Cabaret Collective, or, Yes, The Police Did Come And Take All Our Beer

Let’s address the elephant in the room first. Halfway through Kelley Sweeney’s rendition of an old Joni Mitchell tune, the Stony Brook University police came, knocked on the door, took all our beer and checked IDs. The Cabaret Collective has always had a spoken policy that it’s okay to discretely bring your own beverages. From what I understand, some people were coming to the Collective with open bottles in hand and mistakenly went into another performance in the same building, who thereupon called the police. I don’t know how disruptive these individuals were being, if at all. So the police came, stopped the show, and did their police thing. What I’ve heard is that Stony Brook has a wet campus, so our understanding was that there shouldn’t have been a problem. We were, obviously, wrong. According to the “State University of New York at Stony Brook Alcoholic Beverages on State Property Policies and Procedures,” (http://studentaffairs.stonybrook.edu/jud/docs/Alcohol_Policy.pdf):

“Unless a permit has been obtained from the State Liquor Authority, Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (“SLA Permit”) by the sponsoring individual or organization, the consumption of alcohol or possession of an open container of alcohol anywhere on campus is prohibited. This includes, by way of example only, classrooms, grounds, parking lots, student lounges and bathrooms.”

So the cops were in the right, unfortunately, to take all our booze. However, I’m not convinced they had any right to ask for people’s phone numbers:

“Standard identification procedures are required at all campus functions and at establishments where alcoholic beverages are available. Acceptable forms of identification include:

U.S. or international passport

Valid driver’s license

NYS non-driver’s ID

Selective service registration card

Resident Alien identification card

An individual must be proofed each time s/he requests an alcoholic beverage or enters the alcohol service area. Alpha lists will be used to verify student dates of birth. University staff may spot check the legal age of any persons in the area of consumption. The use of false ID is prohibited. All false IDs will be confiscated and a disciplinary referral will be made.”

That aside, let’s talk about the art!

In spite of Becky Goldberg’s clarification of my last response to a Cabaret Collective (http://waylonlenk.blogspot.com/2011/12/inter-arts-collaboration-at-sbu-cabaret.html), I’m still seeing a substantial lack of interarts collaboration. I’m not saying there isn’t any. Lukas Kürten and Karl Hinze both foray outside of their own departments (Physics and Music, respectively) to participate in theatrical endeavors. In Kürten’s case, he was the originating artist of a bilingual reading of Goethe’s Zauberlehrling with Theatre’s Nancee Moes.

But those are only individuals. To all extents and purposes, this Cabaret Collective was a concert by the Music Department, with a couple theatrical acts and some art in the hallway. And the format of the Collective seems most conducive to music. Nearly all of the acts (this includes both of the theatre acts) read their pieces off music stands. The ten minute spots are perfect for musicians whose songs range on average from three to four minutes, and a dominate venue for singer-songwriters are bars anyway. As for us in theatre, especially dramaturgs, I think we’re a little used to having a little bit more time in our individual events to hold forth on some theoretical theatrical concept. Not to say we can’t get the audience up a tree and back down in ten minutes – both of the acts I saw last night, as have many others that I’ve seen at previous Collectives. All I’m saying is that it seems like a musician’s natural habitat, not necessarily a dramaturg’s.

And a performance-based venue is the opposite of a plastic artist’s natural habitat! Especially if you’re going to get sequestered to the hallway. Maybe a better idea, if the Cabaret Collective is really about fostering interarts collaboration, is to put the art in the room with the performances, and perhaps even have the artists there to say a few words about their work to associate their face more strongly with it.

I’m still very dubious about the overall effectiveness of the Cabaret Collectives. Yes, they have inspired a few individuals to cross over out of their departments, but I’m not seeing anything that brings the arts together in a way that blurs the boundaries between disciplines. If anything, it’s become a fun way for a bunch of Theatre and Music grad students (and I’m purposely excluding Art here, because they seem excluded by the very structure of the event), have a few beers, maybe get busted up by the cops, and play music and do skits for each other. Which is all very nice, if that’s what the Cabaret Collective wants to be.

Staller [Off] Center

Last night was the inaugural Staller [Off] Center – a joint endeavor by the Staller Center and Stony Brook’s Theatre Department to bring new work to Stony Brook. While the double-bill of Jake Hooker and lumberob was a miss and a hit in terms of performance, Staller [Off] Center as a whole successfully brought one-man shows that you’d expect to find Downtown or in Brooklyn to the beautiful North Shore of Long Island.

Jake Hooker

Hooker’s show, thisisitisthisit (Shit Shit Shit): A Map of the Known World or thatwasitwasthatit (Shit Shat Shot): A Rememberance, was indeed a rememberance of another show that looked to be visually and theoretically rich and compelling. I would have loved to have seen it. Instead, I saw its shadow. Derivative of the original, thisisitisthisit left me feeling cheated that I all I got was a telling of what seemed to be a very good show.

lumberob

Rob Erickson (lumberob)’s method of playwrighting/storytelling fascinates me, and so for my little review for his piece Rocky Point, I’m going to try something like it. When I got home last night, I wrote a bit about Staller [Off] Center in my journal. Today I’m going to do an audio recording of me critiquing Rocky Point. You’ll never get to hear it. I will though – I’m going to listen to it and let it prompt me in saying it again to the video camera. You will have access to this recording: I’m going to put it on my YouTube channel and link it to this post. Then I’m going to write a review to post below that video off of what I say in it. It probably won’t be word-for-word, though, because I’m not going to pause the video while I write. Here we go…

