7HDFKLQJ$IULFDQ$PHULFDQ'DQFH+LVWRU\WRDૺ3RVW5DFLDOૻ &ODVV<DOH૷V3URMHFW2 -RVHSK&HUPDWRUL(PLO\&RDWHV.DWKU\Q.ULHU%URQZHQ0DF$UWKXU$QJHOLFD 5DQGOH-RVHSK5RDFK Theatre Topics, Volume 19, Number 1, March 2009, pp. 1-14 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/tt.0.0047 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tt/summary/v019/19.1.cermatori.html Access provided by Columbia University (25 Jul 2015 20:21 GMT) Teaching African American Dance / History to a “Post-Racial” Class: Yale’s Project O Joseph Cermatori, Emily Coates, Kathryn Krier, Bronwen MacArthur, Angelica Randle, and Joseph Roach The authors of this article are members of Yale’s World Performance Project (WPP) creative team. We write together as we make dance-theatre work together—collectively, collaboratively, and experimentally. We seek to change the way in which performance scholarship is created, published, and evaluated. To that end, we are moving beyond the single-author model of traditional humanistic scholarship. We are adopting instead the multiple-author style that is typical of the sciences, whereby all those who participate in the project sign the article and share the credit as well as the labor of producing it. We lay no claim to the specialized empirical methods of scientists, but we want to learn from their social practices of collaborative experimentation, discussion, and publication. The project about which we write arose out of our shared premise that African American forms represent the mainstream of modern American cultural performance (rather than the “minority,” as they have for too long been characterized by some), and that this powerful general preeminence is particularly evident in popularly mediated dances and dance music from the 1950s and ’60s. To explore this premise, we offered a team-taught seminar-studio course that culminated in a production, applying the research done in and by the class to the creation of a musical that was simultaneously a multimedia event. We assigned readings in social history, dance history, media history, and performance theory. We learned and practiced together the popular dances of the rock ‘n’ roll era: kinesthetic emulation was the object of our research; it was also our method. We also explored myths of musical creativity centered on popular “Orphism”—the charismatic possession of groups by specially gifted performing artists. The course description set forth our intentions: Studying the historic retellings of the ancient myth of Orpheus—by Peri, Monteverdi, Glück, Offenbach, Cocteau, Williams, Zimmerman, and Ruhl—Project O will revive American popular music and dance forms of the 1950s and ’60s to create and perform a multimedia rock ‘n’ roll version of the doomed love of Orpheus and Eurydice, tentatively titled Classical Grease: Rebel without a Clue. As documented in our readings and in-class presentations on pop music and media theory, televised teen-dance parties in the mold of the long-running American Bandstand transformed youth culture, playing conformism off against rebellion by appropriating African-American rhythm & blues, consciously or unconsciously acting out their cultural future before the disavowed historical backdrop of the Cold War, the Kinsey Report, and the emerging Civil Rights movement. The story of the Orphic singer and his hell-bound bride has inspired many composers, lyricists, and choreographers to stage the dramatic conflict between irreconcilable imperatives—“you can’t look back” and “you must look back”—and it will be restaged again by Project O in collaboration with a simultaneous revival of Monteverdi’s Orfeo by the Department of Music. As predicated on our own retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in the race-conscious idiom of the televised teen-dance parties, therefore, the musical pastiche that resulted from our collective 1 2 Joseph Cermatori et al. work went through many drafts and conceptual shifts. Most of these changes were contested or, at least, resented by someone in the class of eighteen students and/or the four members of the WPP team, but they led ultimately to the sold-out production of a live/media event titled Don’t Look Back!: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Orpheus. No one on the WPP team or in the cast would be likely to describe the process as mostly happy or the result as wholly satisfying. Nor could anyone say that the work left him or her without something to think about, even if that only meant thinking more skeptically about the efficacy of challenging long-established norms of teaching classes, researching past and present social problems by acting them out, and making musicals. We could follow many other threads of the story in conveying our experience of this work, but the most intractable and the most promising issue we faced together was talking about and representing race, when the clear majority of students thought of themselves and their peers as “post-racial” in some new and fundamental way. Even as we researched the racial politics and popular culture of the civil rights era, our class meetings and rehearsals took place during the weeks in which Barack Obama (the “O” did not for long refer to Orpheus alone in our thinking about Project O ) challenged and overtook Hillary Clinton in the Democratic caucuses and primaries. The early working title for the script, Classical Grease, fell away as our experience together intensified. As the seminar confronted the history of race in America and the concurrent primary race, the phrase “Don’t Look Back!” became more and more resonant until it took over our sleeping and waking dreams. The purpose of the following narrative is to explain our process, to analyze our opportunities and obstacles, and to report our results—the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is also to challenge head-on the status quo in performance research, authorship, and publication. We do so from positions of specialized expertise: Joseph Cermatori is a dramaturg in the Yale School of Drama; Emily Coates and Bronwen MacArthur are professional dancers and choreographers; Kathryn Krier, head production designer, and Angelica Randle, producer, are design professionals; and Joe Roach, the only one in the company with a living memory of the time when “American Bandstand” was