In
Spike Lee�s film Bamboozled (2000), we get a powerful
close-up of a visibly distressed black performer applying
blackface. The tears are unscripted. Lee said that the
actors dreaded blacking up: they felt it was dehumanizing;
it tore out their souls. Recently, as part of a performance
at Danspace Project at St Mark�s Church, a white performer
blackened her face, declared herself black, and stated
quite simply, �I have been waiting my entire life for
this.�
Danspace
Project, a leading space for experimental contemporary
dance, just finished a two-month program that examined
the meaning of black dance. Curator and choreographer
Ishmael Houston-Jones asked, �[D]oes �Black Dance� even
exist? And assuming it does, what defines it?� Thirty
years ago, Houston-Jones first examined how a new generation
of black artists existed �in the parallel worlds of Black
America and of new dance.� He reprised his eponymous 1982
program, Parallels, and brought in many of the same choreographers,
now luminaries in the dance world, as well as a younger
generation: from Jawole Willa Jo Zollar to Ralph Lemon
to Nora Chipaumire. The series was routinely reviewed
and recommended, and garnered attention and acclaim.
On
February 18, 2012, in a program that examined the intersections
of black dance and postmodernism, choreographer and multidisciplinary
artist Dean Moss presented his vision to an overflowing
house. Moss invited three younger artists to stage their
work; he stated, �None of them [are] African-American,
but all of them are Black.� Moss was attempting to de-essentialize
black as a biologically determined category, to look for
its meaning elsewhere. This is nothing new. There is a
long genealogy of thinkers�among them W.E.B. Du Bois,
Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall�who have defined blackness through
its emergence in society; it�s an historical and political
consciousness that produces resistant narratives to histories
of oppression, slavery, and colonialism and fights for
a future of equality and freedom. Blackness�race�is counterintuitive;
it exists because it is a response to the brutal fact
of racism.
What
an opportunity to present serious meditations on questions
that deeply undergird our society; however, as Houston-Jones
clearly understood, Moss�s program could also cause controversy
should any of the performers show up in blackface. Quite
predictably one of them did, challenging her audience:
�I am doing something that could be offensive, right?�
Yes. But why? Did the performer know? Did her audience
know?
That
evening at Danspace Project, Ann Liv Young, a performer
notorious for her irreverent exhibitionism, entered in
a flamingo pink dress, a black afro, and a face painted
black. The �post-dance� performance was mostly a dialogue
between performer and audience. The back and forth was
banal. A microphone in hand, the performer engaged audience
members. She asked, �Who are you?� and received such stock
responses as: I am German, Italian, black (here the participant
was not as exuberant). Young said she was black because
she had soul, and someone retorted that her backside was
black, though in more colorful language. She asked for
a show of hands of people who were gay, because as she
told us, if you are gay, you are black. Many in the audience,
which was predominantly white and young, thought all of
this to be hilarious. Some of us thought differently:
it was mindless and inept. More disturbingly, the minstrel
show restaged the very categories it was supposedly seeking
to trouble: it trafficked in racist stereotypes and behavior.
If blackness is a revolutionary consciousness, we were
a far cry from its liberating potential.
For
a while, in the small space of St. Mark�s Church, the
performer stayed away from us, a critical mass of people
of color (three), whose faces registered disapproval,
disgust, boredom, and embarrassment for her. We had a
choice: Do we leave, do we stay mute, do we play along
(which was not going to happen), or do we say something
even when we did not want to become part of the act and
its mechanical exploitation?
Halfway
through the performance, the performer saw me saying something
to my friend and approached us, demanding to know what
I had said. So I asked, �Could you please tell us what
the history of minstrelsy is in the United States?� Needless
to say, she did not know; she balked at the question and
became hostile. What ensued could not have taken place
in the streets or any other place, I imagine. She screamed
at the top of her voice: �This is my performance, get
out! Get Out!� One friend of mine said we would be more
than happy to, but we would like our money back. That
didn�t happen, nor did we leave.
Her
attention was now fixed on us. She became (enacted the
role of?) a raging and racist lunatic. She came within
an inch of our faces and hurled obscenities at us. There
was no more laughter. A few people walked out. Most people
said or did nothing; the audience was silent. We never
raised our voices, never swore back. She told me I was
ugly and needed to look in the mirror. I said, �I do,
everyday, and I see a black woman.� She said she looked
in the mirror everyday too. �Yes,� I said, �and you see
a white girl.� And the tables turned. She now invoked
her Native American bloodline; I think it was her great-great
grandmother who was Crow. And then, yes, her best friend
was black, or maybe it was her neighbor. Someone was black.
She began asking for testimonials from her friends in
the audience. These she received, as we were assured that
all was well, the performer was not a racist. In a moment
of blinding insight, one young man told her: �They�re
old, and they don�t understand what you are doing.�
The
performance ended and two people came up to us (two young
men of color). One simply gave me a flower, and the other
reiterated what we had already heard: �I know her; she�s
really not a racist.� Perhaps not, but by attempting to
bamboozle her audience by manipulating images without
skill or knowledge, those images boomeranged and we were
all caught in a virulent web of hate and racism.
The
performer was, one imagines, trying to shock. If so, shock
whom and to what purpose? �Epater la bourgeoisie.� Flaubert�s
dictum to the avant-garde. Yet, was this minstrel show
shocking or rather acceptable to a liberal bourgeois audience
in the East Village? I am certain the performance could
not have occurred in Harlem with a predominantly black
audience�bourgeois or not, liberal or not. Why? Why does
this matter? The New York Times review of the performance
sanitized and sanctioned what happened. In a vanguard
space, such antics were deemed appropriate and having
�purpose.� Historically, the avant-garde understood shock
as a pact between the aesthetic and the political: shock
is a radical technique to propel revolutionary consciousness
and engagement. But if shock has no other purpose than
to shock, it can and does harm. In such cases, there is
no interruption, no rupture; rather, it both enables and
perpetuates the violence of the state, the very thing
avant-garde art attempts to critique and displace. If
this was an occasion to show different visions for black
dance, what occurred was a profound failure of the political
and aesthetic imagination.
