master plan

We had a Director's Meeting last night to plot out what the show is going to look like. The image above is the outline we made on the white board. If it makes any sense to you, maybe you should try directing!

We're filling in the remaining holes and hoping to have a final script by Monday!!

directors' note (a conversation)

Have you ever heard anyone talk about building the boat while you're sailing it? That's what we've been doing with this play. The best way to figure out what the play is "about" is to just start building it! But, of course, certain things have to get done on deadline and one of them is the program. Since the directors had to come up with a note to put in the program, we started talking about the play (over email) and I think we discovered some important things by talking about it.

So, for your enjoyment, here's what we came up with! (Not surprisingly, it's also in the form of a conversation!)

****

DIRECTORS' NOTE (a conversation)

Brian: What do you guys think the audience should know about this play?

Dan: It’s important to realize that we are America and that America—its culture and its politics, what it’s doing with the rest of the world—is our responsibility. If we have concerns with how it's going, we need to reorganize the performance.

Sita: This play is about more than America. It's about what really goes on in the minds of Americans, how we are the product of our own producing. Our “conversation” never stops, while at the same time has never really happened. After all, if we are talking to America, who will respond?

Brian: Well, I hope the audience will respond. I hope they talk to us in the hallway after the performance, or on our blog http://www.americaconversation.blgospot.com.

Serge: We’re reminding our audience of where we are and what may be happening to us. This nation was built from dreams, sweat, and blood. But now it has become, and I quote, the “land of confusion,” a gathering of all the good and bad. I just hope that those who still stand on American soil start to realize this. After all, “this land is your land, this land is my land,” right? This country is only what we make of it. What will it become and what will we be?

Brian: Maybe we can re-make it, Serge, just like we did in our performance. We took what already existed—poems, songs, and quotations created by others—and we re-ordered them, added to them, and made something new. Isn't that what American culture is all about?

Sita: I agree, Brian. American culture is a mixture of many things. And since America itself can't talk back, we should continue the conversation with each other... through the internet, art, music, etc. Expand the culture and influence one other.

Brian: Yes! Everyone, go out and create more new performances!

***

So, what do you think??

U.S. vs. "them"

During last night's rehearsal, we started getting into a lot of new, interesting material. Most of the time when we talk about "America" or talk "to" America it seems like we're talking to something other than ourselves. During our discussion it often seems like "America" is something that hovers above us, somewhere up in the air. When we say "America" (especially when we are being critical), what are we talking about exactly?

We concluded that some of the things that are "up there" are:

- The Government
- The Big Ecomony - corporations, commercialism
- The Media
- History - everything in America's past (especially genocide and slavery) that has brought us up to the present moment

The more we talked about it, the more complicated the ideas became. All of these "big" entities and institutions can seem totally separated from us ("the people"), totally out of our control. Yet, though each of us cannot necessarily re-direct the courses of these big cultural forces, we do also contribute to them. We purchase products, we consume media, we vote, we create history every day. It's a weird contradiction: we are part of the culture yet it can seem completely alien to us. It is created by millions of individuals, but it can end up limiting our options as individuals.

As we tried to wrap our minds around it, Gilbert thought of an image from science class, the water evaporation cycle. All of the components that make up our culture do, in a sense, get filtered through us and re-processed so that they can be consumed again. We are enmeshed in the cycle, but it's much larger than each of us.

Every time we criticize America or speak of it as something "other," it's important to recognize that we are America, too. I know that Marielle wants us to recognize that; she keeps reminding the group that America is not just about bad things that are keeping the people down.

In our next couple of rehearsals we're grappling with how we can "show" this. How can we perform something that we are a part of and yet is not us? How can we show all the contradictions and ambiguities of that idea?

snippets of scenes

What if America was a character in our play? What would he or she talk like?

What would America say on a first date? How about to his (or her) therapist? Best friend?

We tried out some of those scenarios earlier this week using improvisation and came up with some interesting, weird, and really funny scenes. We combined improvised dialogues with lines that we got from the texts we've been studying. Here are some samples:

***

Immigrant: Hey America, I've heard a lot about you. I'd love to move in with you.
America: Hey, good fences? They make good neighbors...

***

Job-Seeker: Hello, I really need a job.
America: Don't cling so hard to your possessions.
Job-Seeker: No, no, it's owed to me. Because this is the land of dreams and I came here to get a dream and I need to feed my family.
America: Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamt.
Job-Seeker: Exactly! I came here and my dream is to find work.
America: When I go to Chinatown, I get drunk and never get laid.

***

Wife: This is the third night in a row! You're not home, you're not responding. I don't know what to do anymore. I think I want a divorce!
America: I am the worker! Sold to the machine!

***

Therapist: OK, America, I see you need some help.
America: I sit in my house for days on end and I stare at the roses in the closet.

***

Player: Hey there, America.
America: Your machinery is too much for me.
Player: It's a little too bright for you? A little too bright? I'll calm it down for you. Now listen, I see you giving every other boy opportunities. You better give me a chance, too.

***

Those are just a few samples -- you'll be seeing more of this in the show!

every girl's dream

On Saturday, Cynthia told us about a brochure she got in the mail that "seemed like a slap in the face." It was a promotional brochure for the "National American Miss" pageant. Looking at the girls in the pictures, she felt excluded; the qualities the pageant seemed to be looking for were ones that she would never possess. Though the brochure talks about the opportunities available to girls who participate -- like scholarships and prizes -- she felt completely shut out of it. Here was another example of "symbolic violence."

I looked up the pageant's website. They are quick to note that they are "definitely NOT a beauty pageant." They point out that girls are judged on the basis of four different categories. Notice, however, that the "Formal Wear" category counts for three times as much as "Community Service"!

The pageant claims to be about more than just feminine beauty; it is "dedicated to celebrating America's greatness and encouraging its future leaders." National American Miss is selling an idea of America and an idea of American success. The young girls who enter are told, "You’ll feel good about yourself and gain the competitive edge to succeed later in whatever field you may choose, from modeling to business." The pageant tells us that the doors of the American Dream are open to all -- as long as they can scrape together the $440 entrance fee and as long as they are able to make themselves into some version of traditional American beauty.

I don't know but I have a feeling that most of the families that enter their daughters in these kinds of contests are lower-middle or working-class. (Does anyone have any statistics?) These are the kinds of families most in need of scholarship assistance. Why does our society persist in telling young, poor kids that the best paths to achievement lie in fields like sports and beauty pageants (fields that one out of a million people succed in)? Perhaps because it's easier to feed them those kinds of dreams than to create more substantive educational and employment opportunities for them.

dancing our democracy

On Saturday we became a modern dance troupe. Using our "language" of gestures, we started to improvise movement sequences and set them to music. Movement coach Judy Myers helped us out with some exercises to refine our work. She reminded us that every movement has an intention and a focus. If you have those internal elements, then you don't actually need to be moving at all -- you can "dance" while standing still.

Some of the songs we "danced" to included:

"I Can" by Nas
"Dirty Boulevard" by Lou Reed
"I Am the American Dream" by Afro-Man
"Movin' On Up" (Theme song from "The Jeffersons")
"Baba O'Reilly" (aka Teenage Wasteland) by The Who

Each different match-up of movements and songs gave a different resonance to our performance. We could have done an entire show based on just these basic movements, in different rhythms, and these pieces of music. But we've got a lot more to add!

more Bourdieu

I liked this excerpt from from Katha Pollitt's obituary of Pierre Bourdieu. It relates directly to the kind of development we try to foster here at Youth Onstage! and the All Stars Project:

"Take, for example, his attack on the notion that making high culture readily available--in free museums and local performances--is all that is necessary to bring it to the masses... In fact, as Bourdieu painstakingly demonstrated in Distinction, his monumental study of the way class shapes cultural preferences or 'taste,' there is nothing automatic or natural about the ability to 'appreciate'--curious word--a Rothko or even a Van Gogh: You have to know a lot about painting, you have to feel comfortable in museums and you have to have what Bourdieu saw as the educated bourgeois orientation, which rests on leisure, money and unselfconscious social privilege and expresses itself as the enjoyment of the speculative, the distanced, the nonuseful. Typically, though, Bourdieu used this discouraging insight to call for more, not less, effort to make culture genuinely accessible to all: Schools could help give working-class kids the cultural capital--another key Bourdieusian concept--that middle-class kids get from their families. One could extend that insight to the American context and argue that depriving working-class kids of the 'frills'--art, music, trips--in the name of 'the basics' is not just stingy or philistine, it's a way of maintaining class privilege."

symbolic violence/symbolic language

Over the last couple of rehearsals, we've covered a lot of ground and we've really started to build on the ideas we've been developing.

