Advocacy - International

Manila Pages - Part 1

A. GARCIA aka ROKAFELLA

North Bergen, NJ

Theater is a place where I can have a voice equal to the men... my stories can be told without being subjected to an outside perspective.a woman can be tough, aggressive, motivational and an example of abuse...Hip-Hop inside a theater is a liberating place for her to recite rhymes and play records-vinyl, spin on her head and create beats with her mouth, she can also hold a spray can and put her writings on the wall.  Hip-hop theater women are presented with many options regarding characters.so I am not stuck with just being an addict or a whore, but I can be an artist or a struggling artist or an artist trying to provide for her beloved partner and /or children... theater is there to reflect reality indoors, and I feel like my street reality is palatable to the indoors audience because we all hustle to some extent.we all want to fit in.hip-hop was about standing out, not conforming and so hip-hop is both...resisting and looking for recognition..the duality is perfect in theater.

ok hope you like it...hit me back...I have to dye my hair red tomorrow...not lucy ricardo red but a tint to my dark brown... who knows.it is for my character (of the crack mother) in that indy film.

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DAEL OLANDERSMITH

New York, NY

"I'm a trying to write stories."  I am interested in the human condition and to be pigeonholed as a "Black female playwright" is disconcerting to me. It is a given that I'm Black and female.  No one says that Arthur Miller or Edward Albee are white, male playwrights -- they're just playwrights.  Given that, it (in many people's minds) determines the "kind of writing" I should be doing.  The new play is an English/Irish/Nuyorican play written by me, a Black woman, and directed by a Czech woman.  An Asian woman will be doing costumes.  I explained this to someone recently and their response was "Why? are you trying to make a point?"  My repsonse was/ is: I'm NOT making a point.  This is the way it's supposed to be and that's the point.  Albee can write about Bessie smith, Neil Jordan can do the "Crying Game" and "Mona Lisa", Shakespeare can write the Moor.why can't I write a play about English and Irish people?  And what makes someone think that only white males have that option?  The rules have been set by white males and it's time to break them so ALL of us can just write...

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KARIN AGUILAR-SAN JUAN

St. Paul, MN

I don't have anything to say about theater except this comment about whiteness as a spectacle: I've been living for 4 years in the Great White North and still, it all looks like Lake Wobegon to me. Some people actually came here to photograph the place, which is supposedly fictional:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com /ngm/0012/feature5/

As for actual theater, I haven't paid for any.  Our students staged
something they called the Family Reunion which had good acting but no message; the point was for them to interview people all over the Twin Cities and tell their stories. Instead, the students told about themselves.  Isn't it often true that when we ask for other people's stories, what we hear is about ourselves?

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ELLEN McLAUGHLIN

Nyack, NY

So here's what I've been thinking about:

In the last year, as America's administration has steadily squandered all the international good will directed our way in the wake of 9/11 and piece by piece dismantled much of what is worthwhile about my country and the principles it was founded on, I have given in at times to despair and the helplessness of the particular kind of rage this obscenity has induced.

The one moment of hope occurred through this medium we all share. On March 3, 2003, a global phenomenon took place which was unprecedented in human history.  On that day, people all over the world did readings and performances of LYSISTRATA, one of the oldest plays in existence.  It was a project engendered by two out-of-work actresses in New York who put the plea on a web site, wondering if it might catch on.  It did, beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

Every major city in the world, along with numerous minor ones, hosted readings, sometimes dozens of separate ones in one city, in theaters, mosques, churches, town halls, temples and living rooms.   Performances were as far flung as Siberia, New Zealand and the press corps tent in Afghanistan.   During the course of that one day, a staggering number of people read that ancient Greek comedy about women attempting to stop war in the most direct way possible, by refusing sex, thereby refusing to bring more children into the world only to give them up to the engine of war.  Yes, it's a comedy, partly because it is about sex, which is inherently funny, but mostly because the women succeed.

Problem solved.  Everyone decides that, in the end, life and all its pleasures should be privileged over death and violence.  The joy of this stunningly simple solution seems out of reach to us, but there is tremendous hope in even entertaining the notion of it.

In being part of this unprecedented theatrical event (I directed and wrote the version done at Brooklyn Academy of Music--one of 56 readings in New York alone) I felt an extraordinary, palpable connection to the rest of the world for the first time in my experience.  And it was through this medium I have given my life to. That made sense to me.  The theater is unique as an art form, not because it can reach across boundaries and ethnic divides--all art is capable of such power--but because of the way in which it engages its participants in time together. 

