load shedding

2008-09-12T00:58:00.000-07:00

LOAD SHEDDING

Fig.1. Burning the bra.

I wore my first bra on the day I left the production of Skin of Memory. (Wits School of The Arts, March 29 2008). It was a matinee performance on a Saturday and I was about to leave for a conference in Manchester. Another electrical storm was brewing on the Jo’burg horizon. In accepting the bra from the cast of eleven women, studying performance: six scholars from the Drama Department of the Wits School of the Arts and five visiting American scholars, it was also acceptance. I wore the bra in a tribute to my farewell and perhaps an indication that I should be a woman or act more like one. I was performing identity. We perform identity when the collective anticipates, recognizes or encourages identity to be performed. Jung suggests how the collective might envisage the archetype through ‘collective personification’ (1986, *) meaning the public might recognize the fool before the fool’s own self realisation. Does the comedian still think he is the straight-man, even when he is performing on stage, only to discover his comic identity through the audience’s response? This text hopes to perform identity. It expects one thing and in performance, might be received as something-other. It is a collage stitched with fragments of important memory stitched in intersection with other voices. It is a ‘by product of our acting together’ (Hess 2006, 2). This text of memory is written inside from the outside. It is relational. I want to recall and recover other things besides for the validation of my own practice. Can I write as I remember a performative experience with others? Can I prove that the practice of my research might perform something useful within regions of unexplored territory that co-exist in the landscape of the known? Can this text become active through this process by re-applying connections into a body that extends as it is reconstituted.
In February 2006, I returned to my birth town–my home town of Johannesburg rather like a heuristic jingoist unpacking his systems including a treasure hunt in a ready made landscape from before in order to make a work about memory with students studying performance and collaborative theatre. What occurred was a performed flight of fantasy that crashed landed into the continuum of the now and the before.
Fig.2. A portrait of the heuristic jingoist in rehearsal.

I am now entering the unknown.
I am still entering the unknown.

Fig.3. Is this the unknown?

Mapping is one of my favorite exercises in collaborative projects. When I am lucky I like to call it ‘Cartographies of Performance’. I am not always lucky and my system of cartography and performance is often threatened by my own Ego, made up in the territory of patriarchy which always likes a big production. Ego is often confused as identity but whereas identity is inscribed (textured) onto the practices and regimes of performance; Ego can detain performance just like Narcissus who was detained in his own reflection.(1) Identity also functions as things we do when we perform. When we perform, we load and shed identity much like a country’s energy crises. Load shedding is an idiom and a paradox. Performance is a paradox. Is South Africa performing its energy crises? Is South Africa performing a paradox? In this paper called: ‘Load Shedding’, I want to understand the parallels of performing identity and load shedding through the intersections of several auto-biographical moments that occurred while creating work in Johannesburg. This is a reflexive attempt in bending back and forward these encounters in order to help me understand how it is to load and shed identity while creating further performance-events like what was created in Johannesburg, March 2008.

Fig.4. Jozi.

Fig.5. Mapping in Jozi.

This year (2008) Johannesburg and South Africa experienced an energy crises because of insufficient fuel, outdated power stations, and other impracticalities from poor planning. This has resulted in blackouts. Blackouts are periods of time when a city shuts down. These are periods of time when energy cannot be used this is done in order to save energy-what the South African government calls ‘load shedding’. This affected the operation of performance sectors in South Africa including theatre and tertiary institutions.

Fig. 6. Performing with shadows and various alternative light sources during Skin of Memory.

This crisis occurred as the work on the commissioned collaborative project was almost complete. Performances were interrupted as much as they were negotiated into new playing spaces that could accommodate the energy crisis. The project attempted to explore and expose the strata of memory–revealed on a treasure island landscape. The audience who participated in this treasure hunt were identified as survivors, from surviving a simulated airplane crash that occurred in the only performed site of the theatre. These survivors were led from the confusion of the crash by four air stewardess who in turn shed and loaded identity along their tours of salvaging memory.

Fig.7. Disrupted air stewardesses in the disrupted theatre.