On Monday, Stephanie added to our discussion of the American Dream by informing us about the ideas of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. She informed about Bourdieu's study of the French educational system, which revealed the difficulty that young people have in moving outside of the "fields" they are born into -- kids from poor backgrounds will typically remain poor and the privileged will remain privileged because they lack the "habitus" (or "know-how") that allows them to move out of those fields. In other words, even though there are opportunities for advancement freely available in our democracies, cultural forces prevent many people from being able to attain them. Bourdieu once wrote that he has consistently discovered "necessity, social constraints, where we would like to see choice and free will."

These limitations, Bourdieu said, are imposed through various forms of "symbolic violence," meaning cultural signs and habits that reinforce structures of social dominance not through outright violence but through sublter, almost subliminal means. Though the term was unfamiliar to the group, we quickly came up with examples.

Amanda pointed out that if you go every day to a school that has metal detectors at the front door, you're naturally going to internalize the idea that you're a potential criminal. Gilbert and Cynthia talked about going to high schools -- like Washington Irving and Erasmus -- that have bad reputations. When everyone tells you that they are the worst schools in the city, you start to doubt that you'll be able to get anything from the education you receive there. Finally, Emily mentioned how her relatives tend to have very limited ideas of what Hispanics can achieve: if a young person in her family said she wanted to be a doctor, her older relatives would likely respond by telling her how hard that would be to achieve rather than supporting her to accomplish it.

Not everyone agreed, of course, that the situation was so deterministic. Marielle, for example, continued to insist that despite all of the obstacles, everyone still did have the freedom of choice to go against all of that and to succeed. Basically, this discussion became another thread in our debate about the American Dream: was it really open to all or has it become more and more exclusionary?

After all that discussion, we tried to perform the debate -- without language. Two groups were formed and created scenes that were meant to show the two contrasting ideas: on the one hand cultural forces limited our opportunities, on the other hand hard work and determination brought success. The performers could only use a few key words: "need" "want" "how" "stop" "yes" "no" "please." Then, on Wednesday, we took the scenes and reduced them even further into silent tableaus, which the whole group worked on to complicate and refine. Eventually the group developed a series of poses expressing the different philosophical positions and we started to move fluidly from one pose to the next. What we're working toward is a "language of gesture" that we can use along with words and music to tell our story.

One of the exciting things about our performed "conversation" is that it can be internally contradictory. The gestures can say one thing while the words or the music can say something else. We're going to keep building on this in Saturday's rehearsal.

we're not alone

It seems like we're not the only folks in town using the poetry of Langston Hughes to create a performance. A show called "Langston Hughes in Harlem" is playing for the next few weekends at The Bowery Poetry Club.

Anybody want to go and check it out?

from sea to shining sea

Co-director Serge Velez brought up a good point in our directors' meeting last night. If this play is called "America," what about all the other states? Most of our discussion has focused on New York City and the area immediately surrounding it. How is New York connected to the other states in the Union? (Sita suggested that NYC ought to be its own country.)

How many of us involved in this production have been to other states? Which ones have we been to?

is THIS what freedom looks like?!?

In rehearsal on Saturday, Eugene told us that when he thinks of total "freedom" the image he sees is Will Ferrell running around naked in the movie "Old School."

There are different ideas of freedom, but most of us tend to think of it as an individual thing, the freedom to do whatever you want. We think of a lone person doing something that goes against the grain -- like taking off all of their clothes!

Judy led the group in an exercise on Saturday that challenged our ideas of freedom, though. She told the cast that they had one and a half minutes to be "completely free on their own." Most of them had no idea what to do and just ended up sitting around. Then they had one and half minutes to be free "in a group": one group went upstairs for a bit, another just sat around talking. Then they had time to "be free" while Judy played different types of music; even though she didn't tell them to dance, pretty much everyone in the group stood in a circle and moved to the music, at one point collectively choreographing dance moves.

