WHY BLOOD QUANTUM IS NOT ABOUT BLOOD

An Easterner who knew nothing about "Indians" questioned the title of one of my short stories:  “Blood Quantum,” which was meant to be a fictionalized tracing of how the US Army originally tried to impose order on a population they had just “conquered” and were therefore obliged to record and feed.  (In modern times conquerers feel no such obligation.)  The People were lined up, their names written down (though these People had several names each without counting nicknames or translations and they belonged to an oral culture unacquainted with writing which is different from being illiterate in a writing-based culture) and that original list became the provenance (the genealogy) and fate of all the following generations.  They were LEGALLY  pure Blackfeet, no matter that there were Cree, even  enemy Shoshone, maybe a few Irish and several other categories on the list.

“Tribe” was a European concept and so was Nation.  So was “legal.” The People just traveled together, partly because of being related and partly just because they liked each other.  There was no boundary, as there is for the category called “citizen.”  The reader asked “quantum what?”  He’s used to hearing about quantum physics, I think.  We can only interpret new things via things we already know -- unless one has means of inquiry that opens both cans of worms and the sky after storm.  This guy will try to fit “quantum” into “genome” but basic blood types hadn’t even been discovered when the first list was made.

The biggest problem is the courage it takes to look at something that may challenge one’s assumptions, which is the basis of one’s identity and relationships.  Trying to go farther and deeper has destroyed a whole sequence of communities who thought they had it all -- including me.  The main thing I learned is that to learn some things will mean a death of illusion.  For instance, the more I learn about my family, so sure it was fairly virtuous and educated, is that it wasn’t.  This makes me unwelcome at family events, but there are few of them now anyway -- they’re out of fashion and I have never met the people under thirty.  Even the denomination that claimed it accepted everyone turned out to be as prosperity-worshipping and proselytizing as any others.

My terms of understanding are drawn from fields so far from what most people know that to them I sound like a stuttering idiot speaking nonsense.  (Blood quantum -- WTF?)  The assumption of our times is that people exist in friendship networks which they are proud to extend and which mean good commercial skews.  Prosperity and proselytizing in their devil’s bargain.

The first of my favorite two fields is methods of indigenous thought -- both by and about and inclusive of a number of “disciplines” like paleogenetics, cell morphology, disease and language patterns, neuropsychology -- stuff we’re just defining as we come capable of perceiving them.  The two main principles are that everything is related, even interwoven; and that everything is a process -- it’s all constantly changing in some random and surprising way.  Someone recently suggested that if we knew the genomes of everything, we could make the world be the way we want it: safe, luxuriant, and easy.    They haven’t understood anything.

The other field of method and awareness I’ve internalized is that of theatre.  Not just naturalistic portrayal of humans, but also the landscape and illusion projected on the kuppelhorizont of our minds, which means all the aspects of religion from the rigid and politicized “organized” religions to the drug-propelled visionary sensorium people sometimes call “spirituality.”  On the one hand, all this stuff is just a kaleidoscope of broken glass making patterns in a handheld tube.  On the other hand, it’s the only focus and meaning we have and we must hold on despite the tumbling.

Lou Diamond Phillips in place

Indians just seem so different.  Are they better or worse than us?  Should we imitate them or run from them?  By now isn’t their blood quantum so diluted, their cultural context so broken, their competence so challenged, that we ought to just dump the concept of indigeneity -- people shaped tightly to their location -- altogether?  Movies begin to be about the entirely pristine tiny groups in the Amazon forest who have never made contact with the larger world.  How do we know ANYTHING about them?  Should we send an envoy?  Sting? (To “help” them -- i.e. control them.)  In there somewhere is the hope that they really are magic.

I’m interested in the series called “Longmire” that’s based on a wagonload of procedural mysteries by Craig Johnson.  I was startled that our librarian dislikes the video series on grounds that it portrays tribal people as corrupt and avaricious.  It took me a while to understand that the show uses the point of view of actual "indians" and from the tribal point of view right now people are obsessed with corruption among their own people.  So is the larger world, which makes the issue worthwhile.

Graham Greene in "Clearcut", an early Canadian film

Graham Greene in "Longmire", current

The fact that many roles are played by NA’s with chops means that there’s a “real-feel” that can be disconcerting.  I mean, watching Graham Greene’s career and personal life can be wrenching.  On the other hand, the idea of an old woman who is an authority and a mystic at the same time, is absolutely convincing when the battered hat and impossible shelter belong to Tantoo Cardinal.  Lou Diamond Phillips is plainly at the heart of all the plots, sometimes more than the sheriff.

