A project of the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly
Hot off the press: the 9th Circuit held today that the controversial Prop 8, which was a voter initiative amending the California constitution banning gay marriage, is unconstitutional.
From a practical perspective, this decision will likely mean that the case will go all the way to the Supreme Court for a decision that will have a national effect… a pretty big deal.
Just over a week ago, the Ala Costa Center in Berkeley hosted a screening of Miss Representation, a new documentary (out on DVD) regarding the portrayal of women in mass media and its impact on society. I watched it last week at a private screening hosted by a student group for women in the law. Having written a paper recently about the difficulties women in the workforce face, especially within the upper echelons of our country’s leadership, I simply expected to experience a less academic/more entertaining version of the articles and studies I had read last semester.
After watching the film, I must say that this movie is more than your typical documentary. It’s a powerful and thought-provoking film that makes you challenge the images and rhetoric currently used to depict women in mass media. The film follows the story of a mother struggling to shield her young daughters from the one-dimensional female “role models” lauded by mass media. The film focuses on the fact that, in the eyes of modern mass media, the value of a woman has more to do with her physical appearance than her personal achievements. Without spoiling too much, the film features an impressive list of interviewees including Condoleezza Rice and Gloria Steinem.
The screening I went to consisted mostly of women, and the film was followed by a group discussion session. One consensus that the group reached was that men should be included in future screenings/conversations around this film.
To watch the film, you have a few options: 1) Student organizations and other community associations can apply to host a screening of the film. It’s a very interesting way to start up an engaging conversation about women and the media. More information on the film (and a trailer) can be found here: http://www.missrepresentation.org/ 2) Watch it on OWN (Oprah’s new network) or 3) Attend a screening on campus on March 13 in Dwinelle Hall: http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=51141&date=2012-03-13&tab=academic.
Mark your calendars; you’re in for a treat!
Editor’s Note: This blog entry is the first in a series from the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO). ROHO houses thousands of oral history interviews conducted since 1954. Some of those interviews, including many with Berkeley students, faculty, and staff recall the events of 70 years ago today – the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
UC Berkeley on December 7, 1941
In a series of recent oral histories with UC Berkeley alumni, the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) has recorded the recollections of individuals who were students at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor – December 7, 1941. Many of them teenagers late in 1941, they are now approaching ninety years of age. These oral histories shed light on what UC Berkeley was like before the United States officially entered World War II, and provide insight as to how students, faculty, and staff reacted to the news of the event.
For countless university students — in Berkeley and around the country — the events of that day would prove to be a major turning point. While a handful of students behaved erratically or irrationally upon hearing the news, the majority of students quietly realized that the event would soon alter their existing plans and goals. Understandably, as many students worried about their own futures, most were also anxious about the safety of their families. Some worried about their friends of Japanese ancestry. Other students would remain on campus to continue their studies, and numerous faculty members carried on teaching. For other faculty and graduate students, however, the news of the attack would provoke a series of difficult choices – many joined the armed services, found jobs in the rapidly expanding defense industry, or contributed to the war effort through research for government agencies. As the events at Pearl Harbor led many to weigh choices and voluntarily leave campus, numerous students of Japanese ancestry were soon given no choice but to leave campus.
Through the lens of oral history, we can explore the place of Pearl Harbor in the collective memory of the University of California, Berkeley. This story represents but one component of our larger efforts to record and interpret the history of the WWII homefront through oral interviews. Other collections, including our numerous oral histories with faculty, staff, and administrators, speak to the significance of that date in the history of the campus.
December 1941
By many accounts, December of 1941 was shaping up to be a terrific month in Berkeley. The weather was outstanding. Many of our narrators recall the weekend as sunny and even unseasonably warm. Instead of spending time outside, however, most Cal students were busy cramming for final exams. Despite having final exams the following day, some students were taking a mental break visiting family or friends. Others were at home or in their dorm rooms studying.