a new idea, is a theatre historian and stage director. Teenarama Drama We began Project O with a dance party. More specifically, we began with “The Teenarama Dance Party,” an after-school television sock-hop for black kids first seen in 1963 on WOOK-TV in Washington, D.C. Memorialized as “the nation’s first television station that programmed for the ‘all Negro audience,’” WOOK-TV broadcast “Teenarama” live on weekday afternoons until 1970 (“Dance Party”). The show became a local institution as well as a predecessor to the long-running “Soul Train” on the national scene, but it did not spring fully armed from the brow of Zeus. Similar in format to the predominantly or wholly segregated white teen-dance shows of the 1950s, “Teenarama” followed the emerging conventions of an enormously successful genre, which defined an epoch of American popular culture and spear-headed the mass mediation of race in the era of the civil rights movement. African American rhythm and blues drove the genre from the get-go, regardless of whether the faces on the screen were black or white. The conventions, so familiar now as to obscure their innovativeness at the time, included a pattering disk jockey—Bob King in the case of “Teenarama”—to spin the records and keep the show moving; a featured daily recording artist to lip-synch his or her hit (or “soon-to-be” hit) song; and, as the cost-effective main attraction, nicely dressed and well-groomed teenagers—all unpaid amateurs—to dance the latest dance crazes to an R & B or rock ‘n’ roll beat. Radio had been programming roughly similar variety formats since the Jazz Age, but now the on-air partiers could be seen as well as heard. They bopped into the living rooms of America every day after school, first in black and white, then in living color. When “clean-cut kids” spoke assertively of a Teaching African American Dance / History to a “Post-Racial” Class 3 “beat you can dance to,” they shouted out to the boomer multitudes of the first televisual generation. In that way, they were truly “Orphic,” exerting a charismatic appeal through song and dance. The medium itself amplified their ring-shout through the ether and down the multiplying rabbit ears: in 1950, 9 percent of American households had televisions; by 1960, 90 percent did. But the chorus shouted very politely. Although the shows were wildly embraced by their fans, they were preemptively cautious in their social staging so as not to disturb the elders unduly; this appeared to be the case even though the Orphic revelers were seeding a racial revolution as well as a sexual one. We came to Project O with a specific historical premise about the dance parties: that they were the mass-mediated entry-point for African American dance and musical forms into American mainstream consciousness during the crucial years from Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 to the tumultuous years of revolution and reaction, 1964 through 1968. In the beginning, the shows were strictly segregated; by the end, they were less strictly so. In that circumspect revolution in how people danced together, some saw the opportunity to change how they lived together (Fig. 1). Nothing came easily to the airways, however, anymore than they did to the folkways. Philadelphia’s iconic “American Bandstand,” Baltimore’s “Buddy Deane Show,” and Washington, D.C.’s “Milt Grant Show” played tunes by black performers and danced the dances created by them, but the managements segregated the dance floor, at least to begin with—only “American Bandstand” ultimately survived long enough to integrate sufficiently to allow mixed-race couples. Prior to the “allNegro” advent of “Teenarama” in 1963, Milt Grant had invited African American teens to dance on his show in Washington, but only on a (strictly segregated) designated day of the week. Grant’s “Black Tuesday,” as it was sardonically known, perpetuated—and broadcast live to the nation’s capital—the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which the US Supreme Court had struck down as a matter of law in 1954, but which persisted almost everywhere in local custom as a festering national sore. In Crackpot (1983), John Waters, one of our primary sources on the teen-dance parties as popular Orphism, called his chapter on the rigorously segregated Buddy Deane Show, “Ladies and Gentleman . . . the Nicest Kids in Town.” He turned the segregated local Baltimore version of the television dance parties into the film Hairspray (1988), and its noxious fumes remained hanging in the air for some time: “To this day,” Waters quotes Marie, one of the original Buddy Deane regulars, as saying, “I’m reluctant to tell some of my black friends I was on ‘Buddy Deane’ because they look at it as a terrible time” (97). We did pertinent reading in the relationship between televised music and race: Marc Weingarten’s Station to Station: The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll on Television was a useful primer (40–68); and Julie Malnig came up from New York University to lecture on material from her new edited collection, Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake (passim). We studied the bare-bones history of the civil rights era, but we also brought to Project O our own memories and attitudes that were individually shaped by our different generational experiences and outlooks. Joe Roach had his dormant recollections of watching teen-dance parties during the 1950s jolted awake by Malnig’s paper on the racial culture of teenarama shows that she presented at the 2006 ATHE convention. “Semi-integrated dance parties,” he recalled, with Malnig’s prompt, because while black and white couples eventually danced on the same floor at the same time, they did not dance together as mixedrace partners, or at least they didn’t for long. When guest artist Frankie “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Lymon was fleetingly seen dancing with a white girl on ABC’s “Allen Freed’s Big Beat” in 1957, it prompted immediate cancellations of the show by all of the network’s Southern affiliates, followed soon thereafter by cancellation of the show itself before the end of its first-year’s run (Weingarten 49), when the commercial sponsors bailed to save their brands (and the parts of their executive anatomies to which brands of the cattle-rancher