I haven’t talked to any local tribespeople about these things.  The ones under thirty or even forty are nearly indistinguishable from small town whites, all wrapped up in  music and celebrities.  The ones with whom I used to discuss these ideas are dead -- not long ago.  They used to be travelers, widely-read, linked to people who knew things.  More political than anthropological.  It is lucky that I saw my solitary state coming and prepared for it.

But I’m disappointed in all cultures most of the time.  They’ve forgotten so much and refuse to learn anything at all.  The movement called “political correctness” has created much evil with their idea that people can only speak for people just like themselves.  Instead of creating an even playing field it has opened a litigious abyss.  Publishers and producers are afraid of such poison -- it costs money.

Australian and Filipino = contemporary American West

Theatre teaches me to enter other people, to feel their spines in my own back, to look out through their eyes. There is so much stored in people of the land, even now, but not for much longer.  Not because they are disappearing but because their land is disappearing, industrialized, poisoned by agriculture, and now dried and burnt by cities sucking up every resource.  The cities make the laws, the cities still want us numbered, recorded, controlled.  The cities are the Matrix.  They know nothing, John Snow.

WINDJAMMER IN A THOUGHT STORM

Name, please?

When I have trouble framing up a blog post, it is never because there is no material at hand.  It is invariably because I’m in the middle of a storm of ideas demanding digestion and readjustment of assumptions.  New facts elbow each other through my many frames of reference.  I'm confused.

Just now I went cruising Google for Alvina Krause, my professor of acting at the end of the Fifties, (because the essay I wrote about her methods is supposed to be published this month in http://stanislavskistudies.org) but instead I found by serendipity the photostream of PR images of the productions at the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble in Pennsylvania dedicated to her methods.   https://www.flickr.com/photos/btepr/albums.  The theatre is named for her.

"Moon over Buffalo"

I don’t know all the plays, but they appear to be amenable to the realism strategy of sense-memory evoked by the Method and faithful to the dilemma/crisis/resolution sequence that Ivy League schools admire.  This is not a put-down -- done carefully these productions will not just be remembered for a lifetime but will also change your internal life.  But they are often thought-based in conventional terms.

Then I find this note about a production of “Ladies Ring Shout”  by Honey Pot Performance “An Afro-diasporic creative collaborative community centered on feminist and fringe sensibilities.”  This is staged in a theatre also named for Alvina Krause on the NU campus.  The presenters perform something “devised”  by hefty black women, a minority (powerful) of a minority (women) of a minority (African American).  You may have seen these woman around but never had one over for dinner and drinks.  In fact, I’d bet on it.  (Except for Tim.)

“Using a combination of spoken word, movement, and an original soundtrack, The Ladies Ring Shout journeys through contemporary women of color’s experiences. The multimedia work meditates on four frames integrated into our lived realities – the statistics and sociological condition of women of color, our mundane everyday acts, the codes and rules we are disciplined into, and the myths we conjure to imagine our future possibilities.”

When I was in Annie May Swift Hall learning about sense memories, the closest we came to such people was statues in Malvina Hoffman’s Hall of Man downtown at the Field Museum of Natural History.  Now dispersed to avoid accusations of racism.)  The character I worked on was the woman with a bowl on her head who has paused to watch a cockfight.  I suppose Clifford Geertz might have watched her in real life somewhere in Bali.

Here’s the anonymous entry about Geertz and cock-fighting in Wikipedia.  "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is an essay included in the book The Interpretation of Cultures by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Considered the most seminal work of Geertz, the essay addresses the meaning of cockfighting in Balinese culture.

Cockfights were generally illegal in Indonesia when Geertz was doing his fieldwork there in the 1950s. The first cockfight that he and his wife viewed was broken up by the police. The experience of hiding from the police in the courtyard of a local couple allowed Geertz to break the tension between himself and the villagers, and perform all of the interviews and observation which make up The Interpretation of Cultures.

“The essay describes how cocks are taken to stand in for powerful men in the villages, and notes that even the double-entendre sense of the word "cock" exists in the Balinese language as much as in English.

“The last half of the essay describes the rituals of betting and concludes that the cockfight is the Balinese comment on themselves, as it embodies the network of social relationships in kin and village that govern traditional Balinese life.

“The title of the essay is explained as a concept of Jeremy Bentham, who defines "deep play" as a game with stakes so high that no rational person would engage in it. The amounts of money and status involved in the very brief cockfights make Balinese cockfighting "deep play." The problem of explaining why the activity prevails is what Geertz sets out to solve in the essay.”

This is nicely dry and informative.  But perhaps the experience of that acting work guided me to the Blackfeet and Bob Scriver, sculptor.  Later, maybe even to animal control where my “beat” included a guy who raised fighting cocks, though I never caught him.  In that neighborhood, no one objected to the fighting -- cruelty was a given -- but they didn’t like the noise.  No one with hangovers like noise early in the morning.  Nor attracting attention.

