Mac Wellman

[About a year ago, the New York Times published an article about playwright Mac Wellman (Antigone, 2004; Second-Hand Smoke, 1997; The Hyacinth Macaw, 1994; A Murder of Crows, 1992) as a teacher at Brooklyn College.  His teaching techniques and his tutorial points about playwriting are very reminiscent of his own writing—not just in his play scripts, but also in his essays about theater. 

[I‘ve seen three of Wellman’s plays (Sincerity Forever, 1990; Hyacinth Macaw; Energumen, 1985) and an anti-Iraq war collage called Collateral Damage to which Wellman contributed in 1991.  (I posted a brief report on Energumen in “I’m So Confused . . . !” on 4 July 2012,  Unhappily, there’s no report on Hyacinth Macaw.)  As part of my research on Leonardo Shapiro, the founder and director of The Shaliko Company on whom I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater, I looked into another Wellman play, Whirligig, which Shaliko commissioned.  For that same research, I also read Wellman’s wonderful—but idiosyncratic—essay “A Chrestomathy Of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater,” published originally in Yale School of Drama’s Theater magazine (Vol.  24, No. 1, 1993).

[So I’m going to republish “A Mentor Whose Only Mantra Is Oddity” by Alexis Soloski below and then close this post with my description of Whirligig.  I hope you all will find both (or at least one, please) interesting.}

“A MENTOR WHOSE ONLY MANTRA IS ODDITY”

by Alexis Soloski

[This article first appeared in print in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 18 February 2015.]

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mac Wellman, the Donald I. Fine Distinguished Professor of Play Writing, sat at the head of a table in a Brooklyn College classroom. It was the first meeting of the semester, and he needed to arrange tutorials with his graduate students. He asked them to draw up a plan for the term’s work: something small, something secret. “Pick something you’re a little afraid of,” he advised in his gentle, raspy tenor.

“Pick something that scares you. Plays that are covered in fur, for instance.”

Since Mr. Wellman joined the Brooklyn College faculty in 1998, he has trained many of New York’s wildest and woolliest playwrights. Annie Baker, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for “The Flick,” studied with him. So did Young Jean Lee, Thomas Bradshaw, Tina Satter and members of Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the National Theater of the United States of America.

This winter and spring [i.e., 2015], JACK, a theater space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is devoting much of its season to recent graduates of the program. The festival is called Damnable Scribbling, a nod to Mr. Wellman’s favored appellation, the one that graces his website: Damnable Scribbler.

There are other places to study playwriting, of course. And other professors to study it with. No one sniffs at a master of fine arts degree from New York University, a certificate in playwriting from Juilliard. But Mr. Wellman’s program has the distinction of turning out audacious writers with very little in common with him or with one another. Try to find the overlap of Ms. Baker’s empathetic neorealism and Mr. Bradshaw’s scabrous provocations. Look for the intersection between Ms. Lee’s canny deconstructions of identity politics and Sibyl Kempson’s rapturous nonsense. Keep looking.

Mr. Wellman, 69, came to playwriting accidentally. As he explained over a glass of rosé at a cafe near his Park Slope apartment, he was hitchhiking in the Netherlands during a junior year abroad when the Dutch director Annemarie Prins happened to give him a ride. He gave her a few of his poems, and she asked him if he had ever considered writing plays. “No,” he told her. “I don’t like plays.” But she persisted, and he obliged her, writing plays for Dutch radio.

In his own estimation, his early poetical plays “were really pretty awful.” It took him a decade of constant theatergoing and constant practice to learn how to write. Since then, he has won three Obies and numerous grants and awards and has completed more than 80 plays, some epic and one only a single word long (“Psychopannychy”). He has written history plays, mystery plays, biographical plays, political plays, science fiction plays and plays composed of gleefully bad grammar.

He loathes what he calls “the theater of the already known” — the predictable, the formulaic, the tasteful, the complacent. As a consequence, his work is strange. He favors, as an article in the journal Postmodern Culture suggested, “wrongness, ceremony and a bit of demonism.”

There’s an exacting attention to language — every sentence, every word, every syllable — that would seem exhausting if the works weren’t so mischievous, so exultant, so fun. (He signed a scheduling email, “See you tamale!” This was not a case of autocorrect.) And he’s fond of impossible stage directions like “something strange happens” or “a furry pause.”

To Mr. Wellman’s annoyance and delight, his students tend to treat him as a cross between a favorite uncle and a minor deity. He teases them, mispronouncing their names or kidding them when they turn serious, but when he offers one of his playwriting koans — “The theater is a very strange and elusive thing to do,” he told his seminar participants — they reach for their notebooks.

