Department Chair Allyson Green
and Dr. Nadine George-Graves
Address Racial Diversity and Tolerance
at Theatre and Dance
CALL TO ALL: DEPARTMENT TOWN HALL MEETING
Wednesday, March 10, 2010, 5:00 to 6:00 PM in the Arthur Wagner Studio Theatre
To All Students of Theatre and Dance (and Faculty and Staff)
It has been a very painful time on campus and the Department is in full support of creating an open, safe and supportive community for all of you. Following upon my statement last week, I have encouraged the faculty to give full consideration to any students in courses, practicums and meetings who have been greatly distressed by the recent events and have been busy organizing responses. I hope that your faculty are talking with all of you about what has been happening, and I have asked them to give you extensions if needed for course assignments. CEP is also allowing late withdrawals from courses if you feel you are unable to complete your classwork due to these events.
I join with other Chairs to condemn the recent racist acts on our campus, and we stand ready to assist the University in creating and enacting institutional policies that will make UCSD more accessible to and hospitable for all members of our community. We view the recent events as signs that UCSD must do more in order to achieve racial and cultural equity. We urge the administration to renew its commitments to ensure that racial and cultural equity and diversity are integral to any campus plans to restructure the university during the budget crisis.
In an active response to counter the these racist acts the Department is going to host an all campus arts response day on May 8, 2010 Saturday 6th week of spring quarter. We will send out a call for proposals next week asking for artistic responses to what has happened. These could be poetry, music, theatre, dance, performance art, essays etc to be performed all day inside and outside our theatre district. We would also like to invite visual art works to be created to hang in our hallways and lobbies. We also intend to invite Compton High students to make a presentation. The process is to include a campus wide call for proposals and then a vetting by a committee of interested PhD, Graduate and Undergraduate students and faculty. Staff participation is also very welcome. Selected proposals will be mentored through the creation and performance process to insure both quality and content. If you are interested in participating in this in any capacity, please let me know. I welcome all ideas and suggestions.
I am now calling a department wide Town Hall meeting from 5-6 pm in the Wagner Theatre. I hope that all of you will extend your schedule to attend, as I think it is very important that we come together as a FULL department at this time. Let us all create a welcoming community of faculty, staff and students that believes in the power of art as a tool to listen and reflect upon complex problems. Together we can create, transform and effect positive changes both locally and globally.
Thank you
Allyson Green
Chair, Department of Theatre and Dance
Return to Top
Department Chair Allyson Green's Letter From February 24, 2010
As Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, I would like to address the “Compton Cookout” party organized by UCSD students and the subsequent racially charged performance aired by The Koala on SCTV. I deplore the actions of these students and I am dismayed at their lack of understanding of the enormous harm they have caused. I urge all of you to listen to the leaders of the teach-in today and to recognize the very real pain that has emerged last week, but has been felt long before this. I hope that this forum today is just the beginning of a sorely needed dialogue and commitment to initiatives on this campus to address the need for greater diversity at UC San Diego.
I am proud that you will be hearing a statement from Dr. Nadine George-Graves from our department which I hope will help you to understand the painful historical implications of the theme of the Compton Cookout. I hope that you will learn today why this party was not “harmless fun” as it has been defended.
Our department has a long tradition of exploring theatre as a modern incarnation of an ancient form that examines the human experience, promotes civic dialogue, and serves as an educational and creative resource for the campus at-large. We are a community that actively embraces and supports diverse voices, in our classes, in our studios and in our productions. We are committed to providing a home for a diverse student population, and successfully recruit minority students into all of our programs. We have recruitment and scholarship initiatives to encourage even greater numbers of minority students, and I pledge our continued devotion in this effort.
I would like you to know of what we are proposing as ideas to positively address the events of the past week.
Our students and faculty are engaged in discussions, and have been examining this issue in all of our current classes. We are currently designing new curriculum ideas and in a symposium next quarter in response to these deplorable events.
We had already established undergraduate awards for minority students such as the Dr. Floyd Gaffney and the Dr. Jorge Huerta Spirit awards, and we are conducting a funding campaign for these.
Our Dr. Floyd Gaffney National Playwriting Competition on the African-American Experience, selects one new play, selected from submissions by enrolled undergraduate students from across the country to receive a staged reading in our Baldwin New Play Festival. We urge you to apply and create your own response.
We would like to expand upon this competition with the creation of an arts festival next quarter that will seek submissions across the campus for artistic and scholastic responses to these events. We will be sending out a call as this idea is finalized.
We will be featuring site-specific dance and theater performances all next year in honor of the 50th anniversary of UC San Diego, that will honor minority voices in the strong tradition of street theatre such as El Teatro Campesino and Boal Theatre.