Natalie Salsig, one of our narrators, recalled in a recent interview “having to study for finals in a closet with the door closed.” After Pearl Harbor, students who wanted to continue studying in the evening were forced to confront both the distractions of global events and the immediate blackouts organized along the entire coast. Salsig recalls studying for finals in the closet, a small light illuminating her books, so as not to signal to the enemy where the cities began and the Pacific Ocean ended. “It was a scary time,” Salsig remembers. Fear of an actual attack was sporadic and uneven, but uncertainty was seemingly universal.
Jack Rosston was living in a co-op in December of 1941. Usually a punctual student, he had let a paper assignment sit until the last moment – staying up late the night of December 6 in order to finish the assignment. In the early hours of the morning, he woke up to screaming. He recalls the reactions of the students on campus, explaining that a couple of students were so angered by the attack, that they were threatening to bomb the Japanese Student Association. Jack recalls the pockets of anger and threats of violence, “It horrified me at that time, and most of the kids were horrified at that.”
Nearby in Oakland, another young woman had more immediate concerns about her upcoming senior ball than world events. In 1942, Margaret Walton would enroll as a freshman at UC Berkeley, earning money during summers working in the shipyards. Months before she enrolled at Cal, she recalls sitting in her bedroom the morning of December 7, “I was still in my bedroom reading and listening to the radio because I had fallen and spilt my lip, and I was feeling very sorry for myself because my senior ball was coming up Friday night, and I had this mashed up face . . . I had the radio on and I got the news, and I ran out and told my folks.” Her family spent the rest of the day, like many Americans, glued to the radio. “It was a real shock,” Walton explained. She adds, “Well, right away you got the news that the coastline could be attacked at any minute . . . my dad had already built black out curtains to put up in the windows.” Her family spent the evening huddled into the one room of their house that would not let any light escape to the outside world – eagerly awaiting updates over the airwaves. Walton’s classmates who enrolled at UC Berkeley during the war years were asked to complete an accelerated degree program – as the war had depleted the number of available faculty and staff. Today, Walton and the classes that followed, students who shared the same unique circumstances on campus, are known as the War Alumni Classes. Members of the War Alumni Classes not only shared classes; they became bound by common experiences with rationing, blackouts, and air raid drills. Almost all of these students had at least one close friend or family member in the service.
In the Classroom
The effect on the Berkeley campus that followed Pearl Harbor was both immediate and palpable. Harry Wellman, who years later became Acting President of the University of California following the dismissal Clark Kerr in 1967, recounted that life changed quickly on the campus in the months that followed the attack. In an oral history recorded in the 1970s, he described his recollections of Pearl Harbor as a member of the Berkeley faculty. A specialist in agricultural economics, Wellman recounted that he was briefly assigned to administer the enrollment of students with the department: “I had the responsibility for insuring that classes desired by students would be given. That was not difficult. Student enrollment dropped sharply after 1941-42 and continued downward until the end of the war. In 1944-45 there were only a few undergraduate students in agricultural economics and almost no graduate students.” Indeed, so many of the students had either enlisted, or left school to assume a job in the defense industry that the department had an excess of faculty for teaching needs. Classes pertinent to the war effort, in engineering, science, and foreign languages – witnessed temporary surges in enrollment from enlisted servicemen assigned to the campus, but enrollment in many other departments declined during the war.
Other Berkeley faculty took a prominent role in the war. The most notable of these efforts included Robert J. Oppenheimer, a Berkeley physicist, who served as the scientific director for the Manhattan Project. Working engineers and physicists, his efforts led to the creation of the first atomic bomb. Numerous other Berkeley faculty and alumni worked in all types of war agencies, but their presence was felt especially within the top-secret networks of atomic weapon research at Los Alamos, New Mexico and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Turning Points
Activity on the Berkley campus following the initial shock of Pearl Harbor, however, was not always so eerily quiet and isolated. Even as Wellman reported dwindling enrollments in his classes, for example, he was occasionally flying to Washington to advise the government on rationing, taxes, and commodity price fixing. Others affiliated with the campus were working on research that would have an even more far-reaching influence on the modern world.