Memory was the central stimulus within the project but it also was the catalyst for the crises of the self, one that preceded the energy crisis. The self, while attempting to collaborate with the collective in the making of performances, experienced a strong sense of return to the locus of memory–by returning to the city of one’s first memories. It got–and–gets fuzzy as memories do. Memory impacting on memory. I do hope that the collective’s contribution might reccur through revisiting these memories, retelling and remaking this text, assembled somewhere else in order to be analyzed. Text becomes a counter narrative to itself when assemblage occurs, in this active and rhizomatic region (also a matrix) both collective and self are an identity that can be remapped and reformed onto an existing text already made through the metaphor of the palimpsest.

I also want to argue and present along with this-the making of the hybrid by presenting two external yet also very internal second encounters, (two further case studies) where the notion of performance has enabled the performer or in this case: the stand up comic and the visual artist to load and shed identity. (Images needed) These two further case studies occur from my witnessing stand-up comedian Nic Rabinowitz in his one man show: One Man One Goat and my meeting visual artist Leora Farber at her exhibition Dis-location/Re-location. There are examples in Skin of Memory, One Man One Goat and Dis-location/Re-location where I noticed the position and question of ‘Jewishness’ in relation to shedding one’s ‘Jewishness’ whilst simultaneously loading it, as a way of performing one’s identity in the complexity of the hybrid. There is also a similar reoccurrence in the re-stitching or even stitching of this text. Faber re-stitches her skin with indigenous South African plants and the narrative of Bertha Marx. Rabinowitz re-stiches his patois with Xhosa and accent. In both cases the skin that is being re-stitched might not only be the artist own but the collective who share in the performance experience. Skin and Jews. An experience painfully pointed out by anyone who has passed through the halls of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. In the project my own ‘Jewishness’ was clear and I became more vividly aware of it….There other altercations here as there are also suggestions. I suspect they can only be articulated by trying to taking issue with survivors like Charlotte Delbo and Debbie Kushner. Firstly Charlotte Delbo.

Charlotte Delbo worked in theatre in Paris but when she became a member of the French Resistance she was arrested by the Gestapo. Her survival of first Auschwitz and then Ravnesbruck resulted in her creating a canon of Holocaust literature that has been described as ‘a lyrical rendering of atrocity that is alarmingly beautiful, an aesthetic of agitation.’ (Lawrence Langer, Introduction to Auschwitz et Apres, p16:1995). Her trilogy Auschwitz and after is the composite of fragment, a myriad of memory and reflection. Her text throughout is an assemblage of memory, anecdotes, storytelling and poetry. Delbo discards any notion of logical framing and instead relies on the metaphor of memory to form her narrative. One chapter entitled: ‘At First We Wanted To Sing’ is a powerful description of herself and her fellow female inmates in Auschwitz as they reconstruct from memory Molieire’s Le Malade Imaginaire. (The imaginary invalid) in order to perform this classical French farce. The poignancy and irony of recreating theatre to uplift the unbearable predicament is even more apparent in the attempt of the imagination to solder the spirit of survival. ‘It was magnificent’, says Delbo, ‘because for the space of two hours while the smokestacks never stopped belching their smoke of human flesh, for two whole hours e believed in what we were doing’ (171). These are other dramatic examples of how theatre was used during the Holocaust to revive both hope and faith in living. Thus far there has never been any attempt to dramatize Delbo’s life. She is a unique and remarkable role model not only as a leader among women but as that rare oddity of being a non-Jew interned in Auschwitz for her belief and values rather than her religion. (From another text)

I introduced Delbo’s notion of ‘Skin of memory’ to the group as a title and perhaps as a vehicle to the notion of not having theatres but still performing in them.

‘The starting piece of the project: ‘The skin of memory’ - is a phrase from Holocaust survivor, author, poet, and theatre maker Charlotte Delbo. Writing many years’ later Delbo sets up a task to explain the inexplicable; an almost audacious task of translating trauma into testimony. Delbo does so by conjuring up the metaphor of a snake shedding its old skin emerging from beneath it in a fresh, glistening one. The metaphor of a snake can inform text as a meandering narrative that is rich in the fluid sediment of memory. Delbo asks: ‘How does one rid oneself of something buried far within: memory and the skin of memory?” At first one imagines that the metaphor will aid in discarding the horror of the past to live in a new skin. Delbo complicates this. She stubbornly insists that, the deep memory, the skin of memory, the memory of internment is buried far within, cannot be discarded, and clings to the very being. New skin, more immediate skin, made up of present memory or common memory might cover up the deep skin but underneath the skin of memory does not renew itself. ‘Oh, it may harden further... Alas I often fear lest it grow thin, crack and the camp get hold of me again….’

