The Medea Project and Katastrophe

Yesterday was the Women and Theater and LGBT Studies pre-conference for ATHE (Association for Theater in Higher Education) in San Francisco. For the evening keynote performance, Rhodessa Jones brought some of her performers from The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, which was completely amazing. I expected it to be simple, honestly, girls with no performance training enacting their life stories and what got them to prision, but it was actually amazing from a performance standpoint as well. These women were wonderful artists, which made me all that much more impressed with Jones' work. I will most certainly buy the book one of these days.

Following Jones, katastrophe performed. The sad thing was that by that time it was 10pm, and almost everyone was exhausted from a full day of conference and only a few people were left in the audience. Even some of the people I would have expected to stay there, like the girl from Santa Barbara who studies transgender performance, went home. So Katastrophe was left in this big theater, performing by himself to about 20 or 30 people scattered throughout the audience. He did a valiant job, and he was great holding his own on a panel (with SEC among others) in the middle of the day, but it was clear that he belonged in a smaller venue with 2 or 3 other artists (or perhaps a show like Fresh Meat) and an audience with much more energy. Hearing more of his songs, though, convinced me to buy his CD (despite the awkward way the conference organizer relished saying the name Let's f*ck and then talk about my problems). I look forward to seeing him perform more in his element at some point. I hope they paid him well for this gig, though.

I must confess that one of the highlights of seeing Katastrophe is also getting a glimpse of Michelle Tea, who also rocks. I love her books and getting a chance to see her is pretty cool. One of these days I'll have to go and hear her speak or do a reading. I'm still a bit mad at myself for missing her in LA.

Earlier in the day, I walked in late for a performance by Anastasia Coon, who is an MFA student at UT Austin. It looked like an interesting, if slighly awkward show about a queer woman who lived as a man for years in the 1960s, but apparently eventually decided to live as a woman. What was amazing about the whole thing was the slow pace of all the talking. The performance was incredilby deliberate and precise, but clearly intentionally slow but with bursts of frantic energy. Missing the beginning, several things were unclear about the performance but it was interesting nonetheless. I will try to watch out for her in the future.

Richie still a creep

The season for the Kirk Douglas theater has been announced:

all wear bowlers by Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings Based on a Short Story by Gabriel García Márquez Adapted by Nilo Cruz
Permanent Collection by Thomas Gibbons
The Stones by Tom Lycos and Stefo Nantsou
“Solomania!” A Repertory Festival of Solo Performance Artists featuring Jerry Quickley in Live From the Front, Dan Guerrero in ¡Gaytino!, Adriana Sevan in Taking Flight, Roger Guenveur Smith in The Watts Towers Project
“Pyrenees” by David Greig

It it at least much more diverse than the Taper and Ahmanson seasons, but it remains more than half by white authors and performers, and the majority of the people of color are involved in the solo performance festival (Quicky and Smith are African-American, Guerrero and Sevan are Latino). Ironically, at least three of these pieces were presented at the Douglas last season as part of the now defunct New Works Festival and received some funding from the disbanded Blacksmyths Lab and the Latino Theater Initiative.

Also note that THERE IS ONLY 1 WOMAN ON THIS BILL! (although all wear bowlers is directed by Aleksandra Wolska who I believe got her PhD from Stanford and used to direct this Stanford Summer Theater program that I'm currently working on). I'm especially dubious about Richie's complete and utter failure to include female playwrights in his entire season.

In the LA Times article about the new season, Ritchie sounds like a total slimeball. He's still living in New York and claims he can choose plays that appeal to and represent LA? Creepy.

The Summer of Old Movies

Stage Door. Starring Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers. 1937. Based on a play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kauffman.

Stage Door was another excellent old movie. It was odd and complex with compelling acting and some moral ambiguity. The play was set in The Footlights Club, a boarding house in New York for aspiring actresses. It centered around the moral quandries of a blonde ingenue, played by Ginger Rogers, who must decide whether or not to compromise her principles by getting involved with a big producer who has taken an interest in her, and her roommate, played by Katherine Hepburn, who is an heiress trying to make a name for herself by forsaking the family fortune and becoming an actress. Both Hepburn and Rogers were wonderful actresses with fascinating and nuanced characters who were perhaps the greatest when they were bickering wittily. Hepburn seems wise and knowing in any role, so her performance as a somewhat sheltered rich girl setting out on her own was complicated by her amazingly high status and self-confidence. Some of her actions seemed both altruistic and inexplicable at the same time. She was clever and gruff and not entirely lovable but wonderful nonetheless. Notable aspects of this movie include a large female ensemble among whom are Lucille Ball and Ann Miller. Also, compared to Ann Miller, Ginger Rogers appears to be a suprisingly bad dancer. It would have been wonderful to see the two of them dance more, but I suppose this show wasn't a musical so that's a little much to expect.

To Have and Have Not. Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. 1944. Based on a novel by Ernest Hemmingway.

I must say I was a bit confused when the first 10 minutes of this movie were all about fishing. Hemmingway, fishing: did I really care? But then Lauren Bacall asked "Have you got a light" and I was hooked. She is an amazingly powerful actress and was delightful and compelling throughout the film. It turns out it's actually about the French Resistence in the Carribbean in WWII, which is much more interesting than just fishing. And the film is notable for the moment in which Lauren Bacall says "You do know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow." Also, Bacall has an amazingly deep voice, especially when she's singing. Which makes the film oddly homoerotic, although I'm sure it's not intended to be. Bogie plays the captain of a small fishing boat, an American drafted to assist the Free French smuggle a Resistance fighter into Martinque. He happens to fall in love with Bacall along the way after he catches her stealing a mutual acquaintance's wallet. They make a great team, and more or less sail off into the sunset to fight for the French together. Also on the DVD is a Warner Brothers cartoon called Bacall to Arms which spoofs the movie and is weird (and really disturbing) but kind of fun.

The Maltese Falcon Starring Humphrey Bogart. 1941. Based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett.

Honestly, I didn't like The Maltese Falcon nearly as much as I enjoyed The Big Sleep. I didn't find the lead female, Mary Astor, particularly interesting or attractive. She seemed neither dangerous nor seductive, but rather seemed manipulative and frumpy. I wasn't convinced by the attraction between her and detective Sam Spade at all. Bogart was great, and he looked significantly younger, but even his character wasn't quite as interesting as in The Big Sleep. The famous Sam Spade would have been more exciting if there were more attention to the relationship between him and his partner or even him and his secretary. But this is the classic example of film noir, and as such was a good, educational film to watch. I will now appreciate the queer spoofs of it even more, and of course the scene with Peter Lorre and his cane was fantastic. He and the Fat Man were delightfully queer and strange.

Read it for the Pictures II

Halberstam, Judith and Del LaGrace Volcano. The Drag King Book. London and New York: Serpent's Tail, 1999.

