Mapping the Placeless Place: Pedestrian Performance in the Urban Spaces of Los Angeles

Mapping the Placeless Place: Pedestrian Performance in the Urban Spaces of Los Angeles D.l. HOPKINS Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of indiYiduals to their real conditions of existence. -Louis Althusscr (294) IT/he Althusserian definition of ideology / .../ al/ows us to , .../ cognitively map our individual social relationship to local. national, and international class realities. -Frederic Jameson (52) The map has to do with performance. -Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (12) On 19 January 1998, a review in the Los Angeles Times began with this unequivocal lead line: "Internationally renowned theater and opera director Peter Sellars has a new show in town, but there is nQ evidence that he, or anyone, directed the production of 'Los Biombos I The Screens' at the East L.A. Skills Center in Lincoln Heights" (Winer F3).' FoJlowing this opening salvo. reviewer Laurie Winer went on to describe Sellars' "3 l/2-hour epic gone wrong" in no uncertain tenns (F3). Although Winer expressed some disappointment that Gloria Alvarez's adaptation lacked the "soulful nihilism" of Genet's original (F3), the review dwelt especially on the acting: "The cast is populated mostly by first-time or inexperienced actors. The dialogue [...) is delivered with the 'my line, your line' rhythms unique to amateur theatrics. After half an hour of this, anyone without friends and relatives in the large cast will be champing at the bit. Three hours later, the will to live is a gift no longer taken for granted" (F3). At this point, a reader can comfortably conclude that Winer's opinion of Los Biombos will be unifonnly negative. But it is also at this point that her review begins to establish itself as a cultural artifact, one that reflects the popular perception of theatre and perfonnance at a particular historical Modern Drama, 46:2 (Summer 2003) 261 262 D.l. HOPKINS moment. I would like to examine this artifact as a way of introducing Los Biombos and the kind of theatre it represents. Winer's review provides an example of the ossified conceptions of theatre and society that are challenged by community-based theatre. Community-based inquiries have gained currency in academic discourse, overriding the negative connotations of "community theatre" as amateur entertainment and identifying instead a localized "theatre of social engagement" (Kershaw 5). The production of Los Biombos also interrogates the idea of location and site. While site-specific theatre has attracted some academic and popular attention, the tenn "sitespecific " is often applied to a wide range of theatre events. Los Biambos provides an opportunity to consider the flexible parameters of site-specific theatre pract~ce. as well as an opportunity to consider site-specific practice in community-based theatre production. .This consideration is located in relation to current discussions of space and place. My goal is to develop an understanding of theatre focused on place, an understanding theorized in tenns of "pedestrian perfonnances" that rely on the specificity of the local to map the position of individual subjects in relation to global territories. Toward this goal, I consider a single, representative production: the Sellars-directed Los Biombos. Los Biombos demonstrates the problems and opportunities offered by "platial" theatre projects. Similarly, I focus on a single location: the atomized, post-urban landscape of Los Angeles. Though Los Biombos was developed with a community in Los Angeles and responded to that city's specific social and spatial structures, the conceptual and material interactions between performance and city in this case suggest a "pedestrian" paradigm for reading performances in other communities and other cities. Los Angeles, as Edward Soja notes, is often derided as "idiosyncratic" or "bizarrely exceptional" (Pos/modern 221), but this city has become the "polycentric, polycultural, polyglot metropolis regarded by many as the prototype of contemporary urbanization" (Dear 3). Joel Garreau has famously observed that "[e]very single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles" (3; emphasis in original), and studies of this city have much to offer in an international context as well. At a time when cities around the world are expanding in incompletely understood ways, perfonnances developed in and for specific urban communities offer the opportunity to investigate the cities of the future...