Fig.8. My mother’s skin.

From this time there photographs of my mother’s skin. There are fifteen
notebooks in front of me to transcribe. Sometimes I think I am running out of time but not my memories. We write so as not to forget.

Playwright Tony Kushner says:

'Judaism has a distinguishing feature its unreasonable difficulty. It is un-appeasably hard. You must remember. You must remember everything. You must write down what you remember. You must read what you have written every year. Not once a year but a whole week. And even worse you must understand. And even worse you must elaborate on that understanding' (1996: 125).

And in Skin of Memory Jenny Weiner, from Boston University, created a character called Debbie Kushner, born in the Southern United States- looking for her father Solly, a South African Jewish kind of Mengele who invited a skin lightning cream called…

------------

Debbie Kushner:

'Brown stains and tainted pictures covering the walls reminding me of my blood. But blood is red. These walls are white and my father was here but now he’s dead somewhere in Kazakhstan or Australia or who knows where and his heart filled with empty guilt of skin cancer and chemicals. No name brand white cream. Lightening dark skin, dark white'.

Debbie Kushner was one of several semi-fictional characters (including Miss World, an avant garde Film maker and two feminist freedom fighters) who were all on the same flight path from Johannesburg back to New York when the plane crashes–as a result of being hijacked by this group of devious arched - nosed feminists lead in spirit by Valerie Solanas.(2) Solanas arose on the first day of rehearsals to counter Charlotte Delbo, but I learned how to respect Solanas’ narrative and tried to compromise with the frustrations made from random choices and re-articulated identities and crises.

Crises is not something I necessarily bring to work but in the case of applied drama it happens. It is clear I experienced several on my return visit to WITS, particularly the crash of memory upon memory and its impact on the ecosystem of theatre (See Baz Kershaw, 2008). In this paper, I want to present the energy crises, my own crisis, how other eco systems are threatened and these include ‘very long memories’ (See Angela Davis 2007, 11). I was working in a city which had become foreign to me, Johannesburg, it was the place of so many of my dramas, my plays, my conquests, it was the place of electrical storms, it was the place of Gods, it was the place of my mother’s stories, my father’s death, it was the place of mistakes, of me fleeing the city from broken love affairs, could I fix it, could I the prodigal perform identity as a everyman and fix the tear and I returned and there were electrical rain storms as there was sporadic lack of electricity. Johannesburg theatres go dark. Without proper generators and storms, non-theatrical work in Johanesburg is dangerous and dangerous is aesthetic as much as it is research. Jo’burg is hometown. Dreamtown. Birthtown. Downtown. Jewishness. It is the intersection of memories. And sometimes they collide and intersect. I was returning to my Alumni Mater as a ‘brilliant’ PHD student with a commission from my mother university, WITS. But somehow the project had difficulties. Despite these difficulties there is my ongoing acceptance of crises. I had been asked to create a collaborative piece with women, American and South African whose differences in cultural identity was significant. I was returning to my own Drama department where I received my honors in theatre studies in the tumultuous nineties and was now at WOSA, which in its own right is a splendid old Medical School riveted in history.

This is Angela Davis:

'We have to take into consideration the ghosts that still haunt us today. Repressive institutions often have very long memories, regardless of what the individuals who are their agents know or don’t know. The memory of those institutions is in its practices and its regimes. The prison functions just like it did before' (2007,11).

Returning home was like reclaiming an identity of ‘Jewishness’ while shedding another. The prodigal became the pariah, the traveler became the archivist; shipwrecked on an island cursed called ‘Lysistrata’. I performed this exploration by including a large vintage safe along the performance route, it was placed on the concourse of WITS and in it ‘forget me not’ seeds were hidden proclaiming the concern of the ephemeral. Two historical anecdotes. This is the first.

'The myth of Alfred Beit’s lost fortune. In 1904 the Transvaal Technical Institute opened and two years later the mining magnet, Alfred Beit, left 20000 in his will for a university of Johannesburg. But the Beit bequest was never to be used for a university in Johannesburg…' (Murray 1982, 3).