In our discussion afterwards, we discussed how comfortable we are with varying degrees of freedom. Cynthia confessed that when she heard we were allowed to be completely free, she was worried that someone would take off their clothes (like Will Ferrell!) but no one did that. Gilbert said that when he has free time, he most enjoys doing something like listening to music or going on the Internet -- if he was just alone by himself in a room without the possibility of doing that, he wouldn't really know what to do.

Why do we think that most of the people in the group felt more comfortable "being free" together? Is that just because it's easier to just go along with the group or was dancing with everyone else what they really felt like doing? Freedom to choose can be a paradox; it doesn't always have to mean that we "do our own thing." Though the conventional image of freedom is individualistic, groups can also freely choose to come to consensus, can't they? Or is someone always the leader?

We'll be exploring this paradox more in rehearsal tonight. When you think of "freedom," what image do YOU see?

langston live

Hip Hip Hooray to Castillo ensemble member Mike Klein! In the comments section, he posted a link to Langston Hughes reading his poems with musical accompaniment by the Charles Mingus jazz group. The following website has each poem as an individual file (as well as the lyrics translated into Spanish!):

http://www.geocities.com/xxxjorgexxx/hughes1.htm

You need RealPlayer in order to listen to the files.

One of the poems on the recording is called "Notes on the Commercial Theatre." It's about how mainstream commerical theater and film have consistently appropriated black cultural forms for their own ends. I never knew this poem before, but it's powerful and it serves as a calling card for what we're trying to do:

"Notes on the Commercial Theatre" by Langston Hughes

You've taken my blues and gone—
You sing'em on Broadway
And you sing'em in Hollywood Bowl,
And you mixed'em up with symphonies
And you fixed 'em
So they don't sound like me.
Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

You also took my spirituals and gone.
You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones
And all kinds of Swing Mikados
And in everything but what's about me—
But someday somebody'll
Stand up and talk about me,
And write about me—
Black and beautiful—
And sing about me,
And put on plays about me!
I reckon it'll be
Me myself!

Yes, it'll be me.

report from saturday

At Saturday's rehearsal we branched out in a lot of new directions. The performers were told to bring in other texts that they felt had some connection to our two poems. These ranged from Gilbert calling our attention to a Subway commercial to Kristina reciting the Internationale. We have more music on the way, too: in subsequent rehearsals, we'll be listening to songs by Lou Reed and Nas, suggested by Tabitha and Eugene.

One of the topics on Saturday was how America presents, or "sells," itself. The "American Dream" is a product like any other and one group presented a very funny commerical (inspired by Subway) that was meant to show how America was more free than other countries. We also talked a lot about the visions that people in other countries have of what America is like. Several performers concurred that their relatives back home in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad all have exaggerated ideas of how prosperous America is. Tabitha's grandmother, upon first visiting New York and seeing steam rise up out of the manhole covers, thought that it meant the streets were heated! This vision of America as a "land of plenty" has been around since the 19th Century and even before that. It is said that earlier generations of immigrants to America thought they would arrive to find the streets paved with gold.

Our discussion of opportunities in America continued with an extended analysis of the Will Smith movie "The Pursuit of Happyness". We talked for quite a while about whether this film, based on a true story, provided evidence that, with enough self-determination, someone could raise themselves up from poverty by their bootstraps and achieve financial success. Some people argued that Will Smith's character was an extraordinary person who put up with an incredible amount of setbacks, which the average job-seeker would not have been able to overcome.

We ended the day by exploring the notion of "freedom" in more detail. Inspired by Tabitha's refence to Rousseau's idea that "civilization begins with fences," we asked what complete freedom would really look like. Would it be a blissful state of complete liberty and cooperation or total chaos? Are some restrictions on freedom good just so that we can accomlish things as a society? The American poet Robert Frost includes a famous adage in one of his poems: "Good fences make good neighbors".

Judy ended the day with some exercises exploring what "total freedom" felt like. I'm going to write more about that on a subsequent post, because the results were so interesting. Or maybe Judy (or one of the cast) wants to tell us about it??

langston's legacy

Last night we realized that our two poets had a lot in common: Hughes and Ginsberg were both gay, both affiliated with the Communist movement, and both attended Columbia University. Unfortunately, though, I haven't been able to find as many exciting Web resources about Langston Hughes as about Ginsberg.