Mr. Wellman and his colleague Erin Courtney, who graduated from the program in 2003, design an individual curriculum for each student. They’ll assign readings in philosophy, poetry, structural anthropology, nonsense or an early American novel about a murderous ventriloquist.

Ms. Kempson, who graduated from the program in 2007, wrote in an email: “He taught me that we have the right to read whatever the hell we want, and write whatever the hell we want, whether we’re smart, dumb, worthy, irresponsible, interesting, boring, pious, satanic or confused, and whether we ‘get it’ or not. And he’s right.”

He asks students to write bad plays, to write plays with their nondominant hands, to write a play that takes five hours to perform and covers a period of seven years. Ms. Satter recalled an exercise in which she had to write a play in a language she barely knew.

“I wrote mine in extremely limited Russian,” she wrote in an email. “Then we translated them back into English and read them aloud. The results were these oddly clarified, quiveringly bizarre mini-gems.”

Mr. Wellman explained: “I’m not trying to teach them how to write a play. I’m trying to teach them to think about what kind of play they want to write.”

Alec Duffy, the artistic director of JACK, enthusiastically described the work that emerges from the program as “plays that don’t really behave like plays, plays that feature an adventure in form.”

Mr. Bradshaw, who graduated in 2004, said in an email that Mr. Wellman is “an expert at helping you unlock your mind.”

“He’s not interested in getting you to write like him,” he added. “He never attempts to force a particular aesthetic down your throat. He wants everything that’s unique about you to emerge on the page.”

And once that singular voice emerges, Mr. Wellman will champion it. He follows the careers of his current and former students avidly. He mentioned a dozen or so in the course of an hourlong conversation. Then he sent a follow-up email mentioning more. Then a second email. Then a third. Then a fourth. At the end of the last one, he wrote that he loses sleep worrying about all the writers who haven’t yet received “the attention they deserve!”

Mr. Wellman’s own work no longer receives the attention it once did, although he’s still writing plays, as well as poetry, novels and opera librettos. He’d like to see these new works staged, though he worries about taking opportunities away from young writers like his students.

“I’ve had a lot of productions,” he said as he finished his wine. “I would like to have more. But if it means somebody I think highly of can’t get a production, I don’t need it.”

[Alexis Soloski is a contributor to the New York Times and the theater review-writer for the U.S. edition of The Guardian.  She’’s a reviewer former  for the Village Voice, and a writer for American Theater and Capitol New York. She’s a lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University.]

*  *  *  *

WHIRLIGIG (1989)

[I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his work with The Shaliko Company, his East Village experimental theater company.  While the company began reimagining classic plays (Children of the Gods, based on several Greek tragedies; Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts; and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, included in the first part of my “Faust Clones,” posted on 15 January 2016) and ended with company-built pieces (Strangers, examined in “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 March 2014; The Yellow House; Mystery History Bouffe Goof), in between Shaliko commissioned works by contemporary playwrights.   In the spring of 1989, Shapiro staged Whirligig by Mac Wellman at the Cooper Square Theatre in New York City (producer:  MaryEllen Kernaghan, music:  Charlie Morrow, set designer:  Kyle Chepulis, scenic artist:  Polly Walker, cast:  Geza Kovacs – Man, Cecil MacKinnon – Sister, Elena Nicholas [Prischepenko] – Girl, Michael Preston – Bus Man, Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann – Girl Huns).  The play premièred from 5 April to 7 May 1989, right after Doctor Faustus.  From my research on Shapiro and Shaliko, I compiled a brief examination of this sci-fi-based play.]

From the demons of Hell in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shaliko shifted to demons from space in Whirligig, commissioned from Mac Wellman in 1989.  Described by photographer and writer Allen Frame in a Bomb interview of Shapiro as “William Inge meets Rod Serling meets The Three Stooges,” Shaliko’s Whirligig was a display of pyrotechnical language and sight gags featuring a green-haired runaway girl at a bus station (Elena Nicholas) who meets a metallic spaceman (Geza Kovacs).  Visiting Earth to discover why we are so happy, the Man, known as a Weird, had escaped a marauding band of female space warriors, the Girl Huns (Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann), and the Girl had run away from her goody-goody, materialistic sister (Cecil MacKinnon).  Alisa Solomon characterized the play in the Village Voice as Wellman’s “wry look at our hopeful fascination with the final frontier.” 