sort are customarily affixed). On this premise of popular culture and social memory, we relaunched the millennial, inexhaustible story of “Orpheus,” the irresistibly popular singer who brought tragedy to himself and his bride by stopping to look back at her as he was bringing her back from the underworld. As we thought about what kind of book our musical show would have, the class began to confront a problem about 4 Joseph Cermatori et al. FIG. 1. Miscegenation mambo: Project O’s “American Bandstand,” post-segregation. (Photograph courtesy of Jennifer W. Lester.) our fraught racial past that James Baldwin summed up aphoristically: “What Americans mean by ‘history’ is something that they can forget” (Baldwin 258).1 With “Don’t Look Back!” constantly on our lips, we found ourselves entangled in our own allegory. In the biblical story of Lot’s wife, as in the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the protagonists hear the same divine imperative: “Look not behind thee” (Genesis 19:15). But, dramaturgically speaking, they must look back—otherwise they can’t move forward. Dramaturgy We decided early on that our students would need to be dramaturgs in both the sense now traditional in this country—that is, researchers, collaborative critics, artistic consultants—while simultaneously pursuing a more etymological sense of the word—as makers of drama, dramatists. Where this latter goal was concerned, we sought to instill in them a sensitivity to the ways in which dramatic form can model ideas of historical narrative: in short, to the ways in which dramaturgy is history. Using this initial ambition as our starting point, we began a research and development phase, investigating such critical texts as W. K. C. Guthrie’s Orpheus and Greek Religion, Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, and Steven Lawson and Charles Payne’s Debating the Civil Rights Movement. We then turned our attention to various canonical versions of the myth, including Virgil’s, Ovid’s, Tennessee Williams’s, Mary Zimmerman’s, and Sarah Ruhl’s. Particularly useful for our purposes—given our special interest in music and dance theater—were the famous operatic versions of the myth. Wikipedia lists works on the Orpheus story by nearly sixty-five composers, from Jacopo Peri to Ricky Ian Gordon. We found the most to talk about, structurally speaking, in the versions by Claudio Monteverdi (which was being simultaneously revived by the Yale Baroque Opera Project), C. W. Glück, and Jacques Offenbach; we found the most to dance about in the versions of popular Orphism embodied by artists such as Fats Domino (and his market-savvy, toned-down knockoff Chubby Checker), Elvis Presley, and the Temptations, whose “Don’t Look Back” became an anthem. Teaching African American Dance / History to a “Post-Racial” Class 5 After examining these intellectual and artistic touchstones, we began by conceiving of the Orpheus myth as a play in five scenes, or “nodal points”: first, the courtship and wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice; second, the death of Eurydice; third, the journey to the underworld and the injunction given to Orpheus there; fourth, the journey out of the underworld and the moment of looking back; and fifth, the denouement. The most obvious problem posed by this dramatic structure was the last scene, which left us with an immediately pressing question: If our dramatic structure is meant to model our view of history, should the finale of our version of the Orpheus myth be comic, tragic, or otherwise? Monteverdi’s version, for example, is ambiguously comic with Orpheus being taken up to the heavens by Apollo. Sarah Ruhl’s telling of the myth, on the other hand, is not so cheerful: in it, Eurydice and Orpheus are doomed to spend eternity in the underworld, in each other’s presence though with no memory of their own or each other’s identity. Those students who had expressed interest in playwriting and production dramaturgy at the course’s outset then met with Joseph Cermatori for a number of scenario-building workshops in which potential scenes, or fragments of scenes, were sketched out in rough form around the five-act schematic. The sketches were then proposed to the project leaders, who, after lengthy discussion and some strategic modifications, brought much of this embryonic “text” into the rehearsal room as basic material for theatrical and choreographic experimentation. Simultaneously, students were given assignments to develop physical études around the five principal moments of the myth (for example, how to tell the story Orpheus and Eurydice’s wedding using only dance and music). The results of these études became fodder for further rehearsal-room experiments. The initial goal was for the students to generate as much of the material as possible—on their feet, as it were. They were to use the dramaturgy to create the text and the dances to create the performance. Predictably enough intellectually, but nonetheless somehow emotionally unforeseen, tensions arose along the text/performance fault line as well as others: race consciousness vs. race oblivion, old media vs. new, “retro” vs. “metro,” “love” vs. “theft.” The goal was to conduct an embodied and critical investigation into the main themes of the course, rendering the final work a product of shared research and critical analysis, productive arguments, and “collective intelligence” (Jenkins 281–82). That proved elusive. Although all four instructors agreed on this mostly bottom-up approach to script-writing, the exigencies of time and the energy-diverting clash of views led to the imposition of a top-down system in moments of crisis. We found ourselves at odds not only about how we were telling our story, but even about what story we were trying to tell. Are We “Post-Racial” Yet? A number of students in the class and in the show—not all of them though probably most— wanted to think of themselves as belonging to one version or another of a “post-racial” generation. They thought of “post-race” as an achieved reality in their lives, not merely as an aspiration. The most outspoken student on this issue, who apparently was white, said that she never noticed race, never thought about race, didn’t know who in the class belonged to which racial category, and didn’t really know what the racial categories were. Others held similar though less emphatic convictions, whether or not they used the term post-racial—and some of them did use it, as it was current at precisely that time. Near the beginning of the term, on January 28, 2008, following Obama’s victories in Iowa and South Carolina, commentator Daniel Schorr, editorializing on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” asked: “Is the U.S. entering a new ‘post-racial’ political era?” He seemed to answer his own question affirmatively, corroborating the Yale students’ self-reflexive testimony from the authoritative fount of liberal totality, promising that all things were being considered. He spoke in the context of the publication of The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (2008) in which the pollster describes youths between ages 18 and 29 as “the first colorblind Americans.” 