In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter four Touching History: Staging Black Experience The cover of the Theatre Communication Group’s (TCG) edition of SuzanLori Parks’s play Venus features a silhouette of Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman who gained European celebrity status as the “Hottentot Venus” in the early nineteenth century.1 Her ample backside, a condition known as steatopygia that endowed her with a shape that the bustle attempted to approximate four decades later, made her famous. The cover emphasizes this feature—this main attraction—by centering the ‹gure against a white backdrop against which the black bottom of Baartman appears even more pronounced. Superimposed and vertically running down her silhouette , the name of the play—V-E-N-U-S—appears. The letter U, located at her midsection, has been scripted in a font that is nearly three times larger than any other letter and, in turn, emphasizes her steatopygia. The U attracts the eye and subtly encourages a reading of “Us.” TCG draws additional attention to Baartman’s midsection by incorporating latitudinal and longitudinal lines around her lower torso. The con›uence of these design elements suggests a play that not only centers a black body within (and, perhaps, as) the world but also locates “us,” the viewers, within the experience of the black body. The cover gestures toward the play’s ability to reenact and ›esh out the experience of the black body. A blue silhouette of the Hottentot Venus stands against the black one. The misalignment of the images—blue overlapping black—hints at the ways in which Saartjie Baartman has been approximated in both life and art. In Venus, an actor plays “Venus Hottentot” and/as Baartman. In real life, Baartman simultaneously was and was not this role. The slippage between her willing role-play, the enforced projection of the role across her body, and her relative silence within the historical record 119 appear within the opening moments of the play. Venus begins with Venus Hottentot standing upon a rotating platform. Similar to the TCG cover, she appears in pro‹le. Her pronounced backside, enabled by the adornment of a prosthesis, is on display. She “revolves” until she “faces upstage,” thus enabling spectators to continue to gaze upon her body without having their looks challenged by her. Her movements followed by her stillness are reminiscent of Alfred, Fassena, and Jem, among others, who, as Alan Trachtenberg has noted, performed “the role of specimen” before Joseph Zealy’s camera . As Venus stands still and silent, the other company members in the production introduce themselves to the audience. Following the last introduction , they point to the black body on the platform and name her as the Venus Hottentot. The actor, playing the title role, repeats after them: “Venus Hottentot.” She con‹rms the label and, in so doing, appears to consent to her new identity. On the heels of Venus’s acceptance of their projection of the black body, a character declares: “The Venus Hottentot iz dead.” Another adds: “There wont b inny show tonite.” Despite these proclamations, the viewer suspects that there will be a show tonight but may wonder whether the silent ‹gure on display, the black body, will speak again. Reconstructed from the surviving historical documents that feature Baartman—the lectures of George Cuvier, the doctor who dissected Baartman and paraded her remains around the world; the recorded, eyewitness accounts of spectators who paid to see Baartman on display in various carnival circuits; and the court proceedings, prompted by many of those negative accounts that sought to determine whether Baartman was being exhibited against her will—Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus re-creates not only the experience of the “Hottentot Venus,” but also the environment within which she lived. In her historical revisitation, Parks encourages her audience to ask several questions. Can historical documents represent the experience of a black body? Can the experiences of the displayed black body get reclaimed by theater ? Or does the representation of the body, as centered and central to the dramatic narrative, replay or reenact its previous experience of being the exhibited body, but before a different audience? How do the repeated similar experiences of passed/past (historical) black bodies touch the black body in the present and in the future? In the following pages, I explore each of these questions by looking at how three playwrights—Parks, Robbie McCauley, and Dael Orlandersmith—use theatrical reenactment to gain access to the experience of select historical ‹gures. Parks stages Baartman. Robbie...

Share