil’s (and Latin America’s) most important artists of the period forged collectives to continue their artistic and political work in the face of criminal politics. Boal worked with other important artists in the Arena Theatre, Buenaventura started T.E.C in Colombia, Yuyachkani began working in Peru, and so on. It went against the thinking of the times to stage solo work. Even amateur performers formed groups to engage in street theatre, staging pieces that spoke to the current political situation in the favelas and other ‘popular’ neighborhoods. The political instrumentality of performance of this period made it difficult for theatre practitioners and artists who went into exile to continue their work. Deprived of their groups, their audiences, and their contexts, most exiled artists either stopped creating for a time or taught in theatre schools. Stoklos, however, used the period of exile to train herself as a solo performer. Even so, ‘solo’ doesn’t mean ‘alone.’ She is always in conversation, artistically and ideologically, with others who have fought for freedom. Her last words to Elis Regina, in her one-woman homage, maps out the trajectory of solidarity—Stoklos quotes Regina who in turn sings one of Atahualpa Yupanqui’s most famous lines, “Yo tengo tantos hermanos que no los puedo contar….” [I have so many brothers/sisters that I can’t count them all].
In the U.S., the issues, the stakes, and the viable spaces of contestation, are profoundly different. While discussions about colonialism, militarism, political freedom, regulatory systems of gender and sexuality, are also intensely politicized within the U.S., international dialogue about them, even among progressives, usually remain in the realm of wishful thinking. The strategies, the gestures, the corporeal and symbolic languages used to express them reflect the cultural specificity of their articulation and threaten to render them ‘untranslatable’ in another context. In a manner as humorous, but perhaps more difficult to recognize than in Heavy Nopal, Stoklos too plays with the epistemological grid of understanding by staging the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t of the seemingly transparent. What makes it through the hegemonic filters, artistically or politically?
This playful hide-and-seek, unnoticed by respondents to my do-it-myself poll, is one of the characteristics I find ‘very Latin American.’ Although Stoklos performs it, moving in and out of the ropes, stripping, dressing, moving, camouflaging, transforming before our eyes, it goes unnoticed as a strategy because it’s antithetical, according to the grid, to a ‘Latin America’ that is fixed, known, repeated, and absolutely accessible to us. So, what would it mean to refer to hide-and-seek as a ‘Latin American’ strategy? It might refer to a broad range of cultural practices that, since the conquest of the Americas, have seemed suspiciously inaccessible to its colonizers. Even though State and Church authorities imposed strict regulations for how native peoples could dress, live, worship, celebrate and so forth, the extant writings transmit the uneasy conviction that for all their watchfulness, the Europeans were nonetheless missing the point. The colonizer/colonized spectacle is always double-coded. Something else is always happening beneath the seemingly transparent routines imposed by the new masters. The mutli-coded cultural practices have, if anything, become even more dynamic with the passing of centuries. The native and African populations of the Americas have always found ways of transmitting their performative practices under the very noses of the ruling groups, as did the conversos, Jews, and other minority people. This skill, long a survival strategy, has also at times been converted into an art form. For Denise Stoklos, a Brazilian artist who learned her trade during a period of military dictatorship, censorship, and state violence (1964-1985), multi-valiant virtuosity takes into account both the demand for clarity and the oppositional tactic of selective or partial visibility.
Let’s look, for a moment, at the relationship between sexuality and freedom. Brazil, unlike other Latin American countries under dictatorship during the same period, seemed to allow for greater physical and sexual ‘freedom,’ though people were denied freedom of speech and other civil rights. The image of a sexy, multiracial body was Brazil’s greatest export. Carnival and samba, Brazil’s two best known cultural products, both glorify sensuous, undulating, seemingly unrepressed flesh. The body as both an economic and political commodity, functioned as a signifier of a freedom only skin deep, part of a double spectacle, or rather, a spectacle within a spectacle— somewhat along the lines of what Debord calls the military (or “concentrated”) spectacle functioning within the more “diffuse” spectacle of global capitalism. The body, for the military, does one thing. The words go someplace else.