Not that the plot was so easy to follow, or so significant to begin with.  (The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold disparaged it as “nonsense . . . like having the first act of The Tempest suddenly followed by two reels of a schlocky Cinecittà flck about women warriors.”  The Show Business reviewer, Martin Blake, dubbed the plot “whimsical” but “at times unfocused.”)  It was Wellman’s language and the political satire, biting if sometimes obscure, that drove this production.  As James Rasenberger wrote in City Paper: “As a respected poet, Wellman understandably delights in linguistic trickery: his characters speak with twisted eloquence, turning the American idiom inside out and upside down.”  Calling the play’s language “an amazement,” Martin Blake insisted that Wellman “is a poet of formidable power and biting wit,” asserting, “Poets can make great playwrights if they pay as much attention to form and structure as they do words”—though I’m not convinced that Wellman would buy the caveat.

Like all Shaliko work, Whirligig is political—the bus stop in the middle of nowhere is Wellman’s stand-in for a fascist universe.  When the Girl describes her sister, she is describing Wellman’s idea of the American middle class:

This is my good sister, Jennifer.

Jennifer, meet Xuphus.  Xuphus meet

Jennifer.  Jennifer is a normal American

cunt.  She can’t stand the idea someone

might not want to be like her.  She hates

anybody is different, or looks different,

or aspires to strange gods.  She thinks

the Arabs should unilaterally accept UN

resolution 242.  She thinks South Africa

is America’s best friend in Africa.  She

believes in god, Somoza, Swaggart and Margaret

Thatcher.  Look at her, Xuphus, she’s a closet

religious maniac who wants to be reborn so

badly she’d blow the world up gladly.  Pleasure

is lost on her, simple fun means nothing to her.

Human life horrifies her unless it’s a famine

on TV that reminds her how much America is not doing. . . .

Further on, in a speech by the Man, Wellman evoked what is clearly his vision of the rules governing American society:

God curse those who do what is

Forbidden.  And chief among the things

which are forbidden are the combing of hair

not our way, the eating of food not to our

taste, the enactment of dramatic scenes not

to our liking, and the rubbing out of our

very being, when we have merely been

engaged in the working out of our destiny,

as described in the Big Book of Tlooth,

who you may not reckon as amounting to

a pot of piss compared to your god

Tengri, but I assure you it is not so,

because Tlooth [. . .]

is called Tlooth for good reason.  For Tlooth

is truth made manifest and angelic and eternal.

And the truth is eternal, that is why it is

called truth [. . .].

Politics aside, Whirligig was also a very physical play like much of Shaliko’s work.  The small cast included Cecil MacKinnon and Michael Preston, veteran circus performers, and Wellman created a piece for this group.  The playwright had actually been working on something very different when Shapiro told him Shaliko had gotten a grant to commission a play from Wellman. 

I met with Leo’s company, which at that time consisted of the two women, Cecil and Elena, and basically talked with them about what they wanted to do—what sort of theater they liked to do—and tried to figure out a play that . . . .  Both of them were fairly interested in physical theater.  Cecil in particular: she has a background in clown work.  So I tried to figure out something that would do that and then also allow me to do what I wanted to do with language.  And we worked on it, and the result was Whirligig.

The production was also loaded with special effects—low tech, though they may have been.  A body, for example, manages to turn up repeatedly and inexplicably in bus station lockers—among other sight gags.  Show Business’s Blake characterized the FX as “remarkable, featuring an outerspace ride to rival the Hayden Planetariums’ [sic] splashiest shows.”

With a backdrop painted by artist Polly Walker and real bus station lockers designer Kyle Chepulis found somewhere, the production ended with what City Paper reviewer called “one of the most transporting theatrical sights I’ve ever seen.”  In an interview I did with the director in 1992, Shapiro described that moment as we looked through some production photos:

