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Beyond the Stage
Illuminations Artists and UC Berkeley Professors Discuss American Dreams and Culture Wars
Illuminations Artists and UC Berkeley Professors Discuss American Dreams and Culture Wars
How do we reckon with the tension between individual liberties and community needs?
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
In this series, Illuminations: “Individual & Community” artists and distinguished UC Berkeley faculty explore the tension between the American Dream and current culture wars (defined as conflicts between different social groups aiming to impose their ideological/political beliefs on others) resulting from polarizing values and beliefs across the United States. In questioning some of the tenets underlying the American Dream, many argue that what would qualify as the American Dream for some is deemed as the American Nightmare for others, depending on one’s race, gender, religion or sexual orientation; those very identity markers are key points of focus in the ever-increasing social polarization we are experiencing today.
This series is broken down into three parts, with part one focusing on the power paradox and implicit bias; part two, polarization and empathic curiosity; and part three, racial profiling and questions of the American Dream.
Part 1
The Power Paradox; Implicit Bias: Stereotyping & Implicit Attitudes
Part 2
Polarization & Empathic Curiosity; Curiosity & The Deep Story
Part 3
Racial Profiling: The Self-fulfilling Prophecy; On the Question of Progress; The American Dream
This video features Arlie Hochschild, PhD, Professor Emerita of Sociology; Jack Glaser, PhD, Professor and Associate Dean at Goldman School of Public Policy; Dacher Keltner, PhD, Professor of Psychology and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center; Patrice Douglass, PhD, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies; Erwin Chemerinsky, JD, Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean of Berkeley Law; Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD, Chancellor’s Chair and Professor of Bioethics; and Greig Sargeant and John Collins of Elevator Repair Service.
Learn more about Illuminations: “Individual & Community.”
Additional Credits:
- Directors of Photography: Heath Orchard, Avery Hudson, Ethan Indorf
- 1st Assistant, Cameras: Jared Tabayoyon, Aja Pilapil
- Special thanks to the UC Berkeley Library for hosting faculty video interviews.
Transcript
PART I:
Arlie Hochschild:
What a deep story is a story that evokes the feelings you feel. You take moral precepts out of the deep story. You take rhetoric out of the deep story. It’s just your gut feeling.
Jack Glaser:
Stereotyping is both cognitively normal and problematic. Early in human evolution, it was highly adaptive, and now in our much more complex environment, with our much more complex social categories, it’s much less adaptive and it can have very harmful effects.
Dacher Keltner:
As Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher and mathematician said, every social relationship at every moment in time is defined by power. It is defined by power dynamics from the developing fetus in the womb is struggling over resources with the mom all the way to the last moment of life.
Patrice Douglass:
A lot of our value in our society isn’t built on a form of collectivism, but it’s built and rooted in a form of us versus them, and those thems aren’t outside of America. They’re actually very much within the confines of its borders.
Erwin Chemerinsky:
The American Dream is that people can advance in this country. The problem is that studies show there’s not the economic and class mobility in the United States that there needs to be.
Greig Sargeant:
I went on to YouTube and I watched every James Baldwin interview, documentary, and I came across the debate, which I didn’t know beforehand. When I watched the debate, I was shocked by how many things, from 1965, how many issues that were discussed were relevant today.
Jodi Halpern:
The good news is even if you hate people and they threaten you enormously, if you have a shared task, you can develop empathic curiosity about each other, and when that happens, the walls that polarize people come down and tremendous progress can be made.
Dacher Keltner:
The Power Paradox sums up my 25 years of studying power. There’s evidence for this thesis from small scale societies that lived 10,000 years ago to contemporary organizations in tech, which is groups tend to give power to individuals who advance the interests of the collective, most typically. You can think of counter examples, but typically that’s how we, in most settings, give power. A lot of research shows that people who make other people more innovative, people who share resources, people who build strong social networks through their charisma, they tend to rise in power. That’s the first part of power, is like “I advance the greater good, I make us strong, I’m a great teammate, I have special skills and intuitions in ways of inspiring people that lead me to prominence.” That’s how we get power.