We invite you to our many theatre and dance productions that feature minority playwrights, designers, dancers and actors and we pledge to a season that will continue this mission.
If you would like a place to develop your positive response to this discussion today, please bring your ideas to the Department of Theater and Dance. You will find a welcoming community of faculty, staff and students that believes in the power of art as a tool to listen and reflect upon complex problems. Together we can create, transform and effect positive changes both locally and globally. Our door is open to all of you.
Sincerely,
Allyson Green, Chair
Department of Theatre and Dance
858-534-6889
Return to Top
Dr. Nadine George-Graves'sStatement From February 24, 2010
UCSD Teach-In Address
Performance is Not Benign
by Dr. Nadine George-Graves
Associate Professor, Theater and Dance
February 24, 2010
Good afternoon.
My name is Nadine George-Graves and I’m an Associate Professor here in the Department of Theater and Dance.I have devoted my entire professional life and scholarship to issues of race and gender in performance. Here are some classes that I have taught here:
African American Theater
African American Film
Gender and Performance
The Body and Performance
Ethnicity and Performativity
My books are:
The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and
the Negotiations of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940
and the forthcoming
Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working It Out
I have many articles on similar topics and my creative work as a director also deals with these issues. I say this because I know there has been some backlash against this event and wonder if the speakers are qualified to talk on the subject. So I wanted to let you know where I’m coming from as a scholar.
I want to start off by saying that I fully support the BSU students and faculty of African descent in their efforts to bring about real structural change that has been an ongoing struggle escalated by recent events. I want to acknowledge the strong responses against these acts from many different constituents in our community, not just African Americans, who stand in solidarity with these efforts.
A number of students in the department of Theater and Dance have written a statement that begins to get at some of these issues from a perspective that has not been fully addressed in the blogs and open letters that I’ve read so far. We’re passing them out today and will post it online. I encourage you to read it because I can only give a nod to these issues here. This is not an official statement from the department of Theater and Dance, doesn’t represent everyone in that department’s opinion but the students felt strongly that they wanted to get this word out to you and add their voices to the many others decrying the actions and calling for institutional change and I support them in that. We are also passing out a statement from the department chair. I encourage you to read the blogs on stopracismucsd.wordpress.com as well as the battlehate.ucsd.edu website. I encourage you to read as much as you can—talk to as many people as you can and educate yourselves, because I can’t do it all in 15 minutes. I encourage you to take classes that address these issues especially if you don’t see anything wrong with these events.
I’ve been asked to explain the historical and social context surrounding the “Compton Cookout” to help people understand why the originating incident is “a big deal.” I’ll be honest with you, when first asked, I was concerned, ambivalent and a bit outraged about this charge. My entire body of scholarship is dedicated to analyzing and articulating the negotiations of power in terms of race, class and gender through performance on and off stage. So it makes sense that I was asked. But how do I condense that rich and complex scholarship into 15 minutes? But as events escalated I decided that I wanted to use this opportunity to do a small part toward battling ignorance.
Of course, two hours is a drop in the bucket. And this must be part of the larger response from the University and not just a band-aid. We must all keep the administration accountable for that.
I can’t tell you how many versions of this talk I’ve written, each in response to the latest occurrence or internet response or news piece. And I stand here right now, not quite knowing what to say. This has become so enflamed that I seriously doubt anybody can hear what I have to say.
There is no trust on this campus
The atmosphere is toxic and hostile.
The atmosphere was toxic and hostile before but it has become unbearable and unsustainable.
This community has fractured.
Unless the demographics of student, staff and faculty representation and the commitment to work in areas of race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability and cognate fields is more fully supported, nothing I can say here today will matter.
Not to mention this is just plain embarrassing. UCSD is becoming known nationally as an institution of intolerance and ignorance. What year is this?! I hope the university takes quick, decisive and sufficient measures to address the campus climate, starting with the already existing yield report and the calls for action from the students who are bravely leading us all. I hope we all commit to our part of the project of ensuring that something like this doesn’t happen again. And I hope that we can all commit to our part in changing the atmosphere so that students don’t think these behaviors are sanctioned. Because I don’t know how much longer I can take it and I’m sure there are others of you who agree.
So, what do I do? Do I try to begin to talk about these issues or do I stop here and give up?
I’m not one to give up, so I’ll try to do my small part.
My other area of concern was who to address. The students who threw and attended this party? The students who are the target of these vicious representations and have to live with the fallout? The faculty and administration members who have fostered the toxic campus environment that allows students to think this event was harmless?