But even now, deep into a writing retirement, those acting concepts are guiding me through the stories of the Cinematheque boys who have done survival sex work, which in the age of AIDS just doesn’t work anymore.  Nice people don’t go there.  The vocabulary alone stands your hair on end: repetitious, bare bodied, defiant -- almost chanting.  Not in books -- in vids.  The code is about four layers down below convention.  If you don’t have the frame (survival, swagger, need, money) it won’t mean much.  I’ve never read an essay analysis of tricking in terms of cock-fighting but I can imagine the concept with no trouble. 

The analysis I did of the statue woman was about her impassiveness as she stood, pausing in her work, gazing with no emotion at a frenzy of blood, feathers and shrieking birds -- descended from dinosaurs, you know.  And that seems typical of the boys, too.  “Cool” -- though their bodies are scarred by attacks.  What about the betting and hunger for prestige?  Oh, yeah.

Moby Dick PR   This would be Queequeg, tattooed

Both the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble and the Honey Pot Performances <http://honeypotperformance.com/video/> are “devised” by group testimony about their place in time and space.  Lookingglass Theatre, another Chicago-based company does something similar that’s halfway between.  “Moby Dick,” the current production, might easily be framed as the tall ship culture as a predecessor to the boy-whore internet culture.  Isn’t the technology of sails, ropes and anchors as compelling as internet platforms and image management?  Aren’t the same whale-obsessed captains now at the helm of Apple and Twitter?  Aren’t the paths across the ocean among cultures the same unseeable forces?  Yet they draw on the vitality of the underclasses, compressed by need into a desire that cannot be fulfilled without death.

These distilled experiences onstage are incredibly powerful, esp. in a feeling denying culture.  But what do you do with them?  Video only gives clues.  Being there in person in the audience for the finally defined event is good, but in a low-density place an audience can never be big enough to pay the rent.  Many people have the idea that intense experience can be “bottled” online if you can just get the right shape of “bottle.”  

The evidence: an Austrialian beetle with just the right imprint to fall in love

 with shiny, dimpled, brown bottles -- oh, Mama!  I like 'em BIG!

And that means those engineers can stay detached from engagement on grounds that they are bottlers.  Doing that separates them from the raw and raging actuality.  If we could see into their neuron pathways, we would see the rationality (means) getting thicker and the inspiration (ends that require feeling and metaphor) surrendering, thinning, hungering.  No drug can compensate for experience.  But at least performance can suggest the tastes, point to the locations.  Give the audience courage in the world, even for social change.  Give the code engineers more insight.

DANCING WELL WITH PARTNERS

Me, 1962 or so. 

High school dramatics saved my life.  Not the life everyone saw with me walking around, a good girl getting good grades, but the REAL life where I had dragonfly wings and could sing in a strange key no one could hear.  Even writing was not a comfort in those days with the “creative writing” teacher demanding that I demonstrate the robin’s rain call I claimed I knew  (I did.)  Everyone praised too quickly -- no one really “grokked.”  Teachers would ask me to “help” and “befriend” obviously unhappy classmates, never hearing the shrieking in my own head.  I needed a community of people like me.

Onstage one can shriek -- in costume -- even in high school and certainly in real university theatre classes. What I learned was the necessity of empathy, the vicarious inhabitation of other people’s worlds and motives.  The Blackfeet reservation was “grad school” where the trade-off for the survival of the group versus survival of the individual was “for reals,” truly life and death.  Being “nice” was a defensive pose but no guarantee of not starving.  White skin helped but it was a minority identity.  The whole delicate diplomacy of advance and retreat according to race, gender, status, is always a dance.

Queens of the Ball

Last night I watched “Paris Is Burning” for the first time (you can find it online).  It was filmed when I was circuit-riding through Montana with 19^th century frontier Methodism as a script, so I never heard about it at the time.  I don't think many people did.  It’s a movie about dressing up and posing as the person you “really” are.   I mean, REALLY are. The other aspect is about forming groups:  “houses,” as in couture; “family” to replace the one that threw you out; "voguing" and "throwing shade" as ways of extravagantly interfacing one’s most flamboyant showing-off self with all the competitors and sympathizers, judgers and defenders.  Very tribal.  A rumbling rhumba.

I don’t think anyone has ever interpreted “Paris Is Burning” -- the whole phenomenon of a minority blazing out in a protected setting -- in terms of a Native American pow-wow.  Surely fancy-dancing is not so different from voguing, a way of yearning and mocking at the same time.  No 19^th century warrior or hunter danced in a whirl of bright ribbons and ostrich feathers, but neither does the 21^st century dancer have to fear the cavalry will come to shoot them dead as they once did.  (Gays still might worry.  Hispanics?  We're all worrying.)  The two forces -- self-expression and community solidarity -- combine in a very powerful way on that grassy campground next to Browning.  The families, like "ball houses” act in the same competitive way, driving each other to higher achievement, but sheltering the vulnerable.

