Speaking Truth To Power:

SHALIKO’S MYSTERY HISTORY BOUFFE GOOF

Following 1986’s The Yellow House (see my report on Rick On Theater on 9 February), avant-garde director Leonard Shapiro (1946-97) put together a contemporary version of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1918/1921 Mystery-Bouffe, considered the first Soviet play, as a project of The Shaliko Company’s residency with the Department of Dance & Theatre of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.  (At its inception in 1972, Shaliko planned to produce in January or February 1973 a street-theater version of Mayakovsky’s original play, which Shapiro noted “is not so much about the overthrow of the government and the vindication of the oppressed—which is clearly involved—but deals directly with the more radical question: what do you do if you win.”)  Billed as “A Circus Opera,” Mystery History Bouffe Goof was intended to be performed in a tent with high-wire and trapeze artists, stilt-walkers, and a circus band, translating Mayakovsky (1883-1930) “from the past into the future.”  In the “Rough Scenario” of the prospective project Shapiro prepared in January 1987 for the grounds of the late World Trade Center, the “circus framework” is clearly diagramed.  

With allusions to Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), who directed the 1918 production; Konstantine Treplyev (from Anton Chekhov’s The Sea Gull); and his own dream of a company that “can speak in many languages at once . . . so that this piece is meant to be in English and Spanish and German and in music and in movement and in circus and in verse and in theater,” Shapiro pronounced “circus opera” “a new form with moving sculptures, dissident art, prophetic poetry, ritual choreography, giant puppets and wild music.”  In fact, coming three years before Strangers (ROT report posted on 3 and 6 March 2014), Shapiro’s most sophisticated attempt to craft his new theatrical form, Mystery History was a rough and rowdy Model T of his dream. 

Unhappily, Shaliko never completed Mystery History, though they performed pieces of it on 25-28 March 1987 at Manhattanville College; on 1 August at the Yellow Springs Institute in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania; and in September at Creative Time’s Art on the Beach at Hunters Point in New York City’s borough of Queens.  After years of development—Shapiro put it at “three or four”—and “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” a final performance in Boston never took place as planned.  

Had Shapiro’s experiment succeeded, it  might have ended with something resembling the “circus opera” he envisioned, the “new form built out of elements of environmental theatre, moving sculptures, visual art pieces and giant puppets, choreography, text, jazz, rock and third world popular musical forms, and sophisticated electronic-percussive-rhythmic musical structures” of which he dreamed.  To create this project, Shapiro had to collaborate with two composers, two choreographers, a “circus choreographer,” a visual artist, and two poets; the performing ensemble, aside from being multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multi-generational, was skilled in acting, dance, music, and circus arts.   These were all the elements of Shapiro’s dream production.

Creative Time, the organizers of Art on the Beach as part of a program to bring art to the city’s public spaces, originally used the Battery Park City landfill that was just north of what was then the World Trade Center.  In 1986, Creative Time moved the project to Hunters Point in Long Island City, Queens, on land donated for the summer program by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (owner, too, of the WTC).  Despite the 1987 date of Shapiro’s scenario, it was probably originally prepared for Creative Time’s previous venue, where Art on the Beach had been presented from 1978 until 1985; Shapiro reconceived Mystery History for Hunters Point, but the scenario remained unchanged from the earlier conception.  (The World Trade Center towers fell on 11 September 2001 after the terrorist attack in which they were struck by hijacked airliners.)

Creative Time, a peripatetic non-profit arts organization that mounts art installations and performances in unlikely sites all over New York City, was founded in 1973.  Art on the Beach, one of its summer programs, was forced to move from Battery Park City in 1986 because of commercial development.  (The BPC complex, a 92-acre, multi-building planned community, was opened for occupancy beginning in 1985.)  In 1987, the program ran at Hunters Point, a “six-acre site that still looks more like the garbage dump it once was” than the home of an art exhibit, from 24 July to 20 September.  (Hunters Point in Queens should not be confused with Hunts Point in the Bronx.)  The event was envisioned as “a multidisciplinary collaboration between visual and performing artists,” and of the nine sculptures on display, other performances of music, poetry, and dance were connected to eight, each presented at dusk twice a week.  Mystery History Bouffe Goof was performed on Sunday and Wednesday evening, 13 and 16 September.

Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe was a farcical parody of the biblical story  of the flood in Genesis.  As Shapiro described the pageant, which Mayakovsky created in 1918 to celebrate the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution (and then revised and remounted in 1921 for the fourth): 

It’s a six-act epic about the Russian Revolution in rhymed verse told through the story of Noah’s flood.  The first act is at the North Pole and flood of revolution is sweeping the world.  The second act is on the Ark; the third act is in Heaven; the fourth act is in Hell; the fifth act is in the Land of Chaos; and the sixth act is the Workers Paradise. . . . [Meyerhold] did it with a cast of twenty thousand in some huge stadium.  This was in Moscow at a celebration of the Revolution.  It’s a great play and it’s full of wonderful irony.  It’s got great enthusiasms and passions. 

Each scene is filled with puns, grotesqueries, Commedia lazzi, satire, topical jokes, and circus acrobatics.  Mayakovsky regarded poetry as his weapon, and Mystery-Bouffe was pure, obvious, and simple propaganda meant for mass consumption.

Arguably Shaliko’s largest work and clearly inspired by Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre which Shapiro admired, Mystery History was described in publicity for the Manhattanville College performance as a piece that “will bring together giant puppets, ceiling-high moving sculptures, circus artists, dancers, painters, and a company of . . . actors.”  An archetypal mixed-means piece, fully employing Shapiro’s take on Sergei Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions” (see my ROT report on 31 January 2010) as practiced by Meyerhold and exploiting as many forms of popular entertainment as possible, Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof evoked “a world of balance and diversity . . . of a symbolic journey to create a world possible only through collaboration, each of us with the other . . . an optimistic vision of human possibility” in contrast to Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe. 

The preface to the 1921 version of Mystery-Bouffe includes a notice that reads: “In the future, all persons performing, presenting, reading, or publishing Mystery-Bouffe should change the content, making it contemporary, immediate, up-to-the-minute.”  Shapiro took the playwright at his word.  While both plays were allegorical and propagandistic, Meyerhold’s version used the flood to represent world revolution at the end of which emerged the “promised land” of a “mechanised state of Socialism”—a cold and rigid vision.  Shaliko’s version, on the other hand, “used [Mayakovsky’s] play and the myth of the Revolution as a metaphor for the transformative power of the human creativity” just as the Russian poet had “used the mystery play and the myth of the Flood for his ‘heroic, epic, and satiric’ representation of the Russian Revolution.”  “Our show,” said Shapiro and Greta Levart, the director of Manhattanville College’s dance and theater department, “is about courage, hope, and the necessity of working together to change the world,” reiterating several consistent Shaliko themes, as well as Pyotr Kropotkin’s fundamental thesis. 

(Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, 1842-1921, was a 19th-century Russian aristocrat who found court life repugnant and eventually espoused an anarchist philosophy.  His beliefs were steadfastly non-violent and he held that cooperation was the way to advance the human condition, not competitiveness.  His most famous work, Mutual Aid, which Shapiro read along with other material concerning Kropotkin, proposed that collaboration is the natural order of the world for both humans and animals.)

At Manhattanville College, Mystery History, conceived as a six-act modern mystery play using Noah’s flood for its storyline, was performed in the East Room of the Benziger Building, an “arena-size” room wired for sound, while at Hunters Point the company performed the piece outdoors in an overgrown, disused Long Island City landfill, part of the grounds of the Daily News plant.  Starting at dusk and playing into the evening as the Manhattan skyline, centered on the United Nations complex across the East River to the northwest, began to light up in the background—the only artificial light in the production—the  allegorical and mobile Mystery History Bouffe Goof meandered through eight other large-scale artworks on the “rocky, riverside mound,” redolent of fresh-baked bread courtesy of a nearby bakery, to its own set piece on the riverbank: “two giant wood figures tugging at a fragile blue globe suspended above a small gray battleship,” designed by recent Soviet immigrant Leonid Sokov. 

