[Here’s the second (and last)
part of my analysis and examination of Leonardo Shapiro’s last big performance
piece, Strangers, built with his New York
City company, The Shaliko Company. I
pick up here where I left off in Part 1 (posted on 3 March and which I
recommend reading before getting into Part 2) and move into some performance
description. I said that Strangers was potentially a first step towards the
realization of Shapiro’s search for a new form of theater, the goal toward
which his lifetime of work in theater was aimed. Shapiro never completed the work on Strangers, due almost exclusively to funding, and
that was one of his greatest disappointments at his death in 1997. Unhappily, the concept and the script were
far too personal a vision for any one else to complete in the director’s
absence, and with the additional passing of composer Max Roach in 2007, an
integral element in the mix that was the collaborative effort of Strangers, it’s unlikely a finished text will ever be
staged. The greater loss, beyond that of
a fascinating artist and an ambitious project, is that Strangers is precisely the kind of work for which
experimental theater exists: immensely innovative ideas that may never succeed
on stage but which will forever alter our notion of theater’s
possibilities. Michael Wright said as
much when he explained his rationale for writing “In Process: Leonardo Shapiro,
the Shaliko Company, and Strangers”
24 years ago: “My personal scale for appreciation of a given performance work
has generally been whether it . . ., at the pinnacle, moves me to want to learn
everything I can about it and how it was made because it has changed in some
way my basic assumptions about theatre.”]
In conjunction with the diverse narrative strains, the
separate production elements each played a significant role in Strangers. Past Shaliko productions often included
coordinated use of dance, music, sound, speech, design, and technology. Shapiro promoted and employed a synthesis of
arts as an important philosophical aspect of his work; however, the complexity
of Strangers led Shapiro
to see these elements differently this time.
Unlike Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (usually translated as “total work of art” but gesamt can also
mean ‘synthesis’ or ‘collective’), this synthesis wasn’t intended
to subordinate the other arts to language or blend them into what Brecht
described as a “muddle.” As Richard
Kostelanetz delineated this structure in The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968), “the components generally
function nonsynchronously, or independently of each other, and each medium is
used for its own possibilities.”
Speaking of the diverse collaborators, Shapiro put it thus: “The idea is
to use what is strongest in each artist in order to create something new rather
than force them into an homogenized predictable ‘blend.’ Collaboration,” he observed, “is not
compromise!”
Each element in Strangers was to remain independent
but further the “common task” of illuminating the important ideas. Shapiro built Strangers out of four
distinct layers which he called “tracks,” an analogy to the recording industry
in which each instrument and voice is recorded separately then assembled into
an integrated performance. A significant
difference between Shapiro’s work with tracks and its record-business analogue,
however, is that the final recorded rendition could never exist live while
Shapiro assembled the tracks for Strangers on stage at each
performance. Another difference is that
the producer of the recording mixes the separate tracks together, whereas
Shapiro deliberately elected not to mix the four elements of Strangers,
leaving them “independent but inter-related.”
“What we are looking for,” wrote Shapiro, “is a sung image theater that
is layered, dense and deep, but that makes sense on first hearing.”
The four tracks roughly corresponded to the elements of the
Navajo chant ceremony noted in Part 1: action (theater), visual (graphic art),
vocal (poetry), and instrumental (music).
It’s significant that the major collaborators who helped develop Strangers
were each independent artists who worked in areas allied to each of the tracks:
Robbie McCauley, an actress and performance artist; Polly Walker, a visual
artist; Shapiro, a writer and poet; and Max Roach, a composer and jazz
percussionist. Had final plans for a La
MaMa production been realized, they’d have been joined by Kei Takei, a dancer
and choreographer, who was expected to work specifically on developing the
action track further to make it more dance-like and less mimetic. (As dramaturg, I would have concentrated on
the action and vocal tracks with considerable focus on the visual as well.)
With each track operating independently and contrapuntally
at the same time, the director suggested, “To imagine this form, it may be
helpful to think of the music and narrative action as being like a dance and
the verbal and visual tracks as being the music the dance is set to.” The action track was “an operatic and
choreographic enactment of” the Goiania story in which very few words were
spoken. This narrative, which Shapiro
regarded as dance rather than pantomime, was the “heart” of the
performance. The visual track included
the set, costumes, props, and various effects Shapiro engineered with shadow,
light, and color. These devices were
intended to “parallel the music, mirroring the intrapsychic dimension of the
central narrative . . ., and making tangible the inter-connectedness
of modern urban streetlife.” Strangers’
environment, created in collaboration with Walker and designer Kyle Chepulis,
centered on the frame of a house made of metal pipes and covered with
newspaper.
Like many Shaliko environments, the
set was redesigned specifically for each performance site and interacted with
the performers rather than functioning merely as a backdrop or picture
frame. At the one-hour-forty-five-minute
Washington Square Church performance, the venue was essentially a large, open
room. The audience was seated on three
sides of the acting area with the projection screen made of newspapers forming
the fourth side. (At Yellow Springs, the
audience sat on two opposite sides of a long, narrow performance area, sort of
like a fashion runway. For the
unrealized staging at La MaMa, Shapiro had been discussing with artist Walker a
way to use the Annex’s balconies for “visual elements that would come in from
above and that would work . . . the way a mobile works.”) The action took place in the center of the
space while the vocal track was delivered from four microphones placed on
stands at the corners of the acting area.
At certain times, an actor spoke lines in silhouette over one of the microphones
carried by hand behind the screen. At
the edge of the performance space, but well within view of the spectators, were
the keyboard and drums on which Francisco Mora or Max Roach improvised on
Roach’s compositions.
The principal scenic element was the metal-pipe house, which
represented the Ferreira house, the Steinberg home, a hospital, and other locales. Covered with newspaper pages, it served as a
screen for shadow play and other effects of light that Shapiro devised. The discovery of the radiotherapy machine
(Act 1, scene 1), for instance, was seen in shadow play within the frame
(representing the abandoned clinic), after which one of the scavengers, played
by Du-Yee Chang, burst through the newspaper covering into the playing area
with his find. The structure, which was mounted
on casters and rolled onto, off, and about the playing area, looked like a
child’s drawing of a house and was thus symbolic of the main theme of Strangers, demonstrating how the childlike house
couldn’t withstand the onslaught of the technological culture, offering no
protection to the families who lived in it.
Other scenic objects included shopping carts, which served as the main
form of transportation around the stage; cardboard coffins; and various
hand-held rhythm instruments the actors played on top of Roach’s or Mora’s
sideline accompaniment. One
common element in many Shaliko productions involved symbolic matter falling
from the fly space; like the interactive sets, this was a Meyerholdian
“attraction” in Shapiro’s productions and Walker intended to extend its use in
the redevelopment of Strangers.
The several levels on which the visual track, for instance,
functioned could be seen in the shopping carts the actors used. Actors were wheeled about in them, props were
transported in them, and, topped with a sheet-draped board, they became gurneys
and examination tables in both the Brazilian clinic and the alien
spaceship. (The doctors in the clinic
were the same as the UFO aliens, reinforcing another thematic point of Strangers.) They were reminiscent of the carts of the
Mexican Day of the Dead pageants while at the same time evoking the homeless
street people often seen pushing all their possessions in them.