So while I wasn’t as big a fan of Jake’s piece, I was of lumberob’s. So I’m doing a review like he did his piece. He’s manically impressive. He’s just sweating and sweating halfway through the performance. He records his stories, then listens to them while he does the performance. He swiftly and sweatily leapt between beatboxing and storytelling. He tells stories like this in comedy clubs, but he started to loose me in the middle. He did a mashup of disparate elements from different texts and he started to loose me. It can really work and keep you on your toes but you have to be able to follow the narratives. They can leap between manically but it can’t be a mash-up between “I Am a Woman” and a sailor story. Each unit has to be complete in itself. If you do that you can get away with what he does. And he does in the beginning and end. It was manically impressive, but he started to lose me in the middle.

hereandnow theatre at Stony Brook University

hereandnow theatre company is an Asian-American group based in L.A. that tours the country telling stories of Asian-America. Their purpose seems to be to promote the autonomy of Asian-American storytelling (especially Asian-Americans whose families come from the Pacific Rim). Most of the stories they told are sourced from their company members, who are younger, so they deal with very modern issues. The Japanese-American internment camps and the brutality of Japanese colonialism in the Far East did make brief appearances, as did exodus from Laos and a Native Hawaiian myth, but the stories generally seemed geared towards a college age demographic. Sex was a major theme (including one encounter that went on long past the audience getting the point – I was surprised they didn’t end up taking their clothes off), as was identifying themselves in their own words.

It’s interesting to note the degree to which these two things go together – autonomy of body and autonomy of narrative. The dominant culture constructs narratives regarding Asian bodies, particularly Asian woman bodies – the geisha girl, the Japanese school-girl. Some American men have an “Asian fetish”, which presupposes a severely limited view of Asian sexuality. By pushing for a broader range of narratives regarding what it means to be Asian, hereandnow theatre actively promotes a level of autonomy in the Asian-American community from stereotypes that the mainstream (read “white”) community would impose upon them, especially in the Hollywood film industry.

Liz Sager's Spring Awakening

The cream rises to the top, and Liz Sager’s production of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in the Staller Center Cabaret is an excellent showcase for some of the best acting talent the Theatre Department at SBU has to offer. Caitlin Bartow and Eric Michael Klouda stole the show as Melchior and Moritz, respectively. Bartow was especially engaging with her adolescent boy bluster, and brought a good deal of depth to her character. From pretending to know more about sex than he did, to freaking out when Wendla (Molly Walsh Warren) had him beat her, to insisting on taking himself seriously in the graveyard, Bartow’s Melchior was the star of the play. Klouda (although he was a little hard to understand at first due to diction and delivering his lines at the floor) was the perfect opposite and scene partner to Bartow. Nervous and high-strung, he created a convincing character arch that culminated in a theatric tour de force in his suicide scene. They were perfectly cast as the two male points in the core Spring Awakening triangle. Unfortunately, I found the third point Wendla wanting. Warren seemed unable to deliver much beyond sighing innocence. She almost broke through into something incredible in the scene when she gets Moritz to beat her, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting for her to commit and meet Bartow’s energy, but she never did. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast was also split between those who owned the stage and those who seemed tentative, sometimes to the point where I thought they were grasping for their lines. I hate to say it, because it seems like Sager has been working hard on this for the past six weeks, but it read as under-rehearsed.

I would like to say a word about Sager’s directorial concept – this is her Spring Awakening and MFA project after all. From her program note, she is obviously interested in deconstructing the gender binary, and she approached this with gender-blind casting and costuming. The casting worked in part, and didn’t work in part. In a cast of twelve, she had nine women and three men. This meant that the preponderance of male parts was played by women, which audiences are used to in academic theater where we have more women than men. From the other direction, both Andrew Breslin and Chris Petty played women during the course of play. Breslin can be taken seriously as a concerned mother, and this is not the first time he’s been cast as such. It’s hard, though, to take the heavily bearded Petty seriously as a giddy school-girl. That choice seemed forced and heavy handed, as did Herr Gabor (again played by Petty) undressing Frau Gabor (Becky Goldberg) from her men’s clothing and re-dressing her as a woman when they decided to send the recalcitrant Melchior to reform school.

I left the theater feeling that a good idea was undermined by being under-resourced. With such a large dramatis personae, it seems that Sager was forced to cast actors who couldn’t meet Bartow and Klouda’s (among others) energy, and to cast a preponderance of women which I feel undermined the point of her gender-blind casting. And that's not even mentioning that a dozen actors is a lot of people to coordinate! Even half that would have been a handful. I left wishing that instead of attempting to do a translation of Wedekind’s entire play and super-impose a critique of the gender binary on it, Sager had instead adapted Spring Awakening to focus on those parts of Wedekind's story that best supported her critique.

Spring Awakening plays tonight (March 10^th) at 8PM and tomorrow (March 11^th) at 2PM in the Staller Center Cabaret. Last night was a full house, so reservations are recommended: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/events/284882374915297/

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.

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.