This is a beautiful book, and I'm actually quite a fan of Judith Halberstam's work, but I found the book somewhat disappointing nonetheless. The book contains photograhps of drag kings primarily from London, San Francisco, and New York by Del LaGrace Volcano. The images are beautiful and artistic, and my only complaint about them is the fact that Del himself appears in a disproportionate number of them. For a collection of artwork, however, that seems quite acceptable and I very much enjoyed and appreciated all of the images. The text, however, I found irritating. It lacked any kind of scholarship and in certain places read like a personal rant about what Halberstam finds interesting and attractive about drag kings. She wanted to focus on the experiences of people who perform as drag kings and live as bucth women or transgendered men in their daily lives, but rather than narrowing the topic of the text to that subject, she threw out various ideas and opinions on several drag-king-adjacent topics.

The book was written at the height of lesbian chic and popular media fascination with drag kings, and as such it deals a lot with the contemporary (1996-1997) drag club scene, particularly in London and New York. It does not, however, do anything resembling a thorough history or anthropology of its subject, it merely touches on various relevent ideas. It seems to be written more for a popular audience than a scholarly one, so the lack of research or references is perhaps understandable as part of the project. Halberstam fully acknowledges her biased interest in studying drag king culture as a partipant, and a few photographs of her feature prominently in the book. The book, however makes gestures toward a history of drag kings, however, that it fails to properly document or support, mentioning early drag kings but not giving details. Similarly, Halberstam does description and analysis of various drag performances and even some of the photographs in the book, but the book is not layed out in such a way that the photographs accompany the relevant text. This project is more of a work of collaboration and friendship between Jack (Halberstam) and Del, and less of a book notable for its text.

The portion of the book I found most irritating was the "interviews" with drag kings such as Mo B. Dick (Maureen Fischer). Halberstam particularly spent much of the interview forwarding her own interests and ideas, often seeming to lecture her interview subjects on her own gender theories. I can't help but feel that there's some kind of weird misogyny in Halberstam's insistence on 'realness' as opposed to "femme pretenders" who remind the audience of the femininity of the body beneath the male drag. She does, however, touch on a wide range of issues, including the racial and class ramifications of performances of masculinity. She draws attention to the fact that lesbian clubs are stil in many ways racially segregated and that queer clubs in general are often gender segregated; there are few clubs where gay men, lesbians, and transfolks mix and mingle regularly. Halberstam claims that when they do, a significant portion of the crowd is also in drag.

The major successes of the book are in the images; it is a beautiful photography collection and it is worth the price if only for that. It also touches on several important issues relating to drag and transgender performances and identities, which are important to bring up even if they don't get the thoroughness they deserve. And the book probably did serve its purpose; it made me want to go see a drag show. Too bad I'll be in LA by the time this one rolls around!

I guess I'm in love with you

The Big Sleep. Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. 1946.

This is a truly magnificent movie, and a classic example of film noir. I loved it. It's the kind of film that makes me break out the cliche "they don't make 'em like they used to." But I really mean it. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. Humphrey Bogart plays Raymond Chandler's famous private eye, Philip Marlowe. While I've never considered Bogart particularly attractive, he makes quite a compelling hard-boiled detective. And Lauren Bacall opposite him was cool and striking; I was certainly fascinated by her. My mental images of Bacall are from when she was a bit older, but in this film she was young and very beautiful, with slightly odd, angular features that make her quite memorable.

The film starts off quickly with some interesting characters and impressive dialogue, and quite soon the bodies begin to pile up. Of course, what I found most interesting about the film was the women. Several female secondary characters, exemplified by Dorothy Malone as the Acme Bookstore Proprietess, seem to be instantly attracted to Bogart's Marlowe and willing to help or seduce him at a moment's notice. Rather than being offended by this male fantasy, I found myself sympathizing with them, hoping that they succeed, especially the cute bookstore girl. The array of beautiful and eager young women falling over themselves for Humphrey Bograt (who, again, I don't find particularly hansome) all seemed fairly independent and spunky and I would gladly have seen more of any one of them.

In this film, you never quite know whether you can trust the women, especially Bacall as Mrs. Rutledge. She could have very easily been a murderess, the femme fatale who triumphs at the end. And that would have been exciting, too. But instead, she turns out to be a good girl. She was just protecting her sister all along, and while she may have a nasty gambling habit, she is in general a tough and fairly intelligent female character, brave enough to take actiion and release Marlowe when he's being held hostage and caring enough to try to take the blame for a murder committed by her younger sister. While this, and her happy ending with Marlowe, isn't quite as exciting as a woman who's just trouble, it was an interesting and powerful character, and I found her and the whole film utterly delightful.

Read it for the Pictures

Stryker, Susan and Jim Van Buskirk. Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fwd by Armistead Maupin. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995.

This book is both fascinating and disappointing. While it lacks thoroughness and depth, the history of queer culture in the Bay Area is a rich and compelling subject, and this attempt is certainly better than nothing. In fact, it's quite a good book. It's just short and non-academic. There are very few references or bibliographical information. Its approach to history seems to be focused mainly on a biographical overview of important people and political groups as representatives of movements, but the discussions of none of these people are particularly thorough. The book is a beautiful overview most valuable for its illustrations; there are wonderful images from the archives of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California and several personal collections. Posters, campaign advertisements, and personal photographs make this book far richer than merely its historiography. It is a stunning book on a fascinating subject and it achieves well its intentions to illustrate and commemorate Northern California queer culture. It is heavily skewed toward the late 20th century, packing about 100 years into the first half of the book and devoting the latter half to the 30 years from 1967 to 1990. In this latter half, Stryker and Van Buskirk devote a great deal of attention to celebrities and bars, suggesting an exercise in personal history and their own nostalgia as much as historical importance. Despite my academic objections, it's a wonderful, short, fun book and I do actually recommend it for anyone interested in local queer history.

Fascinating Upcoming Events

Three events in Los Angeles that promise to be super-cool and probably very weird as well. If I were in town, I would be going!

1. Start the Tape Now Saturday July 9, 2005 7:00pm REDCAT
We are pleased to present a program focused on artistic practice and performance. From stories of punk rock rival yo-yo/skate gangs to fantastic feminist news networks, this program brings together herstorical tapes and recent pieces by contemporary artists. Sit back and look forward!
--curated by LTTR (Lesbians to the Rescue) collective.
Now Linda Benglis, USA, 1973, video, 10 min.
Electric At The Cosmic Age Lodge AK Burns, USA, 2005, video, subtitled, 3 min.
The Yoyo Gang G.B. Jones, Canada, 1992, video, 30 min.
Sometimes You Fight For The World, Sometimes You Fight For Yourself
Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz, Germany, 2004, video, 5 min.
Working Portraits Maîa Cybelle Carpenter, Canada, USA, 2005, 16mm, subtitled, 8 min.
Mock Rock Ulrike Muller, USA, 2004, video, 3 min.
550 Jamaica Ave. Klara Liden, USA, 2002, video, 5 min.
Searching For The Fourth River Fereshteh Toosi, USA, 2003, video, 2 min.
Strangers Carola Dertnig, Austria, 2003, video, 3 min.
New Report Wynne Greenwood, Kate K8 Hardy, USA, 2005, video, 12 min.