Indecipherability, then, has long been a strategy for combating the exigencies that everything be transparent, available for immediate de-coding. Ambiguity subverts the demand for decipherability and strict compliance. In a social situation demanding strict gender and sexual formation as integral to the political performance of national ‘being,’ not being available for easy reading was both a danger and a form of civil disobedience. Humor, for Stoklos and other Latin American performers, provides the vehicle for the multi-coded communication. Predicated on unexpected juxtapositions, subversions, reconfigurations, her humor hints at other possible meanings, doubleness, multivalence.
Stoklos, who had worked in theatre in Brazil, as a playwright, actor and director from 1968 until she left for England in 1979, learned a couple of new languages—one linguistic, one aesthetic. English, as I mentioned previously, offered ‘lightness.’ Working on solo performance offered a zone of expressive and political possibility during a period in which group disobedience was dangerous in the extreme. Better to stage one’s own, solo act of resistance. Perhaps one point of convergence that drew Stoklos to Thoreau was the similarity of this ‘solo’ political performance. “The only obligation which I have the right to assume,” Stoklos says, quoting from Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, “is to do at any time what I think is right” (387). Both withdrew from their world, temporarily, not to escape but to reinterpret it, to dis-identify, to retool. Civil disobedience, for Thoreau and for Stoklos, is a solo practice, the politics of non-participation, the anti-identity, anti-cathartic politics of individual resistance, the politics of the one. For Stoklos, corporeal language could say what words could not. The “scenic body” (Stoklos, 26) assumes the responsibility of communicating, of re-opening the venues closed down by the terror systems, silencing, and exile
This political context leads to somewhat “different” kind of political performance than much of what my friends and acquaintances see in New York. The aims, and thus the strategies, differ. Several of the best U.S. solo performers—Peggy Shaw, Kate Bornstein, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, John Leguiziamo, Marga Gomez, Carmelita Tropicana, Deb Margolin, Spalding Gray, to name a few-- draw from autobiographical material. They write their own material, recalling their personal experiences with menopause, sex-changes, coming out, dis/owning one’s body, growing up in a dysfunctional family, Alzheimers, exile, and religious formation. Often in the first person, the performances tend to privilege language over corporeality and rely on identification with an audience they recognize as their own. The humor, the intensity, the beauty of these performances often stems from taking the small, the personal, the confessional, and making it speak to a community organized around (but not limited to) an ‘identity.’ Latinos/as, gay/lesbians, feminists, find in these artists a space for identification, for mutual recognition, for being otherwise than that regulated by dominant culture. These performances legitimate alternativity through irony, humor, joy. They are often associated with specific venues (off off) and audiences are self-selected around specific ‘issues.’
Stoklos, perhaps more in the vein of Anna Deavere Smith, takes another route in solo performance, allowing her body to channel (rather than own) a whole range of positions. Their work is intensely ‘personal’ as far as its political and aesthetic project is concerned, but not autobiographical. Nor do they address like-minded audiences. Rather than the inside-out approach described above, these two artists go from the outside-in. Anna Deavere Smith has stated that an actor can get inside a character through language—if we learn to say the words of another, we will be able to somehow feel what they feel, and understand why they do as they do. Neither of them use their own words, although they very much conceive of and create their own texts. Rather, it is precisely by incorporating these other words, other languages, other ways of thinking that allow for the inter-personal and inter-group (be it racial or national) communication they both see as key to their political project. Stoklos, somewhat along the lines of many of her Latin American contemporaries, thinks of herself as a revolutionary—she seeks a profound and radical transformation in the individual’s way of thinking and acting. But, again ironically, she is more of a revolutionary along the lines of the anarchistic, individualistic Thoreau than along the lies of Fidel or Ché or Sandino. Too many failed revolutions later, Stoklos cannot subscribe to the cathartic, identificatory, restrictive programs these have set in motion.