The end of that show—you can’t see it, the pictures don’t show it because it was so dark . . . .  The Ride of the Valkyrie thing was done . . . .  The backdrop, you see, is these stars which are—I don’t remember what they are.  I don’t know if there were holes in the canvas or light bulbs.  I think they were light bulbs.  Anyway, at the end what I did was, I had a strobe go off and over the whole set we dropped black, velvet drops—covered the whole set.  The set disappeared [. . .] and they were covered with stars cut out of glow-tape.  And we had hit them with two strobe flashes so that it lit them as stars for five minutes.  And the last scene took five or six minutes and it was done totally in the dark with these stars, and it was totally illusionistic.  Nobody had any idea how we created this.  Nobody would have guessed it was glow-tape— something so low-tech.  And they did their choreography . . . .  They had helmets that were made out of plexiglass with tubes that had light-emitting diodes in them so their antler-things were lit.  And there was a little light on their eyes that was made by a little, tiny flashlight inside the helmet.  So their faces were lit and their antlers were lit but you couldn’t see their bodies at all.  And they’re in this infinite black and their riding horses.  [. . . .]  And the horses’ heads were hollow and they had a light inside—a colored light—and they were made by Polly.  So you could see the glowing horses’ heads and the faces and the antlers, and they’re doing this sort of riding choreography.  But they’re floating in space.  One is on a chair and one is down and low, and you can’t tell where they are, and so there’s an illusion of infinite space with these things.  It was really beautiful, but it doesn’t show up in any photographs or video because there’s literally no light.  There’s no light that goes out of anything.

           

The press, however, showed little interest.  Frame felt  that Shaliko’s Whirligig, a “highly original satire of the American scene,” was “a sleeper” that had been “underrated by critics.”  The playwright thought that had Whirligig been delayed until the fall of 1989, after he had done Bad Penny in Central Park, Whirligig would have attracted much more press attention.  After liking his first play, Wellman contended, the New York Times “didn’t like a couple of things, then they wouldn’t review me for four years during which time I did Whirligig.”  After Bad Penny, however, Wellman’s work had gotten good coverage. 

Those reviewers who did come, including Feingold of the Voice, mostly conceded that they did not understand the play, but some enjoyed the theatrics anyway; Feingold was not among these last, though Wellman recalled that other Voice critics—Erika Munk and Alisa Solomon—liked the production but did not publish full reviews.  Solomon published a capsule notice in the “Voice Choices” section of the paper in which she described the production as “[b]ending language like blues guitarists bend notes.”  In his notice, Feingold declared that “Whirligig, like earlier acts of Wellmania. rapidly reduces itself to repetitive trash entertainment, in this case the comic-book scit-fi kind.”  The play, lamented the Voice reviewer, “could have been developed into something witty, scathing, painfully true.” 

In City Paper, James Rasenberger affirmed that “the play fully lives up to its title: its plot is convoluted, its meanings obscure—Whirligig is dizzying.”  The reviewer continued, “But this is not the kind of stupefying experimental theatre that leaves one feeling numb.  You may not ‘get’ Whirligig—I sure didn’t—but it is so entertaining and electrifying that it doesn’t matter.”  In TheaterWeek, Neal E. O’Hara wrote that “boy is my head spinning” and reported that once MacKinnon’s Jennifer “arrives on the scene, the dramaturgical fireworks ignite.  And it’s not even the Fourth of July.”

Show Business’s Blake asserted that Whirligig succeeded “mostly because of [Wellman’s] masterful and imaginative use of language.”  He specified: “His monologues are not merely emotional episodes or opportunities for  character development, but twisters of words that fill the theater and set the atmosphere.”  The trade weekly’s review-writer pronounced, “The audience is hypnotized . . . .”  Comparing Whirligig with the work of Twilight Zone’s Serling, “whose influence is palpable,” Blake applauded how well, through Shapiro’s direction and design, the play “communicates a marvelous creepiness.” 

[My quotations from Whirligig were taken from the unpublished text used in the 1989 Shaliko production, but Wellman’s play was published in 1989 by the Theatre Communications Group as part of its Plays in Process series and subsequently in The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).]

“May You Be Blessed With Light”: The Zuni Shalako Rite

The Shalako ceremony of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico is, according to Frank Waters, a writer of mixed Cheyenne and Southern Caucasian ancestry, a rite that assures the transformation of winter’s death into spring’s rebirth. The ritual is expected to bless the Zuni people with the sun’s light for another year. It is also a dramatic interpretation of what the Zuni religion means to the people. As one Zuni chant tells it:

This night
The ones who are our fathers
Masked god priests,
All the masked gods.
At their precious mountain,
Their precious lake,
Perpetuating what has been since the first beginning,
Have assumed human form.

All observers describe the Shalako ceremony as a magnificent spectacle; Waters, who lived in Taos (site of one of the oldest pueblos), said simply that it is “one of the greatest Pueblo ceremonials.” American ethnologist Walter Hough, in fact, found the various Pueblo kachina dances, of which the Shalako ceremony is one, “the best round of theatrical entertainment enjoyed by any people in the world, for nearly every ceremony has its diverting side, for religion and drama are here united as in primitive times.” Leonardo Shapiro, an innovative stage director about whom I’ve written several times on ROT and who adapted the deities’ name for his theater company, told me that the ceremony, which he saw while living near Taos in the 1970s, was “the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever been in.”