What I’ve decided to do is to begin with the premise that these events and others like them are wrong and that they instill hatred, racism and violence. If you don’t believe me then I refer you to the library; or to the many responses that have come from various departments and faculty members who study this stuff; or to this huge national outcry denouncing the actions.
I’ve decided to address this talk to those of you in the room who know that this incident was wrong (no matter what your race, class, gender or age) but don’t quite know how to articulate your feelings when talking to roommates or colleagues who pose different beliefs and ask certain questions. There are many ways to approach this but I want to show you how the language of theater studies and performance studies is particularly useful for understanding the events and fallout.
So the title of the talk is Performance is Not Benign.
I’m currently teaching a class on the body in performance and my students and I discussed this at length and some of this talk comes from those discussions.
The imagery described in the original party invitation draws on a long history of stereotyping first begun in the theater genre of minstrelsy in the early 1800s. Minstrelsy has the dubious distinction of being labeled the first truly American theater form. Prior to minstrelsy's inception, American audiences were entertained by versions of music hall and variety that were imported from England albeit with an American flair. But minstrelsy is all ours and as such has become one of the primary narratives of human interaction in this country. And the development of stereotypical character types is the most significant legacy of minstrelsy. These types were developed not only to ridicule and entertain; they also served very significant social functions. As popular culture, minstrelsy marked changing social tide and served as a site for racial negotiation during antebellum, wartime and reconstruction. Minstrelsy was a performative argument for slavery. It presented African Americans as less than human and therefore only worthy of being slaves. And it has resurfaced over and over again throughout American history. It was used as the argument for Jim Crow laws and the continued second-class citizenship of African Americans, among many other directly destructive effects. So that as the times changed, the stereotypes changed but they always served to disenfranchise African Americans, even when African Americans do it. Because we are all implicated in these narratives. There is a complicated history of African Americans also performing these roles but that happening doesn’t diminish the negative power of the stereotypes and it remains with us as a constant anxious negotiation of classed, raced and gendered bodies with different particulars but doing the same cultural work.
The original party invitation acts as a script. And the event itself was a rehearsal of the negotiation of power. It gives people the performative argument for the continued systematic oppression of poor, black and brown men and women. In other words, by playing at mocking a group of people one can practice not respecting them as human beings. We can tell ourselves it is all done in fun but it fundamentally changes the way we see those people in the future especially at a place like this when there are so few of us that you see. This is not just symptomatic of racism but it creates racism—it enacts racism again and again. There are many reasons why—just one of which is the fact that this was a mockery of black history month. And the social work of this party will come back to haunt other spaces—job interviews, legislative chambers with lawmakers drafting legislation, doctor’s offices, classrooms—this is where racial profiling comes from.
Performance is Not Benign.
I could go on and point to other moments in history where these kinds of acts were negotiated. But what I thought would be most useful is to focus on developing language to help us articulate our feelings of dissent. I’ve talked to a number of people who essentially say, “I know it was wrong but I don’t quite know how to respond when somebody says____.” I want to use the time I have left to talk about some of the more complicated conversations that people have had and start us sharing strategies for how to respond. So, I’d like you to think about one such moment that has happened to you in the past week. When you didn’t know what to say when confronted about your beliefs. Turn to your neighbor, introduce yourself if you don’t know the person and explain the situation, what you did or didn’t do or say, and try to work together to come up with a way to respond.
I’ll start you off with an example: Somebody said to me “People are so sensitive. It doesn’t mean anything and I’m tired of people complaining.” To which I said, “Well let’s talk about this oppression fatigue—who gets the right to be bored, who gets the right to dictate who is offended? I was to resist allowing others to dictate the terms of my offense and I’m bored with people who are bored with the continued acts of racism. If these acts didn’t persist, if we didn’t have an atmosphere that fed the ignorance then we wouldn’t have these problems and we could all get on with our lives. But they do persist, it is important and people don’t feel safe, so we can’t stop.”
Another comment was “I don’t want to look stupid so I don’t say anything.” To which I responded, “Well how can we create a climate of respect especially in this educational setting so that you can feel comfortable working through these issues.”
Those are just a few examples.
So take a few minutes to do that—turn to your neighbor and talk about a situation you experienced and what you said or wish you had said.
(After a few minutes…)
I’m out of time but I hope this has gone a little way in our productive conversations. I invite you to bring up those situations when we open up the discussion so that we can all think together of strategies for battling racism, sexism, classism and homophobia.
Thank you.
You can view a video Dr. Nadine George-Graves's statment at the Teach-In by clicking here
(Her statement begins at 29:11.).