We did learn from Dan that Hughes' great-grandfather (and namesake) John Mercer Langston was the first black man elected to public office in the United States (and that was even before the Civil War). That certainly gave young Langston Hughes a big legacy to live up to. That got me thinking about how comparatively few African-Americans have been elected to major public office, even today. Is that changing? This year, Deval Patrick was elected governor of Massachusetts, but it's hard to believe that he is only the second black governor in American history. Barack Obama is only the third black U.S. Senator elected since the end of Reconstruction. Some people think he may end up as the Democratic candidate for President in 2008. Will that change things?

Has anyone else found any good Langston Hughes resources? If so, send us the links!

establishing the discussion

Wow, the conversation has really started! We had an engaging discussion yesterday at rehearsal about the poems and the poets' backgrounds, during which some different ways of looking at America emerged. Here are some notes:

- During the discussion, Marielle took issue with Allen Ginberg's first line: "America I've given you all and now I'm nothing." She wanted to know where Ginsberg got off saying something like that. What had he given to America? From the evidence in the poem, it seemed like all he did was sit around and smoke marijuana all the time. Marielle articultaed the position that there was opportunity all around us in America and that people just needed to make the choice to take adantage of it.

- Several people talked about the obstacles that get put in the way of that kind of achievement. Nowadays it seems that you need a BA to get a good job, said Cynthia, and college isn't free. And even a college degree is no assurance that you can find good employment. And some people get an advantage over others because they went to private schools or because their parents were successful.

- Tabitha changed the terms of the discussion and called into question the very way that success is measured in America. Citing the work of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, she expressed that mainstream America defines success purely in economic terms, as if people were like businesses. What about people like Ginsberg who don't want to conform to that set of standards? What place is there for them in American society? As Ginsberg says, "Businessmen are serious / Movie producers are serious / Everyone's serious but me."

- Windia expressed very well the conflict between the opportunities offered by the "American Dream" and the restrictiveness of it. To achieve that dream, you have to fit a certain "image." According to Windia, America says to us, "If you're willing to be the way I draw it out for you, you're lucky. But if not, you're out."

It's really exciting that we have so many different opinions emerging within the group. Giving expression to contradictions is exactly what this process is supposed to be about. Does anybody else out there want to add a comment or respond to any of this??

experimental art resources

Mike Klein, a member of the Castillo Theater ensemble, calls our attention to Ubu Web, which seems to be the YouTube of the avant-garde. It has video clips of experimental poetry, film, performance, and music. I've barely had a chance to look at it much, but it includes a 39 minute video interview with Ginsberg, filmed in 1995.

We should keep looking through this stuff, who knows what else is in there! We're working in a long line of other experimental artists.

the group

I'm very excited to announce the ensemble that will be creating "America (a conversation)":

Performers:
Kristina Acheampong
Gilbert Arias
Eugene Clowney
Cynthia Cyprien
Windia Dieudonne
Francisco Espinoza
Marcus Jones
Edaliz Morales
Emily Munguia
Tabitha Peavey
Stephanie Rampersad
Marielle Suarez
Amanda Williams

Directors:
Dan Friedman
Brian Mullin
Sita Sarkar
Serge Velez

Producer:
Marian Rich

Stage Manager:
Kat Ostrova

Movement Coach:
Judy Myers

Our ensemble is very diverse: The performers range in age from 15 to 23 are residents of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and New Jersey. It's a really exciting group with whom to start this conversation!

We had a great first rehearsal over the weekend. After everyone got to know each other, we got right down to business. Each performer stood up and did an unprepared, one-minute solo performance of their experience of America. They could only use three words. Some of the words people used included: "hiring?," "broke," "freedom," "Food Stamps," "life," "liberty," "happiness," "running," "dream." A theme started emerging even at this early stage: the gap between the ideal of what America is supposed to be and the way it really is. Many of the performers showed that contradiction and showed themselves struggling with it in various ways.

We didn't even get to our poems on the first day, but everyone was assigned to read them before our next rehearsal. On Wednesday, we'll start talking about who Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg were and we'll start using their words to create scenes. It already seems like everything's moving quickly!