ABSTRACT
In the early 1890s, vaudeville performers Bert Williams and George Walker billed themselves as “The Two Real Coons.” As Jean and Marshall Stearns explain, “the emphasis was upon the ‘Real’ and not the ‘Coons,’ for they were consciously rebelling against minstrel stereotypes” (Stearns 1994: 121). Williams and Walker were in dialogue with Black-face minstrelsy, a system of representation which, through its appropriation of Blackness, set in motion an expectation of what Blackness “really” was, both on and off-stage. White audience expectations, in the face of such essentializing material as the 1896 song, “All Coons Look Alike to Me” (written by Black performer Ernest Hogan), dictated which representations of Blackness could succeed in the public eye (1994: 119-20). These circumscribed roles persist today, under various guises, throughout Western culture. As a theatre director, teacher, and activist, I attempt in my work to uncover, through performance-the very medium that constructed these deleterious identities and personae-how certain expectations and practices can be dismantled and erased. My central question is, if “race” (that is, an expectation of behavior and culture based on phenotype and physical appearance)—like gender-is always already performed and if stereotypes are reiterated, how, then, to destroy the machine that perpetuates these types? In other words, in the moment-to-moment performativity of live theatre, how can the practitioner disrupt or “unperform” that which has common currency? What I will attempt to do in the pages that follow is: 1) outline how certain performances of “Blackness” have attained their currency; 2) suggest strategies for the dissolution of these performed fictions; and 3) explore how Augusto Boal’s work tethers with both of these performative moments.
