Inter-arts Collaboration at SBU: The Cabaret Collective and Shared Support Services

CORRECTION: As per Becky's comment, I'd like to retract my statement about the Cabaret Collective not contributing to inter-arts collaboration, and insinuating that it might in fact do the opposite. She brought up many interesting facts that I didn't know, and that I encourage you all to read. ~W.L., 12-12-2011

The Cabaret Collective is an event that began about a year ago at Stony Brook University as a forum to facilitate inter-arts collaboration. The Staller Center houses the Theater, Art, and Music Departments, which, until this semester, have been autonomous from each other. This autonomy lead to a departmental insularity that John Lutterbie, then head of the Graduate Theater Department, and now head of both Art and Theater, found troubling. Under his guidance, Chris Petty of Theater reached out to his colleagues in Theater, Art and Music to form the Cabaret Collective, a periodic variety show exhibiting work from the three departments with the motive to spark dialogue and collaboration between us. The December 9^th Collective was successful, but not in terms of facilitating collaboration between the arts.

This Collective showed that the Music, Theater and Engineering students (there was a comedy troupe from the Engineering Department) are tending away from self-gratification and towards performativity. It’s my opinion that art of any kind needs to be for the audience – it needs to talk to and with them, not at them. College departments are beautiful in the artistic freedom that they provide, but one of the dangers of this freedom is that the art that comes out of them can be self-involved. This Collective showed that we can experiment and still engage audiences. A good example was Levy Lorenzo’s Stick of Joy. Levy is a percussionist, but his instrument for this piece was a joy stick plugged into a laptop plugged into the speakers. He used the joy stick to manipulate audio to create a musical piece. Levy’s a-rhythmic style can be disorienting, and the lack of an identifiable instrument could have compounded that disorientation. Instead it did the opposite. The newness of juxtaposing a technology that I remember as reaching its heyday in the 90s with his style of music was intriguing, and the way Levy performed the piece by throwing his whole body into its creation drew and held the audience’s focus.

Where the Cabaret Collective doesn’t seem to be succeeding is in its intended purpose – inter-arts collaboration. The sole representatives of such a thing were Timothy and Mallory Vallier’s Kinetic Petals (a dance/composition piece using a Kinect), and Belsazar, a poetry performance by Becky Goldberg of Theater and Lukas Kürten of Physics. But I’m not sure if these instances of inter-arts collaboration can be credited to the Cabaret Collective. Timothy and Mallory are husband and wife, and Lukas is becoming a fixture of the Theater Department outside of the Collective. The rest of the pieces were specifically music or specifically theater. Our friends from Engineering, Monroe Comedy, are included in that with their sketch comedy act. But I’m not sure we can expect much more – two evenings a semester aren’t enough to facilitate inter-disciplinary work on any meaningful scale. What will do this is interaction across disciplines on a daily basis.

This interaction has been happening on the graduate level through the Staller Departments, as well as English and Philosophy, encouraging students to come take classes with them. But another form of inter-departmental interaction has been happening, one that is more controversial, and one that . What is happening at Stony Brook University is called “shared support services.” This means, to quote Alyssa Melillo of the Stony Brook Press, “the administrative staffs of two or three academic departments are merged into one central entity where staff members can specialize in a certain department, but be available and prepared to handle responsibilities outside their specialization.” You can read her full article here: http://sbpress.com/2011/11/shared-services-from-scratch/.

While faculty and student resistance from the Humanities Building is stalling the process, for the present, shared services have been incorporated between Theater and Art with hardly a cry of protest. There are two reasons for this, I think.

The first has to do with personalities. Last year, Art didn’t have a permanent chair, and there was an atmosphere of distrust towards Nick Mangano of Theater. John Lutterbie, who now heads both departments, seems to be fairly popular professor whose heart is in the right place – he has a sincere inclination towards inter-arts collaboration.

The second is that the Theater graduate students seem unable to organize themselves towards a common political goal. This is the result, I believe, of divergent personalities and a general business with graduate level course work and the creation of art. I cannot speak to the graduate student culture in the Art Department, nor to undergraduate culture.

It’s my opinion that positivity towards Professor Lutterbie and a strong focus on individual projects draw our focus away from the larger issues that, among other things, means continued disciplinary insularity between the arts. These issues include:

·         “Shared support services” mean merging of administrative staffs, not departments of disciplines.

·         The goals for shared support services are not to facilitate the interdisciplinary goals of Lutterbie and many others in the Staller Center. They are to adjust to an $82 million budget cut. For more, please read President Stanley’s statement: http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/50forward/message3.html

·         There is a widespread concern that shared support services will inhibit faculty and administration to provide quality attention to the students. This concern has been expressed by our colleagues in the Music Department (http://sbpress.com/2011/11/shared-support-in-progress/), in the Humanities, and by the GSO calling for transparency on the part of the Administration (http://www.sbgso.org/files/u1/resolutions/RESOLUTION%20ON%20SSCs.pdf). These concerns are being met by the University Senate, who has called a moratorium on shared support services pending further investigation into their viability. 