2. F- (The Failures of Queerness)
(also Saturday night right after the LTTR screening at REDCAT)
my (emily roysdon) video "social movement" is in this program
Curated by Kevin McCarty and José Esteban Muñoz. Queers fail - and often fail miserably. If standards are set by a horrific straight culture - a culture that feeds on reproduction and mediocrity - how can we help but fail? The media that we present here ruminates on queerness and failure. Or failures of queerness. Or queerness as failure. We are interested in failures both large and small, sublime and gory. Performances include the trials and tribulations of having a hustler boyfriend, the sad life and times of sexy serial killer Andrew Cunanan and the various stories of queers being lost.
Push It David Quantic, Abe Sylvia, USA, 2005, video, 4 min. LYPI Jim Stamatakos, Australia, 2004, video, 4 min.
Is Bigger Better? A.L. Steiner, USA, , 6 min. Portrait of Wrongness Coco Frio, USA, , 5 min.
I Feel Love Matt Wolf, USA, 2004, video, 15 min. My Hustler Boyfriend Peter Pizzi, USA, , 4 min.
Bigger Alberto Ferreras, USA, 2004, video, 13 min. Social Movement Emily Roysdon, USA, 2005, subtitled, 8 min.
The King and I Johnathan Horowitz, USA, , 2 min. Destination to be Determined Seema Kapur, USA, , 20 min.
Let Me Nao Bustamante, video, 25 min. Accompanied by a live performance, this video invokes primal forces that may indeed destroy us all.
To purchase tickets for the screenings: www.outfest.org 213-480-7065 Box Office

3. LTTR performance! event at The ECHO 1822 sunset blvd.
it's early, 7-10 on sunday the 10th
Butchlalis de Panochitlan
SKIM
Nao Bustamante
Tracy and the Plastics

ABOUT LTTR:
The annual queer feminist art journal LTTR was initiated by artists K8
Hardy, Emily Roysdon, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi in New York in 2001 with
the first issue, whose title was an acronym for Lesbians To The Rescue. In
2005, Lanka Tattersall and Ulrike Müller joined as editors. In addition to
the journal, LTTR initiates events, organizes exhibitions, and supports and
documents the work of a community of critical thinkers who reject absolute
self-definition and identification. In Summer 2004, in conjunction with the
release of its third issue Practice More Failure, LTTR organized Explosion
LTTR at Art in General, a dynamic month-long series of events, collaborative
projects and exhibitions that celebrated and supported an international
community of queer and feminist artists. LTTR projects have also been held
at Cubitt Gallery, London, LACE in Los Angeles, The Kitchen, New York,
and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. Issue 4, "Do You Wish to Direct Me?,"
will be released at Printed Matter in NYC in late September 2005.

CTG Update

The LA Times posted a new article about the CTG New Works cuts. It features various playwrights who have had relationships with the Taper, including Anna Deveare Smith and John Belluso who ran the Other Voices program, writing short responses about the cuts. They try to offer measured and balanced consideration, desperately hoping that new and better things will rise from the loss. There's the mixed feeling that perhaps forcing multiculturalism by specifically targeting certain minorities wasn't the ideal program anyway, but it is nonetheless a loss and the problem of diversity is by no means resolved. They seem mostly to be mourning the loss of a community of writers from a program that brought them together. It's an interesting and important article and I hope it gets some attention. I'd still like to hear from more playwrights and Brian Freeman, Luis Alfaro, and Chay Yew, the other directors who lost their jobs.

Fresh Meat

This is one of those events that I would have driven up to San Francisco for if I had been living in LA at the time, and even with that insanity it would have been worth it. Fresh Meat 2005 was an excellent evening of performance by various transgender and queer performers of all sorts. The big-name people that are fairly famous (at least in the circles I travel in) were Lipstick Conspiracy, a rock group of fabulous transwomen and Katastrophe, a trans rapper. I'll admit that I mostly know Katastrophe because he's Michelle Tea's boyfriend, but now that I've seen him perform, I'm pretty impressed with him in his own right. Both of these acts totally made me want to buy their CDs, and if I were less broke and homeless at the moment, I would totally order them. So the list of queer CDs to buy in October when I get my next real paycheck now includes Lesbians on Ecstacy, Lipstick Conspiracy, and Katastrophe.

But back to Fresh Meat. The first thing I learned was that Michelle Tea was there, and was much smaller than I expected. She has such a big personality! She goes in the category with Holly Hughes as suprisingly tiny and you wouldn't suspect it until you see them live. She was totally kissing Katastrophe in the lobby, which was way cute. Awww. He's tiny, too, and they look adorable (and tough) together.

The show itself was mostly fabulous, but, of course, the highlight for me was Turner Schofield. I first saw him perform at the GQQG Conference in Santa Barbara, and he performed a much smaller exerpt of the same show, Debutant Balls. Debutante Balls (which, I'm sorry, but I don't like the title of; it makes me picture some large hairy bear man in a dress, and I don't know why. I feel like it should be the title of a performance by someone who looks more like Guillermo Gomez-Pena and less by adorable, sweet, gentlemanly Turner). He's a charming, powerful performer with so much charisma and humor that I'm always hanging off his every word. The piece is really polished and well-paced and so funny! But he deals a lot with gender and class and whiteness issues (good for him!) and actually thinks about them, which is wonderful. I really hope that I get to see the whole show performed straight through sometime.

6 Hours was a new piece by Sean Dorsey of Fresh Meat Productions. My disclaimer is that I'm really bad at talking about dance, but I find his work very entertaining. I definitely appreciate the fact that it's set to a narrative, and this time some of the narrative was even spoken live. Dorsey has a fascinating storytelling voice, and that is definitely a part of what makes his performances so beautiful. This one was a little less cute than Second Kiss, which I've seen him perform twice now, but wonderful in different ways. It's so honest about the way we fight and the way we hurt people who are close to us when it's completely different things that are bothering us. The piece was about a road trip with a girlfriend, six hours in the car to meet a father with whom the narrator is not out as trans. Some of the first movements in the piece looked very similar to some of those in Second Kiss so I was a little worried at first that this wasn't going to be particularly different or creative, but they got a way from that fairly quickly. Sean performs with a female dancer, Mair Culbreth, and there's a lot of mimicking and following one person to the other, which always makes me question the gender politics, but it's really about power in the relationship and who leads and who follows does change depending on what's going on in the story. I really appreciated the section describing the girlfriend as being supportive and understanding of the narrator's bad mood which was illustrated by some beautiful lifts where she lifted him. In my limited understanding of dance, that's a pretty powerfully gendered statement. The whole thing was lovely and very entertaining in my opinion. I wonder if swolf would go with me again if he comes to perform it again in LA.

ryka aoki de la cruz performed a piece called "Randori" that was about judo and the possibilities of pain and injury. It was beautiful and disturbing.

I would have liked to see more by Thea Hillman, spoken word artist and intersex activist. She's fascinating and mesmerizing and very intelligent. And I have every intention of buying her book, Depending on the Light one of these days.

The TransAms Babershop Quartet were also fascinating and I would have loved to see more by them. It's just such a great idea. I want to see T6 in a barbershop quartet; wouldn't that be so cute?

I'm unclear about how queer or transgender it was, but The Extra Credit is a group of all women hip hop dancers and they were wonderful and fun performers.