Then our research has shown in every imaginable way that power corrupts those very skills. It’s almost embarrassing to list all these findings, but if you give people a little bit of power, they are more likely to swear at other people, they’re more likely to stereotype them and treat them in a racially prejudiced way, they’re more likely to take candy from children, they’re more likely to cheat, they’re more likely to violate rules of workplaces, they’re more likely to have sexual affairs. What power does to us is it kind of makes us very animated to gratify our own desires, and we stop doing things that are good for the group.
Jack Glaser:
I don’t think that we can even think of humans as we understand them as non-stereotyping. I think it’s something that is so fundamental to how we process information that it wouldn’t be realistic, and that’s really important actually. It sounds demoralizing, but it’s very important to recognize our limits and to recognize that there are some ways that we think about other people that we can’t help, so it’s very important to try to change the decision-making environments and the structures and the incentives and the rewards and consequences than to try to reprogram how people process information and how they react to other human beings.
Implicit bias is a really important aspect of this, and implicit biases include stereotypes, implicit stereotypes, but also implicit attitudes, just positive and negative and emotional feelings toward people as a function of the groups that they belong to. Implicit processes operate outside of conscious awareness and control, and that is also highly adaptive. We have to be able to perceive things to encode them in our memories and to retrieve them from our memories without having to exert conscious effort. Otherwise, we’d be overwhelmed by all of the stimuli that are flowing into our five senses at any given moment. We’ve, again, evolved, as have other organisms, to process information unconsciously, and that means that we retrieve it unconsciously, and the reference to implicit means that we don’t have a subjective experience of that memory being activated in our thoughts. When we encounter a person from a group that is stereotyped, that stereotype gets activated automatically and whatever ambiguous behavior, whatever ambiguous cues they’re sending us or whatever mind we’re trying to read, we do that through the filter of that implicit stereotype and it causes us to make a bias judgment.
This is in some ways sort of the underbelly or the dark side of the individual community relationship because, in many ways, community usually confers strength and comfort and support. One of the challenges of stereotyping and bias and implicit bias and all of those things in general is that it reveals our tendency to view people from other communities, from other categories, as being more similar to each other than they actually are, and then we regard the individual with reference to their community, which could be a positive thing, but can also be a negative thing, and it takes away their individuality.
PART II:
Arlie Hoschild:
In 2011 already, there was a lot of talk about the Tea Party and how people didn’t believe in the government anymore. So, get rid of welfare, get rid of public schools, lop off Environmental Protection Agency. I don’t know any member of the Tea Party, and I didn’t know neighbors who knew them. I felt in a bubble, and I thought, “I have to get out of my bubble and climb into an equal and opposite bubble” because even then people were deciding “maybe we can’t talk to each other. We’re that different.” Louisiana was the second-poorest state in the Union. It had the worst life expectancy, and it took more money from the federal government in aid than it gave to it in tax dollars and reviled the federal government. That’s where I began scratching my head. This is a paradox. I came to call it the Red State Paradox; that set me off on my five-year journey into the world of the right wing.
Dacher Keltner:
We know if you disempower people, they have elevated cortisol, the stress hormone, more shame, they suffer physically, and more health problems. When diseases hit you, if you feel like you have less power, if I’m a seven on a ten-point scale and my neighbor’s an eight, I die earlier from the disease. If you are disempowered as a kid and you don’t grow up with resources and influence, you’re more likely to have childhood diabetes, you’re more likely to have asthma., you’re more likely to have fragile bone syndrome. That’s what powerlessness does, it deprives you of contributing, of being healthy. To me, it’s a fundamental engine of polarization.
Jodi Halpern:
Then we have tremendous amount of disinformation and manipulation of people for political purposes, that riles up hate and distancing. The more polarization there is in this country, Republicans and Democrats, et cetera, those folks, people now avoid people from anything that’s not their exact point of view. Avoidance far worsens polarization. One way it does it is, avoidance of people from different groups or different viewpoints than your own is related to extreme loneliness. Right now, we have a 51% rate of severe loneliness in the United States among young people, people in their teens and 20s. We have about 40% across the whole population. That’s never been seen in American history before, at least since it’s been measured by sociologists. When people are lonely, they become much more extreme. So, the whole cycle is terrible.