6 Joseph Cermatori et al. As Obama’s candidacy advanced unevenly through the primaries, this idea reechoed through the media and blogosphere, especially after the candidate delivered his “speech on race,” titled “A More Perfect Union” (March 18, 2008). But it did not reecho through the seminar, because the subject of “race today”—what does it really mean to you and me here and now in this room, because of who we are and where we’re coming from?—sputtered and died. In fact, a more robustly candid discussion earlier on might have disclosed just a few nitty-gritty connections between way back then and right here now. As Joe Queenan writes in his mordant review of John Zogby’s ebullient rollout of “the first colorblind Americans”: Presumably this means that young African-Americans attending Nascar rallies won’t notice all those Confederate flag headbands the colorblind good old boys are sporting and that Yalies whose BMWs break down at 3:00 a.m. outside a hip-hop club in East New York won’t notice that there don’t seem to be a lot of Whiffenpoof aficionados in the immediate vicinity. (Queenan 12) But the students didn’t want to hear that, nor to be reminded that Hurricane Katrina and its earthquake-like social aftershock happened in 2005, not 1955, nor to register statistics like comparative infant-mortality rates or the numbers of young men going to college as opposed to those going to jail. In responding that they’re “not our problem” during our desultory seminar discussions, they showed no bad faith, but rather the stubbornly exhilarating buoyancy of an imagination for what the world is like that is inflated by their certainly about who they were becoming. So what we learned together and from one another we had to learn from rehearsal and performance, figuring out where we stood in the epochal year of 2008 by remembering what kind of steps it took to get us there. Choreography As the choreographers of Don’t Look Back!, Emily Coates and Bronwen MacArthur were able to observe aspects of post-race culture as it lands in real bodies, in real time. Through the process of reconstructing 1950s and ’60s social dances, Coates and MacArthur led the students through exercises that necessitated applying their kinesthetic imaginations to the social and cultural atmosphere of the civil rights movement. Toward this end, the choreographers reconstructed and taught such dances as the Twist, the Watusi, the Hitch-Hike, the Stroll, the Mashed Potato, the Bunny Hop, and the Hand Jive. When it came to performing the dances, the choreographers witnessed the effects of a generation gap: twenty-one out of the twenty-two-member company possessed no living memory of the early 1960s. Only one (Roach) had experienced the pre–civil rights world; consequently he possessed a very different muscle memory than the post-race students and the thirty-something choreographers. The multicultural kinesthetic consciousness we noted in our students’ bodies consisted of knowledge of movements that, during the late 1950s, would have been classified along racial lines. In examining the 1950s and ’60s through the lens of dance, we had zeroed in on the moment in which “black” dance whitened—that is, migrated into, or suffered the appropriation of, “white” social-dance forms. Movement initiated in the hips and pelvis, the fluid mobilization of body parts, a flexible spine, and rhythmic groove are just a few of the qualities attributed to African American dance forms that were for the most part nonexistent in white social dancing prior to the late 1950s. We discovered that our students’ bodies seemed to already possess this multicultural kinesthetic awareness to such a degree that, from their perspective, the 1950s and ’60s dances were stiffer and simpler than anything they might dance in a club today. This perception led to the students’ general feeling of physical constraint in performing the old dances. Through observing the effects of this generation gap, the choreographers were able to chart, in an informal and unsystematic manner, the kinesthetic effects of a post-race culture. Through their observations, Coates and MacArthur discovered that post-race, if this is an accurate label, plays out Teaching African American Dance / History to a “Post-Racial” Class 7 kinesthetically in a complicated blend of that which lingers and that which has disappeared. That is to say, an intermingled, multicultural kinesthetic consciousness remained in our students’ bodies, while the ability to recognize, kinesthetically or otherwise, the reality of racial segregation, past or present, seemed to have faded away. For MacArthur, this qualified as “presence”; without denying the tangibility of that experience, Coates made a mental place in it for “absence.” In general, the students felt constrained by the dances they learned. Their comments and facial expressions revealed that they perceived the dances as quaint, simple, controlled, and innocent. Their skeptical questions included: “Surely you must have done something else while dancing the Watusi?”; “Did you talk to your partner while dancing?”; “Didn’t you get bored doing the Bunny Hop?”; “You seriously repeated this same step over and over again?” In the dark and crowded club scenes that are the settings for the social dancing of 2008, chatting with your dance partner is not the goal as much as taking advantage of the opportunity to get close to their body in motion. With