Other performers included a stunning aerial hoop performance by Miguel Chernus-Goldstein, and East Indian dance by Dr.Jafer, a humorous burlesque number by Harlem Shake Burlesque, and a gospel song by Jamie Armstrong-Pouncy who is also a member of Transcendence Choir. Johnnie Pratt performed with Thea Hillman and Scarletto performed with Katastrophe. Luster (Sile P. Singleton) of IDKE fame emcee'd.

All of the performances of the evening were very high quality, and if you have a chance to see any of these performers, I highly recommend them. I'm not entirely sure about the organization of the evening. I feel like it perhaps ended on a meditative note rather than a rockin' one, and that might not be the most successful plan for them. I think it would have been better to sandwich the more meditative pices (especially Jamie Armstrong Pouncey, Miguel Charnus-Goldstein and possibly Thea Hillman and Johnny Pratt) between the more energetic numbers. If there's any way to make people leave the theater dancing, they're way more prone to a standing ovation, and probably buying things and donating money as well.

Speaking of which, Saturday night they had two back-to-back performances, one at 7:30 and one at 9:30, and this was a PROFOUNDLY bad idea. They weren't spaced out enough, so at the first performance (which I attended), they had to rush people out and I believe they even cut a down some of the performances (one of the songs by the TransAms and one by Scarletto and Katastrophe, plus the Viragos didn't beform Saturday night), although Lipstick Conpiracy instead isn't much of a sacrifice. But the really bad news about this (having to keep the show to 2 hours isn't exactly a bad idea really) was after rushing us out to the street after the show meant that there wasn't much of an opportunity to talk to the performers (I'm going to actually meet Sean Dorsey one of these days, now that I've seen him peform 3 times!) or to buy things after the show. I was totally out of cash, but I would have gladly purchased Lipstick Conspiracy and Katastrophe CDs and I keep saying I'm going to buy Thea Hillman's book. But I felt so hurried (ok, and I was broke) at the end that I really didn't feel like I had an opportunity to do this. I need to be better about this, and just buy CDs and books at shows when I want them, because I always regret it later.

Also, the thing that made my evening was Turner Schofield standing out on the street in tiny leopard-print boyshorts collecting donations for next year's event after the show. He said "I feel like I'm doing sexwork." Silly boy, all theater is sexwork, and it has been from the beginning (trust me, I can tell you all about Roman actresses/prostitutes). But it was interesting coming from him, since he's so sexy onstage. I don't know what it is about him, but seriously, seeing him perform makes me want to kiss him. This boy is going to be a star (well, at least in the tiny little land of queer theater).

Despite small organizational criticisms, the show was exellent and I'm so glad things like this happen and that I got to see it. My congratulations to all the out and proud queer and trans performers that I saw last night. Good for you!

Queer Time

I just finished reading Judith Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives and I have a very complex relationship to it. There's a part of me that wants to fall in love with everything she writes, because she's rather brilliant and writes and talks very readably and I agree with so much of her politics and her subject matter. But I recognize that the fact that I think Jack is intellectually attractive (and cute, of course), doesn't mean that everything she writes is perfect. But it does always make me want to know her better, and that's something in itself.

First of all, I think everything Halberstam says and does is really about herself. She has a very complex relationship to masculinity and her own female-born body and while she rarely talks about her own identity issues in her work, it's very much there underneath everything else. This is true of Female Masculinity and it's true of In a Queer Time and Place as well. I really wish she'd write an article or autobiographical novel or something about her own personal identity and her relation to her subjects, because it really feels like the elephant in the room in all of her work. And while she meticulously catalogues and describes various manifestations of female masculinities and trans masculinities, she doesn't always address the relationships between them in ways that need to be continuously discussed. The chapter in Female Masculinity about the "Border Wars" was fascinating, and it came out of an article that apparently caused even more trouble, but I don't think that's all there is to be said. Things like SEC's deep suspicion of Jack and her general dislike of transmen "because they often tend not to be feminists" is fascinating and problematic. So is the fact that one of my transguy friends said that it's offensive that I identify as a lesbian and yet admit that I'm occasionally attracted to and would consider dating a transman. Where does Halberstam stand in all of this? Why has she chosen not to transition (not that I'm complaining...) and how much does she identify herself as transgender? Does she often pass? How do her identity and her academic career relate? How does she theorize her own gender? What are her investments in the communities she studies? It's not entirely clear. As a feminist, I want her to situate herself. Plus I want to know when or whether to call her 'Judith' or 'Jack' when I see her at conferences and in bars. In this entry I will discuss her as female because that it the name under which the book is published.

That's my concern with Halberstam's work in general, but In a Queer Time and Place raises a different issue for me. It seems to want to say too much without quite enough exploration. There are so many different ideas and different subjects circulating in the book that I feel that none of them are explored or tied back together particularly well. There are 3 or 4 things she talks about that probably need and deserve books of their own.

The main issues that jumped out at me, probably because it relates to my own work, is queer temporality. She defines normative (heterosexual) temporality as the cycle of birth, adolescence, maturity, marriage, reproduction, death. Queers, at least those that resist normativity and assimilation, don't follow the same timeline. She talks about the AIDS crisis and how that altered perceptions of time and lifetimes in the queer community, but also that queers who avoid the imperative toward marriage and reproduction remain invested in queer subcultures much longer in their lives and thus can be perceived in a state of prolonged adolescence. This statement can be pretty provocative in relationship to a long history of pathologizing homosexuality as a failure of proper psychological development and the whole "it's just a phase" thing, but Halberstam means to valorize it as a disruption of the concept of maturity and marriage as ultimate goals. Queer lifestyles can be used to rethink imperatives such as monogomy and reproduction or even just "settling down." These are disruptions to normative conceptions of time and progress, which are important to challenge.

Another important element of the book that doesn't get as much attention and support as I think it needs in the book is the idea that transgender identities and gender fluidity became important and visible at this particlar moment at the end of the 20th century at the same time that we were discussing the fluidity of global capital and dissolution of other forms of borders. A kind of fascination with transgenderism is valorized as the epitome of postmodernism (ie Judith Butler), but that has more to do with the discourses surrounding all aspects of life at the moment than it is any real reflection on actual people. I'd love to hear more about what Halberstam has to say about this, but it's not particularly well supported in the book.

Then there's the subcultural theory that moves throughout the book and is possibly intended as the throughline, though I didn't find it quite as compelling as some of the other ideas. She takes popular standard theories about subcultures and how the are assimilated into mainstream cultures and draws attention to the fact that these theories were based on heterosexual subjects who can become part of the mainstream. Because queer subcultures have something that unites them beyond that mainstream and prevents them from ever completely identifying with the dominant culture, they can have a sort of continuity that others may not.

Each of the chapters of the book has very different objects of study: the first three are about Brandon Teena himself and representations of him and other transgender subjects. Then there's a chapter about visual art, one about mainstream film (Austin Powers and The Full Monty) and one about musical subcultures. In a lot of ways they seem more like a collection of unrelated essays without a strong throughline. Though each is quite fascinating in itself, they way they connect and work together isn't as strong as it could be. This feels like 2 or 3 different books, each of which is incredibly important but unfinished.