Pearl Harbor, of course, was also an important turning point for millions outside of university settings. Denise Fleig, a Berkeley resident who was returning home from work when she learned of the attack, recalls the sense of confusion at the moment she received the news. In her oral history, she describes her sense of unease, “Everybody’ll have to be drafted, now. Everybody. Oh, I wonder what that’ll mean . . . Sure going to change everything. Sure will . . . Everything’s going to change. Everything.” In her oral history, Fleig notes that, before Pearl Harbor, California seemed to be on the edge of American life – with New York and Washington as the primary focus of the nation. The attack on Pearl Harbor, however, seemed to momentarily shift national attention westward – forcing people in California to prepare for a possible attack from the Pacific.
A growing military presence in the Bay Area, coupled with a rapidly expanding wartime defense industry, brought thousands to the region. The arriving labor force, and their families, reshaped the character of the Bay Area by introducing new religions, ethnicities, and social norms. Thousands of women soon joined the labor force in the Bay Area, many taking up work at the shipyards, coming to be known as “Rosie the Riveters.” These changes not only impacted the students, faculty, and staff of the University of California, Berkeley – they were felt by everyone in the region.
Conclusion
Experts who study the creation of our long-term memories are generally in agreement that powerful experiences, such as those experienced in December of 1941, are either lodged into our memory or quickly rejected and forgotten. Memories surrounding important events are naturally and frequently recounted orally, thus reinforcing the recollection of meaningful events. A project such as the one undertaken by ROHO allows these recollections to be archived and preserved for a larger audience. Certainly, oral histories—like all sources—contain inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Human memory is, of course, fallible. Archival records, however, frequently confirm the narratives of those who are interviewed, and collecting from various sources allows the historian to mine the lived experiences of a more diverse array of historical actors. Often, the subtleties of emotion – the shock, fear, anger, and anxiety surrounding tragic events like the bombing of Pearl Harbor — are either lost altogether, or dramatically embellished in the newspaper accounts that have buttressed more traditional histories. By opening a forum for these emotional recollections to be presented, ROHO is helping to expand the historical memory.
Note: The oral history interviews quoted in this blog entry are currently in production. Transcripts of the interviews will soon be available alongside other WWII homefront oral histories here.
Read the complete transcript of the Harry Wellman oral history, conducted by ROHO in 1976.
Samuel J. Redman is a graduate student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. He works for the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) of The Bancroft Library where he serves as Lead Interviewer for the Rosie the Riveter / WWII American Homefront Oral History Project.
Tags: history, local history, oral history, pearl harbor
From left to right Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Emcee Soulati, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Theaster Gates
Show information: “red, black and GREEN: a blues” takes place at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Performances are at 7:30pm on October 20, 21, and 22. For more information, visit http://ybca.org/marc-bamuthi-josephthe-living-word-project
“red, black & GREEN: a blues,” by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, is a performance that explores identity and colors, politics and participation, and there’s probably no one better equipped than Bamuthi to create this work. He’s a community organizer, formidably talented artist, and co-founder of Life is Living, described in his biography as “a national series of one-day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life through hip hop arts and focused environmental action.”
For “red, black & GREEN: a blues” Bamuthi collaborated with director Michael John Garcés, set/installation designer Theaster Gates, and a team of others who contributed – visually and acoustically — to the production’s seamless grace and elegance. But it’s the stellar contributions of the cast of four (Bamuthi, Gates, Traci Tolmaire, and Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Emcee Soulati) who turn the performance into a riveting commentary about how people have made abandoned parks into places of possibility. “red, black & GREEN: a blues” inspires each of us to look at the impact of our decisions. Anecdotes range from the story of Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses to an explanation of a Tupac documentary that Bamuthi gives his 9-year old son. Each scene sparks consideration of the fertile tension between history and theater, a chance to see again people, relationships, scenarios and ways in which meaning can be transformed through their retelling.
Bottom row, left to right: Gates, Traci Tolmaire, Shepherd. Above: Bamuthi
“red, black & GREEN: a blues” defies easy synopsis: it’s not only multi-disciplinary, but also multi-directional, encompassing past and current events. Tethered to locations where Life is Living takes place -– Chicago, Houston, New York, and Oakland – the performance use spoken word, rhythms, music, and dance to bring to life different people and encounters. The set by Gates is assembled and dissembled by the cast to provide different environments.
