It ends, but not before:Constellative dramaturgies at the end of the world

Abstract

This presentation builds on the concept of performance constellations to think about expanded dramaturgies that entangle sites, temporalities, actors/actants, and media in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inspired by the dramaturgical frameworks brought into being by the Chilean estallido of 2019 as ways of knowing and doing that aim to sustain progressive social transformation efforts, I ask what do performance and dramaturgy – as sensorial and formal composition – afford the project of thinking-doing/doing-thinking between finishing lines and utopian horizons?

I want to start by thanking the organizers and everyone who has been involved in putting together this colloquium. Thank you for your hard work in bringing us together. I also want to thank the participants for your inspiring presentations and workshops. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to spend these past few days with all of you, thinking about the work of performance, about what moves us, about inquiries concerning artmaking and world-making, and about the many ways in which dramaturgy (in our various understandings of it) propels and transforms creative and epistemic inquiries.

This is a very special occasion for me because it gives me the opportunity to return to one of my first loves: dramaturgy. When I was in college in Argentina in the early 90s, studying in a recently launched program called “Combined Arts,” I loved learning about dramaturgy, which was an emergent field back then. Dramaturgy appealed to me as the perfect combination of my right/left brain activity, or to put it in more concrete terms, the perfect synergy between my intellectual curiosity and my love for collaborative creative making. In the months leading to the colloquium, I started using “dramaturgy” more intentionally in my pedagogy. Highlighting this term and its workings to my students framed the class as a real collaborative-making space where students were able to open themselves to unexpected discoveries. Dramaturgy reframed the classroom from a site of knowledge transmission to one of knowledge pursuit, a place of genuine learning by doing. At a time in which we must rebuild trust and hope (to be able to create after what the pandemic left in its wake) dramaturgy, and its attendant methodologies of dialogue, attention, and response, gives us tools to set change in motion.

I am excited about launching what I see as the “ushering-us-all-back-into the world” section. As the title of my talk states, it ends but not before… So, here, I want to offer some thoughts and provocations about transitions and transgressions (the title of the conference track I lead) as particular kinds of dramaturgies propelled by the idea of change not just as innovation but as transformation, a determination to move out of, to get out from, and, in some cases, to dismantle. Instead of the linear configuration of the trans that transitions and transgressions imply, as we transition back to our current places of dwelling, I want to propose the figure of constellative dramaturgies[1] as non-linear, scattered, and multi-scalar modes of conjunctive action toward change.[2]

CARPA8 invited us to engage movement as a methodology for solving (solving questions, challenges, indeterminacies, impasses, and perhaps even hesitancies). While the title of the colloquium is “Solved by moving”, “moving” precisely suggests that solutions or quests are never final or fixed because knowledge is produced in dynamic conditions. Knowledge is never exhausted nor exhaustive. So, if we add the figure of the constellation to this idea of knowledge in/as movement, we are inviting a perspective that embraces movement as reaching out toward the multi-sited, the trans-local, the proliferating, and the out-of-sync. Constellative dramaturgies as modalities of thinking in action foster a particular kind of movement toward differentiated associations and resonances, lines of convergence and divergence, and histories that complicate notions of live art and collectivity in a moment of collapsing states and lingering vulnerabilities.

It might be argued that all creative compositions and research designs involve a multiplicity of materials and are indeed “constellations” of mixed-methods, case studies, interdisciplinary approaches, perspectives, and aesthetic premises, including opposites, such as stillness, opaqueness, silence. Some presentations in the “Transgressions and Transitions” track offered concepts that gesture in the direction of the constellative that I am proposing here like “kaleidoscopic dramaturgy,” “differee,” “intermediality,” and “new media dramaturgy”.

However, whereas these important contributions focus on transversal forms of collaboration, liveness in expanded temporalities, and media agencies, the notion of constellative dramaturgies I am proposing draws from the work of social activists and protest performances that I engaged with during my research on performance constellations. In my book Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America, I defined performance constellations as networked, multi-sited and multi-temporal mobilizations against neoliberalism in Latin America. The alliances and contingent synergies that I analyze as performance constellations such as the electronic civil disobedience performances by the U.S.-based collective, the Electronic Disturbance Theater; the alter globalization protests of the early 2000s; the Chilean mobilizations of 2011 against student debt; and the Ni Una Menos [Not One (Woman) Less] feminist mobilization, use performance as a mode of symbolic and concerted action that works across time, space, and media. Performance constellations entangle on and offline spaces and temporalities to act out and act upon oppressive conditions that have national and transnational dimensions. As an analytic, performance constellations seeks to visualize ways that, as an integral part of their sustained struggles, activists leverage and expand the politics of performance beyond the live, context-specific, embodied event.