It demands that living people perform in front of living people at just this moment, no other, speaking directly to each other, creating each ineffable, unrepeatable event together as they go along.  That such a modest medium--it exists only in its own time and space--could have such a worldwide effect was simply exhilarating. The event belonged to all of us and yet to none of us, not even to old Aristophanes.  No other art form can do that.  I am grateful to be a member of this profession.  I am humbled by the power it can unleash.

May we never underestimate it.

Ellen McLaughlin

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CARIDAD SVICH

New York, NY

We live in uncertain times.  Perhaps times have always been uncertain.   But it seems to me that now the uncertainty of the modern condition is particularly palpable, as a strange soft porn mentality has begun to govern our lives.  There seems to be an increasing, and alarmingly so, lack of clarity not only in local but global culture, as those in power refuse with egregious nonchalance and arrogance to acknowledge the fragile ecologies that need subsist in our world, and the rate of poverty that grows exponentially whilst an infinitesimal percentage of people control the economy.

Those of us who practice art are faced daily with not only the blank page, stone, or screen, but also the seeming impracticality and irrelevance of making work for a consumer-driven culture.  The worth and value of a piece of work is measured often by how much one has sold one's work and to whom.   Intrinsic value is not a marketable commodity, but therein lies the strength and power of what we as theatremakers and artisans do.  We are joined at the hip to the ephemeral, to the vanishing moment, or the passing look.

We make something for it to last not eternally but in finite time.  Art is like life: finite, and subjected to random destiny.  It takes fortitude, will, a good sense of humor and precious little nonsense to get things done and do them with honesty and integrity. We know we are passing through, we know art is a simple mark of our passing through this time and space. Reveling in the temporal, we need look both inside and outside ourselves in order to document properly what we see, hear, and feel, what impacts us truly, regardless of fashion's impatient sensibility. It is tempting and comfortable to submit to fashion. But what if fashion is fascist or inhumane? Do we go along with it anyway? It is not for me to judge or preach. But it is important to me to keep vigilant to culture, and how it transforms and evolves over time.

Practitioners are involved in a constant and neverending lab experiment with the art form, the discipline, and society. Each mark, cyberscrawl, or invisible footprint (consciously drawn or not) becomes part of the skin stretched out over the planet, and part of the living membrane of society. It is our job as theatremakers to not only make the mark but be alert to the other marks that have been made before us and in our time. We cannot predict the future, even as it is constantly within our reach as every second goes by. But we can make a living present, a truly living present (living for all) out of the strength of our conscience, and a willingness to refuse intolerance in our world.

A far cry heard close:
Multiple languages are released
through the human
YES

Caridad Svich
resident playwright, New Dramatists

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SARAH SCHULMAN

New York, NY

Thank you so much for this invitation. The situation is so wrong that I don't know if I really have the strength to describe it. In summary the problem is that the white men who run the theater believe that they are objective, neutral, and value free. They see anyone else as special interest. They identify with plays that either reflect their own coming of age experiences, or that re-enforce their sense of themselves as right, regular, the way things are. When one of us tries to expand the paradigm of what is allowed to be seen on stage, we are told that what we are doing is wrong.  Familiar is right.  Like all people with power, they want to be told what they already know-principally that their experience is superior.   My experience is that gay men with power understand that oppression exists but are profoundly bored by women, and that straight men with power have no comprehension of the oppression experience, and - most importantly - the impact of exclusion and stigma on individual human beings. It's a dismal, upsetting experience to be part of this.

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SUSAN JONAS

New York, NY

(A recent NYSCA report surveyed regional theaters around the U.S. and found only 16% of the plays written by women, and 17% directed by women).

I am so glad the report has some impact.  Only honestly I don't SEE the impact.  I SEE mainstream theatres that say there are dedicated to new American plays producing seasons with maybe one play by a woman, maybe one by an artist of color, usually directed by a man-- in a city like NYC, with an audience that is 62% female-- granted almost exclusively white.  I see plays that deal not at all with world politics.  I see women voting in Arnold Schwartznegger and voting against themselves, like the Jews leading up to the Holocaust, and supporting the loss of their own hard-won rights, I see decreasing representation in government -- LESS advocacy for childcare -- and a world perception that women's rights are not human rights.

So, well, the report circulates among already disgruntled women who never seem to organize and use their leverage. And men don't read it or feel in the least pressure to change their programming or their thinking.

I am very glad you are going to the international conference and so wish I could go in your pocket.  PLEASE bring back the news and CIRCULATE it.  We need information widely disseminated.  If the journals and AMERICAN THEATRE and the papers won't carry it in detail, then please won't you send us emails and we'll do our damndest to get it out over the internet.

