Solo Performance

We're moving on this week to talking about solo performance as a form with its own history and cultural significance. It occurred to me as we were discussing this that I wanted to include it for a lot of reasons. In addition to giving students some practice using Viewpoints vocabulary to build a performance, I wanted to give them the opportunity to tell their own stories before they moved on to listening to, talking about and performing other people and characters.

I was thinking about the fact that it may seem strange to begin a semester about performance and community with such a self-oriented assignment as an autobiographical solo performance. But the history of the form clarifies why it seems appropriate. We read Jo Bonney's introduction to the anthology of solo performance she edited, which is entitled Extreme Exposure. Bonney points out a lot of important things about solo performance as it was practiced in New York in the 1990s that show how it relates to community based arts.

• it was often focused on the process of discovery and development rather than on creating a sellable product;
• as such, it was non-commercial, and in fact often served as a critique to more profit-oriented theatre, television, film, etc.;
• it was a form used by people who seem to have been left out of representation in mainstream culture for whatever reason, or it gave people the opportunity to represent themselves in the face of a long history of inaccurate or even offensive representations in American culture;
• it was frequently performed by the artists for an audience made up of people in their own communities, however they defined that;
• it often involved direct, active contact with audience members;
  
• it was used as a way of provoking questions rather than providing easy answers;
• it was used by people who had limited financial resources, and could be done in small spaces. In other words, it was developed in the spirit of independent "do-it-yourself" art that also inspired independent film and home recording of music.

I reminded students that this kind of work hasn't always been well received and is often subject to censorship. In the early 1990s, controversy over the NEA Four (Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller) was at the heart of the so-called "culture wars" that centered around questions of who should determine decency and morality when considering public funding for individual artists.

So, as we begin to choose the play we'll all focus on over the course of the semester, we're also starting to explore how we can begin to produce performance of our own that uses the stories and resources we have on hand. And we'll discuss some of the importance of being able to tell our own stories publicly.

Here are some Youtube videos we watched in class yesterday. These are examples of solo work that made its way to more mainstream venues and media:

John Leguizamo's Freak



Margaret Cho's I'm the One that I Want



and Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia