Critical Correspondence

MRPJ#10/performance/protest/resistance/activism: Extras

In a deadly dull world, realism means living with risk and living on hope, means moving into new territory on principle, means forcing oneself to go against the grain of respectability. The object is to stay awake and keep moving, not to acquiesce in the great lie of the powerful that the world as it is is the best of all possible worlds. In the progressive arts community, as in the progressive religious community, such a conclusion seems obvious, incontestable, trite. It’s not. Or rather, it may be pitiably trite as a conclusion, an observation. But as a way of living and breathing, it is never obvious and never easy. Viewing it as obvious and easy gravely underestimates the power of the lie and the power of the liars. — from “The Turd in the Punch Bowl” by Peter Laarman

The stage for me is distilled. The stage is the black silence I can enter. I saw a scientist hold a snake and a sterile container. The snake seized the container with its jaw and shot its venom into the pure atmosphere that the glass contained. This is the stage for me. How else can I see what my own sweet venom is made of? — From “Protest as… Coming Out on Stage” by Annie Lanzillotto

Performance Journal #10: performance/protest/resistance/activism is a product of a period of intense political upheaval and activity, a time when artists often found themselves on the forefront of the activist movement. It is all the more prescient as a call to consciousness today, at a time when so many of our civil liberties have been curtailed with barely a wisp of dissent. What is the contemporary relationship between arts and political activism? Read Cathy Edward’s introduction to this issue, which includes not just dance artists, but writers, activists, performance artists, and thinkers beyond the immediate scope of the dance world. Our featured article is by Guillermo Gómez Peña – The ’90s Culture of Xenophobia, all the more relevant after the issue of immigration reignited during the last Republican Presidential primary, indicating it is an issue we have yet to come to terms with as a nation.

It’s interesting that Not-About-AIDS-Dance is seen as having a political use. Discussions of the personal being political may be in order here. Of honesty being political by itself. I’m glad if the work does have some political use. I am HIV+ and gay. My brother and other friends who died last year died of AIDS and were gay. There is political work to be done around AIDS and HIV due to homophobia, racism and other issues. I’m glad if that moment in the dance when I imitate Jon in his final coma “humanizes a plague and a political issue” (from The New York Times). It would be coy of me to claim that I had no conscious political motives. It was important to me to “come out” as being gay and HIV+ in the text that is a part of the work, and to make clear that the deaths of my friends mentioned in the piece were from AIDS. There is political motive there. But more than political motive, there was personal need. I think I included my HIV+ status in the piece, for example, because I felt the need to break my own denial of it, a much stronger need than any desire I had to politicize the issue.

Watching Jon die, and die of AIDS, was for me like watching myself die, and die from AIDS. The experience brought me closer to conceptualizing my own death than I had ever come before, and perhaps ever will again. The experience brought me to great grief and despair. Nearly unbearable for me, yet inescapable. So I did what I have always done – I made a dance. — from “Unbearable and Inescapable” by Neil Greenberg