This is not to say that Stoklos doesn’t worry about the other issues—such as gender and sexuality—that concern some of these other artists. Even though her reflections are not attached to a personal narrative, they continually spin before our eyes. As a performer, Stoklos seems to have equal access to the broad spectrum of genders normally reduced and dichotomized as male/female. But she does not engage in drag, if by that we mean a conscious, parodic masquerading or un-masquerading of ‘opposite’ gender roles. There is nothing parodic in the way she assumes the power, authority, control and physical strength usually bestowed on the masculine, nor in the way she exalts in the pleasure, vulnerability and expressivity of the body associated with the feminine. Rather, she challenges the normative system that assigns ‘masculinity’ exclusively to males and ‘femininity’ to females. The critique, as the make-up sequence makes clear, lies in the way that we are forced to fit into the reductive strictures of stereotypical gender roles.
Androgyny, however, is not a popular category for some queer theorists in the U.S. The move in the U.S. that is seen as most politically radical involves a more explicit, categorical, presentation. The disparagement stems from the way in which androgyny has been mobilized to foreclose, rather than pry open, the complicated relationships between gender and sexual ‘acts.’ And there is a way in which Stoklos’ performance, while challenging restrictive gender paradigms, stops short of linking gender performances to sexual practice. Besides the Steinian moment of being gay there, not VERY gay, just gay, her sexuality is indecipherable because of the anti-autobiographical nature of Stoklos’ performance. One could argue that, once again, the performance stages the rupture between the corporeal and the speakable. Stoklos’ body performs one thing and speaks another. She dismantles normative femininity and masculinity as a dressing up and stripping down, she performs gayness through Stein, she exerts her physical strength in the swinging of the chairs, and allows for sensuousness and vulnerability. She laments our inability to make use of our full range of body, thought and being. Her body and her words call for more options, an expansion of our current expressivity. But what works physically as a challenge to limitations can also (as the disparagement about androgyny suggests) be seen as working discursively as its opposite—subsuming issues of sexuality under blanket of “oppression”—a clumping together, rhetorically, that works against the performance of prying open. However, this discussion too benefits from a broader inter-cultural dialogue. Rather than dismiss this kind of performance of ambiguity as non-political or ‘unqueer,’ Sylvia Molloy encourages us to look at ‘posing’ and other forms of ‘unpatriotic’ gender practices as “a significant political performance and a founding queer cultural practice.” The discussion that opens up around the seemingly transparent issues of politics, gender and sexuality, I would argue, highlights the indecipherability produced when two political imperatives run into each other—the politics of ambiguity stemming from Latin America is at odds with the U.S. identity politics that demands definition.
IV. Why is it so urgent that performance theorists focus on intercultural spectatorship, on the ways that we understand or misunderstand each other across cultural and national borders? As systems of circulation—economic, cultural, migratory—undergo change as part of globalization, we are confronted with new systems of control and centralization in which we play a part. While performances have long traveled (usually one-way) from the centers to the colonial peripheries, we now live in an environment of far greater, and seemingly multi-directional, cultural circulation. This circulation take several shapes. We have the ‘pre-fabricated’ productions such as CATS and Miss Saigon that play simultaneously in New York, London, and Mexico City. These are cultural commodities, objects that change little if at all in transit. Secondly, folkloric shows continue to let “third world” products into “first world” stages: performances of the Ballet Focklórico, tango, and flamenco fall into neat categories that confirm what we already know about these ‘excessive’ cultures. We have some artistically innovative international performances traveling to alternative spaces—such as ‘Civil Disobedience’ playing at La MaMa. Then we have what my colleague calls the ‘global’ circuit—the ‘world-class’ performances by the Robert Wilsons, Pina Bauschs, Phillip Glasses and Tadushi Sasukis showcased in huge productions for the cultural elite in the world’s great cities. In short, cultural production plays an important though too often unexamined role in what usually gets talked about as financial ‘flows.’ The global city, as Saskia Sassen argues in her book by that title, earns that stature in part through the concentration and diversity of the cultural commodities it can furnish for its affluent, urban, new professionals. Moreover, global cities are linked to each other, sharing more products (including cultural) with each other than they might with the countries in which they happen to be situated. The re-territorialization, however, leads to a different structure of relatively closed systems along new class formations. For, on the other end of the same process, we see the rapidly increasing immigrants and minority groups that take the low-paying jobs servicing these new professionals. These ‘service’ groups also demand and create cultural products. In New York, for example, mural art, casitas, and community sculptures function as ways in which minority communities ”upgrade” and ‘make home’ their new environment.