Portland, OR, Leadership Forum

In the Nineties I still had heard nothing about this movie and even now it’s discussed more in terms of Gay than Black, New Orleans in Harlem.  In that decade I was working for the City of Portland, which was trying to come to terms with the Black population it acquired in wartime when Kaiser brought in shipyard labor.  Affirmative action meant that I was working with Blacks, getting to know them at least a little bit.  They knew that movie. 

When I got on the bus and saw an empty seat next to one of my Black coworkers, I hesitated to sit there and he saw that, so then I was determined to sit there.  We talked about golf.  He’d stop by my desk and ask if I had any hand cream and I’d give him some from the tube in my drawer.  (We worked so much with paper that our hands were always dry.)  Then I thought I’d be generous and gave him a tube of his own -- too late seeing that he took it as rejection, not wanting to share a water fountain.  We step on each other's toes.

There were enough Blacks that they interacted among each other, less guarded than otherwise.  One of them, a young (and according to them, very spoiled) woman would occasionally “vogue.”  When I imitated her, everyone was both amused and nervous.  It was indiscrete.  Was it hostile?

These ladies are in my old nabe in Portland.

The men of color were careful not to be anything but conventional in a white way.  One older dignified man was constantly treated like a slave by our little white hen of a boss, I think because she was afraid of him.  Me, too.  I mean, she was afraid of me, too.  He and I became sympathizers.  He was a strong church person and since I was thinking about all those issues, I decided to attend his church.  He met me there, thinking I would feel isolated, and his small son came along as chaperone so no one would get the wrong idea.  People were dressed as for a coronation, fabulous upper-class Brit couture with hats like herons spreading wings.  Everything was patterned.  The music was soaring.  It was another moment when people who usually had to keep their heads down for safety were able to really cut loose, not in a low way, but as an entitlement to the best, most powerful, most splendid.  Star power.  Status.

Octavia St. Laurent

People in middle-class white America don’t much dress up for church anymore.  Even the pastors are not so likely to wear robes and enter in procession with the choir.  There seems to be a feeling that it would be “fake,” pretentious.  But poor people don't admire dressing down.  The funeral practice on the rez now -- if the family can afford it -- features pall-bearers wearing new matching cowboy shirts with emblematic armbands.  

Priests still dress up, though the Pope now dresses down.  It's a matter of distinguishing oneself in the vocabulary of wardrobe.   (In the wonderful comic strip called “Francis,” he tries on Benedict’s fancy red shoes and finds himself in Kansas!) 

http://www.gocomics.com/francis/2014/06/09#.U8FN-BaFWFI

Francis demonstrates empathy.

Somehow the hippie/back-to-the-land/anti-arrogance/grunge levelers and deflators have gone a little too far:  they’ve damaged the joy of extravagance, the satirical flamboyance of dressing-up and “playing the role.”   The fairy godmother no longer helps us "go to the ball in in a fabulous gown."  

The “mothers” of the “houses” who are interviewed in “Paris Is Burning,” take a protective, encouraging but not unrealistic, view of their “babies.”  They know these youngsters have been thrown out of their birth families; they know they survive through shop-lifting, sexwork, low-pay drudge work, whatever they have to do; they know that they are constantly in danger and, in fact, one of the most appealing people interviewed is found dead before the end of the movie.  (Octavia St. Laurent has also died.)  In such communities an aquifer of tears is just under the surface.  If it converts to fuel, the fire consumes cities.  Not just Paris.

Religion as institution can enable and justify destruction.  But as small voluntary organic organizations like the former Elks gymnasium productions in “Paris Is Burning,” they can give life, a ground of being where individuals can take root for survival.  They must be kept secret, or at least confidential, so as to attract only those who are seeking them.  They cannot be produced by advertising campaigns like those the denominations fund in hopes of growth.  In fact, even the North American Indian Days pow-wow has become something like a State Fair with out-of-state carnival rides and gimcrack vendors.  $500 fee for a booth on the fairway.  Locals can't afford them.

Military "drag" is popular around the world.

A few years ago Tom Cruise came through to promote Scientology, claiming Indian spirituality as Euros constantly do.  Several people gave Cruise valuable gifts, like solidly beaded vests, expecting that he would reciprocate by maybe inviting them to stay at his place in Hollywood.  NOT.  He thought he was entitled to homage.  Sometimes gay people come to the rez, thinking that all indigenous people are levelers, innocent of social prejudice and ranking.  NOT.  Every tribe has its own gender arrangements, but all respect wealth.  Most are a little uneasy around African-Americans unless they've spent time in the city.