Rant over. Best Susan.

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NATSUKO OHAMA

Los Angeles, CA

I do want to say something as a woman and a theatre person.

It feels that the real work for me is in the voice work, since I haven't done a play since the "Tempest" and perhaps I should address that.  I feel the part of my work that is the voice teacher is engaged in the most important political action for me.  The events surrounding the war in Iraq, our civil liberties, the right to choose, the environment, the constant amazing outrages and revelations by the government and big business and the sense of powerlessness on many people's part, have made it imperative to free people's voices to speak.

The ability of the human voice in the theatre and in life, to reveal our thoughts, desires and emotions, is one of the major components in communication.   The more connected and free it is the better the communication.   So many people are now dulled and cowed into silence and indifference.   It is essential that theatre, the most human of arts, awaken the spirit and encourage expression not repression.  I am working on the breath, vibrations, physical bodies, minds, emotions of people, so when they unite with text the spark of life ignites.  It has become increasingly important that people speak truly and from the heart.  When the cliff of fear rises up in front of you, throw up your life lines, cramp irons, and pick axes and begin the climb, hand over hand, step by step. SPEAK!!!

I hope this is okay.  I do feel this Alice, that as fun as it may be to play a pedicurist on a Bernie Mac film, or the dry-cleaner on King of Queens, and I do my one line with commitment and energy, it is not the most valuable of my work.  I do not want to put it down, since I have a great sense of humor and enjoy it, and there is a lot of talent involved.  Still at the end of the day, what are we here for, and what is life about?  I have this ability to teach and inspire and it behooves me to use it...as my friend Greg Cole told me when he was a child, he talked back to his father...."I've got a tongue in my head
and I'll use it!!"

Love, Natsuko

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POLLY PEN

New York, NY

Here's a quick thought...

I've been feeling an increasingly joyous bubble of subversion as I
scribble away in a country that seems subsumed with the words "safety" and "security".  I almost begin to bless the idiocy that hovers about us...

hmm. Polly.

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ELENA MINOR

Los Angeles, CA

Something happens to women when they write for each other: they break barriers and find familiar pathways to communication: starting here . . . going there  

It's when they have to write to The Paradigm that they get lost.   The paradigm is still Aristotle's, who posited it most likely because he couldn't find a pathway and decided to invent one that would be simple and easy for others like him to understand.  Communication and the artistic expression of it are difficult and complex phenomena, like trees.  He stripped off the leaves, then cut off the smaller outlying branches upon which they hung, and shortened the larger branches to fit them all in his peripheral vision sightlines (so he wouldn't have to move his head in order to see one or more entire trees).  It is still a tree, he must have insisted.  I have simply pared it down to its essential parts.  He might then have chuckled to himself at his play on words.

Difficult to explain, or even comprehend [in one page], how across the millennia much of the creative realm women once inhabited in theatre disappeared, while Aristotle's stunted tree survived and was transformed into the petrified legacy that dominates -- even rules - in the US today.   Some US women writers have accepted and adopted this predominantly "rational" paradigm and flourish in its execution (or seem to).   Others struggle with it, knowing that what they have to say doesn't fit the box, but understanding that if they do not or will not or cannot communicate within its parameters, they had better choose a medium other than theatre.   Still others make the hopeful attempt but end up walking away because it is a gut gouger.   To go that deeply into essence, then pull it out, put it on paper, entrust it to others, then make it public and have to defend it as not to the paradigm is a fearsome thing and often gets to be more than is bearable.   Better to withdraw and return to silence, which is what most US women of color do.

To be a woman of color of the US writing colorfully in the US is still a struggle to: 1) be heard at her own pitch; 2) be seen in a hue of her own mixing; 3) be acknowledged as a rightful self; 4) be felt as a creative force; 5) be enabled to roam free.  

Notwithstanding, once or even twice per decade a WOC of the US is accorded honor and small tribute.  Five thousand words of rave and 'nuff said print out on the pages of magazines with a collective circulation of five hundred worldwide.   Big hoopla tolls out for a l-o-n-g, l-o-n-g ten seconds to all the digerati via their small and smaller screens and the young are pacified that all's well in the mediated colorblind society they insist they inhabit.   But they don't come to hear the words or see the vision. [Sidebar question: When pain touches pain, does the one cancel the other out or is it simply greater pain?]

[A final note to note:] Not writing to the paradigm is not indicative of an inability to understand, learn and master the rules of convention; rather, it is this: Writing is what it is and that is all it can be.

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