The vocal track, or libretto, was made up of the first-person
accounts taken from the published sources mentioned and delivered over the microphones. Except for the Ferreira family narrative, the
events of Strangers were more heard than seen. The vocal track neither narrated nor served as
dialogue for the action or visual tracks, though it might comment on these, or
suggest connections which the audience was expected to fill out for themselves. It was one of Shapiro’s strongest held
principles of theater that the audience was an active participant in the
theater event, “connecting the dots,” as the director liked to put it. For example, in the sequence described below,
when two exposed children, Leide and a neighbor, were taken to the clinic for
testing (Act 2, scene 2: “In the Clinic”), the Mother was behind the newspaper
screen. She began to speak Hedda’s
courtroom testimony about trying to figure out what was wrong with Lisa and
then her lines became Jim Jones’s last speech at the People’s Temple. While the children were being examined, Betty
simultaneously recounted her UFO abduction from one of the corner microphones
in short phrases between the questions by the court interrogator (who’s also an
alien) and Hedda’s answers. As
Hedda/Mother came to the description of examining Lisa, Betty depicted the
alien probing, and the action track presented the examination of the children
in the Brazilian clinic. Shapiro had
consistently used voices musically and Strangers was no exception, and there
were times, such as Betty’s delivery of the short bursts of monologue in this
scene, when the vocal track and the instrumental track conflated, with the
actors speaking in rhythmic cadences or pitching their voices in harmony with
Max Roach’s music.
In the earliest workshop presentation of Strangers at
the Yellow Springs Institute on 5 August 1989, for example, the opening
sequence included recordings of what
sounded like African-American teens talking about “wilding” followed by
testimony of alien-abductees describing experimentation. These latter sounded like prepared
statements, as if at a hearing or presentation; in the recording, one testament
overlapped another. These were followed
by statements about AIDS that sounded like a hearing with questions from a
panelist of some kind with witnesses asserting that AIDS was a hoax or
conspiracy. After this came an enactment
of Hedda Nussbaum’s testimony in court about the death of Lisa Steinberg with a
questioner. This 11-minute segment ended
with considerable overlapping of voices from these recordings followed by a
three-minute segment starting with a ululation and what appeared to be a speech
by Jim Jones. Then there was another
voice, ranting “I will fight.” After a
short silence, the Nussbaum testimony returned.
The recordings ended with about 20 minutes of Nussbaum’s testimony—no
other Strangers scriptual material was presented and only the Nussbaum
material seemed reenacted; the other recordings appeared to have been
actualities from interviews and hearings.
Finally, the instrumental track included the Mahler
recording, which evoked “what the dead children are, and what they represent in
us and our society,” and original music composed by Roach and played live by Mora,
like Roach, his teacher and mentor, a jazz drummer and composer. (In the last two performances at the
Washington Square Church, Roach performed his own music. Had the La MaMa production been realized,
Roach would also have appeared.) In
performance, this score was improvised according to the actors’ movements,
though not in the sense of a movie soundtrack or the musical accompaniment of a
silent film. (This makes the procedure
of the actors playing off of the music, noted earlier, a kind of mirror
exercise: it was impossible to determine, even among the artists themselves,
where the impulse started, with the music or with the actor.) The music commented on, played against,
underscored, or enhanced the other elements, while remaining independent of
them. It was intended to add a directly
emotional, gut-level aspect to the performance, intensifying the impact of the
other three, more cerebral tracks. In his
detailed analysis of Strangers in Text and Performance Quarterly,
Michael Wright declared that “Roach’s genius is to echo the human
rhythms—visceral, physical, and emotional—onstage and then feed those back to
the audience as if they were happening from
the audience in the same moment.”
Shapiro had intended to develop this track, the last to be conceived,
further, including sampling the voices of the cast during rehearsals and
manipulating them with a synthesizer, thus blurring the line somewhat between
the vocal and instrumental tracks. To
make the actors’ amplified voices “work more musically with Max’s score” during
performances, Shapiro planned to have new-music composer Marilyn Zalkan “do a
live mix with digital delay and effects.”
These plans were never realized.
At any given moment, each of the four tracks might do
different things, even tell different stories, functioning asynchronously; the
audience had to decide where to look and listen and what strains to
follow. The tracks all ran at the same
time but might “sometimes illuminate and sometimes obscure meaning.” “I’m
as much interested in the ways in which these tracks don’t go together,”
Shapiro said, “as in the ways in which they do.” The
best analogy of which I can think, though it’s not entirely apt, is the Talmud,
the collection of writings on the
practical application of Jewish law and tradition: the Torah text under
consideration is in the center of the page and the commentary, which can cover different
aspects of Jewish life (law, ethics, philosophy, customs, history, and lore)
and often touches on other subjects, is arrayed around it.