The performance text was built on contributions by sculptor Sokov, poets Bob Holman and Paul Schmidt (who was also a Meyerhold expert), composers Phil Marsh and David Linton, circus artist (and Shaliko actress-teacher) Cecil MacKinnon, and choreographers Kei Takei and Nina Martin, many of whom also performed in the five episodes that were “specially conceived” for the Hunters Point performances.  (The cast comprised Laz Bresser, Mia Kanazawa, Mark Kindshi, MacKinnon, Lily Marsh, Michael Preston, Takei, and Tad Truesdale.  At Manhattanville, a dozen student performers also participated.)  Described as “an updated, contemporary version of the story of Noah’s ark, wherein characters, having gathered atop the World Trade Center, build an ark on stage—and break it up—steal God’s thunder and lightning, reinvent locomotion, plant trees and take off and fly,” it was presented as “a utopian piece about the possibilities of a world based on diversity and respect for individual differences.”  As Shapiro pointed out, Shaliko’s “collaborative process is meant to mirror the world envisioned on stage,” pointing to the “remarkable range of artists” he had assembled for the project.

Though Shapiro later felt that the work, which he described at the time as “an anthem for action, and a grand, insane spectacle full of optimism for the scope of human possibilities,” was “hippie-ish,” videotapes of the performances at Art on the Beach and Manhattanville College reveal a raucous and exuberant spirit that ignited the blunt, utopian message.  There was plainly an air of the street performances of the 1960s—of the kind that Shapiro himself had conceived and performed in his younger days (see my blog posts “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010, and “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010)—and even a little of the Happening; however, the wandering performance, the towering puppets of foam over a metal or wood frame, the singing, dancing, and acrobatics more closely evoked the kind of all-day events mounted during Indian festivals like the Ramlila. 

In the scenario of Mystery History Bouffe Goof as he saw it in completion, Shapiro laid out an elaborate, even epic, event, carefully conceived with images and actions and metaphorical and figurative associations for all the aspects of the six acts.  In the scenario, the “circus framework” is clearly worked out, as are the theatrical and performative elements of the project, “so that circus elements . . . are a natural part of the action.”  The director’s vision for the piece also included sounds created not only by the musical instruments which were part of the ensemble, but by the actors’ striking parts of the set and everything in the mise-en-scène, on all of which contact microphones were installed.  “In other words,” Shapiro explained, the company “will create the musical score through the playing of the set just as members of an orchestra play their instruments.” 

In the same way, Shapiro planned that every part of the mise-en-scène, including the audience, would be incorporated in the choreography.  Had Shapiro realized the whole project with the same incisive care that he applied to the segments Shaliko presented, it could certainly have been an exhilarating theater experience.  Alvin Klein called the play “extravagant” in the New York Times and observers of the workshop at Yellow Springs remarked on “the incredibly resilient, energetic quality of the production, which swept the audience up into a posture of a kind of similarly resilient reception.”  Saying that the performance “inflamed” them, the workshop viewers added, “It was interesting to be a participant while a spectator, which is very different from the way one normally is a spectator . . . .”

True to Shaliko philosophy, Mystery History complected music, poetry, art, and movement from many cultures and sources; especially prominent were circus arts, in which Shapiro had a special interest since his days as a student at New York University.  Composer Linton built a kind of xylophone, which Shapiro called a “communal instrument,” from 36 pieces of pipe and sculptor Sokov created a ten- or fifteen-foot-long, six-foot-tall ark, modeled after the Bolshevik battleship Aurora, “with hatches, a gun turret, a tower and two smokestacks,” all mounted on wheels. 

The six acts of Mystery History each unfolds in a different geographical or allegorical place.  The performance space is adjusted according to the progress of the scenario.  At Manhattanville College, the performance began when a character named Volodya, a guide, demanded, “Why is the theater nowadays in such a mess?” and offered to take the spectators “to the wild, wonderful, wacky and wide, wide world of total spectacle.”  When the first act ends, the stage and seats are set up in a traditional theater configuration and the ark is built; the flood is represented by the blue-colored seats.  In an approximation of what the British dubbed “promenade theater,” the actors and the spectators occupied the same space and could move among one another as they wished. 

The performance moved about the space in a peripatetic, processional performance—“in, on, over, under, around, through and with the sculptures, which become giant puppets as they are animated by the performers,” who stood above the sculptures on ladders and manipulated the arms with strings and voiced them over a microphone—visiting such locales as Heaven (depicted as Disneyland) and the Land of Chaos.  

