LOVVE/RITUALS AND RAGE
As a result of its supposed radicalism, performance has had a kind of false cachet. When it has included artists outside of the academy–such as most artists of color–it’s often been patronizing. And the artists themselves often play to performance’s expectations of them, even if they do so bitterly. (Watch Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s work, especially after Year of the White Bear, and you’ll see what I mean.)
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The greatest single issue of our time is probably the one that’s most absent from the performance agenda: it’s the rare white performer, and most are white, who mentions race and its attendant concerns, prejudice, homicide, poverty, genocide. And on the rare occasions when race is mentioned, it’s only mentioned. Race is acknowledged as part of the dynamic of racism, that deplorable thing; but it’s never explored, never showcased. While white performance artists may painstakingly deconstruct an incest or coming-out experience, a humiliating job or the epiphanic birth of a child, they seem incapable of looking at their own relationship to race and racism. They seem more interested in personality than in how the personal and the historical interact, more interested in self-references than in taking stock of their place in the world.
This has always struck me as ironic, because performance seems a natural for artists of color. More than most art forms, performance lends itself to oral story telling, fractured time and nonlinear narratives, rituals that involve both the sacred and the mundane, and the process of transformation–all elements that play vital roles in marginalized communities and that have everyday cultural counterparts among African Americans, American Indians, Latinos, and other people of color.
What is particularly fascinating about Root Wy’mn is how subversive, how smart, their assumption is. Instead of drawing a righteous line between those on the inside and those on the outside–as Gomez-Pena, Kwang, and even the more polite Spiderwoman and Pomos often do–they assume the line is already drawn. They don’t bother with it; they figure we know it’s there and what side of it we’re on. This assumption instantly creates a dynamic of trust between audience and performer, and that’s what makes the journey with Root Wy’mn inclusive and whole. At the most fundamental level, Root Wy’mn’s approach turns the focus from the oppressors–white folks who, after all, get plenty of attention anyway–and puts it on the oppressed: women, especially black women.
Lovve/Rituals and Rage isn’t theater, poetry, rhetoric, or any other of the traditional spoken words–yet it uses all these genres. In its treatment of character and time it’s conceptual, and it requires a certain gutsiness–you can’t get into it unless you’re willing to both embrace history and leave some of its heavy baggage behind. Root Wy’mn telescope time in order to connect African women brought over as slaves with the modern women of the company. Through individual monologues linked to one another by imagery and metaphor, Root Wy’mn loop bloodlines with both ancestors and their contemporaries. “This is my story,” they say. “I am my story: first thoughts, without words.”
Will Root Wy’mn redefine performance all by themselves? No, but they may introduce a kind of reformation: artists of color integrating on their own terms, with their own values, and forcing white artists to take a more probing look at their lives and history.