Beginning with an interactive first section that invites us to wander on the stage and get close to the set (this lasts about a half-hour), the cast is onstage for the entire production. The second section takes places in a proscenium-style arrangement with the four artists onstage.
After 90 minutes, I left the theater wondering if I had ever seen a production that so deeply honored people’s stories, interactions, hopes, obstacles, grief, and potential. “red, black & GREEN: a blues” is both affirmation and catalyst, a testament to unwavering commitment and creativity and a form of theater that triggers questions about if/how we consider the well-being of one another.
In a program essay by Berkeley professor Shannon Jackson, Gates is quoted as saying “While I may not be able to change the housing market or the surety of gentrification, I can offer questions within the landscape. To question, not by petitioning or organizing in the activist way, but by building and making good use of things forgotten.” Each decision within the work seems guided by this principle: from the set that appears to be built from discarded materials to the theatrical techniques that are created in order to engage audiences differently, more effectively.
The first section establishes both intimacy and responsibility. We are free to choose which actor or parts of the set we wish to observe, or to step back and see how the movement of the walls transforms the stage from the façade of a house to its interior spaces. The performers’ voices and rhythms create a glue that unites their presence, even when they’re not visible to one another. Bamuthi offers us slices of watermelon. I hear Gates before I see him sitting on a front porch; he is singing – gorgeously.
Initially compacted like a cube, suggesting a shotgun house, the walls appear worn, dilapidated, full of stories. As they separate, the audience finds itself in the midst of an interior and the sensation of being intimately involved with a situation becomes a through-line of the performance.
This approach to theater is not about complacently watching, but insists on interaction and consideration. At one point Bamuthi speaks about “practice as belief,” advocating for artists to dedicate themselves to values that connect with life through architecture, sculpture, dance, theater.
During the second part of the performance, words and images intertwine. Traci Tolmaire captivates as she morphs into different characters: a woman who oversees a community garden or a guy known as “the flower man.” The cast is phenomenally multitalented: singing, dancing, and speaking with conviction. Tommy Shepherd provides acoustic textures that complement the scenes, making rhythms on the surfaces of the set, beat-boxing, and embodying characters.
The production’s details and transitions are extraordinary: television screens built into the set provide images that enrich the stories being told. During one scene Gates’ profile is visible through a window, a glimpse of quiet perseverance. When the stories shift to New York City, the back wall becomes the interior view of a subway station. The design team included media designer David Szlasa, lighting designer James Clotfelter, choreographer Stacey Printz, composer Tommy Shepherd, documentary filmmaker Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi, costume designer Mai-Lei Pecorrai, and sound designer Gregory Kuhn.
A day after the show, certain lines still reverberate: “it’s a trick question” referring to whether or not to bring a mug to Starbucks (why would any environmentally concerned individual be in Starbucks?) or “the paradox of cultivating something you will never see” or “so culturally immune to our long slow suicide” that encapsulates our present condition.
But it’s the last line that resonates most deeply: “If you look real close…”
What might we see? How would we respond? What could change?
La Carpintería Teatro
Friday night. Lola Arias’ Mi vida después (My Life After). La Carpintería Teatro, Buenos Aires. A group of grandmotherly women in fur coats and heavy perfume claims the first rows. The stage manager’s request for silenced cell phones is met with a loud “No!” from a woman with a wrinkled face and sleek, black hair, part of the front-row contingent. The lights dim and another of her party cries, in English, “Silence!” provoking giggles and shushes. From the back comes a censorious, “Por favor,” to which one of the dowagers replies, stage-whispering, “¡Es en serio!” Finally, clothing begins raining onto the stage, and the show begins.