Undoubtedly,
in a program that examines black dance, minstrelsy and
blackface have a role. In his catalog essay, Houston-Jones
explains that black dance has important roots in this
tradition, with 19th-century black dancers, such as William
Henry Lane, performing in blackface. The blackface minstrel
show was America�s first mass entertainment industry and
one of the earliest forms to expropriate black culture.
In the mid-19th century, when the beginnings of a lucrative
public entertainment sector began to take shape in this
country, the emerging class of white professional entertainers
gravitated to the culture of the largely enslaved African
population. The dynamic entertainment value inherent in
African performance traditions�styles of movement, rhythm,
dance, song, and West African musical and oral traditions
of speech and language�were incorporated to invigorate
European forms. (Even today, only imagine what American
popular music would sound like without a black presence.)
This
kind of cultural appropriation could be seen as a form
of admiration, were it not for the pernicious racist denigration
in which it was cloaked. When imitating and performing
black material, these white performers discovered a desperate
need to disguise their indebtedness behind the veil of
contempt represented by blackface. Not content merely
to appropriate the culture for profit, they created a
number of devices and performance conventions�alive and
present among us to this day�for the systematic humiliation
and dehumanization of the owners and creators of the culture
on which the entertainers� careers were based. Later black
artists seeking the public stage to perform their own
cultural heritage would be forced to parody themselves
and compromise their people�s dignity as the price of
their admission. Civil rights activist and scholar Ekwueme
Michael Thelwell writes: �What blackface gave rise to
was a sustained, protracted psychological assault on the
spiritual and intellectual life of an entire people. Its
origins, the manner and means of this assault (while indeed
compounding its long-term destructive effects in the black
community), reveal something truly horrifying and instructive
about the nature and extent of the historical racism which
deformed the soul of white America.� It was a veil through
which black America encountered itself.
This
is an understated account of the cruel reality of blackface;
more so, when we understand that blackface served as the
handmaiden to both slavery and later Jim Crow. Even through
such a schematic history, the concept of black dance is
more clearly grasped. Houston-Jones asked if black dance
exists. We know the answer: black dance must exist. The
question then becomes how does one responsibly present
such material? Certainly not with the arrogance to think
that one could trump a long history of divisive race relations
in this country by performing in blackface without any
knowledge of its history.
Spike
Lee resurrected the medium of blackface in Bamboozled.
Through meticulous research on and an understanding of
the history of minstrelsy, Lee gives a searing critique
of the ways in which stereotypical images of black people
have never stopped circulating in our society. In the
film, the dubious protagonist, a black television writer,
creates Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show. The
show becomes a runaway hit through the presentation of
dancing and cooning figures, such as Sleep �n� Eat, Aunt
Jemima, and Little Nigger Jim. In the end, Lee poignantly
shows how such images harm everyone who comes into contact
with them as the film finishes with a literal dance of
death, and afterward, a montage of film clips of blackface
that breaks one�s heart.
In
his analysis of Bamboozled, scholar W. J. T. Mitchell
writes: �The virtuosity resides in the performances of
the actors, in their ability to move us from stereotype
to caricature to character and back again.� The New York
Times critic says of the Parallels performance that it
is best for the audience to realize that the performer��Sherry��is
a character and not risk getting caught up in it. However,
�Sherry� never reached the level of character in her performance.
Entirely the creature of Young�s exhibitionism compounded
by astonishing bad judgment, she was always hovering between
caricature and racist stereotype. The critic was wrong
when she said, �Sherry always emerges unscathed.� What�s
sad is that even if we didn�t all realize it, we all emerged
scathed. As Mitchell states: �In the world of the stereotype,
everyone is both judge and judged, victim and executioner.
Putting on blackface [�] is a dangerous game that burns
the flesh, and draws a divisive color line not only around
facial features but between persons, and through the split
psyches of the characters themselves.�
Post
Script
In
1993, a quarter century after the civil rights movement,
Ted Danson performed in blackface at the Friars Club,
a space in the city known for its risqu� entertainment
and comedy. There were enough people in the audience (many
black) who were offended and angered, and an apology was
issued from the club. We are now almost a half-century
after the civil rights era, living in a supposedly �post-racial�
society. In an experimental dance space�where Judy Hussie-Taylor,
the executive director of Danspace Project, invokes the
importance of an ethical practice in the introduction
to the Parallels catalogue�the clumsy, vulgar performance
of blackface to a mostly white audience seemingly needs
no discussion or apology. We are living in a climate of
permissive and willful ignorance, and what occurred is
symptomatic of a larger trend in society. There are a
set of tendencies and attitudes that are gaining currency
not only in art, but throughout the United States that
are denigrating black people�and not only black people,
but women, minorities, and other vulnerable communities.
We need to choose if we allow them to flourish or if instead
we responsibly, ethically, hold them up to scrutiny�beginning
in those very spaces of art. There was once a time when
the avant-garde imagined the world otherwise and worked
to create an ethical and just life. Can we afford to lose
that?
This
commentary originally appeared in The
Brooklyn Rail.
BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Dr. Tanya Jayani
Fernando, PhD is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is completing
a book on the avant-garde concept of shock. She has written
a play on dance, patronage, and race, called Dance, Salome!
Dance! Click here
to contact Dr. Fernando.
