On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

A Cinema Against the Vérités

• • • A Cinema Against the Verites O n this day, Avenues C and D translate to avenues Cold and Debilitating, but the actors betray few signs ofwinter suffering. Sarita Choudhury stands next to the camera in a black cutaway coat that is surely more decorative than warm, her long hair twisted straight up with what seems to be wire. She's holding a television , and in this scene, she'll enter the shantytown to deposit it in a wall of twenty-two other televisions. In Shu Lea Cheang's Waste Land (working title), everyone's a media maven, whether homeless or at home. And so illusion meets disillusion. On this particular stretch of Loisaida's rubble-encrusted tundra, the homeless from Tompkins Square settled after they were evicted from the park. Some are still here. And making inquiries: "They gonna give away the TVS?" The thirteen shanties built by Cheang's crew are just stylized and less sturdy versions of the real thing, fashioned from found objects like traffic cones, a refrigerator door, a hunk of baby crib, rows of broken records nailed to sticks. A white turkey answers the cry for"Action!" with a gobble and a scene-stealing strut across the dolly tracks into the frame. No one stops the bird. It lives here too. . Cheang's film is about the waste afloat in ocean waves and on airwaves -pollution uncontrolled, media ultracontrolled. But that's clearly just part of this ambitious project's agenda. Sarita Choudhury-last seen opposite Denzel Washington in Mississippi Masala-plays Shareen, a salvager/recycler who tools around town in a graffitied pickup truck. Shareen lives in a Staten Island garage with her lover Claire (Erin McMurtry), and Claire's daughter. Who happens to be black though her mother is white and her mother's mother is black. But the movie is not "about" race or homosexuality. Set in a future that seems nearyet -so-far, Waste Land assumes a world of multi in the culti, a world of A Cinema Against the Verites 207 Shu Lea Cheang directs Sarita Choudhury in a scene from Waste Land. (© C. M. Hardt.) broken color barriers, where Lesbians may not need to be Avengers. The fire this time? Toxic waste. Everyone's food is beginning to glow. This is Cheang's first feature, but it's informed by years of collaborative video projects like Color Schemes, for which she commissioned twelve monologues on racial assimilation from twelve Asian, Latino, black, and Native American performers. Born in Taiwan, Cheang moved to New York in 1977 to attend NYU film school, but she graduated thinking she'd never have enough money to make her own movies . She turned to video, working with Paper Tiger Television and editing other people's movies to earn a living. In 1989, she wrote the treatment for Waste Land, applied for grants, and solicited a script from one of the actors in Color Schemes, Jessica Hagedorn. "1 resisted the idea because itwasn't an original story by me," recalls Hagedorn, who's come to watch the shooting at the shantytown, "but when Shu Lea gave me total freedom and let me add characters...." Hagedorn, of course, has since published an acclaimed novel about life in the Philippines, Dogeaters. I listen to someone on the set joke that the film's been cast with To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book 208 REGENERATE ART F.o.J.s-Friends of Jessica. Hagedorn thinks this is funny when I tell her. But no. It's only true for Laurie Carlos, who plays Mimi, Claire's mother and the renegade hostess of a public-access talk show. "I always had Laurie's voice in my head when I wrote that part," says Hagedorn. She did work with Cheang on the auditions, however, and admits, "I'm always casting, even when it isn't my job." For another role she envisioned Guillermo G6mez-Pena, who wasn't available. "You write with certain voices in mind, but the people you end up getting can surprise you and open things up in your head." Hagedorn and Carlos and Robbie McCauley perform together occasionally as Thought Music. McCauley has a cameo in the film, as do a number of other "downtown" performers: Karen Finley, Suzanne Jones, Greg Mehrten, Nicky Paraiso, Pedro Pietri, Alva Rogers, Ching Valdez, Kate Valk, Ron Vawter. Their unique styles...