After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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The index of the playwright’s question (the missing friend) is an absent referent that you should remember but you can’t because it’s hard to keep track of all of the people who aren’t here anymore. You can’t remember the names of everyone who died, which is terrifying, because you worry that in forgetting them (or parts of them), you might be killing them a second time over. In the unread fourteenth note, Cortiñas writes that “memory is not any one person’s task: memory is something we build together. The reason for this is because memory is a burden.”100 Performance, as it was on that night, can be a means of sharing this burden and of keeping the dead alive. And we need More Life.101
If minoritarian performance serves the will to More Life, it does so out of necessity. Death stalks people of color. Just a few years before his performance that night in the Bureau, the playwright lost José Muñoz, who was one of his closest friends. In a 2014 essay on that death, and on the significance of each and every queer brown death, Cortiñas wrote the following:
The dominant social order has always been hostile to or cavalier about brown queer lives. It’s not just the marginalization brown queer lives are subjected to or the way brown queers are always fodder for someone else’s metaphor; it’s the way brown queer lives are actively shortened. The aim is to erase brown queer lives, diminish them, gentrify them out of the neighborhood, deport them, profit from them, pave them over, and be done with them. I want to invite us to resist this praxis and to guard closely against finding ourselves in service of its decimating logics. I would suggest, given the myriad ways the present social order exploits brown queer lives, that until we have radically reorganized the present we might begin by suspecting that every brown queer death is premature. Such a posture might generate new insights into the enormous challenges brown queers face when building (many times from scratch) the resources and systems we need to learn and practice mutual care.102
Death, for queers and trans people of color, is a constant threat, an always-unfolding material reality produced by and through system. “Resisting the decimation of brown queer lives,” Cortiñas writes, might require an understanding of “death not as an abstraction but as socially constituted and distributed unjustly.”103
In a section of the “Notes” not performed in the Bureau, the playwright offers a ledger of the forms of destruction distributed toward minoritarian subjects:
Trouble seems to stalk the lives of your friends like bruises erupting years after the blows were delivered. You ready yourself to hear which of your friends seroconverted (six of them), were homeless for a while (three of them), struggle with addiction (five of them), had a recent hospital stay (one of them), were assaulted on the street (three of them), were evicted (six of them), or lost their tenured teaching job (one of them). Be prepared to revisit the stories of former activists who died from overdosing (two), who died from the strain of detoxing (one), or died after they stopped taking their medication (one). Be prepared to hear about the mutual friend who has become a hoarder (one), never leaves his apartment (another one), or is depressed (five).104
These quantitative abstractions add up. They are the kinds of burdens that can’t be borne alone. They have to be shared out, lest we, too, get pinned to the earth beneath their weight. Under such conditions, the commons produced by and in minoritarian performance is, in Muñoz’s words, a response to “the necessity for communal practices that speak to the current genocidal crises affecting black and queer communities globally.”105
Surely we have to read the playwright’s performance as addressing and offering qualitative and even quantitative evidence of the unjust death and destruction distributed to queer and trans people of color. But this narrative is tangled up with, and indeed inextricable from, a story about survival. “You doubt you will be able to keep this up,” he writes about the constant barrage of bad news, “but it turns out you are, in fact, able to, you’ve had practice.… Mostly it makes you wonder at how it is that any of you are still here.”106 Stillness, like the woman standing still in Baton Rouge, can be a form of durational performance, persistence, and even resistance. To remain alive, still, in the face of annihilation can itself be a revolutionary act. This is to think of still life as, in the words of C. Riley Snorton, the “even so and as yet of living.”107
Black life, like brown queer life, is often lived in close proximity to death, and as Snorton reminds us, black trans life often bears an even closer proximity to death. But if death stalks black and trans life, the fact of still being alive is rich with a world-changing, revolutionary power: “In the future imperfect … [the activist formation of] Black (Trans) Lives Matter provides a conceptual framework to understand the ongoing struggle in the present by way of a future (aspiration) in which black lives will have mattered to everyone. For some, including and following Fanon, that future effectively means the end of the world. And perhaps black and trans lives mattering in this way would end the world but worlds end all the time.… Even so and as yet, there is still life.”108 Black or brown, queer and trans, our differences are many. What we share is a need for More Life, and structural conditions that often make this impossible. When minoritarian performance functions as the “rehearsal for the example,” it can be decent “practice” for what comes next. And when you get to what comes next, it can be the means of keeping alive and carrying on to the next thing after that. Performance, as the playwright mobilized it that night in the Bureau, is a way of lingering, sustaining, and staying. Of remaining here still. Still here. Still.
Still.
The Mission 1989 Virginia 1619 Fukushima 2011 London/Edo 1857 Baton Rouge 2016 RCA Studios 1967 Washington Square Village 2013 Vietnam 1975 Rossmore 1990
Rather than providing a survey of minoritarian performance, the following chapters are organized around artists whose work exemplifies some aspect of this labor. Chapter 1 turns to the live performances of Nina Simone to offer a deeper engagement with this book’s key terms: “work,” “performance,” “freedom,” and “survival.” The second chapter turns to the work of four artists (Danh Vō, Ryan Rivera, Martin Wong, and Audre Lorde), offering a meditation on the relationship between reproductive labor and performance’s mode of reproduction, while considering the ways women of color and their queer children mobilize performance to sustain queer of color life, both before and after death. The third chapter is a study of “The Marxism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” which argues that Gonzalez-Torres mobilized performance to effect a system of redistribution that could foster the collective sharing (out) and survival of black and brown queer life.109 Dancer Eiko’s A Body in a Station occupies the fourth chapter’s exploration of a choreography of emancipation, while theorizing the entanglements that constitute and are constituted by minoritarian performance. The book closes with a study of performance artist and conceptual photographer Tseng Kwong Chi to ask how we survive the party’s fall and the end of the performance.110 Inspired by these artists, and as Gonzalez-Torres insisted, “I’m still proposing the radical idea of trying to make this a better place for everyone.”111 While this objective may seem naïve, minoritarian performance has always traded in the miraculous capacity to make the impossible possible.
Figure I.3. Utagawa Hiroshige, Fukagawa Susaki and Jumantsubo, No. 107, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 5th month of 1857. 14 3/16 x 9 ¼ in. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Anna Ferris, 30.1478.107. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 30.1478.107. (Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.)
Describing Simone’s performance practice, Malik Gaines argues that “the singer and pianist’s expressive approach [consists of] performing agency where it’s a structural impossibility.”112 You catch a sense of this in her version of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” Near the conclusion of the song, she takes flight, describing the “wish to be like a bird in the sky.” Her voice climbs the octave up the word “wish” into the upper register, soaring as she surveys the world beneath:
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly.
I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea.
Then I’d sing cause I’d know how it feels to be free.”
This lyric recalls