hip-hop music blaring, alcohol flowing in the blood, and skimpy clothing, the potential to “hook-up” seems to be our twenty-first-century students’ primary motivation for social dancing. The students were collectively drawn to the Hitch-Hike, however—a signaling with the thumb and a clap on each side that could be done with any number of dynamic variations and incorporating shoulder shimmies, turns with the feet, and jumps. The students fed off the high energy of the song, the range of movement possibilities, and one another to create a very social, interactive dance. The slower, more depressed Watusi, Monkey, and Bunny Hop made them restless. A lack of inhibition with their bodies was displayed in improvisations and set-movement assignments. Through their movement explorations, the students demonstrated an ease with bodily contact, a drive to push one another creatively in their physical expressions, and a competitive showmanship regardless of their prior training and experience with dance. Their bodies reflected the readiness of a new generation to perform—on reality shows, on networking websites, on one another’s cell phones. One segment of the piece was a rendition of the Hand Jive after the version from the 1978 movie Grease (Fig. 2). The students contributed individual dance spots to the choreography by Coates and MacArthur. After learning and practicing both the version to Johnny Otis’s hit “Willie and the Hand Jive” and the more modern version, “Born to Hand Jive,” sung by Sha-Na-Na from Grease, the dancers were asked to riff off the steps, as they do in a scene of the movie. This faster-tempo, free-form version was less restrained than the Otis classic seen in YouTube footage: Otis sings at his piano while three dancers stand in a line and shift their feet to the rhythm, their arms and hands dominating the movement. The students relished playing with rhythm, adding more speed, more bumps, high jumps, and low grinds. The spontaneous creations of the Project O cast included slapping one another’s bodies, hooking onto one another, exaggerating facial expressions, spinning, dancing low to the ground, confronting one another aggressively, leap-frogging, and moving against the rhythm—to list just a few variations. The energy of Sha-Na-Na’s music freed up the class physically and let them explore playfully, bowing to the club music at the local passion pit (“Toad’s Place”), which inspires another kind of dance and ritual. For one assignment, the students were asked to use the Monkey, the Watusi, and the other dances they had learned to create pivotal scenes from the Orpheus myth: the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice, the descent into hell, the moment of looking back. In some versions of the assignment, elements of each dance were broken down, to be used in various configurations that infused them with new meaning. The swaying of the arms from the Watusi, for example, was transferred to the entire body in one section. The effect of a number of students simultaneously swaying slowly against the music to their own rhythm was haunting: when used as the movement language for the wedding scene, it imbued that ritual with heavy overtones of foreboding. 8 Joseph Cermatori et al. FIG. 2. Hand-jive: A hand-jive for the twenty-first century. (Photograph courtesy of Jennifer W. Lester.) Similarly, the thumb motion from the Hitch-Hike was isolated and came to convey many different messages in a study for Eurydice’s descent into hell. The students’ version was done in a kind of Broadway musical style set to music they had created on their computers. The repetition of the thumbs’ pointing motions in various changing directions lent the section a relentless feeling, sometimes becoming aggressive and confusing (Fig. 3). The student sketch using the Monkey to inhabit the underworld turned the Monkey on its back, sliding along the floor and hoisted upside down on a partner’s back; performing the Monkey back-to-back with a partner transformed it into a moving yin/yang sculpture. Another version was fast and robotic: their idea was that the movement never ended, but became an eternal dance-a-thon with a Dick Clark–like character as Pluto screaming at the participants to “keep dancing!” What became apparent in both the improvised and set movements was that African American dance and music forms (as well as Latin and Asian dance and music forms, among others) have intermingled in the students’ contemporary social dancing. Their body language and movements reflected the multicultural world in which they have been raised. In contrast to the historical knowledge that lingered in the younger bodies, the choreographers’ observations of the absences in a post-race world stemmed from the problem of reconstruction. Coates and MacArthur had a small number of limited source materials, including documentaries, archival footage, YouTube and instructional websites on 1960s dances, and original recordings of Top 40s songs. Roach’s muscle memory served as the sole living archive. Working with this collection of sources cast into relief the qualitative, sensate knowledge that is inevitably left by the wayside in historical reconstruction (“[A]ll the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put HumptyDumpty together again”). The Internet, with its combination of video and written description, is a useful tool for reconstruction though nonetheless it too falls short. As professional dancers, Coates and MacArthur learned steps quickly from the digital archive. Coates learned the Wah-Watusi from a website called “Sixties Dances and Dance Crazes,” which lists instructions for a variety of the most popular 1950s and ’60s social dances. The instructions were basic and didactic: “Stand with your feet about Teaching African American Dance / History to a “Post-Racial” Class 9 FIG. 3. In the underworld: The Orphic plea, featuring a remixed Hitch-Hike, Mambo, and Watusi. (Photograph courtesy of Jennifer W. Lester.) 