Globalization, then, has furnished us with a variation on the old center-periphery model of colonialism. Now the center and the periphery often occupy the same space, in concentric circles rather than a linear, direction here/there. It has also ushered in new problems in thinking about location and situatedness—ones that take into account that populations reside in certain places more because of financial and political imperatives than ethnic or national ones. “Latin America” no longer signifies a readily recognizable space or population over there. The elite in Latin America have apartments in New York, and more ties to other economic leaders worldwide than to the majority of people in their country of origin. The migrant Latin American worker has become the pan-ethnic bus-boy clearing tables at chic restaurants in SoHo. In Latin American countries too the past five hundred years have been marked by all sorts of invasions, migrations and other forms of re-location. Brazil has the second largest Japanese population in the world, while Buenos Aires’ Jewish population is second only to New York in the Americas. There is no one language, artistic or linguistic, associated with either the Northern or Southern hemisphere. What do judgments such as “too Latin American” or “too European” mean in the face of these realities? The urgency for developing a more informed and nuanced trans-, cross-, or inter- cultural spectatorship increases as we try to understand our role as intellectuals, theorists, and artists in a rapidly changing system that affects both our understanding of the local and the international arenas as deeply interconnected. Cultural competence now involves not just an understanding of transculturation, that explains how cultural systems undergo change through contact with ‘foreign’ influences—though that would be a start. It requires an understanding of how performances—as commodities, as art objects, as upgrading processes, as vehicles for expression and communication—move within and as part of larger economic and ideological networks, linking São Paulo to New York, for example, or Broadway to the Lower East Side. Broadway shows and the Lower East Side murals are flip sides of the same spectacle in Debord’s understanding of the term: “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (4). The transnational circuits that create one create the other. Cultural production needs to be seen as part of a more mobile, less geographically bound, system of interaction and connection.
Performances not only participate in these systemic international ‘flows,’ they have also long served as a site for inter-cultural inquiry. Louis Althusser, in For Marx, noted that “performance is fundamentally the occasion for a cultural and ideological recognition.” This sounds like Victor Turner’s utopian claim that “[w]e will know one another better by entering one another’s performances and learning their grammars and vocabularies.” However, this only works if we do more than extend our existing paradigms to include ‘other’ cultural experiences. Performance, which can literally stage the intra-group encounter, offers a privileged site for this exploration. Performance not only functions as indicator of global processes, it also opens a space for thinking about them, and about our habits of response. Bad [cultural] habits: to think about performance as object or commodity, rather than as a collective exercise: to label as ‘critical thinking’ what is, in fact, the reaffirmation of exhausted categories. Performances can challenge our assumptions about our role as spectators and our own cultural positioning.
Intercultural performance, theorists have reiterated throughout most of this century, requires a new kind of spectatorship—a dialectic spectatorship (for Althusser) that demands a break both with the “identification” model and its opposite—the one that places the spectator outside the production: “Mother Courage is presented to you. It is for her to act. It is for you to judge. On the stage the image of blindness—in the stalls the image of lucidity” (148). The identification model, which Althusser critiques as reducing “social, cultural and ideological consciousness” to “a purely psychological consciousness” (149) has also been charged by theorists such as Augusto Boal with disempowering spectators, turning them into passive onlookers of the actions and emotions of the high and mighty. The second model—the non-reflective distancing, seems to me at the heart of the hegemonic spectatorship I alluded to earlier. Here the spectator, not the protagonist, is empowered and claims “absolute consciousness of self” (148). But this is very different from the spectactors that Boal advocates for, the disempowered social actors who rightly fight for an active role in the social struggles that involve them. Hegemonic spectators profit from non-identification. As Althusser’s image of the ‘judge’ indicates, these spectators enjoy the superiority and power that accompanies the lofty position of sentencing without ever feeling oneself implicated in the proceedings. The problems of hegemonic spectatorship are even more accentuated in the realm of intercultural performance, where people feel even less implicated in the ideological construction of the performance and even more empowered to demand access. The onus is on the performance, not the spectator, to create meaning. The subject matter, style, or language should not be too foreign (just foreign enough). This is a different kind of ‘critical’ distancing—power masquerading as aesthetics, taste as value. Spectators, secure in their position of the imperial eye/I outside the frame, pass judgment. Instead of breaking down our responses, as spectators, we might simply repeat them. Cultural habits dress up as critique. Yet the critique that shakes everyone’s assumptions about our place in the spectacle as ‘a social relation among people’ might only be able to come from the margins. The aim of our efforts, as one of my students put it, is “to re-educate the epistemological privilege of the ordinary spectator.”