For example, one sequence from Act 1, scene 4 (“Leide Opens
the Capsule”) through Act 2, scene 2 (“In the Clinic”) illustrated this
complex, multi-leveled “collision montage” (a Sergei Eisenstein technique). Leide, the little Brazilian girl played by
Cathy Biro (who also portrayed Lisa Steinberg), opens the vial of radioactive
material (action track) while the Kindertotenlieder plays (instrumental
track). The dialogue was part of the
Hedda Nussbaum testimony (vocal track) while the girl acts out the story of
Nussbaum, Lisa, and Steinberg with her dolls (action). The interrogators of Hedda (performed by
Robbie McCauley, who was also the Brazilian Mother) were UFO aliens and Jim
Jones (visual track), and when the contaminated family was taken to the clinic
in the shopping carts (action and visual), the Mother/Hedda delivered the text
(vocal) in shadow from behind a newspaper screen (visual). During the examination of the family, the
doctors were again UFO aliens (action and visual) and Mora improvised on
Roach’s musical score in a minor key (instrumental). “So the action track . . . advances the
Brazil story,” Shapiro explained, “and everything else is just commentary for
that.” (I’ve simplified the description of some of the vocal track, which also
included part of Betty Mitchell’s UFO-abduction narrative, delivered by Jake-Ann
Jones, and a speech by Jim Jones, in the interest of clarity.) Shapiro believed the tracks were a way “of
transforming documentary material into poetry, music, and dance, of
fragmenting, repeating, layering, and re-contextualizing scenes and text.” Michael Wright, a playwright, director, and
teacher, described the overall experience this way:
At times the work seems to combine
elements of a radio play set to a jazz concert while we watch a shadow play
perform behind a dance piece; it is extremely challenging, the sort of piece
one wishes to see numerous times in order to try to isolate elements which are
not easily absorbed in one viewing.
Sometimes, Wright observed, because of the many levels on
which each track could operate simultaneously combined with the disparate
sources Shapiro drew on for the content of Strangers, a spectator was
required to synthesize “far more” than the four tracks. For instance, because the Steinberg text was delivered
while Leide was opening the radioactive capsule (and acting out the
Hedda-Lisa-Joel story with her dolls), Shapiro believed, “putting them together
talks about the way in which they are
radioactive and how the poison of Joel’s actions infected
that situation.” At the same time, the Kindertotenlieder on the instrumental
track “takes it to another level, a poetic
level.” Then Betty’s account of being
taken by aliens and examined aboard a UFO was paired with the Ferreiras being taken
to the clinic for testing, another connection Shapiro expected the audience to
make. Simultaneously, the minor-key
instrumental track, which came out of Roach’s own response to the scene, added
a direct emotional enhancement to the transport to the clinic and the two
monologues, carrying the audience to another, visceral plane.
Strangers was replete with
this kind of cross-referencing, some of them involving more levels than these
examples, including a reading of the cast itself. Indeed, the cast of Strangers was
Shaliko’s most multi-ethnic (a signal element in the company’s artistic commitment),
including McCauley and Jones, both African-Americans; Korean Chang; Biro, a
Euro-American; Dominguez, Hispanic American; and Iranian Ghaffari. Without the script or the action ever
specifying it, the presence of this international, inter-racial cast suggested
another level to the presentation of the events, that of racism.
“Not easily absorbed” was certainly an understatement from
the perspective of spectators unable to return several times to untangle what
could seem like a jumble of unconnected images. Clearly, Shapiro hadn’t met his initial goal
of making Strangers comprehensible “on first hearing.” Playing on the word “tracks” in the sense of
path, Wright, who variously described Strangers as “exceptionally
evocative,” “provocative,” and “richly textured,” also called it “a maze,” “an
emotional and intellectual labyrinth,” and an “enormously complex puzzle.” To someone trying to assemble a coherent,
linear narrative from the assault of impressions instead of focusing on
whatever made a visceral connection, Strangers would have been, as one
viewer, a respected theater professional, described it, “a mess.” On the other hand, someone more
receptive to Strangers’ blueprint might, as did Wright, become “thoroughly
. . . immersed in its complex world . . . that, for now, is perhaps
overwhelming for the audience.”