One major critique that I feel that I ought to voice is that the "transgender bodies" that Halberstam discusses are almost exclusively FTM. There are very few mentions of transwomen at all, and they get only glancing discussions. I don't think that it is in any way a bad thing that Halberstam's subject is almost exclusively transgender masculinity, I just feel as if she ought to discuss that.

With all of that said, I think it's a fascinating and brilliant book, and there are several parts of it which I would like to discuss with various friends if only everyone I know had read it. I will most likely talk about it and recommend it frequently, and it will be quite useful in my Salad of the Bad Cafe paper on which I should be working right now. It raises some important questions, and leaves room for quite a bit more work to be done. I wonder what she's working on next?

Meditations on Watching Dance

Last night my roommate and I saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform at the Ahmanson. For the first half of the evening, they performed a dance called Fabrications that Merce choreographed in 1987. The second half was a piece called Split Sides that he recently developed (2003). It was performed to music by Radiohead and Icelandic musicians Sigur Ros. Both pieces were fascinating, but they also made me realize how little I know about watching and writing about modern dance, or any dance really. I don't really feel like I know where to start in describing these pieces at all. I watch very little dance, actually, although one of my good friends at school is a dance critic and I've taken several classes that involve discussing and analyzing dance. I always say that I should watch more dance, that it would be good for me intellectually to be familiar with a wider range of culture and dance is in many ways very much like theater. And yet, I rarely do attend dance performances or analyze dance in any way. I probably wouldn't have gone to the Cunningham either, except that I could convince my roommate to go with me. You see, Cunningham is gay and his partner was musician John Cage for something like 50 years before Cage's death in 1992. My roommate studies John Cage, so even though neither of the pieces performed had music by Cage, we both felt like it was something we should see. And I'm very much glad we did. The dances were beautiful and fascinating and intellectually stimulating.

The first piece, Fabrications, I won't spend much time describing. It was interesting and quite compelling. In the post-show discussion, Cunningham informed us that he created it by choreographing 64 different movement sequences and then rolling a die to determine the order in which they would be performed. In recalling it, the things that I remember most were the costumes; the men wore solid colored pants and dress shirts, mostly in black and white though one man was in bright blue. The women wore very simple 1940s-style dresses but with leggings under them. The movement sequence that I liked best was one in which a single woman danced with all the men, but she led them in some very masculine movements, taking up space as one of the men. It was a great contrast to images of dance in which the women are passed around and maniuplated by the men. The whole piece was quite striking visually, but its approach to gender was what I found most interesting.

The second piece, Split Sides, was the fascinating and exciting one. It began with audience members onstage rolling dice to determine which of two music pieces (Sigur Ros or Radiohead), costumes (black and white or brightly colored), music pieces (A or B), lighting plots, and "decor" (backdrops). The effect of this was that I spent the whole time imagining the other possible combinations that I could have been seeing. It really dramatized the 'absent potential' (a term from Sandra Richards that doesn't have much to do with Merce Cunningham as she conceives it) of all the performances you could be seeing with different combinations of the same elements. Another interesting tidbit was that the Sigur Ros piece involved some live music, which was played by, among others, Christian Wolff. The instrument he played looked very much like a bunch of ballet slippers (they were, actually, ballet slippers, over a series of microphones). And Christian Wolff, my roommate informs me, worked and studied with John Cage and is a famous composer in his own right. The music throughout the evening was an interesting combinations of sound that sounded very natural, like rain or wind, and sounds that sounded very mechanical, like microphone pops and machinery. The movement was developed entirely independent from the music, so the moments in which they interacted and the moments in which they seemed to clash were both exciting. The whole thing was fascinating and stunning and I'm really glad that I got to see it.

The more academically exciting thing about the performance was that Merce Cunningham was actually there, and he even did a little post-show discussion. When he walked onstage to take a bow at the end, he was tottering with a cane and someone to lean on. It's always great to see someone I've read so much about and to hear him talk about his process and his work. Despite all of the mechanical sounds and the fact that he uses a computer and dice to help decide his choreography, he frames his work as questioning and challenging ideas of what movements are possible. It's a great way to think about dance, and about the relationship we can have to technology.

How cool is this?

Phranc is hosting a Tupperware Party tomorrow afternoon to support gay marriage legislation.

This Saturday, Pholk Rock legend, Phranc, will be entertaining as she presents the summer line of Tupperware items. Our movement will be directly impacted as 40% of every purchase will got to Equality California and help support the Los Angeles County Chapter.

Event Date: Saturday, June 4, 2005
Time: 1-3 PM
Address: 6020 Elmer St., North Hollywood, CA 91606

RSVP to tpartyeqca@comcast.net

Can I call that performance art?

With So Much Style, Who Needs Substance?

Tonight I saw The Hot Mikado at UCLA. It was a production of the undergraduate musical theater program and had several of my students in it, and it was absolutely wonderful. I was totally impressed by how talented these kids are. They've been working really hard on this show and it totally paid off - every single one of them were strong dancers with gorgeous voices and great acting talent. I'm completely amazed.

Now, unfortunately, the show itself was not nearly as breathtaking as the performers in it. It was vaguely postmodern in that it was self-referential, but it was mostly intellectually empty. And the racial politics made me cringe. It was a mostly white cast performing a show set in a Harlem jazz club/Japan. The recurring joke was "Hey! This note is written in Japanese. Oh, wait, WE'RE Japanese." There was some ethnic diversity in the cast, but they were for the most part white, especially the boys. The exception was Sterling Suileman as The Mikado. He entered for a show-stopping tap number at the top of Act II, doing what was at moments an excellent Sammy Davis Jr. impersonation, although it faded in and out. It was interesting to have the only African-American man onstage be the most powerful character.

The Mikado's son, with no family resemblance was Chris Fore as Nanki-Poo and he was completely compelling, which is pretty impressive for a role with the development of a cartoon character. He was a cross between the sweet but vulnerable "good guy" (think Jimmy Stewart)and Micky Mouse, complete with high voice. It was absolutely charming. From the moment he opened his mouth I wanted him to get the girl, and I wanted to see him perform more romantic lead and earnest young man roles.

The other highpoint was Robert Bastaron as KoKo, the Lord High Executioner. Robert's interpretation of the character didn't seem to make a lot of sense at first, because he didn't seem too particularly heterosexual. He wore thick glasses and ran around the stage telling us that certain dance moves were "Fosse" or "Busby Berkeley." I kept thinking "I'm supposed to believe this guy really wants to marry Yum-Yum? Please. He'd be happier with one of the boys." But the queer content came out when he had to seduce Katishaw. She was an 'older woman' and they very quickly established a very kinky S/M relationship. KoKo as a kinky bottom thoroughly resolved his latent homosexuality in my opinion, and I loved the queerness of the heterosexual relationship. If he had to be in the closet, what a fun way to do it. In my opinion, they could have gone a little more over the top with the S/M. I would have liked to see some fetish gear, handcuffs, something. Instead they tied KoKo up with his own tie, which was cute and very resourceful, but a little too vanilla for how clearly naughty their relationship was.

In comparison to the boys, the girls in the play were utterly forgettable, altough they all performed flawlessly. Lana as Yum-Yum had a beautiful voice and was in general quite adorable.