12 inches apart. Keep both knees bent at all times. Pretend you are going to take a golf swing. . . .” On the screen, a man in a suit grins pleasantly, demonstrating the trickiest aspect of the dance: the golf swing in coordination with the hip-thrust. Coates marked the written instructions while dancing around her living room, and taught it to the students the next morning. MacArthur spent an evening learning two versions of the Hand Jive on YouTube, which she similarly conveyed to the class in expert detail. The information, or knowledge, that was left out of this process hovered in the back of the choreographers’ minds. In certain ways, learning the dances via YouTube recalled their mediated dissemination through programs such as “American Bandstand.” Indeed, our research produced many images of 1950s middle-class teenagers bobbing around in front of their living-room television sets, imitating the movement onscreen. But Coates and MacArthur were far from being teenagers, and, despite the generational difference, their bodies possessed a version of the multicultural knowledge possessed by their students; also, they never exhibited the steps they learned outside the classroom. Minus the sociality of the dance shows, the unfamiliarity of a sexually charged dance floor, and the newness of a never-before-experienced range of motion, the choreographers conveyed the outer shell of movement that in historical context carried an entirely different weight. They passed on to the students this reconstructed physical shell; those of us born after 1965 were left to imagine the rest. Most of the team could not imagine nor address in the class discussions the sensation of inhabiting a segregated dance floor and, by extension, a segregated world. This was the point at which our kinesthetic imagination failed. Due in part to this failure, the most difficult aspect about the project was how to go about representing a segregated world. Here, the students’ bodies lacked the physical knowledge of segregation, and thereby also lacked, arguably for the better, a kind of imaginative potential. When the discussion turned to how we should relate the Orpheus myth to the television dance shows, the students bristled at the suggestion of segregation: Would hell be an all-white “American Bandstand”? Or perhaps the underworld was “Teenarama”? These ideas were rejected. “We’re all the same, we 10 Joseph Cermatori et al. don’t want to be separate,” remarked one student who had made key dramaturgical contributions. While the students grasped the fact of historical segregation—black teenagers forbidden to perform on “American Bandstand”—staging such a scenario on twenty-first-century bodies proved too morally uncomfortable to fathom. Joseph Roach, who came of age during the late 1950s and ’60s, wrote the main scene that denoted the segregation of the period. As the show opens, a group of white students boogie before the television to “Rock Around the Clock.” The scene freezes, and four characters wander onstage: two African American students, a Nepalese American, and a Latino American. Observing the white dancers frozen in motion, the new arrivals shrug and nonchalantly join in. An awkward discomfort flooded into the atmosphere of the rehearsal space during this silent freeze. For the majority of the company, having never experienced segregation of the 1950s kind, seeing it reenacted in time and space proved emotionally difficult to watch—and even harder to enact. One student felt that she and her fellow African American performer were being “put out there” as black. And she was right. The period costumes of poodle skirts and saddle shoes could not cover up the fact that we were pulling her skin from stock and placing it stage center. All kinds of feelings, which were not voiced when we first saw the costume renderings or learned the Twist together, bubbled up and boiled over. Looking back, MacArthur cogently identified the problem: by letting the discussions slide glibly into the impersonal and historical, we failed to prepare for the staging of the show we were writing in the conditions in which it would be performed. We deferred to the moment of performance the experience of segregation, which could only be tolerated as a vestige of the long ago and far away. At the same time, we understood intellectually that we could not have represented the time period of the late 1950s, the civil rights movement, and the socially liberating power embedded in the very dance steps without representing some aspect of race in its historical context. Our bodies knew one thing and resisted, while our minds had to force the reinstatement of another, past-tense reality. In hindsight, the choreographers turned to the notion of a kinesthetic imagination to make sense of the struggles we encountered representing segregation. Can bodies so fluent in a contemporary physical language and so hyper-knowledgeable go backwards, in a sense, to empathize fully with the past? Can bodies raised in a more or less integrated society imagine a time that preceded this reality, or is there a breakdown of imagination that occurs, a historical recollection that necessarily fails? We would like to believe that the type of kinesthetic empathy conjured by a segregated scenario—meaning in full-blown form the repulsive spectrum of psychological, emotional, and physical reactions one can only imagine lying at the center of racist practices—simply was beyond the ability of the twenty-first-century bodies in the class to fathom. But this fact, along with the implications of calling an era “post-race,” haunted us well after the production ended. Does the failure of imagination denote progress, or, perhaps contradictorily, does this failure lead to a kind of blindness, the denial of the subtle racism that lingers, running through our institutions and social fabric and still needing to be combated? Can bodies look back? Should they try? Design Questions such as these dictated an unusual set of parameters for the design elements. Whatever the social self-conceptions of the different periods—the racial, the post-racial—were and are, no one would argue that they weren’t overwhelmingly shaped by media. Our performance, however, was live. The treatment of the space needed to be spare enough to accommodate full-cast dance numbers and a five-piece live band, along with a three-camera video setup, and be flexible enough to support potential locales including a 1950s television studio, a high school auditorium, a living room, and several layers of reality between the Orphic underworld and the world of the living. Although the production centered on the dialogue