Playwright Wallace Shawn (a longtime friend of Shapiro’s and supporter
of Shaliko), for example, after praising the director for “not [being] afraid
that someone will accuse him of trying to be too poetic” because he dared to go
to “extremes of ecstasy, agony” in the production, summed up his experience: “I
thought in [Strangers], he really pulled it off.”
Richard Kostelanetz observed that this problem’s endemic to
the mixed-means theater of which Strangers is a prime example:
As synchronization is abandoned,
so the relations between all activities, whether at any particular moment or
over the duration of the piece, tend to be discontinuous in structure and
devoid of an obvious focus. As the ways
of presenting material are nearly as various as the number of mixed-means
practitioners, each piece demands of the spectator an actively engaged and
highly personal perception. These
symptoms of apparent disorder, often leaving the eye unsure of where it should
look and the ear unsure of what it should hear, challenge the audience to
perceive in chaos.
He counseled that this “discontinuous succession of images
and events . . . must be pieced together in the observer’s mind if the piece is
to be fully understood.” Still, audiences
appeared to connect with specific moments; as Shapiro observed, for instance,
“There were times when we got quite a strong vocal response from the
audience. People sobbing. It was really interesting,” and, specifically
when Leide, the little girl, died, he reported, “I watched the audience; some of
them actually cry when she goes away, so they must get it.”
Shapiro wanted his audiences to connect the dots on their
own, but he recognized that they’d need some signposts. “We are putting together these different
kinds of activity in a way that creates a synthesis,” Shapiro explained, “but
that synthesis isn’t a recognizable form.”
He was attempting to create a montage of attractions in his most complex
application of his understanding of Eisenstein’s theory (about which I wrote on
ROT in “Eisenstein’s Theory of Attractions,” 31 January 2010), seeking to
create what he described as “a kind of sung image theater that is dense,
layered, and deep, but is also immediately accessible.” What Shapiro was looking for, working to
create, was nothing less than a new form of theater, but he recognized that “the
form of the show doesn’t exist.” However
unrecognizable or nameless, Strangers was Shaliko’s first
concrete step toward that new form—but it remained unrealized.
While reviewing tapes of performances of Strangers,
Shapiro began discussing with his company alternatives for communicating the
ideas he wanted to get across, elucidating the connections—whatever they might
be—for the audience by making the episodes—the “dots” or “attractions”—clearer
within themselves. Some of the planned
revision was to have been textual, but possible solutions ranged over the
entire production, including acting business, props (many falling from the flies),
costuming, and nearly every other element in the production. One discussion, for instance, dealt with what
symbolic costume and prop details might help signal who each member of the
Ferreira family was and what Shapiro thought he or she represented. He observed, moreover, that the audience
sometimes had to block out one or more of the tracks and focus on the remaining
elements to avoid being overwhelmed.
This selective inattention caused some spectators to miss part of the
information Shapiro wanted them to process.
Shapiro was looking for a way to link the tracks so that they’d be less bewildering
to the audience without actually merging them into that Brechtian “muddle” and
without providing a packaged response and pat answers. Strangers was full of ideas, many and
varied, as Wright pointed out, “because Shapiro does not intend to make one
exact, forced connection but rather to leave room for each audience member to
make his/her own necessary linkages.” He
wanted the audience to find the thread that connected the disparate narrative
elements as they relate to the spectators’ own lives; the tracks provided
different layers of information, some of it intellectual and some
emotional. He didn’t, however, want to
spoon-feed them his own associations or those of his cast. Since making sense of the puzzle is part of
what Shapiro wanted the spectators to do, being a little lost, in the sense of
reexamining prejudices and received ideas, was necessary. In Shapiro’s eyes, the audience had to be
“lost in this world [so] that they really need to make the connections” with
events “in the world outside the theater.”
