Ten Huts. Jill Sigman
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cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?”7
IRONY ∙ A manner of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., especially as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion; an objectively sardonic style of speech or writing.
But perhaps this is not a new struggle. In fact, it may be that the very origins of performance hold something of this tension. Way back before performance was what we now think of as performance, performance was more like ritual, ritual was a staple of communal life, and communal life was something everyone participated in. People danced on a regular basis in public ceremonies; no one sat it out to watch. In her Ancient Art and Ritual, Jane Harrison chronicles the birth of Greek drama, explaining how this practice of embodied participation eventually morphed into drama as spectator sport, theater as we now know it.8 She describes the population’s gradual disillusionment with ritual, the appearance of Homeric stories to replace it as public entertainment, and the creation of distance when not everyone participates in the ritual any more.
What fascinates me about this narrative is how the waning of ritual heralds a shift in the architecture of performance. The orchestra, which used to be the place for dancing, shrinks, and the theater, or the place for spectators, is added. Over time, the orchestra shrinks still further, and the theater grows to the proportions we now recognize. The “stage” was originally a place in which the dancers could dress for the ritual (an “Ur dressing room”), but it grew and eclipsed the sacred area of ritual dancing and eventually became the platform we now know.
My “aha” moment came when Harrison described the original stage: “It was simply a tent, or rude hut, in which the players, or rather dancers, could put on their ritual dresses.”9 So, a stage was once a hut … back when everyone used to dance. A stage was a hut in a different time, in a different place, with a different view of the world.
I began my training in classical ballet—a world of proscenium stages—and I circuitously found my way to building huts. As a culture, we have gone in the opposite direction: from huts to stages, from ritual to drama, from participants to spectators, from hot to cool. What happens when we lose our memory of participation, of ritual, of connectedness and investment? What happens when irony and distance lead to apathy and compliance? Wampole wrote in 2012:
The ironic life is certainly a provisional answer to the problems of too much comfort, too much history and too many choices, but it is my firm conviction that this mode of living is not viable and conceals within it many social and political risks. For such a large segment of the population to forfeit its civic voice through the pattern of negation I’ve described is to siphon energy from the cultural reserves of the community at large. People may choose to continue hiding behind the ironic mantle, but this choice equals a surrender to commercial and political entities more than happy to act as parents for a self-infantilizing citizenry.10
There are things that are urgently calling us to pay attention—the way we treat the one planet we have; the way we act as if it is infinitely resilient and immune to our incursions; the destruction of pure seeds, healthy food sources, and clean water; the manipulation of real estate with no connection to the lived experience of actual people; the perceived disposability of workers, immigrants, people of color, and lower-income citizens; the way our climate is changing. Remember the Lorax? Everything is connected. If you throw something away in one place it impinges on another. If you destroy plants, habitats, people, it has an effect on others. If you abuse people, you create a web of violence that shifts its focus when power changes. Perhaps it’s time to rewind from stage to hut—to return to the “Ur-dressing room” where we all prepare to engage together. The huts are a quiet but clarion call to show up.
March for Science. New York City, April 22, 2017.
JILL SIGMAN
And more people have been showing up … speaking about climate change, clean water, environmental racism, Black lives, white supremacy, women’s bodies, the rights of trans people, Islamophobia, immigration, health care, minimum wage, and many other issues. Some people are newly “woke.” Some have been working for decades. As more and more people show up and engage, where will we go from here? What will we build—transforming what we find, working without a blueprint? The improvisation is vast.
Pen America, Writers Resist rally for free speech. New York City, January 15, 2017.
JILL SIGMAN
Searching for fossilized shark teeth.
MATTHEW MCLENDON
NOTES
1 In thinking about failure, I have been influenced by Judith Halberstam’s notion of failure as noncompliance with social mandates to certain capitalist and reproductive behaviors. For more on her use of “failure,” see Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
2 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
3 Thomas and I met to talk in September 2011 at The Hotel Bristol in Oslo on the occasion of my building Hut #6 at The Norwegian Opera. He participated in the performance at Hut #6.
4 Dennis Suttles’ Artist Statement for the exhibition Life After Death and Elsewhere, organized by Robin Paris and Tom Williams. Apex Art, New York City, September 10–October 24, 2015. The men who participated in this exhibition are facing execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. They were asked to design their own memorials.
5 Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 24–25.
6 Christy Wampole, “How to Live Without Irony,” New York Times, 17 Nov. 2012: SR1.
7 Wampole, SR1.
8 Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Oxford University Press, 1948).
9 Harrison, 143.
10 Wampole, SR1.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011.
Harrison, Jane. Ancient Art and Ritual. London: Oxford University Press, 1948.
Nagle, Robin. Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Wampole, Christy. “How to Live Without Irony.” New York Times. 17 Nov. 2012: SR1.
the huts
hut #1
Hut #1.
JORO BORO
DATE ∙ December 2009
LOCATION ∙ The Border, Brooklyn, New York
DIAMETER