So, what can empathy do for the cycle? The first thing is, you have to have a reason that you have to be with other people from a different point of view. So we have to have a shared project or responsibility. So let me give you an example. My first project working in post-war reconciliation was in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. We did this project in 2003 because from 1991 to 2001 in those countries, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, people were involved in wars of ethnic cleansing where people who had been next-door neighbors, basically, at night, their families, were involved in slaughtering each other’s families. It’s horrible. When the war ended in 2001, they were supposed to live together again. They were literally living in communities where that group may have killed relatives of theirs.
So how do you reconcile? How do you live together? So we studied transcripts from interviews of essentially thousands of people. In most of the transcripts, we could not really find genuine reconciliation. We found kindness at times, but not trust. No one wanted to really know what someone else was doing during the war. No one wanted to know what anyone else went through in the war. But then we found this group, and this group was quite prominent. It was a group of mothers who lost sons during the war, and their son’s bodies were missing. They had to cooperate to form an organization to find each other’s sons’ bodies because they had to cross ethnic borders. So this group of women formed a union to find each other’s sons’ bodies, give them proper burials, and build memorials.
But in that group, the two biggest leaders had to constantly work together. They were from different groups. In the beginning, they wrote about how much they hated each other and feared each other. But then, because they were constantly having to do things together, they had to learn how the other person thinks. So they would be curious about what the other person thought. Then that led them to want to know a little more about what the other person had gone through during the war. This is the key power of empathic curiosity. Even if what the other person went through involved opponents, and the wrong side from the listener’s point of view, the story itself, the narrative, evoked emotional empathy as well as cognitive empathy. They developed trust, and that persisted, and the whole group became a basis of trust that carried into their communities.
Arlie Hoschild:
What I did was listen a lot, take my alarm system off, and really give myself the privilege of being deeply curious about people I knew I had very strong disagreements with. That was liberating. When they would hear I was coming, with folded arms, “We know what you think of us. You think we’re backward and you think we’re uneducated. You think we’re prejudiced and homophobic.” And I’ll say, “Look, actually, I’m here to learn from you.” So I got to the deep story in a different way. I listened and listened in this way, in this spirit, and then I looked at what I was learning, what it correlated to pictorially, and I made up that story. Then I went to the people afterwards and said, “Now, does this match what you really feel?”
The content of the deep story is this. You are waiting in a long line, at the end of which is the American Dream. You’ve waited a long time. Your feet are tired. One guy said, “I haven’t had a raise in 20 years.” But as you imagine yourself, you are a good person. You hold no hate in your heart, but you are fixed on this dream. You’re looking at the people who are ahead of you. You don’t notice that they’re 10 miles behind you. You’re a white male in the deep south, and you notice then that someone is cutting ahead of you in line. Who would that be? That would be a woman who, through affirmative action, now has access to jobs that used to be reserved for men; an African-American who, through affirmative action, now has access to jobs that used to be tacitly or not so tacitly reserved for Whites.
Then he sees immigrants and he sees refugees, and he sees well-paid public servants, and he thinks still, “What are they doing? They’re crowding me. They’re pushing me back.” And in another moment, he sees Barack Obama waving to the line cutters: “Oh, so he’s just doing for them and not for me.” And he feels displaced. He feels entitled being angry at this. Then a man who’s ahead of him in line and perhaps better educated and placed in society says, “You cracker. You poorly educated, ignorant, racist, homophobic, sexist, redneck.” To be called that, to be that insulted, then he thinks, “No, this isn’t my show. It’s not fair.”
So that’s the deep story. I went back to the people I’d been interviewing, and they said, “Yeah, that’s our story.” Or they said, “No, you forgot it. That the people waiting in line are the taxpayers and the people cutting in line are not the taxpayers.” So they corrected the deep story. One woman told me, “The one thing that’s missing from your deep story is, we get out of line. We secede.” So she’s talking about a separation of right from left. We can’t talk about it. No empathy bridge. We’re just quitting because you set up the rules that fit you and hurt me, and we’re not participating.