Maybe such organic communities as the ones in the film are on the internet now.  There's a LOT of dance on YouTube, amazing moves.  It wasn’t until the action shifted to pocket computers that filaments of empathy could connect people.  Maybe we need to see faces as well as hearing voices and music. I’m told that soon every school child on the rez will be given a “tablet”.  Let it happen.  We should hand out smart phones all over Central America.  Give them city, give them “houses.”  Call the tribes.  

This is the fifth step of this process of achieving deep meaning: connecting to all these others and what they are feeling.  Find your people.  This is a powerful way to move the out-skin world to the in-skin understanding of who and where you are.  It will take you back to expanding the repertoire of your own bodily instrument, your sensorium.

Hopi Homecoming Royalty

from EDWARDIAN to AQUARIAN: Alvina Krause

Starting to accumulate information about someone on a blog (or in this case two blogs) is not the same thing as writing a book about them.  It’s easy to say,  “write a book” which people envision as one waving a magic wand so “poof” it appears on a shelf somewhere.  One needs to justify writing a biography.  In fact, a thorough search of places and documents means an investment of considerable money and travel.

These are scans of scans rather than transferred code, so they are a little vague which AK was NOT!  

They come from Tom Foral and remind us of AK's favorite teaching story which was about an actress who could summon the sense memory of a rose so vividly that the audience could tell what color the rose was.  The photos were taken at the Bloomsburg home of AK and Lucy McCammon.

Alvina Krause (January 28, 1893 – December 31, 1981) was an acting professor at Northwestern University who taught her own version of the famous “Method,” which used sense memories from the lives of the actors to evoke realistic acting.  That’s not all there is to acting,  First one has to learn lines, follow blocking, make sure to cheat towards the audience, project to the back wall of the auditorium, “land” lines and all manner of other technical things that need to become unconscious, intuitive and second nature.  Beyond that, an eerie and sometimes frightening magic seizes the actor and audience in a trance of belief.

Krause was considered a “star maker” and that’s the way Northwestern University presents her, with a long list of her “stars.”  She herself repeatedly emphasized that to come to her expecting to be made a star was folly.  She told a story about a mother who brought her son, demanding that Krause make him famous.  The silly woman was turned away.  But there were plenty of sons (and daughters) who came on their own, begging to be split open, to get at the heart of their passion or talent or whatever it was inside them that drove them towards this specific art form, a near-sacred vocation.  

Google can lead one in and out of many flammable and burnt buildings.  I’ve read what dead men wrote, secrets and old black mail, and -- if you know how to read between lines written in invisible ink or decipher codes from past eras -- a lot of nonsense and laughable convictions.  For former students none of that has the compelling power of Krause’s handwriting in one of the blue exam books where she scribbled her directing notes.  One glimpse and we’re back in some moment, skewered like an insect on a pin, when insight struck us between the eyes.  Oh!  THAT was it!

A handwriting sample and clip from Foral.  

She liked a small format as is this page which was evidently from a journal or diary notebook.

I’ve been posting all this on two blogs -- actually there are three if you count a fragment that I abandoned early.  They are www.krausenotes.blogspot.com  for those handwritten bits.  www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com for writing about Krause, much of it mine, I confess, but also notes and articles from others.  The fragment is at http://theplayhouseateaglesmere.blogspot.com  David Downs, a student and working partner of Krause, has also posted on a blog at www.DavidGoingOn.blogspot.com.   David Press’ thesis about Krause’s work is available at the usual Ph.D. thesis source, University Microfilms in Ann Arbor, MI, and Krause’s own Master’s thesis is available through the Northwestern Archives.  I put notes from them on "The Silver Comb" blog.  She did not receive a Ph.D.

People have wondered why Krause was abruptly and forcibly retired from the School of Speech and why no one has ever explained her work in the way that other famous Method teachers have been analyzed.  What is it that made her so effective and meaningful for so many people -- quite apart from any “star system” (an idea that made her snort) and even apart from the theatre, since many of us didn't become actors or directors.  Underlying the politics of the School of Speech and the actions of the university are the dynamics of a great sea-change in the nature of theatre and another deep shift in the assumptions of the larger culture.  The theatre went from realism to surrealism (possibly because of film or possibly because of a world gone absurd) and the culture went from prissy to libertine.

Krause’s lifespan nearly coincided with the 20^th century.  She began her career as a stalwart orator, Chautauqua-style, declaiming great literature for her rural Midwest small town.  Her first teaching job was in Seaside, OR, where she was the gym teacher.  Then began a slow progression up through a small college, then Garrett seminary, and to Northwestern University, by that time under the protection of Dean Dennis, a great favorite on the Chatauqua circuit.  She was technically a teacher of “interpretation” until almost the end of her teaching career, though by then she was staging plays year-round.