A compelling example of a constellative dramaturgy is when Ni Una Menos (NUM) transformed the hashtag “Vivos los queremos” (Alive we want them) employed in the search of 43 disappeared male students in Mexico to “Vivas nos queremos” (We want ourselves alive) to stop the epidemic of violence against cis and trans women in Argentina. By appropriating the hashtag and adapting it to a different context, NUM reignited a decaying resource and extended urgency beyond virality and the immediate which are the temporal logics of social media. As the engine of performance constellations, constellative dramaturgies propel a form of persistent inquiry and doing, a mode of insistence that is particularly crucial today as we face a transnational resurgence of fascism and its attendant demoralizing setbacks.

In what follows, I’ll share some materials for us to engage with as we think about what constellative dramaturgies might add to the temporality and spatiality of transitions and transgressions. And what they might contribute to the ways we define our commitments to transformational change through our dramaturgical labor in research and performance.

Our first case study, the Chilean social outburst of 2019, offers a great opportunity to think about “solutions” or “endings” with a commitment to transformational change, a kind of It ends, but not before.

1 – Solve by moving: jump
First constellation: until dignity becomes the norm

October 2nd, 2019. The Chilean government announces a 4% increase in the cost of the rush hour metro fare in the capital city of Santiago (this price hike equals 30 Chilean pesos or 0.04 dollars). The then Minister of Finance shrugs off public outcry, instructing protesters to wake up earlier to avoid the more expensive timeframe. This, not only does not appease protesters but further fuels the growing frustration prompted by the increased cost of living, the diminished wages and pensions, the compromised access to education, and widespread inequality. Enraged by the infuriating response that sediments a generalized feeling that a limit has been reached, high school students organize a massive fare evasion for Friday, October 18th. They jump over metro turnstiles and take over metro stations.[3]

And thus, the so-called Chilean estallido started. This social outburst lasted five months, until March 2020 when, due to the coronavirus outbreak, the government ordered a total lockdown enforced with military control, effectively putting an end to the widespread street mobilizations.

“Evadir, no pagar, es otra forma de lucha” (Evading, not paying, is another way of fighting) became the October mobilization’s hymn. These words acted as both replication instruction and as validation of a civil disobedience act. The student mobilizations of 2006 and 2011 reverberated in this widespread campaign to evade. Once again, Chilean youth emerged as decisive leaders of a demand for radical change.

Key to the spread of the rebellion was the dissemination of videos and documentation of the government’s repressive response to the insurgency. While mainstream media worked as a platform for the top-down repudiation of the growing protest, social media created a constellation of citizens’ reports and replays of on-the-ground events. Whereas the Evade campaign was a leader-soft mobilization, emerging from high school activism, digital tools (built on the many-to-many communication model) contributed to creating and sustaining participants’ experiences of being part of a self-determined collective. Mainstream media attempted to capitalize the fact that Chile is a divided society between old and new dramaturgies of protest and mobilization. The older generations that suffered the brutal years of authoritarian repression are cautious and not always in line with the so-called “fearless generation.” Nevertheless, protesters kept their focus on producing a compelling epic through images and bodily statements that communicated more than words were able to.

The iconic image of a female-presenting student, dressed in a school uniform, posing on top of the dodged turnstile as a monumental, sovereign figure was complemented by another iconic picture that went viral after the so-called “biggest march in history.” The image depicts protesters taking over the monument of General Manuel Baquedano in Plaza Italia, renamed Plaza Dignidad (Dignity Square), crowned by the Mapuche flag against a smokey but also lit up sky.

The 2019 estallido was accompanied and sustained by a plethora of performances and actions from different sectors of the population, including the so-called first line, an avant-garde formation of mostly male youth that aimed to protect public protests from the government’s demobilization efforts.

As a result of the violent repression of popular mobilizations, 36 people died and more than 400 suffered the loss of one or both eyes.