between the Orpheus story and the 1950s, it was important to the creative team that these worlds were also in conversation with our own America. Teaching African American Dance / History to a “Post-Racial” Class 11 Angelica Randle’s poster-sized advertisement for the show outlined these connections for the audience. It juxtaposed an image of Bull Connor’s attack dogs with the album cover from “Elvis Presley by Elvis Presley,” with both of these framing an image of Chubby Checker teaching Conway Twitty and Dick Clark how to dance the Twist on “American Bandstand.” This collection of pictures captured the dichotomies of the 1950s and ’60s that we hoped to explore with our production, including the transformative powers of its emergent music and media that, like religious Orphism in Greek antiquity, were “associated with charms, spells and incantations” to the point of Dionysian possession (Guthrie 29; see Rojek 51–52). As rehearsals and scriptwriting began, it became clear that creating a frame through which the modern post-racial identification of students could enter the past would be as necessary as keeping our audience mindful of the present. The success of the piece depended on our ability to transport the audience and the student-performers back to both the 1950s and to the mythic underworld without fully obscuring the time/space reality of the Whitney Theater, which is an old gymnasium thinly disguised as a black box. Kathryn Krier’s scenic design took the form of minimal texturing of the space that neither obscured nor masked the venue’s architecture. The brushed silver screen of dots and angled lines (inspired by a Buddy Holly set dressing) was abstract enough to accommodate our potential range of locales, while also framing the action and providing the requirements for the lighting, costumes, sound, and video elements to build on. In this stripped-down environment, the few physical, actorscaled scenic components took on great significance, becoming both visual centers of gravity around which stage pictures were built and intersections and touchstones for the shifting and interlocking worlds of Chubby Checker, Orpheus, and Yale. Three of these elements—a period-accurate 1950s television set, an old jukebox, and an overhead projection screen—served as incarnations of the “media,” becoming integral parts of Project O from early on. Media played back and forth among these elements, which were situated at opposite ends of our chronological spectrum, thus helping to locate for the audience and the performers where and when the action was taking place at any given moment. In the opening scene, the actors portrayed both 1950s teenagers watching and consuming the trendsetting broadcast and otherworldly bacchants worshiping and receiving the media sacrament. The “media force” (electronic Orphism) began the show contained in the period-specific housing of a 1950s television set and, while limited to that set, it was also limited to period- and medium-appropriate images. The initial images were all from entertainment television broadcasts during or before the 1950s and were accordingly race segregated. In this moment, the images were visible only on the television screen and were presented in their original grainy format, showing the whites-only world of 1950s mainstream culture. For this scene, the television served as an anchor, tethering the white actors onstage to a specific, racially polarized, historical period. This period fidelity held only for a moment. The entrance of the “minority” cast members on the stage, who cross through the frozen tableau of the white actors, was as close as this production came to embodying segregation. For this moment only the actors were segregated, and for this moment only the media was held within period boundaries. Afterward, these restrictive devices were abandoned in favor of a looser vocabulary that borrowed from 1950s mainstream culture that was liberally mixed with references to other cultures and time periods: mambo, the Beatles, Grease, and YouTube. After the opening scene, the teens themselves began manipulating the media flow as both 1950s “American Bandstand” actors playing to the audience at home, and as modern actors interacting with and adjusting lightweight, modern camcorders that sent live feeds to the projection screen above. After the image and sound flow “metastasized” to the large projection screen and house speakers, the media force was able to expand and flex. At this point, the (visual and aural) image vocabulary expanded to include period newsreels and live feeds, in addition to entertainment footage from the period. Moreover, the quality of the images was no longer limited to period accuracy and began to include variations in speed, clarity, and fidelity. Once freed from its realistic onstage television, the media force was able to reach deeper into history, sideways into other worlds, and, through the cameras, out into the here-and-now world of the actor and audience. 12 Joseph Cermatori et al. The media force (like dance) related to and/or stood in for Orphic power in this production. Although it may have been temporarily manipulated by, or embodied in, an individual, it transcended individual human expression in its ability to capture and communicate the essence or spirit of a world, level of reality, or time period. For this production, by serving as a link between the 1950s, the Orpheus story, and present-day culture, the supernatural incarnation of media opened up possibilities for viewing and exploring points of connection among these worlds. Scenario and Denouement To our “Invocation of the Media Muses,” we gradually (and haltingly) appended a series of expositional scenes to set the dramatic context, situating the drama in a television studio that was broadcasting a teen-dance program like “American Bandstand.” This setting launched a scene featuring an ecstatic, desegregated Hand Jive dance-competition production number in which the roles of Orpheus and Eurydice were awarded to those characters/performers who out-performed the others, with hints of “American Idol.” Three pairs stepped forward, each of mixed race or ethnicity—an Anglo-American woman and Hispanic man, a Jewish American man and African American woman, an Asian American woman and Irish American man—and