The materials on the blogs I shepherd are mostly from the last few years at Northwestern as they transitioned through Eaglesmere, PA to the Alvina Krause Theatre in Bloomsburg, PA, which is another source of information about Krause and her work. (http://www.bte.org) Over the years people tried to question her about her theories and methods, but she was evasive.  There were several interrelated reasons for this.  One was that she really didn’t have conscious theories and repeatedly protested that she just KNEW, she FELT it.  Questions felt like challenges.  In an academic setting she justified her presence in a university instead of a conservatory by emphasizing the crucial importance of history and culture, how it affected a character, how it had shaped the playwright.  Her conviction was that actors could never learn too much.

The Eagles Mere Playhouse in late days.

Photo from Foral.  He is with his mom and sister.

Some students were exploring religion, as is natural at this stage in life, and grappling with some very muscular serpents.  Questions about the core aspects of life were too much for some and there were accusations that her methods were too rough, damaging and belittling.  She was certainly no mollycoddler but the students came begging to be broken open.  It was risky in the way that true creation and art must be to have real value.  Not a pretty pursuit, an entertainment, but a gut-wrenching transformative experience.

Of course sex was part of it.  In those days girls at NU had to sign in and out after dark with a ten o'clock curfew, and the housemother came at midnight to make surprise bed-checks.  If a girl married or became pregnant, no matter the sequence, she had to leave.  A man caught in a homosexual act meant jail, a felony.  Krause was in what is sometimes called a “Boston marriage,” two women in household partnership, a matter of intimacy and trust.  Lucy did not come to campus, but in the summer and on long breaks the two women were together, often traveling.  No one quite believed in lesbian relationships anyway.  But at the other extreme some Method directors and actors at that time felt they had to break barriers and taboos on stage.  One was cautious about being associated with them.

School of Speech professors, who included high school dramatics coaches, speech pathologists, hearing experts, designers of stage lighting, costumers, and other stage technicians, were very assorted in style.  The debate and public speaking people traveled, competed, were half-politicians -- they were the randy ones with opportunities.  Interpretation?  I wouldn’t know.  An undercurrent of lust is always in the hard wiring of a university -- let alone in the euphoric or tortured atmosphere of theatre companies -- no doubt there was worry that it could burst into a conflagration that would consume alumni donations.

Today the School of Speech is gone, replaced by the five divisions of Communication Arts:  Communication Sciences and Disorders;  Communication Studies;  Radio, Television and Film; Performance Studies, Theatre (includes Dance)  Debate and interpretation have disappeared, along with the teaching of high school dramatics which was my actual major.

The division called “Rhetoric and Public Culture” would hardly stutter if presented with problems of sexuality, gender, and all that ticklish stuff.  So why leave that hidden social aspect of the Fifties/Sixties School of Speech unstudied?  What’s still in the closet anyway?

Former students.  Some “out”, some “bi,” some hidden, protecting reputations that control their employment, some just feeling like the Krause years were so intense and so personal that they don’t want them talked about.  And there are, bless ‘em, still people who had no consciousness of any of this.  We’re old now, our partners may be sick or dead, and life is tough enough without questioning what happened in one’s youth.  Some write their own books and include Krause as part of their story.

Former student Joy Zinoman, founder and director of The Studio Theatre, has already spoken of  Krause as a "fierce lesbian" and has been a living example of Krause's other and mostly unremarked major contribution, which is her belief in local repertory theatre like both EaglesMere and Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.

Maybe there’s no place or justification for a book about Alvina Krause.  Maybe it ought to be a play instead.  David Downs took a run at it.  Anyone else?  Or should we just let Alvina Krause fade into the past?  (I do not know who wrote the Wikipedia entry.)

"ENCOUNTER THEATRE" via ROBERT BENEDETTI

Church, theatre, social action, law court, public spectacle, counterculture, personal ritual, indigenous ceremony, movies -- they all move in and out of each other, rearranging the “chairs”, putting up and down the curtain. pulling on and off the masks, and abandoning some things altogether while inventing the unheard of, possibly by breaking a taboo or reversing the assumed.  After the post-war years (any of them) things are likely to get hairy and bare.  And loud.  Because a lot of fathers (and now mothers) didn’t come back or came back broken.  So now the kids have their say.