Zuni Pueblo, on the Zuni Indian Reservation, is in the southwestern panhandle of McKinley County in western New Mexico, near the border with Arizona. The pueblo, home to about 6,500 people (1,500 families), is 35 miles south of Gallup and about 150 miles west of Albuquerque. The area was problably settled about 1,300 years ago (the Zuni say they have been there for millennia), though the current pueblo, the most populous of the 19 pueblos in New Mexico, has been the home of the tribe only since the 16th century and the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors under Francisco Coronado. (Taos and Acoma have been continuously inhabited for about 900 years. It is debatable which is the oldest.) The Zuni people, the most traditional of the Pueblo tribes, have a unique language, unrelated to any of the other Indian languages including the other Pueblo tongues; history; and culture.

The Shalakos are messengers between the spirit world and our own. They are the spirit figures of the Zuni pantheon who mediate between humanity and the gods of rain and prosperity, the principal Zuni deities. (The word means ‘rain bringer’ in the Zuni language. Remember, the Zuni are a desert people—rain is a powerful force in their culture.) The Shalakos come to the human realm to collect the people’s prayers and take them back to the rainmakers at the end of the ceremony, thus connecting the mortal world to the spirit realm. The ceremony reenacts the Zuni creation story; just as the flood of the Judeo-Christian Bible signifies rebirth and renewal, so does the Shalako ceremony.

Life for the Zuni is inextricably bound to their ceremonial art and performances. The Shalako ceremony, on the ninth day of the winter solstice to mark the Zuni new year, involves the entire village and reestablishes the people’s prospects for prosperity, long life, and fertility for the year to come. But spirituality is not the sole focus of these ceremonies at the center of Zuni culture. Most have a strong aesthetic component as well. Literary and social critic Edmund Wilson, who witnessed the ceremony, observed, “Here, too, one finds theater and worship before they have become dissociated, and the spectacle suggests comparisons in the fields of both religion and art,” noting a resemblance to Russian ballet under Diaghilev. “The public rituals constitute the most important esthetic expression of the people,” wrote Ruth Bunzel, an early 20th-century anthropologist who studied Zuni culture. She continued:

Not only are they “artistic” in the superficial sense, in that they embrace the types of behavior which we arbitrarily lump together as “the arts”—ornament, poetry, music, the dance—but they provide the satisfaction of the deeper esthetic drive. . . . Zuñi rituals have a style of their own that belongs to ritual as an art.

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 “manager” each dancer needs to keep from toppling over. The Shalako mask, perhaps the largest in the world, is magnificent to behold:

The masks are turquoise-colored, with a crest of eagle and macaw feathers, and horns with red feather pendants, ball eyes, long snouts which open and close; long hair, a collar of raven feathers and fox skins, dance kilts, and white blankets are also part of the costume. The mask is carried on a pole, simulating a creature ten feet high. The masks are accorded great deference and are consecrated with cornmeal before each use. Each mask is associated with one of the six kivas [underground ceremonial chambers].

The personator looks out through a hole in the embroidered white blanket covering his body. His garments are expanded like a 19th-century belle’s hoop skirt with flexible wooden strips. Beneath the Shalako costume, the personator, his face painted, wears a black shirt trimmed with colored ribbons on his shoulders and sleeves and a black wool loincloth fastened with an embroidered sash. His legs and thighs are bare and his knees are painted red, his calves yellow. He wears high, red buckskin moccasins; only his legs are visible below the Shalako mask. (There are actually two personators for each Shalako: an “older brother” who carries the mask into the village and a “younger brother” who carries the basket of prayer sticks before the god. During the night-long ceremony, the younger brother will relieve the older brother when he’s tired of dancing. At the end of the rite, the roles are reversed.)

According to Zuni belief, those who wear the masks of the Shalakos are transformed into the spirits they personate. The mask of a Shalako, or any kachina, is sacred and magical. It's been ritually cleansed and rededicated, anointed with cornmeal and prayed over. It's been ceremonially given life. No one, not even the wearer who manipulates the strings that roll the eyes and clack the beak—he’s constrained from looking up into the cone-shaped mask above his head—must see how the mask actually works except the designated manager. The wearer’s not only possessed by the spirit and assumes the personality of the god he represents, but, the Zunis say, through him the god has become a human being. A masked personator is untouchable, dangerous to other humans until the paint is removed. But alongside the sacredness of the mask, it is also a work of art in the same way that the ceremony is both a religious ritual and theatrical entertainment. Both physical appearance (that is, beautiful bodies) and performing techniques are integral to the conduct of the personations—and those chosen each year are judged on how well they look, dance, chant, and sing. Members of the tribe aren’t averse to giving the participants performance reviews or, like our own John Simon, criticism of their physical attributes.

