-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Sign up today!
In traditional theater, you typically don’t pulverize tomatoes with a meat tenderizer while raging naked about Jeffrey Dahmer on a plastic-covered stage. But Paul Outlaw’s one-man, one-act show Berserker, which opens the Blaktino Queer Performance Festival at Northwestern University on Thursday 17, is anything but traditional. The performance piece is just one of four solo shows that make up Evanston’s first theatrical event dedicated exclusively to the black and Latino queer experience.
For E. Patrick Johnson, a professor of performance studies at Northwestern and Blaktino cofounder and curator, performance studies differs from traditional theater in that it isn’t just concerned with either a play’s text or training students to become actors and directors. Instead, it approaches performance more broadly by using fiction, nonfiction, spoken word, poetry and improvisation as a way to study another culture.
“We do performance because we believe in the relationship between theory and practice,” Johnson says. “Our faculty and students might adapt a performance for the stage that’s drawn from African rituals, for instance, or based on ethnographic research of another culture.” In the case of Berserker, Outlaw borrows text from 19th-century slave rebel Nat Turner as well as statements from serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and couples those with the writing of black gay authors like Essex Hemphill and Samuel R. Delany as a way to discuss race, homosexuality and the intersection between violence and sexual frenzy.
At a time when minorities often take exception to being lumped together, the term blaktino may seem off-putting. Johnson says that in this case it comes from Blaktino Queer Performance: An Anthology, a book of queer performance artists he’s co-editing with festival cofounder Ramon Rivera-Servera, who specializes in queer Latina/Latino performance art. While the festival showcases some of the artists profiled in the book, in the larger context it illustrates that black and Latino cultures aren’t mutually exclusive.
“There’s lots of commonalities, especially when you think about the influences of the African diaspora on the Latino communities,” Johnson says. “The Nuyorican Poets in New York are a classic example, by which
African Americans are borrowing from Latin American culture and vice versa. Or, in some instances, some of the poets are biracial—black and Latino.”
The connections will become clear with the fest’s four out black and Latino performers. Outlaw opens on Thursday 17 and will be followed on Friday 18 by African-American performance artist Sharon Bridgforth’s love common/blues, a piece that deals with religion, spirituality and home. On Saturday 19, Carmelita Tropicana will perform a piece about Cuban identity and the political crisis that surrounded Elián González, and on Sunday 20, Dan Guerrero’s ¡Gaytino!, a reflection from a 68-year-old gay Latino man about the Latino presence on Broadway, will close the fest.
Johnson hopes Blaktino will fill a gap in Chicago’s predominantly white queer-theater scene. “When people think of gay theater in Chicago, they usually think about the Bailiwick or About Face Theatre and not necessarily what’s going on in black and Latino queer communities,” he says. “It’s here, but it’s not getting as much attention as it should.”
If the festival is the success Johnson anticipates (arrive early, he advises), he wouldn’t mind seeing it become an annual event, just not at the university’s expense. “If it were to be institutionalized, it probably wouldn’t be as big, or we’d try and get more Chicago theaters interested,” Johnson says. “Given the limited resources of Northwestern in terms of the people power it takes to do this, there’s no reason why Steppenwolf or Goodman couldn’t do it.”
The Blaktino Queer Performance Festival plays at Northwestern University Apr 17-20, 2008.