Dacher Keltner:
When you think about how power is distributed in a family, a classroom, a workplace, or a nation-state, is it zero-sum? Is it that my power necessarily means less power for other people? And I think that, to answer that question, we’ve really approached it in terms of two strategies for power. (1) A more coercive strategy, Machiavelli: weaken other people so you can rise in power. That’s zero-sum. Indeed, we find that people who endorse that strategy of power, they tend to see it as zero-sum. They tend to think, “Whoa, if I’m a man and women get more power, I’ll lose.” And that’s their conception of power.
Then there’s (2) a more collaborative model of power, which has actually risen in its prevalence the past 50 years of like, “We collaborate. I share resources. I give you expertise in a reciprocal way, and we strengthen both.” So it depends on the strategies of the individual in the context. Some contexts are very zero-sum—hedge funds. Other contexts—emergency rooms or certain classrooms in schools—are more collaborative. They really try to lift up the power of everybody.
Patrice Douglass:
I think people are hungry for not just change, but they’re also hungry for a narrative to make sense of things because there’s an overwhelming privileging of right-wing narratives or privileging of conservative talking points as the entry points into what we can actually discuss. I see people assuring that in ways that are helpful, which is not entering from the way that they tell us the problem exists but actually animating the problem from our own terrains. I think that is a starting point for something. What it’s going to fundamentally change or if it’s going to fundamentally change anything. I can’t necessarily say, but I can say that it’s very exciting that you can open up a Twitter feed (although I don’t know if it’s called Twitter anymore; it might be called X). In opening up your news feeds online, however you see them, seeing global uprising of people saying, “No more.” That our lives have been pushed to the fringes as much as we can manage.
Part III:
Jack Glaser:
So racial profiling is a topic that I’ve been studying now for about 25 years. And I came to the topic as a social psychologist studying stereotyping and prejudice and then confronting the issue of racial disparities in policing and in my modeling, and in one experiment that we were able to run, we show that racial profiling can actually cause a net increase in criminal offending because usually the people being profiled belong to a minority group. So if you’re essentially facilitating or motivating a larger group, you could have a net increase in crime. But the data, the criminal justice data, will continue to show that minority group members are being arrested at higher rates because they’re being stopped and searched at higher rates. So that will perpetuate the stereotype because we’ll look at the arrest rate as opposed to some random sample of who’s actually offending in the world.
Greig Sargeant:
Fundamentally, nothing has changed. The systems put into place and into every aspect of life in America disadvantages a person of color.
Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin:
Now, what happens when that happens? Leaving aside all the physical facts which one can quote, leaving aside rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already. What this does to the subjugated, the most private, the most serious thing this does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys, for example, his father’s authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything because the past has disappeared and his father has no power in the world. This means in the case of the American Negro, born in that glittering republic, and in the moment you were born, since you don’t know any better, every stick in stone and every face is White. And since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are too.
Greig Sargeant:
Baldwin was prophetic and, as I told you earlier, the issues spoken about in this debate are as relevant today as they were in 1965. And Baldwin would probably say, “See, I told you it’s gotten worse, and you better figure out a way to fix things.”
John Collins:
I mean, he gives an incredible history lesson. And the further we are from that history, the more we need to hear it. And I think probably at least on the Baldwin side, why he might say the same things today is because we may have gotten even worse in terms of forgetting some of those things now because we’re 50 years further on. But that history, that’s how we got there and how we got here is maybe one of the most important things that he has to say. It certainly was for me, that I felt like I got such an education from hearing Greig do that speech over and over again.
Patrice Douglass:
So the more that Black people acquire the very things that we’re told in the American ideal will change your life—whether that be the high paying job, the single-family home with the white picket fence—that there’s still outcomes with death and dying that don’t match the perception that those things change how people live and how they exist; that there’s still heightened forms of stress that are leading people to adverse health outcomes; there are still issues within the workplace that make working in certain positions more precarious or challenging for Black people in the office place where there are now these discourses about how to manage those microaggressions that are forever going to come at you. The question is, why do those things continue to persist? I think we have to change our narrative of what progress is. And that progress is so deeply wedded to a class ideal in the American context, that it is stripped of any understanding of race and how race can become a pervasive structure—or not become, but already is—a pervasive structure that prevails even as people ascend to new higher heights, as they might like to say.
