Abstract
In this performance script, I interrogate the ethical and political implications of the interdisciplinary turn to performance and theatre in critical ethnography. I focus on ethnodramas, and the performance theories of Boal, Conquergood, Freire, Goffman, Madison, Saldana, Schechner, and Turner. A play-within-a-play is offered as an instance of this kind of writing.
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This is a messy and complicated marriage: Turner uses performance as a way of representing fieldwork, envisioning the work of the fieldworker as a performance; Schechner wants to move performance out of the theatre, into a new field called performance studies; Saldana holds to a very specific meaning of drama, theatre, and performance; all the world is a stage for Goffman, Boal, and Freire; and Conquergood uses theatre as a weapon for confronting social injustice.
Performance autoethnography is a blurred genre. It is many things at the same time. It bends and twists the meanings of theatre, drama, audience, ethnography, ethnographer, performer, performance, politics, and ethics. In my telling, there is no separation between the writer, the ethnographer, the performer, and the world.
I seek a new genealogy. Performance autoethnography is easily confused with other terms. It is not ethnography, autobiography, biography, personal narrative, personal history, life history, life story, or personal experience story. It is not deeply theoretical. It is more than personal writing or cultural critique. It is more than performance. But it is performative. It is transgressive. It is resistance. It is dialogical. It is ethical. It is political, personal, embodied, collaborative, imaginative, artistic, creative, a form of intervention, a plea for social justice.
I offer a performance about performance, theatre, and ethnography.
My [auto] ethnographer is a performer, a poet, a playwright, a ethnodramatist, a fieldworker, a storyteller, a critic, a social justice advocate. My [auto] ethnographer refuses to be hemmed in or confined to a narrow set of terms or procedures. My autoethnographer is wild, unruly, passionate, a wily coyote, a circus clown, a disrupter committed to the belief that through performance, we can change reality by making social injustice visible.
I imagine a democracy founded in a social justice that is not yet (Weems, 2002, p. 3). Globally and locally democratic public life is under siege. We have fallen prey to a politics of extremism, misogyny, and ultra-nationalism. Welcome to Donald Trump’s world.
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Close your eyes, listen to the music, imagine a circus, a carnival, laughter, clowns, people in costume wearing masks, social media meets avant-garde theatre, dadaism, surrealism, the situationists, and political theatre, welcome to my autoethnographic theatre of the oppressed (Boal, 1974/1985). Let the play begin. Together we will expose and dismantle Donald Trump’s evil world. Listen to D. Soyini Madison.
I have witnessed courageous interventions by men and women who have faced great risks in the defense of human rights and social justice. I have also witnessed how they employ performance as a subversive tactic to win hearts and minds in their efforts toward a more humane and democratic society (Madison, 2010, p. 1, quote is paraphrase).
We are called to answer the call to resist: to celebrate community c. wright mills challenged me to look at how private troubles became public issues troubles, issues connect your biography to history connect history to identity, to injustice push back, resist, write words that change the world one word at a time. This was back then, before there was autoethnography, and flesh and blood bodies and performances, body, paper, stage a response to the call . . . Life, art, ethnography, politics, turned upside down.
Hold in wright, You need a theatre to change the world. Words alone won’t do it Theatre is your weapon, people freely singing in the open air Voices cry out, demanding a free open society Radical performances enacting pedagogies of the oppressed Rehearsals for a revolution that you can sink your teeth into Go to prison if you have to, dress in black, be an exile, A wife rehearses leaving her violent husband, A wife leaves her violent husband
Solitary suicides, disintegrated families, nightmares at mid-day, fingernails dig into the memory of clawing out chunks of the future, daggers in the chest, neighbors who drowned themselves in confusion, relatives, surrounded by the present, looking into the future, seeing nothing kill themselves by jumping out of very high windows We can stand no more death we seek a radical pedagogy of the heart, a pedagogy of hope and love, forgiveness
So this is why you wanted us to make Paulo and Augusto part of his play. They believe in putting lives on the line. They have lived the call. They have lived lives of resistance. It is not idle talk for them. In their hands theatre becomes the means to revolution.