The Shalako personators are ordinary Zunis chosen during the preceding year and they prepare extensively for the ceremonies. Other villagers simply join in as the familiar ritual unfolds and still others, including outsiders, participate merely by being present. (There were a few specific exceptions to the Zunis’ inclusiveness: because of their violent suppression of the Pueblo culture, Spaniards—and, by inheritance, Spanish-Americans—are not welcome, and certain Indian tribes who have been historically hostile to the Zunis, such as the Apaches, are excluded. In recent years, the Zunis have restricted their ceremonies to outsiders considerably.) The six Shalako personators, one for each of the compass points plus up and down, enter the village escorted by the Long Horn kachina, who has curative powers, after the way is prepared by “mudhead” clowns, called koyemshi. The ceremony, at the end of a year-long ceremonial period when prayers sticks are planted in February, May, October, and November, lasts all night and progresses throughout the village as the Shalakos make their way to the specially prepared houses in which they will spend the night. The progress of the Shalakos, who perform a distinctive dance and run ceremonial foot races, is accompanied by singing, clowning by the koyemshi—some of it pretty low—and prayers. Villagers line the route or watch from the flat roofs of the adobe pueblo houses. The adults all know, of course, that beneath the costumes are fellow villagers (possessed though they may be), but the children are protected from this knowledge until they are initiated as adolescents; for the young, these figures are their pueblo’s gods. The proceeding, which recapitulates the story of the people’s arrival at Zuni and the founding of the pueblo, is a kind of circus-cum-mystery play.

The koyemshi (the Hopi call them tachuki), portrayed as witless, impotent, and grossly misshapen spirits—they represent the idiot children of incest—entertain the villagers with comic and often obscene interludes. Their masks are like knobby helmets made of soft cotton colored with pink clay from Sacred Lake, with bulbous lumps (filled with seeds, cotton, and dirt from the pueblo streets) on their heads and protruding eyes and puckered lips. The use of the earth gives the clowns magical power over the people so the koyemshi can claim their respect and veneration. Sometimes there are feathers sprouting from the knobs. The clowns’ bodies are also painted pink with sacred clay, and the only other costume is a short, black kilt. There are 10 of these sacred clowns, considered brothers, but each has his own personality, reflected in the imagery of the mask and the antics he performs. One, for instance, speaks gibberish when he tries to say the ritual prayers; another’s cowardly, lagging behind the group and hiding under ladders; another can only laugh; and so on. The clowns sing and tell jokes about the villagers; play games of beanbag, tag, or leapfrog; perform magic tricks; chase the Shalakos; and generally do anything to make people laugh. Ironically, the koyemshi masks are the most dangerous in the Zuni religion: no one dares even to touch them for fear of going sexually crazy.

Kachinas among the Pueblos and Hopis are spirits who mediate between the human and spiritual worlds, and may be interpreted as spirits of the dead, among other things. Frank Waters, who wrote both novels and non-fiction books about the Indians of the high desert of northern New Mexico, writes:

Kachinas thus are spirits. Spirits of the dead, spirits of all the mineral, plant, animal, and human forms that have traveled the Road, spirits of the mythical heroes, the stars, clouds, color-directions . . . . The kachinas, then, are the inner forms, the spiritual components of the outer physical forms, which may be invoked to manifest their benign powers so that man may be enabled to continue his journey. They are the invisible forces of life. Not really gods, but rather intermediators, messengers.

They’re often represented in Indian ceremonies as masked dancers who personify them or as elaborately carved and decorated dolls. (The masks are sacred but the dolls are given to children to help them recognize the spirits of the Pueblo pantheon.) The Long Horn kachina is the human counterpart of the rainmaker spirits, the rain priest of the north. He heads the rain priesthood and is the keeper of the Zuni ceremonial calendar. A projection on the right side of his mask accounts for his name and symbolizes long life. The Shalakos are kachinas.