Arlie Hochschild:
The people I came to know said and felt that the American Dream is something available to you, and you don’t ask questions about who else it’s available to. You achieve the American Dream because of the hard work you do that if you succeed and you get it, good for you. That pride is yours, honestly. But if you fail, that also is on you. There’s no excuse. It’s “you get the credit” and “you take the blame.” People on the left are more likely to say, well, yeah, there’s an American Dream and we all want it, but getting there is caused by how you’re situated in the world. What family did you get born into? Was it rich? Was it poor? There are good schools. There are poor schools. So, to the left, there’s a community behind your access to the dream and the dream should be available to everybody, and public investment should help increase that availability. Whereas, on the right, no, you built it yourself. The availability isn’t socially created and you just don’t need much government to get there.
Jack Glaser:
The problem is that there is this powerful myth of meritocracy, that there is this belief that we really do live in a meritocratic system and anybody can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps if they just try hard. And the reality is that it is not a level playing field, is not equal opportunity for everyone. We know from the psychological research that, all else being equal, people of color will be treated more poorly. They will be given less opportunity and their behaviors will be interpreted more cynically. And that’s the harsh reality. And then on top of that, we have generations of inequity that make it such that it is not equal opportunity. There are people starting from different places, so that’s a tremendous amount of inertia that has to be overcome.
So the ideal would be to get away from these thoughts about meritocracy and move toward thoughts of real equal opportunity. But that’s just an abstraction; in terms of what can actually be done, from a policy standpoint, is that we need to start breaking down some of the drivers of these inequities. The ideal of Brown v. Board of Ed was to create integrated schools, not just numerically integrated schools, but truly integrated schools. Not where you just had more Black kids, but you had Black and White kids actually doing things together. And that’s not an ideal that we’ve really achieved. And now schools are starting to be even more segregated than they were before. So in education, we have a real opportunity, because education is required, and that’s an opportunity. And that was the ideal of Brown v. Board of Ed, was “let’s integrate our schools because that’s when we can get people together during a formative stage of their lives where we can start to hack away at these out-group biases.”
The research on intergroup contact has shown and there have been hundreds and hundreds of studies that have now been thoroughly meta analyzed, taken and quantitatively torn apart and put back together. And what the research overwhelmingly shows is that mere positive or even neutral contact with a person from another group lastingly reduces your prejudice toward that whole group. And that is something that is achievable and it is something that was very much at the root of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Erwin Chemerinsky:
I think the Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in higher education is profoundly misguided. First, it doesn’t appreciate the importance of diversity in the classrooms and on campus. The education of all students is enhanced when there’s diversity. Second, it equates giving a preference on the basis of race in light of long history discrimination as being the same as discriminating against racial minorities. There’s a huge difference between using race to harm those who have been traditionally excluded and using race to create a more equal society. And, finally, the court is misguided in its reading of history. Those who adopted the 14th Amendment in 1868 adopted many programs that were race conscious, that today we would call affirmative action. Those who want to follow the original meaning of the Constitution should embrace rather than reject affirmative action.
John Collins:
I think what the American Dream is is a kind of implicit promise, and it’s a promise of equality. But it’s a naïve promise and it’s an abused and misunderstood promise in so far as it seems to assume that we all start from the same place.
Greig Sargeant:
My American Dream has always been to live in a country regardless of the color of my skin or my sexuality, where I could pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Very simple things. And given the opportunity to do that equally with everybody else. I come from a background where I was given great opportunity for education, to move up the ranks of social mobility. Outside forces are always in my way of reminding me that I am unequal in this country. So if I were to revise the American Dream for myself, and I tell people this all the time, it would just simply be to just let me live my life and leave me alone. To spend every single moment of one’s life consciously thinking about race has been exhausting, just to be left alone, for me to be. That’s all I ever wanted, and that is the American Dream that I strive for.
John Collins:
I feel as though it makes some sense to put that American Dream on hold, to work on another dream, which is the one that Greig just described, which is that we can all start from the same place. And in some sense we never will, but at the very least, we need to acknowledge and understand that we don’t start from the same place.