Never mind the beginning. As we said earlier, in the mid-1980s, Turner (1982, 1986), Conquergood (1985), and Schechner (1985, 1988) outlined a theory of culture, ritual, drama, theatre and spectacle.
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The ethnographer studies and records the rituals performed in a cultural setting. These rituals are incorporated into ethnographic texts. The “processed ethnoscript is transformed into a workable preliminary playscript” Playscripts are then rehearsed and performed by drama students (Turner, 1982, pp. 98-99). This is all fine. Where’s the politics?
The politics came later. With the ethnoscript text the know-how of theatre people— their sense of dialogue, understanding of setting and props, ear for a telling, revelatory phrase— could combine with the anthropologist’s understanding of cultural meanings, Indigenous rhetoric, and material culture.
The playscript would be subject to continuous modification during the rehearsal process, which would lead up to the actual performance before an audience.
The theatre people needed us. Ethnographers could help drama students during rehearsal, if not by direct participation, at least in the role of dramaturg, that is as advisers to the performers and director (p. 99, paraphrase). This is how theatre, performance and anthropology come together,
We needed a performance paradigm that privileged struggle, agency, praxis, resistance, the spaces where doing and the done collide. There was not enough of this in Victor for me.
Hold on. Back up in your history. Paulo Freire’s Augusto Boal’s moves Paulo’ framework into the spaces of radical social theatre. The link between theatre, pedagogy and critical inquiry was in place by 1974, but nobody was ready to take it up. Boal had his own radical theory of theatre which implemented Freire’s critical pedagogy.
In simultaneous dramaturgy, a participant describes a problem. When a husband drinks he becomes violent He beats his wife. A spectator is invited to address this situation She proposes an intervention—make him feel guilty, refuse to prepare his meals, no sex, change the locks on the doors, leave him.
This short scene is performed for an audience Actors improvise with the script, and develop the scene to the point of a crisis. They stop the performance. The audience is asked for solutions. The audience writes a new script which the actors simultaneously perform. This is simultaneously dramaturgy (Boal, 1974/1985, pp. 132, 134).
Augusto Boal’s theatre is a rehearsal for revolution, for resistance, for empowerment. The spectator rehearses a real act. A wife leaves her violent husband. This performance makes the experience concrete. It creates the desire to seek fulfillment through real action (Boal, 1974/1985, p.142).
We wanted a new form of theatre, a theatre for the oppressed. We called this use of crisis our It is meant to instill intervention, to invite spect-actors to act out alternative actions.
In two books, Johnny Saldana (2005, 2011), while citing Boal’s project, moved Turner’s ethnoscripts into an arts-based framework, what he labeled ethnodrama, ethnotheatre, and autoethnodrama. Ethnotheatre, a word joining ethnography and theatre, merges ethnography and theatre in a live or mediated performance event (Saldana, 2005, p. 1). Ethnodrama, a word joining ethnography and drama, is a play script that dramatizes ethnographic narrative collected from interview transcripts, participant observation field notes, journal entries, personal memories/experiences, print and media artifacts, and . . . historical documents (Saldana, 2011, p. 13; 2005, pp. 1-2).
Ethnodramas are solidly rooted in nonfictional, or researched reality— “not realism, but reality” (Saldana, 2011, pp. 14, 47).
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Consider the following excerpt from Susan Finley’s “Dream Child: The Role of Poetic Dialogue in Homeless Research” (Finley, 2000).