Stoklos’ performance, ‘Civil Disobedience,’ offers a model for intercultural communication in the face of overwhelming odds. On one hand, this is very much an international performance—one that travels from São Paulo, to New York, and soon to the other great cities. It is also international in its form, drawing from philosophical texts, circus traditions, mime, and other western aesthetic and political repertoires. It stages an international dialogue on topics of ‘universal’ significance, and its protagonists (Thoreau, Freire, Stein) are well known. The words have all been written. They are pronounced in the spectator’s own language. Yet, while on one level the performance functions in the global circuits of cultural flows, in no way does it sustain the ideology of control and management that only occasionally tries to pass itself off as communication.
On the contrary: Stoklos whispers, growls, and sings “Be careful.” It is not so easy to achieve communication. Intercultural or international dialogue is even more difficult, and often treacherous. It turns, too often, into power’s megalomaniac monologue with itself. Intercultural communication is not a ‘thing known;’ our grid can’t frame or capture ‘it.’ A praxis rather than an episteme, it can never be assumed, access is never given but always learned. Multiculturalism, erroneously to my mind, held out the promise of cultural understanding. I would propose that we begin with the assumption that we don’t understand, that we always engage in acts of translation. The task of working towards intercultural communication (as opposed to consuming otherness), Stoklos proposes, is urgent. She takes the first giant, though careful, step forward, ushering in the event that brings the past into dialogue with our future, the over-there into the here and now. That here and now is not a stable place but a configuration of elements in constant flux. Some spectators will recognize some of those elements—maybe the Gertrude Stein, or the Paulo Freire, or the mime gestures—and not others. We are all equidistant from the multi-cultural repertoire of images. How do all the different conversations, signs, movements make sense together? Stoklos, looking at us, communicating with us through languages, images, gestures, movement, challenges us to recognize the urgency with which we too must struggle for communication. Sometimes the words are incomprehensible, the gesture tentative, the meaning fragmented or incomplete. Sometimes we understand each other. Sometimes not. Will we be able to make out the message in the bottle? What if we could? Stoklos’ performance demands an act of imagination from us. This is not the Aristotelian urging that we learn to accept the impossible plausibility (as opposed to the possible implausibility) when watching a performance. She demands that we imagine our interrelatedness otherwise; the occasions for interaction and conversation are far more numerous and flexible than we now imagine. Stranger things have happened: Thoreau engages in a contemporary conversation with Freire, a hundred years his junior. The encounter between thinkers, pacifists, educators, and poets from different parts of the world has already produced a trans-generational, trans-national discourse about freedom and social justice and has led to social visions and political projects as different as Thoreau’s, Gandhi’s, Kierkegaard’s, and Marx’s. Inter-cultural communication is not just wishful thinking; it’s a collective exercise that works towards the creation of what Arjun Appadurai calls a “diasporic public sphere.” Through her work, Stoklos affirms not just its potentiality, but its existence. It is with humor, conviction and courage that she urges us to join her, to add our voices and body language and knowledges to the already vast repertoire of cultural gestures. Together, we will make meaning, or we’ll keep trying—again, and again, and again.