Dacher Keltner:
It’s a truism to say society should be judged according to how they treat their less fortunate, and we’re failing. And we’ve got 700,000 unhoused individuals, we’re failing there. I work with people who are in prison, we’re failing there. And our whole culture feels it. We always have to separate power from influence. There are examples of people who had no real formal power in the world and changed world history. Thomas Clarkson, when he was 19, he wrote an essay against slavery. He was just a college student. That essay got picked up by the abolitionists in England. They then started to publish facts about slave ships. And the English public was like, “I didn’t know we do this.” And they outlawed slavery. It started with a 19-year-old who had no power.
One of my favorite examples is Margaret Sanger, when she invented the birth control pill. She had a disbarred scientist as her lead scientist. Not a lot of institutional support. People thought she was crazy. And she invented a pill that changed birth rates for American women from 5.5 or so to 2.7 per lifetime. She changed history. And you would never have predicted it. So, that’s what beautiful about power. It’s also scary. We never know where it’s going to go, which makes it hard to study.
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Cultural Exchange: The Rite of Spring
Cultural Exchange: The Rite of Spring
How 38 dancers from 14 African countries came to dance The Rite.
By Sarah Compton, arts writer
On February 16–18, 2024, a double-bill production that includes Pina Bausch’s iconic The Rite of Spring, a “ferocious roar of a piece” (The Guardian), will be performed by an ensemble of more than 30 dancers from 14 African countries. It’s been 13 years since the death of Pina Bausch, yet this program, assembled through a collaboration with the Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables, and Sadler’s Wells, is inspired by her pioneering spirit. It represents only the fourth time that any group of dancers outside her home company Tanztheater Wuppertal has danced her ground-breaking The Rite of Spring, the first occasion it has been performed by a specially recruited ensemble, and the first time it has been performed by dancers from African countries.
But for Germaine Acogny, co-founder of the influential École des Sables in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, a center for the teaching and development of traditional and contemporary African dance, this project also represents the culmination of her appreciation for Pina Bausch.
“I liked Pina and I liked her work,” she says, today. “There is a synergy between what we both were doing. For me, Sacre [The Rite of Spring] should be danced by dancers from African countries because it is something universal. When I first saw Pina’s Rite of Spring, I felt it was an African rite.”
The idea for this version of Sacre, however, came from the Pina Bausch Foundation, which is committed to keeping Bausch’s work alive both by preserving an archive and by encouraging new companies to perform and explore the creations under the supervision of dancers who worked with the choreographer herself.
Salomon Bausch, Bausch’s son and chair of the foundation, believes that these “transmission projects” will help increase understanding of one of the 20th-century’s most significant and important bodies of work. “I am really curious to learn what is inside this heritage,” he says. “What is it? What does it mean to people today? We need these new projects where we try to provoke things and learn new things, to do things in ways we have not done before.”
This particular project was always ambitious, even before its planned premiere at the Théâtre National Daniel Sorano in Dakar was derailed by the coronavirus pandemic. More than 200 dancers submitted video audition tapes to Josephine Ann Endicott and Jorge Puerta Armenta, the former dancers with Tanztheater Wuppertal who were in charge of this staging. A total of 137 were invited to workshops in Burkina Faso, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, where they were taught excerpts from the material and a final cast of 38 was chosen. Then the rehearsal process began in earnest.
The dancers represent a range of backgrounds and techniques, which has made the project thrilling. “It will be different,” says Acogny. “But that’s what makes it exciting. These dancers will do what all dancers do; they will interpret the movement of Pina Bausch. The dance is always the same, but depending on what area you live in, there are different energies. The Chinese will dance it differently from the French, the Germans from African Americans.” For Endicott, there were challenges in staging the work. “The many different backgrounds created a big soup that we had to bring together,” she says. “But the dancers had such spirit. We were all together in Pina’s world somehow.”
She noticed the way in which the dancers were particularly receptive to Stravinsky’s music—adapting to it more quickly and easily than some classically trained dancers. In this, the collaboration reaches back to this version’s creation in 1975, when Bausch laid particular emphasis on the score. “She had this huge respect for the music,” remembers Endicott, who was in the first cast. “It wasn’t easy finding the movements. We tried this and that until she was content. She always followed her instinct. The dance is the music, the dancers are the music. That’s the key.”