Then an excerpt from my journal at the time

The same story told
In different ways and
In different times
Maybe the archive will help?
And then much later…
No! Wait!

Writing to this point–in reflection, is ambiguous and is difficult. There were fights, (between facilitator and cast) one in particular in the back of the amphitheatre. These reflected other pains other memories, like sometime in the nineties as a younger student I hit a fellow student and friend, I slapped her face before a final movement exam in the foyer of the WITS upstairs theatre. Years later the horror marked out on that wall repeated itself finding that same anger because almost in the same place I accused two students for not working, and they blew up screaming back at me in the hallway of the theatre. One awful act ultimately years later led to another. Suddenly I remembered another pain tearing at the skins of the walls. An axis mundi of pain. (3)In the same place there is a an active space of pain. I think pain is carried in space in the same way that love expresses itself. It is metaphysical, abstract and enduring. Now I go back to the mistakes like not having enough strength to be patient and I remember these shameful things how I once hit a girl/this occurs/ through the frustration of others... years later...
The possibility of redemption is through this text, performing it, loading and shedding it, as a confession; for it is the confession that translates the shame into a possibility of redemption. In another context, this might also occur in the presentation of these photographs (photographs of process to be shown) as documents to an aesthetic redemption. Here in the photographs is the other eye, taken by the assistant director on the project Sam Nell who through the immediate frame of exactness became the other eye exposing the vulnerability:
Consider Lash and Urry quoting Sontag :
‘Photography is a risk-reducing stratagem enabling people: “to take possession of space in which they feel insecure” (1994, 255). These important images become the glue that holds the fragments of memory together In the end ( like this paper) - There was so much to deal with because all I wanted to do was perform at the barriers of the enclosure to learning but the security of the institution did not allow me. In the end, I found a safe and I thought of my father and created an intervention. ‘Safe’ does not exist accept in the photographs with the actor Niki Douglas standing on top of the world. It not exist because there are no satisfactory photographs of it. It did not exist because it was to far away. This also needs to be an inventory of neatness and readiness. Of ordered notebook and of sober reciprocation. Stitching identity includes tours and maps and journal writings and visits to museums, lost and found possibilities like Leora Farber, whose historical bodies are a complete text, a text that gets stitched on the skin (Slide). “Here are some” I say as I begin to look for some of my own journal entries from that time before they descend into director’s notes.

Endnotes:
(1) Although Barbara Babcock ( cited by Meyerhoff and Ruby 1992, 309) says: ‘Narcissus’ tragedy is that he is not narcissistic enough, or rather he does not reflect long enough to effect transformation’ (1980, 2). Therefore to persist long enough might provoke reflexivity in order to disrupt the détente of the Ego.
(2) ‘Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist writer best known for shooting the artist Andy Warhol in 1968’
(Online: wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Solanas).
(3) The axis mundi is the meeting between zones of reality-the upper worlds or heavens, the underworld, or the world of the dead, and the world of humans, the world of created beings, animals, and plants. (Freedland and Hecht, 2006, 18).

References
• Davis, Angela. 2007. ‘Thoughts to melt prison bars’ in interview with Shaun de Waal. Mail and Guardian.
• Hess, Bridgid. 2006. ‘Faced by race; an impossible forgiveness. A methodology of participation’ Paper presented at Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness, University of Cape Town.
• Jung, C.G. 1986. Four Archetypes. London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Ark Paperbacks.
• Friedland, Roger and Richard D. Hecht. 2006. Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, (Eds. Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres) Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis.
• Kershaw, Baz. 2007. Theatre Ecology: environments and performance events. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Kushner, Tony. 1996. ‘Notes on Akiba’ in too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, (Ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt. The Jewish Museum, New York; Rutgers University Press, New Jersey.
• Lash, Scott and John Urry. 1994. Economies of signs and space. Sage Publications, London.
• Murray, Bruce K. 1982. Wits: the early years: a history of the university of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and its precursors 1896-1936. Wits University Press, Johnnesburg.
• Myerhoff, Barbara and Jay Ruby. 1995. ‘A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology’. In Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual, Storytelling, and Growing Older, Barbara Myerhoff. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.