Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater

Epilogue: Finding Hope at the Theater

Epilogue Finding Hope at the Theater [T]he courage to care, to feel deep agony and anguish, to deal with the tears generated by the suffering that people experience . . . this is not only a matter of following some objective and rational moral law, but is also rooted in the blooddrenched tear-soaked traditions of resistance, critique, and contestation—and in the agency of the wretched of the earth. The courage to hope, like laughter and dance, is an attempt to endure, to persevere, to ‹ght, and to struggle come what may. Nothing can extinguish or crush radical hope—no matter what we continue to think critically about, care deeply for, or hope substantively to achieve—and this is the blues shining through the darkness. —Cornel West, “Celebrating Tikkun and Tragicomic Hope” We need to reject the reactionary contention that, unless properly mediated by irony, matter related to emotion and content are out of place in “real” art. Against the exploitative circularity of this mode of thinking only a rejection of cynicism for its own sake can return art to its true social function —which is to give imaginative shape to humanity’s hope for a better and more inclusive future. There is nothing facile about an art that denounces the conditions of present-day social and economic exploitation in order to seek change. —Bram Dijkstra, “The Dialectic of Hope” Crafting . . . a new political language will require what I call “educated hope.” Hope is the precondition for individual and social struggle. Rather than seeing it as an individual proclivity , we must see hope as part of a broader politics that acknowledges those social, economic, spiritual, and cultural 167 conditions in the present that make certain kinds of agency and democratic politics possible. —Henry A. Giroux, “When Hope Is Subversive” Throughout Utopia in Performance, I’ve suggested that moments of liminal clarity and communion, ›eeting, brie›y transcendent bits of profound human feeling and connection, spring from alchemy between performers and spectators and their mutual confrontation with a historical present that lets them imagine a different, putatively better future. In my attempt to recapture those moments of communitas, of spectacular yet subtle beauty and grace in the performances I chronicle here, I’ve been challenged to write in a way that in itself mirrors the alchemical combustions of those utopian performatives. In critical re›ection and writerly speculation , I’ve been inspired by reimagining and however brie›y resurrecting those performative acts as (via Bloch) rehearsals for examples of a social utopian goal. Writing, like performance, is always only an experiment, an audition, always only another place to practice what might be an unreachable goal that’s imperative to imagine nonetheless. Writing, like performance , lets me try on, try out, experiment with another site of anticipation , which is the moment of intersubjective relation between word and eye, between writer and reader, all based on the exchange of empathy, respect, and desire. Writing Utopia in Performance, I’ve made my own wish for the future and I’ve conjured, through memory, my experience of the past. Trying to capture something of performance itself—even if it’s those inarticulate, ineffable, affective exchanges that are felt and gone even as we reach out to save them—is also a “doing,” a kind of performative that attempts to ‹ll the “aporia between logos and the body,” the gap in which performance inevitably, spectrally swirls.1 Perhaps that gap congenially ushers in both theory and practice, providing a home for however temporary a meeting between mind and body, thought and deed, feeling and affect. Utopian performatives capture the contradictory status of performance as absence, as performance theorist Peggy Phelan has elegantly argued, and the apparently separate doings of writing and gesture, which dance scholar (and my colleague) Ann Daly has evocatively attempted to conjoin.2 How might utopian performatives harness those contradictory separations and offer the possibility to experience both sides of the binary at once in a crystalline moment of past-present-future “now” time? Utopian performa168
Utopia in Performance tives gather power through their attachment to particulars—particular moments in time, spaces in geography, constellations of spectators joined as audiences to witness speci‹c con‹gurations of performers. Perhaps utopian performatives move and stir us because they’re inevitably speci‹c and local products of a here and now that passes into there and then even as we experience them. How can...