And, yet, the movement decidedly followed two statements that worked as refrains and dramaturgical frameworks:

1. Aquí empezó el neoliberalismo y aquí termina [Neoliberalism started here and it ends here] established a finishing line, making reference to the fact that neoliberalism was first applied as a free-market experiment in Chile, and
2. Hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre [Until dignity becomes the norm] gestured toward a new social contract, a micro and macropolitics of relation that honors the other’s humanity, a transgression of the extractive, transactional, competitive, and individualistic script that protesters labored to dismantle from the ground up.

If It Started Here, It Ends Here signifies a determined conclusion, Until Dignity Becomes the Norm commits to a sustained struggle. If one implies the will to not postpone, nor delay, or prolong, the other, as horizon, is a pledge for long duration, an exhaustive plan that will not be content with less than a radical societal transformation. These are two dramaturgical frameworks guided by determination, by what in militant language is known as “commitment.”

Despite diverging modes of action, some at the forefront (like the folks who held the first line), others perhaps sheltered behind screens and interfaces, the two statements were available for protesters to go back to. Within a system predicated on calculus – on investment and profit, on effort and outcome – “dignity” put Chileans center stage, including attention to the violence that that notion (Chile) enacts on minoritarian, indigenous bodies.

I bring up this example because the themes of “solving by moving” and “moving as transgression and transition” immediately evoked the Chilean estallido for me. Also because I see these protest dramaturgies as research in motion by epistemic subjects who not only expressed their discontent but embarked on social change processes, learning in action about their own strength, about how to end, and how to not quickly pivot to the new, because, for a long while, their only demands to themselves were the two refrains, which we might collapse into one: It Ends But Not Before…

2 – Solve by moving: constellate
Second constellation: dramaturgy and performance

In Performance Studies, dramaturgy has been used as a lens to study the symbolic and dynamic construction of social orders, especially social roles, social dramas, and protests. This framework highlights the contingent nature of social structures and the fact that what we see as a representation of a culture is an integral part of its making, a constitutive rather than communicative aspect of the expression of a society. Performances do not reflect but make culture. With its emphasis on making, dramaturgy gives studies of culture a lens to attend to identity play, power relations, conflict development, structural consolidation, and anti-structural subversion.[4]

In the case of protest as a particular kind of political performance, dramaturgy has been used by scholars such as Baz Kershaw and expanded by Susan Leigh Foster with attention to bodies and choreography to contest the idea that contentious actions are chaotic events. This is an interesting analytic because it includes tracing organizers’ planning work as well as backtracking how events unfolded, looking for patterns, uses of space, modes of participation, oppositional forces, and the evolving nature and grammar of contentious behavior in both scripted and improvisational ways.

Recent developments on dramaturgy include human-non-human relations, accounting for agentic synergies that do not end with the human and, more importantly, that decenter intentionality and agency from human consciousness and practice. The analysis of protest and activism that relies on social media tools, for example, by necessity must account for non-human actants, such as algorithms, which are very much a part of what we see and feel compelled to respond to.[5] For example, the concept of “New media dramaturgy,” developed by Peter Eckersall, Helena Grehan, and Edward Scheer is a new materialist working-with rather than on media; not a where but a how that is attentive to what is produced and how that emerges or comes about. Many of these theoretical developments are inspired by artistic research and experimentation on media affordances, and on the aesthetics and politics of performance as an art form centered on the live.

As I mentioned previously, in my book Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America I propose to approach current transnational and networked activisms and protest movements as constellations created from performance actions that are sustained in time and expanded in space. My aim is to disrupt the usual analytic separation and hierarchization between offline and online protest performances. The book’s central question is: How can we think of ways in which contemporary political performances maintain the ethics of the live encounter as an integral part of their dramaturgy but in asynchronic and multi-sited configurations. And, as thinkers of the Spanish Revolution of 2015 have taught us, acknowledge that cooperation, coalition, and alliance do not need simultaneity to create the sense of a growing, pulsating collectivity that moves and draws participants in.