What happens in the final location, representing hell and the future, was supposed to surprise the spectators.  The monumental “metaphorical sculpture” designed by Sokov, was described thus:

The installation is of two giant figures, God and the Devil, with a tightrope stretched between them.  On the rope the Earth moves back and forth, powered by windmills which sit on the heads of the figures.  In between, down below, is the Ark.  Water will come out of the globe and rain on the Ark.

. . . .

The two giant figures—God and the Devil—are approximately twenty feet high.  They face each other across a distance of abo[u]t 25-30 feet.  Because the movement of the globe between them is powered by the windmill-like action of the wings of the birds which are perched on top of the figures, the globe’s action is irregular and dependent on the wind; it is always part of the moment.  On the ground between the figures is the Ark, which is a combination of Noah’s Ark and the battleship Aurora.  The Ark comes apart and is approximately 12-15 feet long and 6 feet high.

On a promotional video for the company from 1992, Shapiro gave his own description of the ending of the performance:

The scenes of Mystery History Bouffe Goof at Hunter’s Point, ending with a performer on a tightrope silhouetted against Manhattan’s skyline, the Empire St[ate Building] prominent on the left, and with a resounding boom-boom-boom redolent of nearby thunder claps or art[iller]y barrage.  The sounds are from a moment in the Yellow Springs performance, overlapping the later one on the tape, when five actors outside huge windows are seen from inside the room banging rhythmically with open palms on the window panes as curtains slowly close in from each side, obliterating the performers and literally cutting them out of the scene to total darkness.

The performer on the tightrope, Mark Kindshi (also the tech director of the performance), was a “man from the future who walks on water.”  (The tightrope Kindshi walked was the guy-wire on which the Earth  traveled.)  There was no artificial lighting in the performance at Hunters Point, so by the time the production reached the final scene at the “ark,” it was dark.  Kindshi on the high wire was a silhouette back-lighted only by the skyline of Manhattan, principally the United Nations building, across the East River.  Shapiro said that he chose not only the site of that final set  piece, but also the starting time of the performance so that this effect would occur.  (This was not the first time that the Shaliko director had done this: see my report on The Yellow House, referenced above.)

Besides its obvious reflections of the 1967 John Arden-Margareta D’Arcy War Carnival on which Shapiro had collaborated as an NYU student (see my blog report on 13 May 2010), and the works of the Bread and Puppet Theater, Mystery History was also very evocative of The Shaliko Company’s namesake ritual, the Zuni shalako ceremony (“‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” posted on ROT on 22 October 2010).  Mystery History’s “giant puppets” and “ceiling-high moving sculptures” as well as the clowning and the peripatetic nature of the staging are the focal characteristics of the shalako rite.  The shalako itself—the word refers to the deity, the masked dancer, the mask itself, and the ceremony—is a nine- or ten-foot-tall figure, towering above the villagers and the attendant each dancer needs to keep from toppling over. 

Six of these shalako personators enter the village after the way is prepared by “mudhead” clowns, called koyemshi, and the progress of the shalakos is accompanied by singing, clowning by the koyemshi—some of it pretty low—and prayers.   In fact, the ritual, like Mystery-Bouffe and Mystery History Bouffe Goof, is a kind of circus-cum-mystery play. 

Just as Mystery History tells the tale of Noah’s flood, the shalakos are representatives of the rainmakers, the principal Zuni deities, and the ceremony is an interpretation of the Zuni religion.  And just as the flood of the Judeo-Christian Bible signifies rebirth and renewal, so does the shalako ceremony.  It would not be wrong, in fact, to see Mystery History Bouffe Goof in part as Shapiro’s attempt to produce a modern, Western version of the shalako ceremony with topical political impact.  If the shalakos can transform Zuni society, perhaps a Shaliko production could transform ours.  And just as the Navajo healing rites, another inspiration for the director, were expected to bring the out-of-balance world back into harmony (see “‘My Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” 15 May 2013), Shapiro declared that “MYSTERY will present a vision of an emerging world culture which doesn’t exist yet but might.  A world of balance and diversity which we might create if we don’t kill each other first.”