Mi vida después debuted in 2009 and has made festival rounds as well as having runs at two different theatres since then. In the play, six actors, one joined by his young son, wear their parents’ clothing, display and interpret photographs of their families and use other objects (books written by an actor’s father, cassette recordings of another’s voice, a live turtle, etc.) to evoke the stories of their parents’ lives. Their parents include an ex-priest, revolutionary militants, a newscaster, an automobile journalist, bank clerks, a secret policeman — all of whom lived during, if not through, Argentina’s military dictatorship. The play, which features professional actors and their real-life stories, is a thought-provoking study of the limits of the self, authority and authorship, and the role of theatre in society.
The characters introduce themselves by describing the circumstances of their births. Blas Arrese Igor, for example, born September 8, 1975, declares: “La nave Viking despega hacia Marte y en la ciudad de La Plata, nazco yo. Mi padre había sido cura y decía que no era parte de ningún partido político salvo el de Dios.”(The spaceship Viking blasts off for Mars, and in the city of La Plata, I am born. My father had been a priest, and he said that he belonged to no party save that of God.) Besides playing themselves, each actor, at some point during the play, embodies his or her parent, whether it be through trying on their clothes, reading their letters aloud or physically going through the motions peculiar to that parent. Carla Crespo leads her fellow actors in exercises her father might have participated in as a sergeant in the People´s Revolutionary Party; Liz Casullo wears her mother’s jacket and reports news from the 1970s, just as her mother did as a newscaster for “Telenoche.” The play must be considered autobiographical, as the actors are, for the most part, playing themselves and telling their stories from their own perspectives. However, this crossover into the realm of their parents’ life stories questions and blurs the limits between the self — the actors— and the Other — their parents.
One particularly interesting moment in the play is when Vanina Falco tells of how her adult brother discovered he was not actually her biological brother. Rather, he had been born in a secret detention camp to imprisoned parents and was subsequently stolen and raised by Falco’s parents. He has taken on his birth name, Juan Cabandié, and Falco’s father has been tried for the crime and found guilty. Vanina Falco wanted to participate in the case against her estranged father and was initially barred from doing so by a law prohibiting testifying against an ancestor. However, this ruling was appealed and overturned, due to the fact that Vanina Falco has effectively no relationship with her father. Part of the evidence contributing to this legal decision was the fact that she has made public her family experiences through her participation in the play.
The play’s text has evolved as this court case has developed. In Mi vida después, Falco sits on a sofa, and the other actors gather round, going through legal documents as she tells the story. She explains that she was the first person in Argentina to be allowed to testify against a parent and that part of the reasoning was that she discusses the case in a play. This moment is powerful for its dizzying circularity — in the theatrical performance that affected the court case, the actor discusses the court case that was affected by the theatrical performance… The spectator is thrown into the position of legal judge as well as being forced into acute awareness of the theatricality of autobiography, the performance that is any life story. The lines between theatrical testimony and legal testimony are blurred, and the frontier between performance and reality is subverted altogether.
The evolution of the play, whose constant dramaturgy is undertaken these days by Sofia Medici, is what allows for such surreal moments. Mi vida después is not a static work, but rather a living exposition of life stories in progress. The selves portrayed are fluid, ranging between parent(s) and child, and the play itself adapts to the actors’ changing reality. Just as the lines between self and Other are blurred in the play, and lines between legal and theatrical testimony are entangled, lines between autobiographical narrator and author are also blurred. Even though the actors play themselves, speak in the first person and tell true stories from their own lives, they are not considered the authors of this piece. Lola Arias’ work interviewing the actors and then compiling, selecting, editing and arranging their stories gives her authorship and authority over the actors’ autobiographies. This blurring of so many lines invites the viewer to question autobiography as a genre, highlighting the impossibility of setting the self in type.
At the end of the play that Friday night last June, one of the previously rambunctious ladies in the front row turned to her friend, who was seated in front of me, and declared more than asked: “A vos no te gustó por la política.” (You didn’t like it because of the politics.) The confirmation was unnecessary, but her friend nodded in agreement anyway. To my thinking, what disquiets the viewer of Mi vida después much more than any political aversion is the way the play pulls back the curtain on the workings of autobiography and dares to question the very idea of the self.