I’m reading Robert Benedetti’s Ph.D. thesis:  “Encounter Theatre.” (1971)  I asked him via email how he got from what I see as “cool” and literary NU Oral Interpretation  (I’m slowly reading “Literature as Experience” by Bacon and Breen, which is Benedetti’s basic guide.) to such intense and abandoned encounter work -- I mean, aside from the fact that it was Sixties going on Seventies.  He said the following and I’ll link you up with some clues from YouTube, which I needed in order to understand.  I do not know this material.

__________

“I got into Grotowski  from seeing The Constant Prince in New York, and The Living Theatre from seeing Paradise Now and Mysteries and Smaller Pieces in Pittsburgh, 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8tXiVj5Efk

“The Constant Prince”  Grotowski

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF7_BdHi_NA

“Paradise Now”     the Living Theatre

then getting to know Julian [Beck] and Judith [Malina].  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXKBuTyTY9g

When I ran the acting program at Yale, Joe Chaikin taught for me two days a week and we got to be friends. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZlKbp3KMHs

Joe Chaikin

So I was directly involved with the whole radical theatre movement, and was friends with Dick Schechner,   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJy1k2gSfAg&feature=fvsr

Luis Valdez,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isPFm9A_xRM

and others too. And that was why I chose the thesis topic I did. 

Breen had turned me on to Edward Bullough's Psychical Distance by then, and I saw the application at once.”

_____________

Benedetti’s thesis is not a “how to” which is what David Press’ thesis about Alvina Krause’s teaching methods was.  This thesis is theory which gives one principles about “why to” before “how to.”  UNdistancing the audience.  Doing what we in the church used to call “unscrewing the pews,” meaning changing the location of the seating.  Introducing social reform as a driving force.  Forming a company that is like a tribe in their willingness to commit to what they are doing.  There might be no scripts, but rather something like a road map, a structure, a set of forces acting against each other.  There might not even be any dialogue.  The action may have been worked out by experiment and rehearsal, but because of weaving different media together, cues need to be followed.  My opinion is that this way of doing things is not a way of skipping out on the skills of traditional theatre but a way of using them differently.  The audience may be asked to participate by representing people in the story -- a crowd maybe.

The 19th century Russian “bourgeois” audience loved natural realism that evoked emotion with which they could identify.  Stanislavski’s method of teaching acting was meant to equip actors to create this illusion of high realism (though it was artful) while the audience sat quietly in their seats.  Of course they were emotionally involved and their muscles must have been reacting vicariously to stage action, but the unsaid bargain was to pretend they weren’t there.  Then came movies.

Movies could create these illusions far more effectively and, as they became more sophisticated, manipulate the audience through flashbacks, controlling angles and nearness, distortions, varying speed -- all sorts of things.  Of course, the same thought processes and tension between realism and abstract affected the movies so that they, too, divided into streams.  One of the most interesting developments IMHO is folding theatre back into movies.  Some films have been watched so many times that we’ve memorized the dialogue and lost the emotional content.  Adding live actors and extravagant reactions suddenly wakes us up to a whole new thought pattern and renewed emotion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2A8KQAEDE8

Roundabout Theatre does “Brief Encounter”

Perhaps the link that has been missing in many minds is the one Benedetti identifies as the role of Meyerhold, who was with Stanislavski and then split to be more experimental.  As it worked out, this change revealed political content that was also more offensive to the powers-that-be, so that Meyerhold was suppressed and banished while Stanislavky remained a favorite of the status quo.  Defiant, experimental Meyerhold is the link to Encounter Theatre:  political ideas boldly presented.  I’ll come back to this “theatre genome” a little later.  It’s what I’m deriving from this sequence of theses originating when and where I did my own theatre work, such as it was.  I was totally unaware of these developments at the time.

To me, perhaps the wildest, most absurd, and therefore most engaging of the experimental theatre groups is the Blue Men.  This little video intro uses a voice-over to make it clear that the audience is included in the action.  There is magic, symbolism, social interaction that the audience clearly relishes, and a strange poignancy that comes from being able to read these actions so clearly while never quite forgetting how weird they are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQdWd_vdoM

Blue Men

ENCOUNTER THEATRE IN CALGARY

Back in the day, when Meadville/Lombard Theological School was a dignified and historic marker of the Unitarian tradition and each student had a key to the library stacks that occupied all of one end, I found the rows of old masters’ theses and decided to read them.  NO ONE ever read them.  Carefully bound in hardback dun muslin and full of heart-blood from generations of aspiring ministers, mostly dead by then, I thought they deserved some attention.  There were no major insights in them.  Mostly the ideas had just absorbed into the mainstream.  A thesis is generally supposed to be received wisdom.  One does not cut trail but re-affirms one’s mentor’s views.  One of my classmates was famous for having on his thesis pages more footnotes referring to previous authorities than text.