The men who perform in the ceremony are chosen during the year before the Shalako performance. During this year, these men must live exemplary lives. They meet periodically through the year to learn the long prayers they will chant, dance, make ritual offerings, go into retreats, make pilgrimages to distant shrines, offer monthly prayer sticks, run foot races, fast, and abstain from sex. Eight days before the Shalako—the final ritual episode lasts 14 days, this year from 5-18 December—the ten koyemshi announce publicly that the ritual will be held and then go into seclusion. Four days before the procession, the Long Horn kachina makes a proclamation and a group of six, the Council of the Gods, begins a four-day retreat. On the day of the Shalako ceremony, the Council of the Gods enters the village, sprinkles cornmeal, and plants prayer sticks at six shrines, aligning Zuni Pueblo with the six directions. The Council goes to a special house where they perform chants and dance through the night. In the freezing dusk, the Shalakos approach the pueblo and pause on the plain on the south bank of the Zuni River before proceeding into the village.

Ruth Bunzel characterized the appearance of the Shalakos as “the most impressive moment in the [Shalako] ceremonies”:

As soon as it is quite dark the six [Shalakos] cross the river quietly and then suddenly rise out of the river bed, each surrounded by a group of singers from his kiva, all singing antiphonal songs. . . . The songs are magnificent, and the sudden appearance of the six giant figures in the moonlight is superb.

Waters picks up the vivid description of the highly theatrical rite in Masked Gods:

Then suddenly they came. Out of the wide, white universe, out of the myth and legend, out of the depths of America itself.

They came filing into the open plaza, shaking their gourd rattles, uttering their strange cries. A line of figures part man, part beast, part bird. Bare bodies splotched with paint, sinuously bending at the waist. Wearing ceremonial kirtles, a ruff of spruce around the neck, and dancing in moccasined feet. But glaring with bulging eyes from great wooden heads—heads with long bird beaks and toothed snouts, square heads, round heads, cloud-terraced heads bearing the symbols of lightning and rain, and hung with tufts of eagle feathers.

How brilliant their clear colors against the snow! Beautiful, so beautiful. But so horrible and frightening too.

They began dancing. Shaking their rattles at the cringing children. Glaring at the stolid missionary. Crying at the pipe-chewing trader. Dancing back and forth before the rapt boy seeing them for the first time. No longer man nor beast nor bird, but embodied forces of earth and sky swirling across the sea of snow from the blue mountains on the horizon, shaking the remote and rocky island, stirring awake the archaic wonder and mystery and pristine purity of man’s apperception of his cosmic role. Dancing as gods have always danced before their people. Masked by the grotesque, but commanding that comprehension of the heart which alone recognizes the beauty within.

Suddenly it was over.

The Shalako ceremony, which lasts all night, ends in special Shalako houses built by the families sponsoring that year’s rite. When the Shalakos arrive in Zuni Pueblo, they plant prayer sticks in shrines and go to the ceremonial homes where they will spend the night. After the procession, the masked deities and their attendants arrive at the ritual homes where they conduct rites and are entertained. Bigger than regular Zuni dwellings, there are usually eight ceremonial houses: six for the Shalakos, one for the mudheads, and one for the Long Horn kachina. The house includes a long room hung with pelts, skins, blankets, and gaily colored calico to decorate and brighten the whitewashed walls. It is a stage set for the ritual drama that will be played out here. The Shalakos bless the houses and pray that the tribe will prosper, live long, and be fertile. When each Shaliko enters his house, he sits by the prepared turquoise altar, decorated with eagle feathers, at the end of the long room and ritual reed cigarettes are passed around. (A similar ceremony has unfolded earlier at the houses of the koyemshi, who also perform magic tricks and clever sleight of hand, and the Long Horn kachina.) Smoke from the cigarettes is blown in the six directions so “that the rain makers may not withhold their misty breath.” (Breath in Pueblo belief is the symbol of life.) The personator removes the mask revealing the costume and body decoration beneath. This is followed by a two-hour ritual questioning of the personator by the host and his family, friends, and attendants. Spectators from outside begin to flow in while a few look in through the windows and move on to another house; some come and go throughout the long night and some, mostly the very young, catnap. (Those that doze off are awakened gently by the Shalako who clacks his beak over them.) In the early evening, the Shalakos chant elaborate prayers which hold magical and spiritual significance in their very words. The delivery of the chants is important as well, however, because oratory is a notable skill among the Pueblo and the personator will be judged on his art as well as the faithfulness of his recitation. This is followed by a feast prepared by the pueblo women (and paid for at great expense by the sponsor). Around midnight, the dancing, which lasts until morning, starts.