Curiously, viewing Mystery History tapes during the George H. W. Bush-Bill Clinton presidential campaign of 1992 (when I was doing the principal research for the article of which this blog post was originally a part) illuminated many issues Shapiro raised in 1987 but which seemed pertinent again five years later, as well as during the primary campaigns and presidential and congressional elections of subsequent years.  Most poignant and apt—and evocative of Situationist philosophy (I blogged on “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” an influence on Shapiro’s epistemology, on 3 February 2012)—was the idea that all our choices are really made for us by the way nominees are selected, as demonstrated in the following exchange between two of the “Winners” plotting against the “Losers,” who are the ordinary citizens:

COLONEL:        . . .  [W]hat they need is “Illusion on a Plate.”

We’ll give them a Leader to make them think they   
    rate!

Let  them think they have power, autonomy, a voice

As if they have really had a choice . . .

MAITRE D’:       But of course who they could vote for would be of our 

                               choosing

So we couldn’t help but win—even by losing.

This is clearly a manifestation of the broken social compact to which Paul Goodman (1911-72), another important influence on Shaliko, referred when he asserted a “natural right to citizenship”:

[T]hey have taken away my society. . . . .  I have the right to my president just as everybody else does, but they’ve taken away my right to have my president because they never give me a candidate I could vote for.

The same is true of the issues around which campaigns are mounted—a verb identical, readers will note, to one we use when speaking of plays—as this pronouncement by a character called Moneyman reveals:

The excitement an election would generate—

The  spectacle!  They’d love it.  Why contemplate

Issues that have no real consequence.

Believe me—they’re much happier in their innocence.

For the applicability of Mystery History Bouffe Goof to the real world, we need only reflect on how Patrick Buchanan, Jerry Brown, and even David Duke were effectively maneuvered out of contention by a combination of legal challenges to their places on state presidential ballots and press neglect in 1992, and how the New York State Republican apparatus fought to keep all challengers to Senator Bob Dole off the presidential primary ballot there in 1996.  The same maneuvers were attempted again in behalf of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush in the New York primary campaign of 1999-2000 until the courts intervened to require the inclusion of contenders Buchanan and John McCain.

In addition, New York State Democrats essentially anointed First Lady Hillary Clinton, newly moved to New York in order to qualify for residency, as their senatorial candidate that year and in New Jersey, Jon Corzine, a multi-millionaire businessman with no electoral experience or record of public service, used his vast personal fortune to obtain that state’s Democratic senatorial nomination and, ultimately, the Senate seat.  Furthermore, many political analysts criticized the presidential candidates in 2000, George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore, for waging campaigns devoid of substance, relying on empty slogans and platitudes designed primarily to make the voters feel good.  (A major issue was which of the two major-party nominees was more likable.)  Once again, there was also wrangling about the televised presidential debates, from which prominent independent-party candidates were excluded. 

(I’ll let readers carry the implications of these maneuverings forward to more recent national and local campaigns.  I will, however, quote one more evocative line from Mystery History Bouffe Goof: Lady with Hats, one of the “Winners,” asks, “Do you think they really could be so innocent / Not to see ‘Democracy’ as fraudulent?”  Does that ring any bells with anyone?) 

It is too bad, in light of these machinations, that the size and scope of Mystery History Bouffe Goof prohibited the impecunious Shaliko from reviving it at a propitious time such as, say, the presidential years of 1988 or 1992.  Shapiro would, however, most likely have seen a message in the very conflict of money versus political statements.  (Remember that Mystery History Bouffe Goof was composed almost a quarter of a century before Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was decided.  As Allswell, the  establishment-controlled politician, says to Moneyman: “Friend, my good friend here just reminded me of something—now, don’t grind your axes / Just look on your contributions as TAXES!”)  He was already on record as stating that the defunding efforts against artists and arts organizations by the establishment are an insidious form of censorship and he believed that “there is no question but that the establishment has won and the experimenters have lost.”

Politics in general—the partisan, electoral variety—was an overriding concern for Shapiro.  In addition to his sweeping attention to politics, from the wars in Vietnam and Iraq to our failure to vote and select our own leaders to our unwillingness to look behind the curtain, the lack of a successful socialist movement here was a particular focus and Mystery History Bouffe Goof demonstrates how much he was willing to invest in the subject.