Tags: art, drama, performance, theater
Entries for The Berkeley Graduate blogging contest are due Saturday, 10/15! Submit your entries to berkeleygraduate@ga.berkeley.edu
Hinchar, according to the Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary, means to increase the volume of an object or body by filling it with air or some other thing. By scanning down to the fifth definition, though, one learns that in Argentina and Uruguay hinchar means to support a sports team with enthusiasm. Entusiasmo might be an understatement. Passion, fervor, frenzy—any word that brings to mind religious zeal tinged with bloodlust gets a little closer to the idea.
I like my fair share of soccer, but can’t claim fandom of any South American team in particular (besides the Uruguayan national selection, which stole my heart during the last World Cup). When I found out that the Buenos Aires institution River Plate was in danger of demotion to the second league after a deciding game with Belgrano, I wanted to cheer for the underdog—the only problem was, I didn’t know which team was worse off. Belgrano was in the second division and stood to rise, but River’s best players had been being sold off to Europe for so long that they were lean to the point of haggard. I decided to go see the game in a pizza place and make up my mind there.
A pizza deliveryman on rollerblades checks the score between runs
The pizzeria filled up as the game began, and my friend Ashley and I filled up on beer and delicious fugazzetta—a pizza consisting entirely of mozzarella, caramelized onion, and deep dish crust. We invited a kid who had only found standing room to join us. Belgrano scored their first goal and the restaurant’s atmosphere seemed to disappear as the River hinchada in the joint sucked in a deep breath and held it in with their disappointed rage. The kid at our table shyly asked us where we were from and who we rooted for. Ashley, who loves Buenos Aires deeply, immediately answered, “River.” I shrugged my shoulders. The kid showed us a photo on his cell phone of himself waving a Belgrano flag in a stadium. He grinned conspiratorially and put away the phone.
The game ended as most knew it would with River demoted and video of police officers hosing down fans who didn’t exit the stadium in a timely enough matter and, later in the evening, riots that left several people injured.
The next day I went for a wander and found the aftermath of the contest painted on the city walls. In Caminito, a touristic street in La Boca, home to River’s rival Boca Juniors, industrious fans had already left their tribute painted on a wall.
“The myth is broken…only the greatest remains.—Boca fans.”
Meanwhile, in a less artistic but more raw graffiti reaction, River fans threatened Belgrano with death.
“You don’t mess with River.”
“Belgrano you are dead.”
I gained a new appreciation for the dedication of the hinchas, and a slight touristic nostalgia for the days of the rivalry. Hopefully River will rise again, and give the policemen a reason to open up the fire hoses.
Courtesy of BAM/PFA
Editor’s Note: Following her preview on Friday, Kate Mattingly presents a review of a special performance marking the opening of the “Silke Otto-Knapp: A light in the moon/MATRIX 239″ exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum. The exhibit continues until January 15, and you can find more information here.
On Friday at BAM, artist Silke Otto-Knapp was asked about the steps she takes to create a new work and replied, “it’s a messy and watery process.”
Her watercolors present shimmering images that emerge from silver-grey backgrounds and come into focus as a viewer walks by and finds an ideal vantage point. Otto-Knapp says her process inverts a traditional method of applying layers of color and texture: “rather than adding, it’s about taking away.” For this exhibit, several works started with photos of dancers, from which Otto-Knapp makes a sketch, then works her image into watercolor, sensitively washing down the details. Ultimately she finds a translucency and vibrancy that give the exhibited works a distinct theme.
Similar to Otto-Knapp’s process of “taking away,” experimental dancers of the 1960s and 1970s sought a simplified, stripped-down approach to dance, seen in Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A” from 1966 as well as Trisha Brown’s “Walking on the Wall” at the Whitney Museum five years later. Although these creations may seem empty or spare, they are rife with possibility: viewers tend to notice subtle details of bodies in motion when dancers present such reduced vocabularies.
On Friday at BAM a program of events included variations of “Trio A,” films, and dialogue that marked the opening of Otto-Knapp’s exhibit. To see landmark pieces from decades ago and then a new solo made and performed by Flora Wiegmann revealed how dance has undergone its own “messy” process: its evolution has been both multi-directional and controversial.
Friday’s program began with a film of Anna Halprin’s “Parades and Changes” performed at the museum in 1970. The occasion celebrated the opening of BAM and was a bold move by BAM’s founding director, Peter Selz: he knew “Parades and Changes” had just been banned in New York (the piece contains nudity) and selected the piece to commemorate a museum dedicated to artists and innovation. According to Friday’s program notes, “Selz invited Halprin to define the ethos of the space before any art was installed.”
In the film there were stunning moments of juxtaposition: naked bodies tearing sheets of construction paper surrounded by the cavernous, almost brutal setting of BAM’s concrete interior. There were contrasts between the textures of smooth, muscular bodies of Halprin’s diverse cast, and the angular balconies of the museum packed with onlookers. Watching a film of the same setting where we were now seated 41 years later revealed how hairstyles and fashions may have changed (slightly), but the spirit of curiosity and experimentation nurtured by BAM remains.
After “Parades and Changes,” a film of Yvonne Rainer’s “Dance Fractions for the West Coast” included glimpses of Rainer working with 25 students at Mills College in 1969. It ended with Rainer performing “Trio A” (its first filmed version) and then the audience watched live dancers perform the same choreography.
Curator Dena Beard said to me a couple days before the exhibit opened, “every time a dance is recreated it changes,” and Friday’s events made this vividly apparent. “Trio A” was performed as a solo by Linda K. Johnson, who maintained Rainer’s emphasis on non-inflected movement and brought a sense of determined calm to the intentionally unpredictable and smoothly continuous phrase. Then Johnson repeated the phrase with Rainer’s cousin Ruth Rainero trying to distract her by catching her focus. Lastly it was performed as a trio with Johnson, Mimi Moncier, and Kristine Anderson, similar to its first 1966 performance as a trio (but one that denies unison coordination). During the last variation, The Chambers Brothers’ “In the Midnight Hour” provided a soundtrack, and it seemed more challenging for the dancers to resist accents and modulations in phrasing.
To switch from Rainer’s intensely non-glamorous, non-spectacular choreography to Wiegmann’s “Allay Alight” was at first jarring. Wiegmann has a gorgeous, facile movement quality and a body that seems capable of doing anything with exquisite ease. Dressed in short shorts and a loose top she traversed a strip of space marked by two lines of white tape. By repeating images and steps, she chiseled moments into my memory: a triplet phrase facing the dark windows of the museum, a fluid backbend that seemed to open her heart to the sky.
Courtesy of BAM/PFA
The differences in these creations that span 45 years reflect our changing attitudes towards bodies, virtuosity, and choreography. It’s inspiring that a museum recognizes the importance of such live events, which can complement exhibits of paintings and sculptures and shed light on art forms’ cross-fertilizations.
It also seemed apt to pair Otto-Knapp’s paintings with dance events since her images demand a choreography of their own: our shifting gaze can activate elements that initially aren’t visible. This kind of interactivity exists in both performances and exhibits when audiences participate in the making of an image.
It’s also what can turn a viewer’s experience from passive reception into active inspiration: when we recognize an encounter in which we generate our own meaning, our own beauty, we see what transformation may be possible in other interactions and relationships.
Tags: art, dance, events, museum, performance
I love taking risks. I love to travel to new cities alone, explore, eat in holes-in-the-wall on the off chance I’ll discover a delicious secret. When it comes to the Hasbro “Game of Strategic Conquest”, though, I just can’t be bothered. I am happy with my continent, and really have no Genghis Khan-like impulse to conquer my friends’ territories. The fact that the game lasts for hours or even days does nothing to attract my interest. I usually end the game in a kamikaze move that most other players find so disturbingly enigmatic that it takes several turns for them to dare to kill me off. Since starting graduate school at Berkeley, though, I’ve found that most of my friends are gobsmacked by the game. They become obsessed with it, insisting on kissing, blowing or singing to the dice as they roll to attack neighboring lands. Maybe my love of travel, risky as it can be, and some strong kumbaya tendencies are exactly what keep me from fully enjoying the game.