The distinctive dance includes sharp clacking of the Shalakos’ long snouts and birdlike swoops from one end of the room to the other. The feathered headdress atop the 10-foot mask almost brushes the ceiling beams of the ceremonial room. The glow of the fire serves as stage lighting for this spectacle, the flickering firelight animating the features of the mask. The spectators are rapt, staring up at the giant figure in the fire’s glow. The Shalako swoops up the street, gliding and dipping with seeming effortlessness. As ungainly as the giant conical figure seems, it moves with surprising grace and fluidity. The top of the giant figure, the huge eyes rolling in their sockets, towers above the heads of the crowd until the Shalako swings around and returns to the house. The experience is said to be mesmerizing and even many non-Indians have reported that they fell under the hypnotic spell of the dancing gods.

The next morning, the Shalakos run a cermonial relay race in which the masked personators run back and forth between 12 holes in which they plant prayer sticks. Like many Pueblo rites, this race is not to see who wins—winning or competitiveness itself is not a Pueblo virtue; it is a race to show endurance. If the Shalako personators can complete the race after dancing all night, they prove that the Zuni people are strong and faithful enough to prosper for the next year and pass their strength on to their children. (In fact, the whole ceremony is an endurance test as well as a celebration and a spiritual renewal.) After the race, a test of whether the Shalako personators have kept their sacred vows during the past year, the spirits return to their home in the west as the people, gathered again on the roofs, watch silently as the giant gods, accompanied by music and singing, leave the village and fade into the distance. There are several more days of dancing and singing, but the Shalakos have gone for another year.

According to the general philosophy of Pueblo peoples (and many other American Indian cultures), everything is connected. Health and wellbeing is the consequence of a universe in harmony; we become ill or our society suffers crises when the forces of the universe are out of balance. The Shalako rite is one effort to put things back into harmony, and the Zunis believe that the benefits of the ritual accrue to everyone in the community, participants and spectators alike, and even to those beyond the pueblo borders. Between those conducting the ceremony and those for whom it's performed, for instance, there's a constant evocation of sharing. The Shalako prayers constantly speak of adding to someone’s heart—the center of the emotions and “profound thought”—and breath—the symbol of life, the way spiritual substance is communicated, and the source of mana, or divine power. The celebrants add to the hearts of their “fathers” (the gods), the gods to the hearts of the celebrants, the celebrants to those of the people, and so on. It's a ritual passing of spiritual power. It's further significant that, though the Shalako ceremony is specifically for Zunis, strangers (with the exceptions noted earlier) were welcome: “Verily, so long as we enjoy the light of day,” a Shalako prayer promises, “We shall greet one another as kindred”; another refrain vows: “And henceforth, as kindred, Talking kindly to one another, We shall always live.”

The Shalako ceremony is a loving enactment for the people of Zuni of their religion and their history. It's a celebration of the coming new year and a prayer, expressed in action, for continued prosperity, fertility, and long life. It's an offering to the gods in thanks for their favors in the past and to ensure their continuing benevolence and protection. But it's also a ceremonial for the dead. At the winter solstice, the earth is on the verge of dying: the sun will withdraw from the skies for increasing parts of the day, the warmth and light will diminish, the plants and animals disappear from the land. But the Shalakos assure the people that it's only a temporary withdrawal and that renewal will come again when the sun is reborn. A new year has begun.

[The name Shalako has several spelling variations—the Zuñi language has no written form so transcriptions differ—but this is the most common one. (Anthropological texts may use forms that often include diacritical marks.) Kachina, too, had various spellings. The ceremony itself is sometimes called “The Shalakos Are Coming” or “The Shalakos Come.” I’ve provided a selective description of the elaborate event that is the Shalako ritual; I’ve omitted considerable elements and there’s no discussion at all of the underlying religion and philosophy of the Zuni culture of which the ceremony is a part. For further particulars on this ritual, the interested reader is directed to the many anthropological studies, the most detailed of which are arguably Ruth Bunzel’s Zuni Ceremonialism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992) and Matilda Coxe Stevenson’s The Zuni Indians (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., [1970]). Somewhat more literary descriptions are provided in Dancing Gods: Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1931) by Erna Fergusson; Frank Waters’s Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism (Chicago: Swallow Press 1950); Edmund Wilson’s Red, Black, Blond and Olive: Studies in Four Civilizations: Zuñi, Haiti, Soviet Russia, Israel (New York: Oxford University Press 1956); and, Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance (New York: Viking Press, 1975) by Vincent Scully. I’m sure the Internet also has many sites with information on the Zuni and their ceremonies.]