Hey, que pasa? I just got out of jail here in Austin. Wrote a poem while I was in jail and decided to mail you a copy. A young girl writes a sad poem. Is This My Life? Once in a while I awaken, asking myself “what am I doing?” Am I going to live on the streets forever? . . . She sleeps in a too large sweater, a cold, lonely night. She dreams. Morning sun awakens She hears her father leave the house for work Dreams of poetry. And a young girl writes a sad poem in a squat in New Orleans, her home (Finley, 2000, pp. 433-434, paraphrase).
A poetic monologue woven out of snippets of audiotaped conversations, lines of poetry written by Dream Child, arts-based participatory action research ethnodrama on the road to being homeless, but not hopeless in New Orleans.
Ethnodramas examine moments of crisis in the culture, liminal moments, suspended in time. They open up institutions and their practices for critical inspection. Depending on the goals of the ethnodramatist, the artistic project is not only aesthetic, it possesses “emancipatory potential” for motivating social change within participants and audiences.
Ethnotheatre can be a manifesto that exposes oppression and challenges the existing social order through moral and political discourse (Saldana, 2005, p. 3, paraphrase; see also Mienczakowski & Morgan, 2001).
A performer speaks from the pages of Mary Weems (2013) book:
(Young lesbian [20s—early 30s] enters stage left, wearing a rainbow tie-dyed t-shirt, a short jean skirt, red high-topped tennis shoes, and white socks: The itsy bitsy spider crawls up the water spout,
down came the rain and washed the spider out [PAUSE].
I tried to kill the spider once. I kind of felt like that spider most of the time, caught in my own web. [PAUSE]. I decided you can’t kill a spider with rainwater and maybe being caught in your own web wasn’t so bad [PAUSE]/ I’m gay . . . Yep, I’m a lesbian. I’m a spider. Rainwater is cleansing. I can’t drown in it. I only start drowning when I’m not being myself [PAUSE]. One day, when I was nine, my parents left me with Uncle Herman. I was in garden watching a spider when I heard a strange gurgling sound, turned, and there he was standing behind me with his pants around his ankles [PAUSE]. I started to back up. I felt the thorns in my back. [PAUSE]. Hey, little girl, come to Uncle Hermie. I started to cry. He held me there. When he finished he wiped my face with his handkerchief. Practicing to kill myself used to be a game (Weems, 2013, p. 8, paraphrase).
Her monologue stands on its own two feet as critique of patriarchy and incest, a cry of pain, abuse, betrayal, no help from the itsy bitsy spider.
Historical [auto] ethnodrama is a cousin to Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Here is an example from a short play based on ethnographic fieldwork in museums, and galleries, and imaginative re-workings of original print and media materials. As the ethnodramatist, I have multiple identities: narrator, Tonto, Ms Coyote, and Coyote. My Coyote, like Boal’s joker (1974/1985, p.182), creates scenes, directs action, disrupts, function as a master of ceremonies. Speakers are designated as Speaker One, or Speaker Two. Each speaker names the character—for example, Ms. Coyote—before reading the character’s lines. Who reads which character is assigned arbitrarily. I was guided by Walter Benjamin’s argument that a critical text consists of a series of quotations, documents, excerpts, and texts, placed side by side. Quotations attributed to a speaker, are paraphrases from an original text which is cited. Following Boal (1974/1985), these are improvised, invented texts, fictions that become reality, blueprints for acting that are realized in performance (1995, p. 185).
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This caveat operates at all times:
The point of the play is this: There is no Custer’s Last Stand. There is no stand. There is no last. There is no where to stand. And dear reader my dramatic format leaves you with nowhere to stand (except to know that what you knew before was certainly not the whole picture). The story was the “Real” Last Stand, this play is an ambush that that story walked right into.
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(Stage right: Spotlight shines on 1886 Advertisement for “Custer’s Last Rally,”: “Buy your tickets for Custer’s Last Rally,”
(Stage right, spotlight shines on Cody in stage outfit)
Allow me to introduce the famous William F. Cody, performer extraordinaire. He still rides today, across our imagined horizon . . . huckster, entertainer, celebrity, myth-maker. He loved the world of the stage.