An important recent contribution is, even when painful and dangerous to the researcher’s wellbeing, the line of inquiry on anti-democratic and authoritarian mobilizations steered by negative affects rather than the desire of a more equitable, better tomorrow. We need to include this in our thinking on constellations and transgressions and dramaturgical moves. Perhaps another version of It Ends, But Not Before is to assess the embers that could ignite a backlash, a drawback. The Chilean activists who after the estallido worked towards creating a new feminist, intercultural and inclusive constitution didn’t expect their bold push to actually ignite a reaction that now promises to create worse conditions than those set in place by Pinochet’s constitution. But, if in the past dramaturgy meant to assist in shaping air tight structures of meaning, and to eliminate unwanted contradictions or unintended messages, current approaches to dramaturgy in the arts precisely enable what Chilean activists set out for: an end (to the tyranny of the text or any hegemonic component for that matter, including the director) and an open horizon based on an ethical premise, that is, dignity; that is, perhaps, being part of a constellation.

In the project that I am rehearsing here, the turn from performance constellations of co-constitutive doing to constellative dramaturgies entails a shift from analysis to making. “Constellative” here means striving for connection, for resonances, for synergies. And from offering an image to visualize a mode of intermedial relation to going back to what “performative” does to “performance”: to put attention not on the thing, not on performance as product, as cultural accomplishment, but, rather, on the performative as what is transformational, generative rather than representational or expressive.

Constellative dramaturgies are, then, modes of making performance that attend to both what sutures, to what micha cárdenas calls the stitch, as well as to what is fragmented and differentiated, the space in-between, the lapse, the pause, the impasse, the lag. Bodies in time and space in their many variations with attention to what emerges, to possibilities. A non-linear understanding of transgressions and transitions, while we think and live an end (of the pandemic, of injustice, of inequality) that is delayed, lingering, deferred.

It ends but not before…

3 – Solve by moving: transgress
Third constellation: a transnational subject as dramaturg/art researcher

For this section, I’d like to ask transnational subjects, those who are migrants in their places of employment, to get closer. Those who are non-alien citizens please move back. I will now share an excerpt of my in-progress lecture performance, Transnational Subject 3, The Invisible Wall. This is, among other things, an autoethnography and personal narrative of my experience of obtaining long term residency in the United States under the Trump administration. I’d like you to respond to the piece through gestures, movement, sound, movement, changes in position as a way of experimenting with the idea of constellative dramaturgy as a generative rather than analytic framework or prompt. Think of your responsive listening as the start of a pulsating performance constellation. Non-migrant subjects might respond to those who moved closer from a distance or in proximity. Others might respond as respondents of the respondents, however you might understand this.

Ok. I’ll start.

Sujeto Transnacional
1 – The American dream

Do you want a chronology?

Or images?

A suitcase.

Because

they want me to leave,

that is,

to return. I carry a suitcase

with all my tax returns…

My suitcase

also holds a dream.

I once dreamed

that all the suitcases I carried,

(the ones that have wheels)

had a life of their own.

They were leaving my side,

sliding off,

self-transported,

errantes.

It was an airport dream,

one of many,

in the series of dreams that haunt me.

Like “performance dreams”,

where I don’t know the script.

Or “teaching dreams”,

where I am in front of a class,

and I don’t know what to say,

and there’s no syllabus to follow.

PTSD ripple effect

from the times I did know the subject,

but that didn’t matter.

2 – Dream

Los Angeles, July 14, 2018.

I send a WhatsApp message to my friends

Angeles and César

to share my suitcase dream with them.

Angeles and César are my Chilean friends who live in New York.

At that time,

they are working on a sanctuary project with Reverend Billy,

the satirical performer.

They are planning an event called

“Deportee Suitcase Solidarity Action”.

Their goal is to bring to light

one of the invisible stages

of the “deportation machine”

that is working more furiously,

under 45s administration.

When someone is about to be deported,

their loved ones are instructed to pack a suitcase

not exceeding 25 pounds

and drop it at the ICE office.

Drop the suitcase.

No goodbyes.

With the hashtag #WhatWouldYouPack

the organizers of The Deportee Suitcase Solidarity Action

ask the public

to put themselves in the shoes of a loved one

that is suddenly confronted

with the task of having to choose an object,

pieces of clothing,

personal photos,

letters, and the like,

and fit them in a 25-pound suitcase

to be dropped at the ICE office with no goodbyes.

My dream:

Airport or train station.

People swim calmly, leisurely.

There is a sort of a pier surrounded by water.

I have five pieces of luggage and I am by myself.

I have trouble managing the load.

The suitcase that contains my performance programs

slides away,

far away from me.

I don’t know where to find it.

Where did it go?

I look for it everywhere.