The Cabaret Collective is an interesting experiment, and certainly a fun event, but fails to address the real impediments to inter-arts collaboration. In fact, by focusing our energies into the Collective, and our hopes in Lutterbie and shared support services, we may in face be distracting ourselves from more effective ways to facilitate inter-disciplinary work and contributing to continued insularity between departments.

All Night All Day, or How I Debuted on Broadway

This weekend, a group of local theater artists created a 24-hour variety show on Broadway. By Broadway, I don’t mean in one of the big Broadway theaters. I mean on Broadway the street. Occupy Broadway, in solidarity with the NYC GA, opened the event on the red steps on Times Square, and then moved north to 50^th and Broadway – Paramount Plaza, a private-public park that they renamed “People’s Performance Plaza.” They describe themselves in their manifesto:

“We join in solidarity with fellow occupiers from Tahrir Square to Davis, California by challenging this restriction on access to the public commons [described earlier as private owners of public spaces reneging on their obligations to keep the spaces constantly open to public use] and by extension to democracy itself. Our creative resistance is using public space to create an exciting mix with public performances, art, and music in vacant, lifeless corporate, bonus plazas. Through such art, New York artists re-imagine their city as a work of art, rather than a shopping mall. With capitalism gone amuck, foreclosures increasing, and bank crises consuming whole communities, we are demonstrating another, more joyful way of living.”

And joyful it was. When I arrived, at around 1 in the afternoon, they were in kind of a lull, and the performance space was occupied by a discussion about the financial issues that have created the Movement.

But, the organizers found a way to pick back up the performative energy by bringing back “dramatic karaoke” from the wee hours of the morning (the event occurred from 6PM Friday to 6PM Saturday). Dramatic karaoke is when somebody recites, as if they were a dramatic monologue, song lyrics. I volunteered, and did the Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby.” Unfortunately, I can only do one thing at a time, so I didn’t record my Broadway debut. But here’s OWS photographer Eric doing “Sympathy for the Devil”!

Dramatic karaoke was one of the staples of the event, as well as readings of the First Amendment every hour on the hour.

There was also real singing, monologues, storytelling, short scenes, and dance. It was a variety show of the first degree. But probably one of the most telling things I heard there was the story of Big Bank: The Musical. Not the story of what happens in the musical, although that’s certainly fun, but the story of how the musical came to be and where it’s at now, which is looking for funding. The problem with doing even a light-hearted musical about a Big Bad Bank that takes sick pleasure in foreclosing on people is that “producers like banks.” Later that evening I was speaking to a young man named Raymond who told me that he feels that we are taught a shallow, unfulfilling lifestyle by corporate America in which we value material things above human affection. If what Adam Rapp of Big Bank says about producers is correct, then the musicals and plays happening in doors on Broadway are a part of the problem that Raymond sees. The street performance of Occupy Broadway offers an interesting alternative to that: it’s Off-Off-Broadway on Broadway. 

Borders and Colonial Structures in Rogue Reading's "Coyote"

Rogue Readings is a group of graduate students at Stony Brook University who put up readings of new plays that have come to our department for the John Gassner New Play Competition, but have not been selected for that particular event. On Wednesday, November 30, Rogue Readings put up Kevin Kautzman’s Coyote.

I remember being one of the first in our department to read Kautzman’s play a year ago. I remember being thrilled until about the middle or end of the second act. As far as story-telling goes, Kautzman keeps you on the edge of your seat as the plot thickens, and you learn (spoiler alert) that the young good-looking Arizona Minuteman is actually a coyote using the old racist Minuteman to help him get immigrants across the border. And the suspense and the intrigue came across splendidly in the reading – Steve Marsh was riveting as the disgusting Vince, and Gareth Burghes gave us all the sweet-faced innocence of a man who has something to hide.

My problem is that Kautzman has Luke’s (Burghes) Mexican girlfriend Anna (Andrea Penaherrara) tell “Fire Race,” a Karuk myth. I wrote, in my initial comments on the play, that for all the play’s strengths, the use of this story outside of its cultural context – I wrote “permission of the community” at the time – is probably enough to sink it if Indian audiences get wind of it. Cultural appropriation, while certainly a topic of debate in Indian communities, can get the appropriator a lot of bad press and alienate a lot of Indian audiences. For good examples that have made headlines, take a look at the ongoing acrimony over Indian imagery used as team mascots, or the lawsuit by the Navajo Tribe against Urban Outfitters. Needless to say, I was miffed when I found out that Rogue Readings had decided to go ahead and do it anyways. But, to their credit, when I brought up my concerns a second time, Erin Treat and Stephanie Walter of the Rogue Readings board invited me to be on the talk-back panel after the reading.

As the play concerned immigration across the US-Mexican border, the other panelists focused on today’s immigration controversy. Gallya Lahav, from Political Science, talked a bit about it from a raw political standpoint; Margarita Espada, a Puerto Rican artist and activist, talked about immigration to Long Island; and Erin Treat, who hails from Tucson, talked about her community’s discussion of the issue. They spoke far more eloquently and knowledgably about immigration than I can, so I’d like to continue with my discussion of cultural appropriation in Kautzman’s Coyote.

My statement was similar to the one I’ve written above, except that I also took Bill Bright and Tony Platt as positive examples. Bright came to the River, and worked with individuals to record and analyze our language. His work is crucial to the continued restoration of our language. Tony Platt actually went to the Yurok tribal office and asked permission. It wasn’t given or withheld, so he proceeded to engage individual Yuroks as he wrote his book, which seems to be well received by the community. The through line for Bright and Platt’s success is that they actively and humbly worked with the community to produce their works, which in turn benefit our community. The Urban Outfitters scandal is a bad example in that they went behind the Navajo people’s collective back, and as such have gotten a lot of bad press as exploiters of an indigenous community.

The panel’s response bears discussion. I was able to touch some upon some of the specific points that they brought up at the talk-back, but having spent some time thinking about it, I would like to continue by looking at the overarching colonial structures that have shaped this whole event. But first, here are the three counter-arguments and something of my response at the time:

• “Fire Race” belongs to the same mythological archetype as the Greek story of Prometheus. Really, there are only maybe about seven myths, and all are cross-cultural.
• Stories have a historical fluidity across cultural boundaries.
• Indians don’t believe in property.

My response at the time was to say that archetypes may all be well and good, but that thought process doesn’t account for the tenacity with which indigenous people often hold onto the things that remain ours. By telling one of our stories, or using our images, out of their cultural context, the story becomes less ours and has less potency as a symbol of our ethnic identity. The second point seems legitimate, but I believe that it still ignores the current political climate. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I was not able to address the third point, which is wrong on two levels – first, every people has a different culture; and, second, yes we Karuks most certainly do.

Stepping back, I believe I can argue that all three of these arguments and in fact the event as a whole, shed interesting light on current colonial treatment of borders. This is almost poetic, since a border is the central issue and conflict in Kautzman’s play.

In order for colonialism to exist, borders must be transgressed. When this play first crossed my desk, I lay down a boundary based on what seem to be generally held principles of propriety in my community, to wit, that this is our story and you need permission to use it. I spoke as a Karuk, and as a member of the Karuk community. Rogue Readings ignored this stated boundary when they chose to do this play. The Rogue Readings board consists of non-Karuks or any other indigenous person who can claim that this is one of their people’s stories. The structure seems to be one in which a group of outsiders ignore the boundaries set by an indigenous person on the behalf of his people’s cultural integrity.

When I stated my misgivings a second time, Rogue Readings invited me to speak on the panel. This belies three things that indicate ongoing changes in colonial structures, as well as ongoing stasis. The first, and most obvious, is that the Karuk voice was given a place at the table. The second is that I could not have done any of this if I was not a grad student at Stony Brook University. My very being here is a sign that the racial borders around academia are vanishing. In fact, one of Stony Brook’s greatest strengths, in my eyes, is its diverse demographic landscape. The flip side of that strength is that, in order to get ahead in the world, I have to accept a degree of assimilation. It’s like Julian Lang says: “It’s hard to be Indian because you have to live in two worlds.” The third is that we Indians really have to push to even have our voices heard – it would have been nice not to have had to repeat myself.

The third stage of this journey is the talk-back after the reading itself. All three of the arguments employed against Karuk intellectual sovereignty (archetypes, geographic fluidity of stories, and lack of ownership amongst “Indians”) tend towards one conclusion – the borders don’t exist. Now Kautzman definitely seems to be against borders by the way he demonizes the minuteman and creates sympathetic characters out of the coyotes, so it’s consistent for him to deny cultural boundaries as well. My problem is that, in order for indigenous sovereignty to happen, borders around what is ours must exist. To look at this in terms of an “us-them” binary would be incomplete, and therefore dangerous. The aspects of assimilation caused by me being a student in a Euro-American education system, and by my accepting the structures of the predominately white Rogue Readings board to voice my protest mellow this binary and soften the border. Outside of this assimilation, however, the overarching structure has been one of an indigenous person setting a boundary that makes sense in terms of modern decolonial politics, and a group of outsiders using a variety of tactics (the act of ignoring, the act of assimilating, academic arguments, and colonial historiography) to weaken this boundary.