(Stage Right: Spotlight shines on photo of William Cody and Sitting Bull):
I killed my first Indian when I was 12.
As you can see, the Custer epic is ritual drama. Custer is eternal youth. The ritual of re-enactment holds out the promise that there really is no Last Stand, for its self-sacrificing heroism assures that the Last Stand will flourish forever in memory, enjoying perpetual life.
What’s the point of this play?
You keep asking this question. Nobody wants to die. Cody keeps Custer alive.
were playing cowboy and Indian, he was Buffalo Bill and I was Wild Bill Hickok, then he was Roy Rogers and I was Gene Autry.
You know Roy Rogers played Buffalo Bill in a 1940 movie.
Just like Hollywood, to use famous actors to play famous people. Western minstrel shows are all about the ability of Americans to be racist and seemingly non-racist at the same time; a talent Cody cultivated. He created racialized spectacles and sold them to audiences around the world as authentic history, history as entertainment. This is what his Wild West Show was all about.
Devising, or crafting an ethnodramatic script, Involves moving from epiphanic experiences to a fully crafted performance text. A goal is to create and perform a story that is credible, vivid, persuasive, and captures verisimilitude and universality through vignettes, scenes, characters, evocative scripts, monologue, dialogue, and performance (Saldana, 2005, p. 2, paraphrase; Norris, 2009, pp. 22-23).
The purpose is to give the reader the sense of being there, the production, the narration, monologue, dialogue, staging must “ring true to life and evoke the world of its participants, giving the audience member not a sense of “being there,” but, during performance, “being here” (Saldana, 2005, p. 141). I see ethnodrama as “a tool for drawing attention to specific issues, with one side critical and emancipatory, the other side evocative, dialogical, self-expressing, and intentionally creative.”
I agree with Johnny. Based on acts of intimate habituation I endeavor to share with the reader, as intimately and directly as possible, the actual worlds of Ghanians themselves (2010, p. 24). This means I show how I inhabited my fieldwork, and connected, through my fieldwork to small stories about and with the lives of others. I became a performer, a co-performative witness in these small stories, these acts of activism (p. 25). I use performance “as a method in the defense of human rights in the actualization of social justice” (2010, p. 26).
How does this work now?
We’ve said this before. Performance is the vehicle for making injustice visible. It is the agent of change, the site where resistance is staged and performed. Performance and activism are mutually constitutive: together public space is transformed, heightened, and made more communal. The ethics of radical performance demand that we pay attention to the deep layers of political economy of poverty and injustice that are inseparable from human rights and social justice (2010, p. 224).
Ethnotheatre, like critical ethnography, troubles the boundaries and barriers between stakeholders, professionals, policy-makers and the general public (p. 469). Grounded in local understandings and experiences, these texts provide the basis for the critical evaluation of existing programs. They return the ownership of programs to immediate stakeholders. (Mienczakowski, 2001, p 470).
Over the last three decades Anna Deavere Smith (1993, 1994, 2004) has created a series of one-woman performance pieces about race and racism in America (1993, p. xvii; 2004). She titles her series
I’ve tried to deploy a documentary theatre style, speaking in the voice and manner of historical figures (living and dead) who are present in my plays (President Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hennings, Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill).
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In my plays gender and race do not need to match those of the characters (2004, p. 7). This does not mean race and gender are insignificant. Rather an actor’s race and gender is on one side of the bridge, and the other they pursue is across the bridge. The effort to cross the bridge is the drama (2004, p. xviii).
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In a powerful class. We see those who are the subjects strive to become the authors of their history . . . These plays, based on facts, take dramatic license and are not offered as truths, but as fictions that attempt to tell other truths, the kinds of truths that live in fiction and in imaginary worlds (2004, p. xix).