I end up at the post office.

Roberto Sifuentes,

La Pocha Nostra’s performer,

is the postmaster.

His office has performance souvenirs,

lucha libre masks,

Mexican artifacts.

When I leave the office I tell my partner,

“The theatre suitcase got lost in the US.”

3 – Care

Even though the letters do not align to form the word “care” in “activist”

(we are missing an r and an e),

“care” is the motor behind the acts

that make a person call herself – or be defined as – an activist.

C-A-R-E.

Do we really care when we care for people,
the vulnerable, the marginalized, the disenfranchised?

What makes us care?

Why do we care, when, perhaps,

it is healthier to not care,

to protect ourselves,

to play sálvese quien pueda,

to go on self-preservation mode

where we all get in our corner,

under the weight (and speed) of harm,

when precarity and precariousness

is what is more diffused and shared than wealth,

resources, power, safety.

Me and you.

Spaces.

Shared conditions turned into

“me or you.”

4 – Coach

“Is it food. Or am I food?”

said a collaboration coach

that the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics hired

to help board members work better as a real network.

The coach taught us in that workshop

that, as human beings,

we always enter conversations with that mindset.

 

Is

it

food

Or

Am

I

Food?

Did she say “always”?

I can’t recall right now.

 

Thank you for your participation.

Notes

1 I realize that the proper adjective for constellations is “constellatory.” However, I prefer “constellative” as it resonates with “performative” in the direction of generative and transformative action rather than simply associative. A fellow traveler in this is performance studies scholar Lynette Hunter whose work on “installing” and “constellating” has inspired me. Hunter defines installing and constellating as processes that highlight the labor of performance as it moves into the public realm as political, aesthetic, and ethical critique within liberal capitalism. “Installing” has to do with the performativity of aesthetic labor (for example, through rehearsal) while “constellating” refers to the moment in which something unsaid but important to the community is made present, generating a response that has the potential to subvert social agreements. Constellating is thus about articulating different positionalities within a society informed by neoliberal ideologies that thrive on fragmentation and individuation. See Hunter 2014.

2 I thank Jess Applebaum for drawing my attention to Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s differentiation between connective and conjunctive modes of social interaction. Berardi defines conjunction as “the pleasure of becoming other, and the adventure of knowledge [that] is born out of that pleasure.” (Berardi 2015, 14) Conjunction is a form of empathic comprehension whereas connection is based on a process of compliance and adaptation to a syntactic structure, a more abstract process that displaced the conjunctive modality “when the automating interfaces of the information machine pervaded and innervated the linguistic sphere.” (Berardi 2015, 12).

3 See “Chile students jump subway turnstiles as crisis continues.” AFP News Agency. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLbtW0hJ03s

4 On performance as “making, not faking” see Madison & Hamera 2005, and Conquergood 2013, especially pages 27 and 56.

5 See Morrison et al. 2019 on algorithms in performance. The authors claim that “it has become increasingly difficult in this day and age to use the term ‘performance’ without calling up an algorithmic matrix of input/output, cause and effect, that produces a variably soft (and sometimes very hard) cage of assessment and control.” (Morrison et al. 2019, 10)

References

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” 2015. AND: Phenomenology of the End: Sensibility and Connective Mutation. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).

cárdenas, micha. 2022. Poetic Operations. Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, Durham: Duke University Press.

Conquergood, Dwight. 2013. Cultural Struggles. Performance, ethnography, praxis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Eckersall, Peter, Helena Grehan, and Edward Scheer. 2017. New Media Dramaturgy. Performance, Media and New-Materialism. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foster, Susan Leigh. 2003. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theatre Journal 55(3): 395–412.

Fuentes, Marcela A. 2019. Performance Constellations. Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press.

Hunter, Lynette. 2014. “Installation, Constellation.” In Performance studies: key words, concepts and theories, edited by Bryan Reynolds, 141–155. London; New York: Palgrave.

Kershaw, Baz. 1999. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard. London: Routledge.

Madison, D. Soyini, and Judith A. Hamera. 2005. “Performance Studies at the Intersections.” In The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, edited by D. Soyini Madison and Judith A. Hamera, xxi–xxv. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Incorporated.

Morrison, Elise, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joseph Roach. 2019. “Algorithms and Performance: An Introduction.” TDR: The Drama Review 63(4 Winter): 8–13.