Only two publications covered Strangers
in New York City. (Michael Wright’s
study, “In Process: Leonardo Shapiro, the Shaliko Company, and Strangers,”
was published in
October 1991, over a year after the performances closed, though it was
written upon viewing the Washington Square Church workshop and then
interviewing Shapiro several times in July 1990.) In High Performance, the
performance-art journal, Allen Frame called the piece “a dirge-like collage of
the bad news of the last decade,” explaining, “The Shaliko Company took a
singular stand towards the tragic events.
There were no laughs, no absurdity, and no ironic edge in Strangers. The
sense of memorialization throughout the piece cast a heavy pall that
threatened to become monotonous.” The writer
and photographer reported in his article
“New York: The Shaliko Company: Strangers” (Winter 1990),
for instance, that “[W]e were asked to do a lot of intense listening. The . . . testimonies were interwoven,
at first in dissonant juxtapositions, but gradually the speeches became interchangeable. In the end we heard the one thing they were
all talking about: the incomprehensible gulf between us and them.” Frame, who’d interviewed Shapiro for Bomb previously, continued: “Balancing
the heaviness was the sophisticated touch of director Leonardo Shapiro . . .
. He elicits performances that are
strong and compassionate . . . . He
stages narrative incidents abstractly but clearly, with a minimum of props and an
absence of clutter.” “The company,”
Frame added, “is adept at creating parallel levels of action throughout the various
disturbing situations and almost fusing them.”
In conclusion,” Frame felt, “The challenge of making Strangers work was in figuring out to what extent its
horrors can be glimpsed. . . . But the
use of testimony to serve the context of theater in Strangers, the failure of testimony as it’s used by the media
needed to be thrown into sharper relief.”
In The Villager
(“No Stranger to New York, Shaliko Previews New Work,” 22 March 1990), a
neighborhood weekly, Todd Olson called Strangers “a requiem for
victims,” adding, “‘Strangers’ is a performance to watch, even to
witness.” Olson wrote, “The torment and the end of
innocents; the unremembered. ‘Strangers’
is a symphony for them . . . .” The
performance, Olson wrote, “is impressive in its athleticism as well as its
sheer mass. It is an hour and 45 minutes
of running, flying and suspension.” The
Shaliko Company, said Olson, “are non-traditional storytellers” and they and Strangers “warrant watching.”
These accounts weren’t so much reviews as reports on a work-in-progress. Shapiro said that he avoided actual reviews
because he didn’t consider the Washington Square Church performances a public
production but rather a workshop. No
mainstream periodical covered the production, but it’s likely they wouldn’t
have known what to make of it in any case, especially in its unfinished
state. Unfinished or not, however, Strangers
represented the pinnacle of Shaliko’s work in terms of its sophistication,
scope, complexity, and daring.
[While working on this
material originally—Leo Shapiro was still alive then, but had already retired
to New Mexico--I decided that Strangers was really sort of autobiographical. I never developed this notion, never
tested it to see if it’s consistent, and I never ran it by Leo, but I think it’s
true. Leo was a “stranger”: he saw himself as an outsider—not just an avant-gardist,
but a real outsider. He identified with
all the “strangers” in the play—they were him! I began to think through the
other stuff he did and the people he admired and was drawn to (Indians, the
artist David Wojnarowicz, the Beats, prisoners) and how he described himself in
various situations (he was one of only two Jews at Farragut Academy, for
instance; he was a lone Anglo among “Cuba’s angry exiles” in his Miami schools,
and so on) and the kinds of philosophy and politics he espoused—it’s all about
being on the outside. Not just ahead of
the crowd, but completely different. Strangers is an expression of this sense of himself in a way that all the other
pieces only suggested.
