Issue #04
Winter/Spring 1992

In this culture we're born with certain tattoos. Or rather, we're told that various aspects of our bodies mean certain things, and then we're encouraged to help make those meanings clearer—how we do our hair, how we talk, or don't. And then, sometimes, we figure out how to use those codes in other ways, to recreate ourselves and this world. What links this issue of the Performance Journal, “Speaking Ethnicity,” to the last one “Gender Performance,” is that they both seek to explore the languages of those markings, and understand how they speak—or how we can make them speak. And one of the best reasons for this issue to follow the last is to reiterate the need for sexuality, gender, and race to be understood in terms of each other (like the fierce pussy street posters on this page) and in relation to political change (see David Chan and Fred Ho). These pages try to get at what the images, sounds, and voices are that constitute ideas of ethnicity, how we use them in our work, how racism is reinforced, and how it is resisted. Especially for dancers and performers, whose work is articulated in their bodies, these questions are central.
— excerpt from Esther Kaplan, "Letter from the Editor"
Editorial team
Contributing Editor
Esther Kaplan - Caroline Palmer - Guy Yarden - Cathy Edwards
Copy Editor
Michael Sexton
Ad Layout
Christopher Caines
Articles
From the MR Co-Directors
Movement Research Co- Directors Cathy Edwards and Guy Yarden address the National Endowment for the Arts’ controversial retraction of funding for the Movement Research Performance Journal following Issue #3: Gender...
Letter from the Editor
In this culture we're born with certain tattoos. Or rather, we're told that various aspects of our bodies mean certain things, and then we're encouraged to help make those meanings...
Stateless Hybrids
Cuban- American visual artist and writer Coco Fusco debunks troubling misconceptions about multiculturalism in ‘first world’ nations like the United States to contextualize the ideologies that intercultural, interracial, and inter-ethnic...
The Male Gayze: A Film Transcript
When I was 23, I took a group of fellow Juilliard dance students to compete in a choreographic competition in Cologne, Germany. The ensemble consisted of two women and two...
Dancing Outside The American Dream: History and Politics of Asian Dance In America
I am a thief and I am not ashamed. I steal from the best wherever it happens to me... I am a thief and I glory in it... —Martha Graham,...
In a Rut
I haven't seen Miss Saigon , which I hear is the usual debasing schlock, but I debased myself enough by participating in the two protests mounted against the play during...
From Negrophobia
CUT TO: SCREEN of high-definition television set in the bulbous shape of Mickey M's head. The area surrounding the screen is pitch black. The screen crackles with a blizzard of...
Songs from the Travelogue
Alva Rogers is a performing star shaking free of historical shackles, in dialogue with audiences of mixed gender and race. Having grown up with racism/sexism and black power/ white feminism,...
Dance in Our Diverse Society
I think we all agree that we live in a diverse society. For those of us who live in New York, this reality is quite evident. In this city live...
A Call for Cultural Guerrillas
Lenin outlined five major features of the system of imperialism—capitalism at its monopoly stage—that are useful to an understanding of the political economy of American culture today: the increasing concentration...
Creation Expresses Desire
Performer Yoshiko Chuma moved to the United States from her native Japan in 1976. Since founding The School of Hard Knocks (SHK) in 1982, Chuma and her collaborators have traveled...
Cornered: A Video Installation Project
I'm black. Now, let's deal with this social fact, and the fact of my stating it, together. Maybe you don't see why we have to deal with them together. Maybe...
My Life at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
As soon as I got ahold of a copy of Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings about 15 years ago, I realized I had to return...
Excerpt from “Dig on the Decade”
...I don't have that swagger that shows I've been working on a '58 Flyboy-Blackeye- Turbo- Heart that jumpstarts like Black-on-Eyed-Peas. My hair doesn't grease back that way, it's too thick,...
Notes on Performing Ethnography
In the preface to her 1953 classic, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti , avant-garde filmmaker and choreographer Maya Deren explains why artists make good ethnographers: "[I]n a modern...
Experience Jamaica
For two months each summer I travel to Jamaica to search for my roots as a Jamaican, through teaching and performing dance. There I've been in the company of the...
Watch Out Mr. Blackwell, Here’s Mr. Fashion with a Passion
Joe E. Jeffreys [hounds tooth trousers, ribbed cotton white turtleneck, and black shirt]: You've got three characters we're going to be talking about: Mr. Fashion, Velvet Johnson, and Mahogany Plywood....
What Time Is It?
Except for the last 37 years (i.e., since the 1964 Civil Rights Act), America has had an official policy of state racism. Since day one, the "American dream" has been...
Building Subjects
As race, sexuality, and gender emerge as popular themes in the media, I have come to realize that I can no longer accept the lack of and the misrepresentation of...
Burdens/Blessings
In Houston, Texas, you don't walk into the hotel lobby after 10 p.m.—you just don't do it. It's not a matter of pride or an issue for scientific debate, we...
Politics, Ethnicity, and “Preaching to the Converted”
I've been performing various one-woman shows for several years. One of the characters who has been with me for about 10 years is an older Jewish grandmother named Sophie, whom...
Suzanne and Stephanie Jones Talk It Over
We, black female midwestern twin sisters, are fervent participants in popular culture. So why are we doing performance art? Stephanie: After years of working in the black-film new wave, I...
Call and Response
Movement Research : How do movement and the language of performance replicate or resist racist imagery? Blackface: You know what hurts? Self-description.... Take seven glasses of Mayflower water. Five patches...
Portrait of a Company: David Rousseve’s Reality
My work is fiercely African-American, and each piece I make is as much a celebration of my culture and people as it is my attempt to accept that culture on...