By interrogating and performing the facts of history Anna’s plays enact a politics of possibility. She deals with truths that matter using fictionalized histories as a way to expose the truths of past injustices. She worries about those who write the facts. She quotes James Baldwin on facts and history. Baldwin is speaking to Margaret Mead: I do not care what the facts are. I cannot afford to care. You, historically write the facts which I Am expected to believe. The difference is that you Historically, Generically, Have betrayed me so often And lied to me so long That no Number of facts According to you Would ever convince! (James Baldwin quoted in Smith, 2004, p. xv).
When the facts have been exhausted, “we must imagine a future and work to make it real, to go beyond the evidence, to make history present, to make the not yet now real” (p. xvi, paraphrase).
Right on, for Baldwin and Anna history belongs to those who record the true facts, the fictions that are truths.
The actor’s job, the autoethnographer’s job, is double-sided, to make the past and the future present at the same time. The task is to embrace the murky truth as tragic, as absurd, and if we are lucky, as inspiring. When the past and the future collide in the present, the possibilities of change and hope are created. Performed dramatic works become catalysts for social change.
The value of politicized theory, of activist art, like critical performance ethnography, lies in the ability to initiate a continuing process of social criticism in the public sphere. This form of theatre and art engages defined publics on issues from the pipeline that moves black males from schools to prison, homelessness to the survival of the rain forests, and domestic violence. It transgresses the confines of public and domestic domains. It shows how public laws and policies influence personal decisions. It shows how the limits of the public sphere shape changes in the private sphere.
Here is Gloria Anzaldua, on the politics of performance along the U.S. Mexico border. These words could have been written yesterday: The border Patrol hides behind the local McDonalds on the outskirts of Brownsville, Texas . . . They set traps along the river beneath the bridge. Hunters in army-green uniforms stalk and track these economic refugees using the powerful nightvision of electronic sensing devices. Cornered by headlights, frisked, their arms stretched over their heads, los mojados are handcuffed, locked in jeeps, and then kicked back across the border, no home, just the thin edge of barbwire (1987, pp. 12-13 paraphrase). “Refugees in a homeland that does not want them,” wetbacks, no welcoming hand, only pain, suffering, humiliation, degradation, death (1986, p. 12). South of the Border, down Mexico way, North America’s rubbish dump, no direction home (p. 11). Thank you Mr. Trump.
I seek a queer-free zone. This is not new. Colored, poor, white, latent queer passing for white, seething with hatred, anger, unaware of its source, rage, crazed with not not knowing who you are, let me pick at the masks (1987, p. 171, paraphrase).
We write our way back home again. Lost and found.
I may be mad, but I choose this madness. Read the signs 145 acres for sale the Indians safely locked up in reservations or urban ghettos. There’s a forest fire in the Cuyamaca Peaks, a sign: 4 parcels For Sale, the Indians safely locked up in reservations and Til’pu behind glass in museum (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 183, paraphrase)
How do you read a sign that says “4 parcels for sale and Indians behind glass in museums”?
Meanwhile, in another time and another place in the U.S.A on the block home girls huddle to talk crap and take shots of cheap wine to chase the Uncle Willie boogiemen and the 40 oz. spirits that haunt us. we drink for an excuse to cut a fool to be the 13-year-girls we really are. We sit around retelling the “remember when” stories so many times they turn into project folklore (Durham, 2014, pp. 57-58, paraphrase).
I write autobiography to place myself in history.
There is no other place to go
In Conclusion
Boal and Freire’s theatres (and pedagogies) of the oppressed, like Smith’s monologues, Saldana’s ethnodramas, and Madison’s critical ethnography, use performance, ethnography, theatre, and dramatic theory to criticize neoliberal discourse, to inspire acts of activism. Here the theatrical, the performative, and the ethnographic come together. The dramatist, with the assistance of spect-actors, uses the facts and experiences of oppression to change history. This is critical pedagogy in action, a politics of liberation, inquiry, and theatre for justice. There is no going back.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.