[I knew Leo, but I didn’t
know him all that well. I also wasn’t
analyzing him when we talked—even if I had the credentials to try that, I don’t
have the standing to do it. As far as
the Strangers/stranger thing is concerned,
though, I’m not really going to “diagnose” Leo, but offer an opinion on how he
situated himself in that context.
Clearly, he chose to make that piece for a reason. While he may have been introduced by one of
his students to the story of the Ferreira family, he put the spin on it and
assembled all the other materials that ended up comprising Strangers. And he chose the title. I don’t imagine he actually thought of it as
autobiographical, but he did acknowledge that many of his plays spoke to him
about his own life—Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son (1985, 1990, 1992) was about him and his father; so was Georg
Büchner’s Woyzeck (1976) in a way (the guy who
sold Woyzeck the knife was modeled after Leo’s dad in his production). Those were only the plays to which Leo copped
to a personal-history connection; I saw links to his life and feelings in many
others going back even to his high school and college work.
[The revelation to me when I
lit on this connection was the understanding that Leo wasn’t a leader of the
opposition, a guy way out in front with others following behind him. That’s Ibsen, an artist whom Leo greatly
respected. (“A crowd now stands where I
stood when I wrote my earlier books. But
I myself am there no longer, I am somewhere else—far away ahead of them—or so I
hope.”) Leo was outside the whole process,
not just in front of it. It may be
significant—although unwittingly so—that one of the books he found important
was Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game/Magister Ludi. One lesson of the book is that, when faced
with the choice of playing a game one way or another—well or badly, say—there’s
always one other choice that is seldom recognized: Not to play the game at all. Leo didn’t just elect to play the game by
different rules—he elected not to play; he played his own game. He suffered for it—society doesn’t take
kindly to people who don’t play its game.
It’s also significant, I think, that he admired the Situationists—they
made up their own games, too, usually to subvert the proscribed games society
determined we should play. (See my post “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” 3
February 2012.) The Situationists
weren’t trying to lead society anywhere.
They were trying to break it!
David Wojnarowicz didn’t want to be admitted to the mainstream, he
wanted to smash it (see my ROT
profile “David Wojnarowicz,” 15 March
2011). The Beats didn’t want entree to
the establishment’s salons—they wanted to create their own milieu. The same with the Hippies—especially the communards of New Mexico in the ‘60s when Leo
lived there—a culture that was really “counter.” And the anarchists (whom Leo also admired) are,
by definition, against anything society structures—they want to tear it down.
[Many of Leo’s literary
heroes are also stalwart outsiders: Horatio from Paul Goodman’s Empire
City; Woyzeck; Galy Gay (Bertolt Brecht’s Man Is Man); the protagonists of both Hesse books he
liked, Steppenwolf and Magister Ludi; Konstantin
Treplyev (Anton Chekhov’s The
Seagull); Spartacus (both the movie
figure and the legendary hero); and so on.
I’m also sure that his affinity for sci-fi works in here, too—especially
since it figured so prominently in Strangers. In a TV play Leo wrote based
on his own marriage, the character of his wife was becoming a mainstream
dancer—People magazine liked her, she was proud to
assert—and he was an adamantly unmarketable artist whose works no one would
buy. That's pretty much a committed
outsider, I think.
[Leo loved AmerIndian
culture—and they are the ultimate outsiders (though not by their own
choosing). The Taos Pueblos, whom Leo
really esteemed, are steadfast in their opposition to assimilation. They want to stay outsiders to the Anglo
society. (I wrote some about the Taos Indians
in “Taos & Taos Pueblo,” 24 and 27 May
2012.) I made mention above in Part 1 of Leo’s childhood fantasy of the little boy
who dreamed about coming to school armed with a tomahawk and scalping his
principal. If that’s not the image of
someone who sees himself as an outsider, I don’t know what is. (It should be mentioned that little Leo
Richard Shapiro grew up to be Leonardo Shapiro, committed pacifist and devotee
of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his philosophy of non-violence.)]