I learned this past year that, surprising as it may seem, the USA has no monopoly on ludic-imperialist urges. In Buenos Aires I attended a play in the university district that formed part of a cycle of works that were all based on manuals—a gardening handbook, furniture assembly instructions, and the rulebook for a game I’d never hear of called T.E.G. The play I saw was entitled Los pactos (The pacts), and featured a group of characters with no name who suddenly found themselves in a mysterious, foggy realm where they had to roll a die, make pacts with one another, and engage in hostilities in order to pass on to the next, equally mysterious level. The play was entertaining even without the cultural context of having played the game. I began to suspect, however, that I did have some knowledge of T.E.G. when one character, the moderator of the game, named the other characters after territories: Alaska, Labrador, Polonia, and Terranova. Could T.E.G. be my old, conquerous thorn in the side, Risk?
I resolved to solve the mystery and gain a souvenir after the play. I asked in a toyshop uncertainly: “¿Tienen un juego que se llama…T.E.G.?
The clerk answered immediately and in rapid fire: “Plan Táctico y Estratégico de la Guerra” (Tactical and Strategic War Plan) and pointed to the top shelf of a wall full of games. His assistant scaled a ladder and showed me T.E.G., T.E.G. La revancha (The Revenge), T.E.G. de los Negocios (Business T.E.G.), and T.E.G.: Independencia (Independence). I went with the original, and looked over the box suspiciously. It cost a hefty $160 Argentine—almost $40 USD. This for a game that might very well be a carbon copy of one I already own.
I asked the assistant if he knew of a game called Risk. He hesitated, looked at his boss, and said he might have heard of it. I asked him if it was the same game and he answered, in a beautifully Argentine evasion: “Tengo entendido que tienen sus diferencias.” (From what I understand, they have their differences.)
I bought the game, whose cardboard box promises an “exciting bellic action in which logic, intelligence, and chance intervene” and which has been delighting Argentines since the 1970s (Given the belliferous government that ruled the country during that decade, these liner notes take on a particularly ominous feel). I even had them wrap it as a gift for my Risk-loving husband. We opened it and scoured the rules for anything that might distinguish it from the game of world conquest we know and love (or love to hate). It turned out that this version (I don’t know which came first, and prefer to leave it as a chicken-and-egg provocative mystery) has smoothed out all the kinks that make Risk so, well, risky. How many little brothers have slammed a fist on the board in anger, scattering cannons and cards? How many cousins have quit just when it was getting good after their pact between Brazil and North Africa is betrayed by an evil aunt? In T.E.G., the rules specifically state that pacts must be declared openly and respected. (Another fun difference is the separation of Risk’s monolithic Argentina into two territories: Argentina and Chile.) What is the fun in that? Perhaps it is my cynical approach to the game in which I play for a quick end to the world that appreciates Risk’s anger-inducing rulebook, but I appreciate the bellicose eruptions of familial rivalry that T.E.G. tries to smooth over.
Silke Otto-Knapp: Stage, 2009; watercolor and gouache on canvas; 55 x 67 in.; courtesy of The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas.
This Friday at Berkeley Art Museum a program of artwork, films, and live performances marks the opening of “Silke Otto-Knapp: A light in the moon/MATRIX 239.”
Curated by Dena Beard, the events include footage from the Pacific Film Archive collection of Anna Halprin’s landmark “Parades & Changes” plus Yvonne Rainer’s “Dance Fractions for the West Coast.” Live performances include Rainer’s “Trio A” and a site-specific creation by Flora Wiegmann. Dance is the theme that binds the events together: Otto-Knapp’s watercolors are fascinating images that appear and disappear, echoing the ephemerality of dance. They inspire interactivity, or as Beard writes in the exhibit’s program, the viewer makes an effort “to mobilize pictorial space.”
If you cannot attend Friday’s events, “A light in the moon” is on view until January 15, 2012. The Friday event is free.
More information is available at the BAM/PFA website.
Silke Otto-Knapp: Two Figures (white), 2006; watercolor and gouache on canvas; 39 1/2 x 39 1/2 in.; courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.
Tags: art, campus, dance, free, performance