The costumes and dancing were really spectacular, and I could have just watched them dancing forever. The men's costumes were very strange, though beautiful. The men wore brightly colored Zoot Suits (now, I associate with Chicano/Latino culture, but that could just be my LA context) but with lots of sequins on them, decorating the seams of their pants and accenting their suitcoats. They were also decorated on the back and arm with vaguely Japanese designs such as bonsai trees and Japanese characters. The girls wore rather more plain '40s-style dresses that matched the men's suits, though some of them had sequins on the heels of their shoes, which I thought was pretty hot. One incongrous costuming choice was that while all the other men wore dress shirt and ties, if not glittery suitcoats, Chester See only wore a men's undershirt with a collar and tie - no dress shirt. Though he has lovely arms and biceps to show off, it didn't really make sense why he would be that much less formal than the other men.

The set initially appeared to be a Shojii (sp?) screen backdrop, onto which various designs and backdrops were projected, but it opened up to reveal a Cotton-Club-like set with twinkly lights on the steps and around a second proscenium. Altogether the combination of style elements traced the history of the show: vague Japanisme layered on top of a 1940s swing/jazz version of a musical about Japan that actually has nothing to do with Japan. There was Gilbert and Sullivan's appropriation of Japan and then white appropriation of African-American music. I'm not so sure the production had a good critical awareness of its politics and seemed to prefer the strategy of being so overfull of signifiers that it distracted you from what it was doing. But really, I was so well entertained and visually stimulated, that I cared very little about what the show was saying. I loved the whole thing and highly recommend it if you happen to be LA this weekend or next. Go support my students!

RIP CTG

I posted a couple of weeks ago about this, but last Tuesday it was made official and covered in the LA Times. The Center Theater Group, which runs the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson, and the Kirk Douglas Theater, terminated all of its new play development programs. This includes the Taper New Works Festival, all of their play readings, the Other Voices program for disabled artists, Blacksmyths Theater Lab, the Latino Theater Initiative, and the Asian American Theater Lab. Not only that, it means several important local playwrights/theater artists are unemployed. Brian Freeman, Chay Yew, and Luis Alfaro are all queers of color, and all were laid off in this decimation of the cultural diversity in Los Angeles Theater. And more than that, all of these artists were committed to nurturing and developing new artists, especially queer performers of color. The Taper New Works Festival supported artists such as Carmelita Tropicana, Alec Mapa, Denise Uyehara, and Luis Alfaro himself. This is an accomplishment in itself and a worthy goal. And if any of these people could survive as writers and playwrights because of those programs, that's reason enough not to cut them.

In the LA Times article surrounding the cuts, CTG's new Artistic Director, Michael Ritchie, who unilaterally decided on all of these cuts, comes off as a pompous, priveledged asshole who thinks that his taste and his perspective are universal. But who wants to put a man in charge of nurturing new plays who readily admits that he's never been to a playreading? That alone would be enough to get him fired from my ideal theater, especially a theater that boasts on its website that its mission is to "nurture artists," produce "groudbreaking experimental new works" and support a "diverse community".

I want more people to be angry about this. I want people to notice that 15 of the 16 productions annouced for next season are written by (straight?) white men. They're doing Chekov, for goodness sake! And there aren't even any women! It's a commitment to boring artistic mediocrity and straight white middle class values. And that's not what I want our major regional theater in LA to be about. CTG was the one place with the status and the funding that it COULD develop new works and support queers and artists of color and non-traditional play formats. The fact that it's choosing not to is extremely demoralizing. This decision is inexcusable and I hope they throw Ritchie out on his ass the first chance they get. I hope no one attends their next season with its unchallenging choices. And I hope Luis Alfaro, Brian Freeman, and Chay Yew speak out against this and go on to develop great new works in response to this conservative crackdown. I am extremely disappointed in this movement in the LA theater scene and I honestly hope the Taper suffers for it in terms of negative publicity, waning subscriber base, and critical scorn.

Bride and Bollywood

This evening I totally gave up on my endeavors to read Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (which is a highly intelligent and interesting book - I just wasn't patient enough to put up with its style this weekend) and went with my roommate to see Bride and Prejudice as a guilty treat right before my long day of classes tomorrow. The film is directed by the woman who directed Bend it Like Beckham and it's a combination of Bollywood style and the plot of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It was released several months ago and I never went to see it, and it will probably be out on DVD pretty soon; I was honestly suprised that it was still playing at one of the smaller theaters near my house. The film got mostly horrible reviews, and honestly it would be hard for me to say who its ideal audience was, but personally I loved it.

I thought the film was fun and funny and self-aware and above all, beautiful. The actors and actresses were beautiful, the color and design was beautiful, the dance numbers were riveting. The film was not for a moment subtle by any stretch of the imagination, but it was grand and excessive and adorable and I spent a good deal of time giggling out loud, for both the moments that were delightful and those that made me cringe.

The not-so-hidden concern behind the film was globalization and the commodification of Indian culture: "you want five-star comfort with a little bit of culture" and the film was honestly participating in the exoticism while grappling with it. In the film, the solution seemed to be Darcy passing on buying an Indian hotel and learning some traditional drumming to impress his bride. The issue seemed a little unresolved and less than satisfying, but I think knowing that it's a problem without knowing the answer is probably about the best you can get and that's OK with me.

The film was much less concerned with the heteronormativity and conservativeness of its approach to marriage. Everyone seems to learn in the end that parents will always try to arrange marriages, and that perhaps some people can be happy with mercenary arrangements, but that marriage for love is truly ideal. The film ridicules mothers who attempt to organize marriage as a commodification of their daughters, selling them to the wealthiest suitor, but it is still the rich who prosper in the end. And it is also India who is represented by the traditional family and the women while the men are all wealthy and if not all Western then at least all living in LA or London. These men penetrate India, coming to a small town to meet and take away her daughters. I would have liked to see a resolution in which Lalita forces Darcy to stay in India with her beyond the traditional Indian wedding ceremony and riding off into the sunset on an elephant (really!).

As a version of Pride and Prejudice the film did leave a bit to be desired. Half the fun of that novel (or six-hour miniseries version with Colin Firth) is its deliberate pacing and maddening tension. The fast-paced Bollywood style creates a rather inconsistent mix. Lalita in Bride and Prejudice was a little too idealized as a heroine; though she jumped down Darcy's throat about economic colonialism and his Western ignorance, there wasn't really a moment where she wasn't completely lovable and we didn't totally sympathize with her as an audience. Darcy just didn't command as much attention or sympathy. But I think looking at the film in relationship to Pride and Prejudice is probably not the best way to judge it. As a work of weaving images and cultures, the film is brilliant and stunning, and its adherence to Austen's original is only equally as relevant as its adherence to the standards of Bollywood film, which I am the first to admit I am in no position to judge, although it did make me want to know more and in that if in nothing else I feel it was a success.

Watching the film made me even more anxious to read Gayatri Gopinath's book, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, which I haven't bought yet despite how excited I was for it to come out. From what I've seen of her speaking, Gopinath is brilliant, and I'd love to read more about her queer feminist postcolonial approach to Bollywood and "South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers". When I saw her speak, she talked a bit about how the isolation between men and women in many Bollywood films creates a strong homosocial environment which can lead to homoerotic moments. I'd love to read more. And learn more about Bollywood and diasporic South Asian film, a category to which Bride and Prejudice certainly belongs.

