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Theatre Topics 12.1 (2002) 63-84



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Guru Clown, or Pedagogy of the Carnivalesque

Mady Schutzman


In 1998, Lee Breuer, theatre director and founder of New York-based Mabou Mines, was awarded an honorary degree from California Institute of the Arts, where I had been employed as full time faculty for eight years. His speech was a resounding warning to the 313 graduates at convocation ceremonies--BFAs and MFAs from the Schools of Dance, Film/Video, Theatre, Writing, Music, and Art--to retain their artistic playfulness and refuse to compromise vision or voice when hazarding the marketplace. He concluded his address with his own playful take on Descartes: "I am entertained," he declared, "therefore I am! I entertain," he continued, "therefore you are!" As the crowd cheered and the business of a rollicking CalArts graduation proceeded, I found myself distracted. Breuer's evocation of entertainment suddenly had provided me with a sorely needed paradigm for understanding what had been a difficult, albeit amusing,experience in a class I had just finished teaching. This paper is a performative attempt to share my experience in that classroom. It is subjective, mischievous, and self-conscious; it is a re-creation that privileges, or at least allows the distortions, fears, and humor that pervade the pedagogical encounter, whether we attend to them or not.

The class was entitled Testimony, Magical Realism, and the Carnivalesque. 1 My desire to teach this class was a continuation of my abiding interest in "cultures of silence" (from institutionalized hysterics of late 19th century France to activists and artists living in Argentina during the Dirty War, 1976-1983). I was particularly interested in their invention of aesthetic means to counter the dominant, silencing discourses of power. We would study these three genres (primarily in literature but also in film and performance) and investigate how and why each has been employed by marginalized or oppressed people as a strategy for telling their (unsolicited) stories, often when such public telling would be self-incriminating and dangerous. We would ask, When do people employ testimony with its polarizing and pointed techniques to share publicly their version of lived experience? When is it best to employ magical realism and convey the truth through metaphor and fiction, foregrounding the magical dimensions of ineffable realities that have grown commonplace? When and how do celebratory expressions of carnivalesque grotesquery, polyphony, inversion, and laughter intervene as stories of resistance?

Students would be asked to select a story from their own lives that they needed to tell, an occasion when they felt unheard, dismissed, shamed, or [End Page 63] violated, an occasion that had not yet been rendered from their perspective. They would be required to tell their story, the same story, in three different versions--as testimony, magical realism, and carnivalesque--by the end of the fourteen sessions of the semester. The stories needn't be written: dance students might choreograph three different dances representing each genre, art students might make photos, objects, or drawings for each. 2 In this way students might understand how differently the same story could be represented as well as why one form would be chosen over another in any given circumstance of its telling.

First, let me briefly introduce readers to CalArts. The School of Critical Studies is responsible for the core curriculum of the Institute; we are, essentially, the liberal arts wing of an Institute whose students are interested primarily in studio work, in the practice of becoming artists. Nonetheless, students at CalArts are required to take 40% of their total 120 units in Critical Studies, a significant percentage higher than at any other art institute or conservatory in the U.S. While students are indeed hard working, they tend to learn in non-traditional ways: a high number of students suffer from dyslexia or A.D.D., for example, and their mediums of learning are often visual, corporeal, and acoustic. My passions (as well as those of many of my Critical Studies colleagues) for reading, writing, and critical analysis are frequently met by students with frustration, withdrawal, and arguments for a...

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