they morphed into “Orpheuses” and “Eurydices” in a number called “The Miscegenation Mambo.” Here, the “metro” identities and self-conceptions of the students chafed against the “retro” paint-by-number Rainbow Coalition we were trying to create with our daily rewrites to the book. One actor made us laugh at ourselves when he suggested that we turn “Kumbaya” into a mambo with a beat “that everyone could dance to”—even rednecks! The mambo we did finally dance, pairing the mixed couples, culminated in a dreamy wedding sequence in which the entire cast danced a slow, ominous Watusi. Eurydice’s death was performed over the course of two scenes; the first, a media montage of the most traumatic moments of 1960s newsreels (the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy among them); and the second, conceived by the students, featured an explosive rendition of the Beatles’ “Revolution” sung by a white Orpheus and emphatically danced by a black Eurydice. The scenes in the underworld subordinated the dialogue to the dances, ending in a plangent plea before Pluto expressed in an evocative rite, choreographed to the sound of Proserpina singing, a cappella, a slow-dance dirge. For the trek out of the underworld, the jukebox played the Temptations’ “Don’t Look Back” as accompaniment, increasing in volume to the breaking point and suddenly erupting into an overwhelming detonation, or gunshot, that triggered the climactic, fateful moment of looking back (Fig. 4). The production’s closing moments showed the entire cast, save one Orpheus and one Eurydice, turning constantly to look over their shoulders and all muttering their different motivations for looking back. From this miasma, the one forward-looking pair managed to escape, continuing their trek out of the underworld and disappearing offstage into a beam of light as the general illumination dimmed on the “chorus of lookers back”—marooned in time, memory, and, truth be told, as student performers dutifully acting out a scenario with which most of them could not wholly identify, in a fair amount of ambivalence about why they, or anyone, would look back now. Free at Last, Great God Almighty—Free at Last? One of the African American students in Project O wrote his Theater Studies senior essay on the experience of creating Don’t Look Back!: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Orpheus. His perspective on looking back, looking forward, and looking around reveals a deep insight into the meaning of the music and dance forms we had evoked and embodied. “To arrive at a more truthful understanding of ‘white and black,’ ‘race music,’ ‘pop music,’” he wrote, “we must take a step back.” The step he then took dramatized Teaching African American Dance / History to a “Post-Racial” Class 13 FIG. 4. The look: Are we post-racial yet? (Photograph courtesy of Jennifer W. Lester.) the Orphic power of music as a force for integration historically and as a symbol of its aspirations and achievements, even prior to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. He argued for the reality of a shared culture, and hence of overlapping identities, as a long-standing fact of American history: Though there was an economic and social split between the majority of blacks and whites, it was, with regards to shared culture, a largely superficial one, one that had been instituted over time through legal definitions of identity. It arbitrarily made null and void the vast amount of cultural mingling and adoption on both sides of the racial divide. (Noble 17, emphasis in original) In this light, which we had somehow missed for so long in the dimness of our dissention, but into which we walked at the end, post-racial America is not a revolutionary transformation, but a discovery. Therefore looking back is another way of looking forward. In this light also, with Barack Hussein Obama clinching the major-party nomination that he would accept on the night of the fortieth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Project O ended. Or is this where it all begins? Joseph Cermatori studies dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama, and is a teaching fellow in the Yale University departments of English and Theater Studies. Emily Coates, a former member of the White Oaks Dance Project, Twyla Tharp Dance, and New York City Ballet, is the artistic director of the World Performance Project at Yale University. Kathryn Krier is production manager for the World Performance Project at Yale University, and design advisor and lecturer in the Theater Studies program. 14 Joseph Cermatori et al. Bronwen MacArthur is artistic director of the MacArthur Dance Project and teaches ballet and contemporary dance in the United States and internationally. Angelica Randle is a Los Angeles event producer and recording artist whose songs have appeared in both English and Spanish US pop charts. Joseph Roach is Sterling Professor of Theater and principal investigator of the World Performance Project at Yale University. Notes The authors wish to thank Terri Francis and Paige McGinley for their helpful suggestions. 1. For this reference, we are indebted to Professor Terri Francis. Works Cited Baldwin, James. “John Brown’s Body: James Baldwin and Frank Shatz in Conversation.” Transition 9.1/2 (2000): 250–66. “Dance Party: The Teenarama Story.” Documentary DVD. Kendall Productions, 2006. Guthrie, W. K. C. Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. Lawson, Steven F., and Charles Payne. Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1968. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Malnig, Julie, ed. Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake. Champaign-Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2008. Noble, Eric. “Project O : A Premature Retrospective.” Unpublished senior essay, 2008. Queenan, Joe. “Zogby’s Crystal Ball,” New York Times Book Review, August 31, 2008. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion, 2001. Waters, John. Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters. New York: Collier Macmillan, 1983. Weingarten, Marc. Station to Station: The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll on Television. New York: Pocket Books, 2000. Zogby, John. The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream. New York: Random House, 2008.