Overall, I thought the film was delightful and I totally recommend it, but I also advise focusing on the pleasure of it rather than the politics. I suspect that is what it wants.

Like a Prayer, or el fin de la semana de teatro chicana/o

I just returned from my pilgrimage to the north to see Cherríe Moraga's The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea at Stanford. While I was quite familiar with the text of the play already (I lectured on it earlier this quarter) and the production didn't do anything radical to clarify, change or interpret that text, I am still quite grateful for the opportunity to have seen this production. It felt like a ritual that I was fortunate to have been allowed to witness.

My trip to the north was very much a pilgrimage, a trip specifically to see this particular play, a play that I feel is important to me as a queer theater scholar. Moraga's works don't seem to receive many productions and I'm not sure this one has ever been fully and professionally mounted. The production at Stanford was semi-professional; it had two Equity actors and a great deal of outside funding, but also several student performers and support from the Stanford Drama Dept.

Moraga's work is political and a bit didactic. This play is very specifically intended for a Chicana lesbian audience, which she makes very clear to those of us who aren't that ideal audience. The use of Spanish is less aesthetically pleasing than Alfaro's in Electricdad, though possibly more naturalistic. It seems intended to shut people out and remind them that they can't understand everything going on in the play, and maybe they aren't supposed to.

The thing that amazed me about seeing this production was how ambivalent I felt toward Medea, the main character. In reading the play, I had always assumed sympathy with Medea. She is clearly the center of the play, and seems to be the character with whom I most closely identify Moraga in terms of lesbian motherhood, heterosexual history, and Chicana feminist radicalism. The play is certainly her tragedy, centered around her as mother goddess and political prisioner. But VIVIS, who played Medea, played her as drunk and desperate and in general not as sympathetic as I had always assumed she would be. I definitely admired this decision, though it made me feel a little lost in the play without a central figure with whom to identify. I felt very conflicted about Medea as drunk and mad, as if it might be playing into negative stereotypes rather than rewriting them. I'm not sure.

By far my favorite performance in the play was Adelina Anthony as Luna. Anthony co-directed the production with Moraga, and she did a stunning job as both director and performer. Of course I must acknowledge my tendency to appreciate anyone playing a nuanced butch role, but Anthony did so particlarly well. She had her shoulder-length hair in braids and at times wasn't even wearing particularly butch clothing, and yet she managed to pull off a tough, sensitive, sympathetic portrayal of Luna the lesbian stonemason who is losing the woman she has loved for the past seven years. Because the play is centered around Medea, it's hard to characterize Luna consistently. She has lived with Medea and raised Medea's son for seven years, since they were first caught together and became exiles, but she also realizes that Medea is drifting away from her and she wants something more. For Luna, her lesbianism is unconflicted; it's not something she could deny or give up. Actually, she's more a symbol of butch lesbian than a fully fleshed-out character in a lot of ways. Her relationship to Medea and her symbolic importance are more central to the play than a consistent character development. She is faithful and loving to Medea despite Medea's madness and the temptation of a flirtateous friend. Anthony handled all this with beautiful understanding and maturity; despite the fact that she was notably younger and has less experience as a professional actress than VIVIS, she matched her and even outshone her in her love for the play and the role.

What I love about The Hungry Woman is its concept; it's set in "the not-too-distant future of a reimagined past," in what was the US after the revolution. Its subjuntive setting posits what if racially-motivated revolutions such as those posited in the Chicano and Black Power movements in the '60s had succeeded. This production rewrites that history into the 1980s, stating that if the Soviet Union could fall, why not the US? The US breaks into several smaller countries, Gringolandia covering the Northeast, the South becoming Afro-America, the Southwest joining with Mexico to form Aztlán and Native Americans and First Nations peoples also possessing their own homeland. In this imagined history, after the revolution the newly-formed states, particularly Aztlán, returned to gender politics as usual and sent the women back to the kitchens. Medea, who had been a leader of the revolution, was forced into a role as mother an housewife until she falls for a woman and gets caught. The play takes place in Phoenix, Arizona, a border town and ghetto where queers of all colors are exiled from the homelands that deny them. I love this almost sci-fi realism of the imagined future; the world that Moraga creates here is compelling, and could be the birthplace of so many fascinating stories.

The Hungry Woman centers around Medea and her son, Chac-Mool. Jasón, Medea's estranged husband, wants to take Chac-Mool back to Aztlán now that he's coming of age. Medea's relationship to Chac-Mool is oddly sexualized and obsessive; she doesn't want to relinquish him to his father, despite Jasón's legal rights. So instead she kills her son (or was it a dream? or was she insane?). The question seems to be how can we raise our children? Is there a model out there for a different kind of man or can we create one? Will boys always grow up to be men and take on patriarchal power in which their mothers and all women can be dominated and rejected? It raises interesting issues around lesbian motherhood as well as around the intersections of race and gender.

I could, and probably should, keep writing more about this production. I think it's important that this is documented, and it should probably be considered definitive considering the playwright's involvement in the production. It's a very strong production of a fascinating if problematic play and I could keep thinking and writing about it forever. But it's time for bed now.

La Semana de Teatro Chicano

Esta noche, I saw Electicidad by Luis Alfaro at the Mark Taper Forum, finally! I need to stop putting things off to the very end of the run; it closes this weekend. But anyway, I enjoyed it very much. It was a version of Sophocles' Electra (although there seemed to be some Antigone mixed in as well) set in el barrio de East Los (East LA). And I must say that it was a little more Electra than I thought it would be, and also quite a bit more funny than I expected. Especially at the beginning there was a great deal of humor. I worried a bit about the exoticizing and sanitizing of the Cholo culture that Alfaro was attempting to represent, but I thought he did it with a great deal of love and respect for both his Greek and his local originals.

It also seemed to be an exercise in female masculinity; both Electricidad in her Dickies remaining true to her father when her brother was too "soft" and "sensitive" and Iphigenia wearing a Catholic school girl uniform (she left the barrio to join a convent) with all the grace and comfort of a butch in a dress challenge and disrupt their mother (Clemencia's) aggressive female sexuality and hunger for power. Ifi's the kind of girl that dances with women (as suggested by the Chorus at the beginning of the show), with a deep gravelly voice a big frame and a wide stance, and though she's a minor character compared to her sister, I personally was fascinated by this completely untraditional characterization. Trici and Ifi are both looking for peace and structure from an absent father and each finds her faith; for Electricidad, it's the Cholo culture of which her father was el Rey, while for Ifi it's Catholicism. For both their faith is challenged throughout the play.

One of the great things about this play was the language. It was written in Spanglish and the fluidity and ease with which the actors moved back and forth between Spanish and English was beautiful. Their accents were strong and their speaking rapid, so that I wondered if the non-Spanish-speaking little old ladies in the audience were getting anything at all out of the play. But then part of me didn't care because of the sheer aural virtousity of the performance. Each of the actors voices was strong and unique, from the tough and gravelly Ifi to the high and nervous Orestes, and their accents were very clear and so familiar here in LA.