Now that I’m trying to frame up the materials available about the lifework of Alvina Krause -- in hopes that someone else will see how rich and meaningful it all is and decide to write the definitive book before it’s too late -- I’ve been trying to read theses through Interlibrary Loan.  Now and then I buy one outright, like David Press’ thesis about AK’s methods.  

In the past the assumption has been that book publishers would immediately pounce on anything worthy and put it on the market as a formal book.  That doesn’t happen anymore, at least not in the humanities.  Even in the sciences the safeguards and legal issues have become such a thicket that it’s certainly not automatic.  The first problem is just knowing that the subject exists.

This week I’ve ordered two theses from NUcat, the catalogue of thesis archives of Northwestern University.  I am an alumn (Sp ’61).  When my local librarian couldn’t follow the cybertrail into NUcat, I picked up the phone and called them.  (People don’t think of that very much these days.)  The NUcat librarian walked me through.  One thesis was Robert Benedetti’s “Encounter Theatre” (1971) and the other was Alvina Krause’s 1933 Master’s thesis, “A Study of Creative Imagination.”  They should be along in a few weeks.  I’ll tell you about them when they come.

In the process of searching, I did lot of googling and discovered other fascinating things.  For instance, Calgary (which is about a four hour drive north of Valier) has an Encounter Theatre !  http:/www.theatreencounter.com/

It’s worth quoting the website at length.

"The core of the theatre is an encounter." [Grotowski]  "It must have searing physical and oral impact." [Artaud]   

Cruel.  Happy.  Challenge.  

  

Theatre Encounter’s mandate is to create expressive alternative productions of theatre’s classic works with a focus on physical explorations and textual interpretations. Theatre Encounter enhances community development by artistic and social means through the essence of quintessential theatre. 

By reinventing classic texts through a modern Canadian perspective, with a strong emphasis on provocative language and embodying movement, Theatre Encounter offers Calgarians an alternative to the mainstream view of classic dramatic literature. 

Welcome to Theatre Encounter.

Approaching art through a performance medium (regardless of the other artistic mediums and multi-media facets that it encompasses) starts with the question of whether we want to tell a story or not. The creation is then able to have focus, which opens it up to style. The experimentation within specific styles is what allows for the discovery of exciting creation, and staves off banality and the trite. What Theatre Encounter insists on from their performers is full commitment to the implementation of the style at hand; this is very demanding work, which comes from full internalization before the aesthetic, and attempts to push the performer to their limits. 

The result edges them into a critical state of awareness that offers the viewer a dynamic connection that inanimate creations lack; as one’s body relates to another body on intellectual, emotional, visceral and energetic levels; the viewer and the viewed are engaged in a relationship that bring livened responses and transformations.  

Thus, the theatre becomes an engagement of individuals in a collective dynamic, and through the art of the actor, the relationship between audience and actor is the source of creativity and embodiment. The actor’s body becomes a dynamic relationship which reciprocates verbal or non-verbal messages and provides an opportunity for performers and audience members to integrate a totality of physical and mental reactions into their awareness. Moments more 'real' than others can be experienced.

In order for the performer to reach this unrestriction, a framework must be used in which the diversity of experience can be experimented within. We at Theatre Encounter believe that literature’s classic works, and a contemporary approach through style, are the perfect avenues for this inquiry; time-tested structures create a trusted code in which a contained modality of artistic and personal research is created.

Theatre Encounter produces a creative environment where a performer can be vulnerable and therefore open to this experiment, so their best work can be harnessed for the greater good of the group. The expulsion of this committed and imaginative work flows through the classic texts emblazoned throughout the ages.

We hope you will be as excited as the team here at Theatre Encounter about this season, as we strive to fully engage you with our art. As theatre theorist Antonin Artaud said, “we are not appealing to the audience’s minds or senses, but to their whole existence. To theirs and ours.” 

Michael Fenton & Mike Unrau

Co-Artistic Directors

Theatre Encounter’s vision is to create a world-class experimental theatre company and artistic & social research environment by reinventing the traditional into the contemporary, in order to push the cutting edge of artistic and social boundaries.

I’m not sure I really get it, but this spring I ought to have enough money to renew my passport and afford a trip to Calgary.  Sometimes it feels as though I’m balancing on the lip of an abyss and other times it’s as though my feet are guided by fate to a place I’ve been seeking a long time.  Most of the time, it’s both.  And that’s the way I want my life to be.  Encountered.

Nevertheless it’s surprising to discover “encounter theatre” which I’m only newly aware of and yet -- through NU -- deeply connected to, just a four hour drive across the border.  But then, Calgary was a key city for Bob and I in the Sixties as well.  I wonder if the Jade Palace is still open.

A sample review:

http://www.ffwdweekly.com/article/arts/theatre/not-something-for-everyman-5281/