Elin Diamond

Re: Blau, Butler, Beckett, and the Politics of Seeming

At the core of Herbert Blaus theatre theory are meditations on appearance, repetition, bodily texts, temporality, history, and the illusory and elusive workings of power. Blaus decades of theorizing are refracted through his long experience as a theatremaker, including his production of Waiting for Godotbefore an audience of San Quentin prisoners. In this essay, Diamond explores the affinities between Blau, the poststructuralists, and Beckett.

Deploying/destroying the primitivist body in hurston and brecht

In April 1928, several months into her second folklore-collecting expedition, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to Langston Hughes:

Folk Modernism: Zora Neale Hurston’s Gestural Drama

Zora Neale Hurston’s desire to dramatize the folklore she collected in the late 1920s is well known. While some have argued that her anthropological training under Franz Boas conflicted with her creative impulses, Folk Modernism: Hurston’s Gestural Drama takes the view that her innovative work in the theatre is a productive synthesis of the modernist impulse toward rupture and rhythmic form, of an international interest in the 1930s in the cultural resonances of “gesture,” and of Hurston’s own dynamic notion of “gesture [in] place of words,” first articulated in 1928. For Hurston, gesture is not supplementary to language but rather the inverse: language is a kind of gesture. In Cold Keener (1930) and Woofing (1931), she develops a drama in which words and movements transmit a culture’s characteristic rhythms – in this case, the culture of rural black Southerners in their everyday labour and leisure. Spunk (1935) and Polk County (1944), aiming for white audience acceptance, conventionalize gestural drama.

Identity Politics Forum

Introduced, compiled and edited by Elin Diamond, this forum brings together feminist theatre/performance scholars to revisit the question of identity politics. Does it still have currency? Does it still matter for feminists today? In what theatre and performance contexts do we still discuss identity politics? Following an overview (from a US perspective) of past and present concerns by Elin Diamond, the forum voices a range of international views as contributors consider identity politics, theatre and performance in their countries of origin: Nobuko Anan (Japan), Denise Varney (Australia), Katrin Sieg (Germany), Bishnupriya Dutt (India) and Tiina Rosenberg (Sweden).

Identity Politics Then and Now

Identity politics, or collective activism based on embodied experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity or nationality, existed before the late twentieth century, but the term was coined in the 1970s and widely circulated in the 1980s as a response to social injustice, widespread prejudice and even assault borne by members of specific minority groups. For lesbians, gays and transsexuals, for ethnic minorities like Native Americans in the US or First Nations in Canada, for women in many Western countries, identity politics has meant working proactively for full legal and social recognition. Feminism often flies under the banner of identity politics with the argument that gender equality is still far from the norm in Western societies and even less so in many Asian and African societies, and in those of the Arab world.

Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times

This collection of essays—Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times—edited by Elin Diamond, Denise Varney and Candice Amich is a compelling and energising read. The twenty-two essays gathered here, from an international cohort of scholars, speak with urgency and passion to a troubling political climate. Documenting the performative responses of women globally to the rise of neoliberalism, these writers engage the intersection of feminist artistic praxis with affective outcomes to demonstrate how these works reveal and resist this ideology and its products. Neoliberalism, which casts people as cogs in an economic machine, encourages entrepreneurship, competition, and do-ityourself individualism through government policies of free trade, reduced regulation, and stripped social safety networks. This “Third Way” governance creates precarity of labour, precarity of health, and a sense of dispossession as interdependent communal relations are undervalued and so eroded.

Feminism, Assemblage, and Performance: Kara Walker in Neoliberal Times

Elin Diamond argues that neoliberalism challenges feminist performance theory to locate agency across multiple bodies in unpredictable configurations. Linking affect theory, assemblage, and distributive agency with urban ‘revanchism’ in New York City, Diamond discusses mixed-media artist Kara Walker’s cut-paper silhouettes of the 1990s and, in 2014, her colossal 40-foot tall ‘new-world sphinx’, a sugar-and-styrofoam installation entitled ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby…’, with its molasses-built child ‘attendants’, at the site of Brooklyn’s abandoned Domino sugar refinery. In the summer heat, Walker’s molasses attendants melted, exuding acrid smells, provoking awareness of long-forgotten slave histories behind the global sugar trade and of newer histories of neoliberalism in New York, including lost jobs, gentrification (the refinery would soon become condos and office towers), poverty, and racial inequality.

Herbert Blau: 1926–2013

I was not yet 20 when I wandered into Ruby Cohn’s class in Modern Drama at San Francisco State College. Hanging around her office, as undergrads will when the class is life-altering, I noticed that her officemate was often, in the morning, taking a nap. Herb had been up late rehearsing at the Actor’s Workshop and was napping before teaching his classes. It was the golden age of SF State, when working-class students like me could still afford an education, and brilliant teachers, like Herb, son of a plumber, could inspire a generation that would hit the strike lines in favor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies, facing off riot-geared cops in front of the English Department. That same practice of radical knowing, always Herb’s signature, led him to take Waiting for Godot out of the theatre and into San Quentin penitentiary, and to envision a Cal Arts that would bring together the leading avantgarde artists and scholars at that raucous time, with Alan Kaprow’s students doing a “hum in” on the lawn, while Angela Davis visited the class of Maurice Stein.

Mom How Did You Meet the Beatles?: A True Story of London in the 1960s (review)

Adrienne Kennedy’s newest work, Mom How Did You Meet the Beatles? has the tantalizing subtitle “A True Story of London in the 1960s.” In this account of Kennedy’s foray into the world of London theatre and its powerbrokers, the “true” includes fact, detail, fantasy, desire, and the fierce will of the protagonist, all of which belie the play’s homey title. Previewed for one performance only at Joe’s Pub, the intimate stage space attached to the New York Public Theatre, Mom How Did You Meet the Beatles? is structured as a friendly interview between a mother called Adrienne Kennedy, or “AK,” and a son called Adam P. Kennedy, or “APK.” On the night of performance, after the Joe’s Pub crowd was prepped with music from the Beatles’ White Album, Chad Goodridge as APK posed a question from within the darkened audience: “How did you come to work with the Beatles?” Standing alone on stage, lit from above, actress Brenda Pressley answered this question for almost an hour, looking and sounding like a slightly younger—and glamorous—version of Adrienne Kennedy. Under Michael Greif’s direction, Pressley’s portrait of the playwright rendered the edgy gaiety, the warmth and vulnerability so like Kennedy’s persona in her public interviews. The audience was delighted and wrong-footed from the start.