8:45 a.m. - 2007-01-24
I'm Your Public Dancer, Dancer for the Proletariat!
I am heartbroken, dudes.
Perhaps one of my favorite quotes of all time comes from turn-of-the-century anarchist Emma Goldman. Many people call her an anarchist and a feminist; I would say that if every anarchist isn't also a feminist, as well as an queer-positive anti-racist, among other things, then they are not really anarchists and need to be told what time it is: time to shut the fuck up. Emma Goldman was a general badass for the working people, and is famous for having said the following: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."
This may have arguably been one of the best quotes of all time. The story goes that, as a young woman first entering the anarchist movement, she was dancing her big Lithuanian ass off (from what I hear, she was proud of her big Lithaunian ass, so as someone with a big Mexican ass who has been known, from time to time, to dance it off and take out a few city blocks in the process, I feel I can use the term) at an anarchist party (and there ain't nowhere better to dance your ass off, I should know), when a friend (and a relative of her boyfriend, because I haven't had enough parenthetical asides yet) came up to her, looking so stern that she wondered if someone they knew hadn't died, and told her that she was embarrassing herself and the revolutionary cause with her wanton behavior. I think he may have thought that such a statement would shame her, both as a political activist and as a woman, and perhaps even elicit a public apology, or perhaps just a downcast shuffle off the floor in full view of New York's radical community. If he did indeed think this, he was quite stupid, and nowhere near cool enough to hand out with her in the first place. I like to think, though--and I know this isn't true, because the sad truth is that, even today, there are some sexist motherfuckers in the radical movement--that someone came up to this guy and said something along the lines of "Dude, dude, wait, wait, come here. No, wait, listen up. I want you to go up to Emma and, like, be all serious, dude, seriously, and just, haha, just, okay, okay wait, just tell her, all serious, to stop dancing. That it's like, ruining the movement or something. I just want to see what she does. Dude, shut up, I'll pay you. No, serious, I'll pay you and I'll pay the medical bills. Fifty bucks. Come on, dude, that's like a year's salary in this day and age, come on. No, I'm totally serious, dude, do it!" And as this man walked up, the other guy said, "Sucker!"
Now, according to Emma's own biography, she did not kick this man in the balls. I think this showed remarkable restraint on her part. Instead, she did what any good self-actualized woman would do when someone who claimed to be one her side, politically, told her to stop dancing because it might embarrass the movement. She lost it at him. She said something along the lines of the fact that she'd had it up to her eyeballs with people telling her what proper behavior for a member of the cause was, because hello, this was ANARCHY, DUMBASS! She said that she was unwilling to be cloistered for the revolution, and if it meant being cloistered, she was out. She quotes herself in her autobiography as having said, "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everyboy's right to beautiful, radiant things."
Contrary to popular belief, though, she never quoted herself as saying, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution" or anything along those lines, hence my aching, broken heart at finding out that, quite literally, the quote was manufactured from the above story in order to sell T-shirts. Admittedly, for an anarchist fundraiser celebrating the end of the Vietnam war, but to sell T-shirts, nevertheless.
The loss of the quote pains me because, as I mentioned above, and as I have mentioned many times, this big Mexican ass has a life of its own. I dance everywhere, to everything, except Justin Timberlake because he aggravates me and I think he looks like an anus, which some might argue should do something for me, but let me just say it's not something I want to imagine when I think about someone who has given up trying to be Michael Jackson and is now trying to be Prince. I dance in just about any club to just about any kind of music. I dance outside of clubs, as well. I particularly love going to BookPeople, the local independent bookstore that two years ago was named best bookstore in the country, thank you very much, because they've had oldies on for the past few days. The other day I was in line for the cafe, in full view of everyone, when "Hang on Sloopy" came on. My big Mexican ass refuses to sit still for that. I'm just glad I refrained from calling out, "THAT'S MY SHIT!!!"
I think that, had Emma Goldman been there, she would have done so, and spent the next few minutes booty-bumping with me.
Emma Goldman is on my mind because I am working on directing a show about her, at the request of a friend working on an anarchist encuentro here in Texas. That is right. I am directing again. I type that phrase and tears well up in my eyes. I think I need to type that again. I am directing again. Oh my God, that feels good. One more time, sorry, bear with me: I am directing again. Okay, I think I can move on now.
I am directing again. It is only now, when I write that phrase, that another voice inside whispers, almost like an echo, except, you know, it's saying something different. What this whispering voice is saying is, "I thought I'd never do that again." I don't know who that voice is. I think it may be the voice that Tori Amos hears when she sings Silent All These Years, and I know that is the cheesiest thing I have ever written, and I don't care. Saying it out loud (or, you know, typing it), "I thought I'd never direct again," when I am, in fact, directing again, is like coming up for air, not after you were drowning, but the first time you got back in the water after the time you almost drowned, and that is a phrase I am saving for later.
There are, of course, some complications. First of all, I'm working from a script(,) which I don't like. The comma is in parentheses because 1) I don't like working from scripts and 2) I don't like this script in particular. That is to say, I do love a well-written play, but well-written plays often direct themselves when you have good actors. When I directed The Women of Troy, a play millenia old that is nevertheless one of the greatest anti-war pieces ever written, I had some great actors. I think I did some good directing, and I know that I got the great actors in the first place because I am a good director and people wanted to work with me, but most of my direction was, "What you just did was great. Maybe stand a little further downstage next time."
Directing without a script, on the other hand is a challenge, and I know that because the one time we (my collegiate experimental theatre company, Intuitons) ever tried to do an unscripted show without a director, the show was so terrible that I still have traumatic flashbacks to being backstage thinking "I don't want to go on! This show sucks! The ending sucks! Why the fuck do I have to go on this $(&$&%*&^_^$*%!" Whereas if you have a good director, and I include many other people besides myself in this, you manage to make a show that every castmember has a profound investment in, because after all, they wrote it themselves. They made the choices. You were just there to make sure everything worked. I hope to do an unscripted show after I finish this one.
The script, as I said, also ain't the greatest. It is very narrative. Emma tells her story. She was born. She grew up. She got married. She witnessed the invasion of an anarchist meeting by the police, resulting in the wrongful sentencing to death of a number of anarchists. She left her husband. She became the anarchist firebrand we all know and love and misquote. One thing follows the other, which, zzzzzz. Moreover, the author chooses to portray her on the evening of her arrest for allegedly inciting Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President McKinley without really dwelling on her feelings regarding Czolgosz and the assassination. This isn't even the most interesting juncture in Emma Goldman's life, to me.
I looked online at some documentaries on youtube (I also found footage of Emma Goldman being interviewed later in life; she has a very dry wit when it comes to dissing fascism that makes me love her all the more), and as it turns out the second act of Emma Goldman's life is far more fascinating and, to me, currently relevant than the first. She went to Russia to be part of the Socialist revolution, only to discover that it had just as much of a penchant for the oppression of dissidents as fascism and capitalism. One historian talked about how hard it must have been for her to admit that she was deeply, horribly wrong about the Soviet revolution, and yet to keep working in the name of anarchism and the liberation of the working class, of all people.
I have become fascinated by the idea of admitting mistakes, of looking back and saying, "I made the wrong choice; what can I do to go back? Can I go back at all? What do I have to do to make things right? Is it worth abandoning what I've done? Should I finish things, or is it better to just walk away? What will I do now?" My fascination should be obvious: I went to graduate school, hated the lion's share of it, and am now trying to decide whether to power through and get a PhD (which, for the record, just about everyone is telling me to do, even the friggin' anarchists) or cut my losses, leave with two MAs, and figure out something else to do with my life. It's a tough choice, and my answer changes every week, although I have to say that the feeling of joy and relief that bubbled up inside me when I said, "I am directing again. I thought I'd never do that again," has me leaning away from graduate school, for the moment. It isn't just that, though. I think of the President, actually, and not without sympathy, when I think about admitting mistakes. I opposed the war long before it started. By about 10am on September 11th, 2001, one of the loudest thoughts in my head was, "Our country is about to fuck shit UP." I had absolutely no belief that our retaliation would fix anything. It would only make things worse. I knew this like I knew that Bush would become president in the first place. You see the story falling into place and there ain't shit you can do to stop it. Yet at this point, when the disastrous consequences of this war are finally starting to get into everyone's head, I wonder if the big boys in power lie awake at night wondering if the past going-on-four years can be undone. I can't imagine the conflicted feelings and thoughts of those who actually CAN do something about this, those who have to decide whether it would be better to just leave now when Iraq has gone from unsightly suburb or Purgatory to downtown Hell thanks to our violence and hubris, or whether we need to stay until somehow, someway, we clean up the abyssal mess we have created.