On a side note, the Abuela (another character not exactly in Sophocles' version), was played by Alma Martinez, who happened to be at Stanford working on her PhD while I was an undergrad. I barely knew her, because I believe she advanced to candidacy my freshman year or so, but I certainly knew her name and probably checked out props for her a couple of times. Anyway, I knew she studied the Teatro Campisino, but I had NO IDEA she was the same Alma Martinez whose name appears in the cast list for plays like Zoot Suit and even in the film. She's totally a major Chicana actress, and I hadn't a clue. She's teaching at UC Santa Cruz now (and apparently still hasn't finished her dissertation), but it was really strange to see someone I knew, however tangentially, onstage at the Taper without expecting it.

La Semana de Teatro Chicano empezó el viernes pasado con las Butchlalís de Panochtitlan y continua con la Hungry Woman esté domingo. ¡Que divertido!

Start Writing Your Letters Now

It hasn't been officially announced yet, but inside sources have confirmed that the new Artistic Director at the Center Theatre Group is planning to terminate all of CTG's new play development programs. This is horrible news. CTG, which runs the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson theater and recently acquired the Kirk Douglas Theater with the specific intention of having a venue in which to develop new works, is planning on terminating all of its Labs, which include the Asian American Theatre Workshop run by Chay Yew, Blacksmyth's Theater Lab run by Brian Freeman, and the Latino Theatre Initiative run by Luis Alfaro. These are important LA artists and their projects do an amazing job at fostering new work. CTG was a major force in the development of Angels in America and Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles among other things. A reading at CTG was an important developmental step for Cherrie Moraga's The Hungry Woman. And the Taper has premiered several of Lanford Wilson's plays. They have an amazing history of supporting and premiering important new works and most importantly a commitment to fostering diversity. They need to continue this work, and it looks like the new Artistic Director doesn't understand this mission. It's up to us as audience members to protest how boring and white their 2006 season is looking (Annette Bening in the Cherry Orchard! Come on!). LA expects better than this, and we need to let them know. Join me and speak out about this in whatever way you can. People need to know. It should be in the LA times and all over the place.

Applause!

I saw Applause! tonight done by REPRISE, which does week-long productions of old musicals with short rehearsal periods. Tonight was a free preview for which the professor for my class this quarter gave me a free ticket. The show was fun in that the audience was mostly full of really enthusiastic high school students who were an incredibly responsive crowd. Otherwise, the production was a little bit off, but interesting.

For me, the high point was totally John Fleck, one of the NEA 4 and in general a fabulous local gay performance artist. He played the gay hairdresser, including looking absolutely wonderful in leather in a gay bar scene. He had a fabulous gravelly voice and in was in general quite queeny and entertaining.

And Applause! definitely justifies playing to the stereotype; it's a show that revels in the campiness of Broadway and of All About Eve including a whole song devoted to "Hold on, it's going to be a bumpy night." There was also a whole scene in a gay bar/disco, which was weird in that the play was set in 1968 (ie pre-Stonewall), so the whole number was rather anachronistic but fun. There were even guys dressed as leather men, but they then acted totally fey and that was a bit odd.

The notable thing about this production was its interracial-ness. The Margo Channing/Bette Davis role was played by Sheryl Lee Ralph, who is most famous for performing in Dreamgirls on Broadway. She was totally a diva, and every song she peformed was a sort of abrupt break-out number. The actress playing Eve was a forgettable and mousy girl who totally couldn't compare with Ralph at all. It was a fascinating casting decision, though. I'm not sure how I feel about it. The moment where Margo's boyfriend accidentally embraces Eve because she's wearing one of Margo's old dresses is completely ridiculous, but more signigicantly, what does it mean to have a young white woman moving in and taking over for an older African-American actress? It felt rather creepy and disingenuous the way everyone kept claiming it was so nice to see someone "young" in the part. What I'm alluding to is how much this is a manifestation of the reassuring usurpation of African-American culture and power by bland white performers. Of course the original text is creepy enough. The whole play resolves with Margo learning that she doesn't really want fame or success, but really just wants to get married to her boyfriend and maybe even have a child. Sigh.

Take me, papi!

This evening I saw the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan perform at Highways. Oddly enough, they seem to have transformed themselves from a duo to a quartet, though one of them oddly enough didn't actually say anything. They are a wonderful, though certainly problematic performance experience, most definitely worth paying for, and even worth falling for. If nothing else, they're pretty good at turning on their audience. Adorably tough and funny, they put on a great show even though there are some kinks to work out. Many of the problems are small and technical - volume and pacing issues, that kind of thing. I'd love to see them a little more polished.

First of all, they're "butch dykes/transgender butches/genderqueer speaking subjects that are not trying to pass as men." Which is interesting, since a few of the pieces definitely hinted at a discussion of transitioning. It seems that at least one (Raquel?) is on T, or perhaps just thinking about it. Masculinity is definitely their main subject. They describe it as the "in-
between space of female biology and testerone-taking transexuality and the identities and neighborhoods these subjects claim and are claimed by." And of course they also discuss Chicana identities, the race and class that are inseparable from performances of gender. Although I wonder a little about their racial politics; how do they feel about the white members of their audience? I picture them along the lines of Cherrie in terms of that being not their ideal audience and thus it not mattering too much if some things go over their heads. Is it a problem if a performer doesn't like a part of their audience? Is that really how they feel? Interestingly, their website promotes the show as organized terms of LA geography, which I think didn't really come through in this particular production but which I'd love to see. It's a fascinating concept; mapping the process of identity onto the city. (OK, it also feeds into something I've been thinking about recently, I'll admit). I can't wait until that production sees the light.

The most interesting, and quite possibly the most problematic, was their final scene, entitled "BDSM." If I recall correctly, it was addressed to 'my academic daddy' or something like that. And it ended with one performer hitting another with her belt. For me it evoked the oddly kinky relationships we tend to have with our academic advisors. I was probably reading it through the artists' biographies (one of them works with Jack), but that may not be wrong. But it also talked about butch-on-butch action and the relationship between artists and the reviewers and academics who write about them; it implied that desire for representation is problemetized by the possiblity that that representation also co-opts the performers' own authenticity and glorifies the academic rather than the artist. This piece also feminized its speaker, which counteracted the masculinity of the boi/boi sexual tension. But really, I think they brought the academic BDSM to the stage and that made me rather uncomfortable - it was quite intense. Nipples and hot wax and spanking. Situating it at the end of the piece might have been a mistake - I'm not sure. It makes the audience leave on a somber and contemplative note when I think they'd be better off ending with more laughing and cheering.

Overall, I loved the performance. They are certainly audience pleasers: sexy, sassy, and hot, hot, hot. They have a lot to say, and say it well, although I hope I get the chance to see them get better. I definitely left the venue stimulated both mentally and physically. I wouldn't mind any one of those papis taking a belt to me (or kissing my heels - whatever works). I'd love to get them together with Turner, my other favorite young trannyboi performance artist and see what kind of dialogue they would come up with (or perhaps just as my own personal fantasy).