"Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition" by bell hooks

I am a huge fan of the bell hooks' work and so was very excited to read and dig into this article. She details the ways in which African-American* performance has grown and developed to be a locus of opposition by nature and by intention. hooks describes how the duality of performance during slavery for survival and for ritual play has lasted in African-American performance to allow for resistance to and subversion of white supremacist oppression by amplifying subjectivity in the use of a personal voice to reassert humanity and connecting audiences in the wake of lived experiences. As an example of the former, she goes into how recitation and oration are lasting forms of African-American performance with speeches and staged conversations being sites of engaging that personal voice that reminds audiences of the humanity behind it. All together, bell hooks gives a stunning assessment and articulation of the tradition and embodiments of African-American performance.

For me, this article feels most connected to my work as a director in the section where she analyzes Anna Deavere Smith's work and comments on the importance of immediacy and using the performance as an intervention to a present, critical moment. It moves me to want to analyze that question of "why this, why now?" that we so often ask about work and really hone in on how the timing of performance can feel disruptive, critical, or irrelevant. Specifically as we are creating work in a pandemic, and work about the pandemic is being made, when will it be most fruitful for that work to be produced? It feels ridiculous to try and perform the reality of COVID for people also experiencing COVID, but it wouldn't it be just as ridiculous to do that performance after COVID? What is the timeline for immediacy to feel cogent and powerful?

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*Note: I use African-American rather than Black in this response because that is the vocabulary that bell hooks provides.