(Re)Presenting the South Bronx

In the fall of 2009, the Foundry Theatre loaded audiences onto a bus for a tour of the South Bronx and its changing history and beauty through the lens of gentrification. An ambitious site-specific production, The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue won an award for Distinguished New Play Project from the National Endowment for the Arts/Arena Stage New Play Development Program. Because Arena Stage intended to showcase all of the award-winning productions in what became the #NewPlay Festival, the Foundry’s artistic producer Melanie Joseph and poet-playwright Claudia Rankine knew that they would have to adapt their production for the festival in Washington, D.C. But producing a site-specific performance in a different place fundamentally alters the piece and the audience’s experience.

The original project began in 2007 when Joseph read Rankine’s multimedia book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, and immediately commissioned the poet to write about the South Bronx, given the Foundry’s history of investigating and dramatizing New York City. (In 2008, for instance, the Foundry produced Aaron Landsman’s Open House and ROTOZAZA’s Etiquette, which took place in a Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village.) Though Rankine was born in Jamaica, she grew up in New York City and liked the idea of returning to her origins, one sense of Provenance. She and Joseph met long-time residents of the South Bronx who showed them photographs, told them stories, and took them on tours of their neighborhoods. In addition, they traced many routes throughout the South Bronx to determine which would be best for the theatrical experience.

In the Foundry’s initial production, audience members gathered on East 121st Street outside of the Elmendorf Reformed Church. This departure site positioned the audience member as tourist, assuming he or she is from Manhattan and is traveling to a foreign place. When I took the tour, the presence of mostly white, mostly young people waiting to board the tour bus in Spanish Harlem told a story of gentrification parallel to that of the South Bronx. Outside the church, an unmarked charter bus pulled up, and the audience boarded. The narrator, Sarah Nina Hayon, sat in the front of the bus and instructed the passengers to put on their headsets and turn on their radios. Small televisions hung throughout the bus presented maps of the bus route. Headsets on, we became a collective tour group, and we began our travelogue by listening to amplified sounds of our surroundings. The bus had external microphones, capturing and delivering the live sounds of the city as we drove. All of these technical elements lent the production the feel, immediacy, and authenticity of a tour.

As we approached the Willis Avenue Bridge, our gateway to the Bronx, the pre-recorded voices of performers Raúl Castillo and Randy Danson filled our ears with philosophical and historical text. They poured forth mellifluous lines comparable to slam poetry. They spoke of the intimacy that they knew we desired but could not have of their disembodied voices or of the stranger sitting next to us; we could hear Castillo’s and Danson’s whispers and know that everyone else could hear them with their headphones, but these headphones also separated us from them and from one another. By identifying themselves with the South Bronx, the voices implied that we could not become intimate with the neighborhood through which we were traveling. As with many tours, the environment became a spectacle that tourists could see but not touch. Although Provenance placed us in the Bronx, we did not set foot there; we remained in our privileged positions, in our comfortable, air-conditioned seats raised above the ground, literally looking down at the people and places of the borough as if they existed for our consumption...