For the record, I think that a country needs to solve its own problems, and that anything imposed from outside, even if it's universal health care and a lifetime supply of Reese's peanut butter cups, will never be accepted by a conquered people, although they would still eat the Reese's, because the Iraqis are not fools and Reese's are damn good. Yet I still maintain, in all serious, and with respect to my fellow radical/progressive/liberal activists who have fought this war from the beginning, who fought the last war and the one before that, that I have sympathy for the people in charge, the same sympathy I have for Emma Goldman in Russia. It is tremendously difficult for me to look at my own life and say, "I think I may have made the wrong choice." I cannot imagine the difficulty of that statement, diaphanously abstracted as it is, when Russians, or Iraqis, or American soldiers have died.
Serious as I may have become in the last couple of paragraphs, I am filled with hope, even though the play, as I said, is not the greatest. Over the past few days I've been speaking with actresses who might be interested in playing the part, and in the process ideas have been forming. One Emma Goldman is not enough. There should be an ensemble, maybe four or five. There should be a mannequin with Emma's signature fin-de-siecle outfit on it, especially the glasses. They should remove articles of clothing and put them on--skirt, blouse, cameo, jacket, wig, those awesome glasses--to become their own Emmas. They should interweave their own stories of coming to anarchism or feminism or revolution or art into telling Emma's story, and they should all speak the last line: "I am Emma Goldman." It's been so long since I directed from a script that I'd forgotten something I'd been told long ago.
One of the greatest compliments I have ever received came from transgender activist and writer Kate Bornstein, whose play, "Hidden: A Gender," I directed as a sophomore in college. I had an AMAZING cast, all of whom were my first choices, three of whom I stole from other theatre companies, heheheh. My tech staff was brilliant. The script was . . . megh. Not the greatest. It interweaves Kate's own MTFTwhateverIfeellike story with that of an intersex schoolteacher in 19th Century France. The schoolteacher's monologues are drawn from her diaries, and they kinda suck. It was hard fucking work to do that show, and I lost it a couple of times when I shouldn't have. Yet the show went on, and was a great success. Kate hirself came to see the show on closing night and did a Q&A. I could tell that, as I told hir about my choices before the show went on, ze had misgivings. After the show, though, ze came up to me, and hugged me, and said this: "You're going places, and one day you're going to look back and realize that this is a very flawed play, but you danced over the flaws. You covered my ass."
Kate, I knew then that it was a flawed play. This is also a flawed play. But sometimes, great art can come out of works that are flawed, and if I can help that happen, as often as I can, then my life has been worth it. Or, as Emma Goldman herself once said, "Both radical and conservative have to learn that any mode of creative work, which with true perception portrays social wrongs earnestly and boldly, may be a greater menace to our social fabric and a more powerful inspiration than the wildest harangue of the soapbox orator."
Before I go, I have to say one last thing. The Notorious MOM is in town, and we had dinner two nights ago, when I told her about the project I am working on. I was a bit nervous, since The Notorious MOM certainly joins those who want me to go back and get my friggin' PhD already. When I spoke about the show, though, she said, "Oh, I LOVE Emma Goldman!" and when I mentioned I needed an actress, she raised her hand. Were she here in Austin rather than in the Valley, I would have cast her in a heartbeat. My mother is not an anarchist, but she is a woman who has fought all her life for the rights of others, and I think I might need to dedicate this show to her.
After all, it's not every mother who can lead a civil rights protest and then go out that evening and dance her big Mexican ass off.