The piece also relies less on technique and more on a total immersion in Bausch’s visceral response to the score and the theme. “How would you dance if you knew you were going to die?” she asked, when trying to find the right steps to match the elemental power of the music. Her answer to that question means that Sacre, with its earthy stage of peat, requires extraordinary commitment and exposure from its dancers. Endicott observes: “You run with your heart and forget all you have learnt before and just come out and be yourself. It has to be real. If you are not exhausted at the end, you haven’t danced it properly.”
Acogny, now 79, remembers the impact the piece had on her when she first saw it performed in 1996, when Bausch restaged it for the Paris Opera Ballet. “In her work, Pina works with the human being, but she also works with the depths of humanity,” she says. But her own first encounter with the score was through the version created by the French choreographer Maurice Béjart, with whom she worked in Brussels and who founded Mudra Afrique, where Germaine was the director, the school from which she laid the basis for African contemporary dance. “It felt like a [primitive] rite and there were even elements of traditional African dance in his production.”
Later, at the age of 70, Acogny, who is known as the mother of African contemporary dance, performed the solo Mon Elue Noire, choreographed by Olivier Dubois, to the score. “Whenever I danced it, I invoked the name of Béjart, and I invoked Pina. Before I danced, I used to ask them to give me the energy to dominate the music. And I used to offer Stravinsky a cigar and a vodka as well,” she says.
Her close association with the piece means that it feels apt that the other work on this radical program is common ground[s], a duet Acogny has created with the equally legendary Malou Airaudo, one of the dancers who worked with Bausch from the beginning of her career. “I was very nervous to meet her because she was so close to Pina, but it has meshed together very easily,” Acogny says. “It has been very profound.”
The duet arose because Salomon Bausch wanted there to be something new in the program. “It has been the meeting of two women to find out where they are in their lives, what they have been, what they have to say to each other,” Acogny says. Airaudo, who is 74, agrees. “We don’t know each other but we find each other. We don’t have anything to prove. What we do is what we are. We were together, sharing together, and what came out is what we felt.” She says creating the piece was quite straightforward. “We didn’t speak about choreography. It just happened. She did a solo and I did my solo and then we were doing it together; it was very soft, very calm somehow. Maybe because of respect or love. It was very simple.”
Respect and love fill this adventurous program, which both looks back to Bausch’s heritage and puts down a marker for a way of presenting her work in the future. It also allows dancers from African countries to experience Bausch’s work for the first time—and lets other international audiences see them at work.
As Alistair Spalding, Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Sadler’s Wells, remarks, “It really is an exchange. It takes this repertoire to a continent where it hasn’t been seen before. And we get a chance to see different dancers bring a different spirit to Pina’s choreography.
“There is a very strong passion about this project. It’s not just dancing in a dance piece; there is more to it. It is an opportunity for these dancers to experience something they never had a chance to do before.”
Germaine Acogny agrees. “It gives these dancers an opening and a curiosity to do other things than they are used to doing. It will make them grow.”
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Q&A With Dancers of The Rite of Spring
Q&A With Dancers of The Rite of Spring
“When someone asked why we were chosen, one of the restagers said it was because of a uniqueness within each of us.”
In between tours, the dancers of The Rite of Spring, which comes to Cal Performances on February 16–18, return to their home countries across Africa. We caught up with two of the dancers, Profit Lucky and Gloria Ugwarelojo Biachi, both from Nigeria, and discussed their careers as dancers and what it’s like being part of The Rite of Spring.
How did you start dancing and where do you dance today?
Profit Lucky: Dance has been my greatest means of communication, joy, and freedom, and has been a part of me right from birth. I started dancing professionally when I saw a post that said I could learn dance for a cheap cost, and I quickly grabbed the offer. Later on I moved to Ghana to further my university studies. Luckily, I met Valerie Miquel, who I consider my “dance mum,” and I worked, trained, and danced with her in a company for years before she moved to France. Currently, I’m not dancing with any dance company.
Gloria Biachi: At first I attended auditions across Nigeria, which boosted my energy and confidence, and kept me going. I discovered a dance school called the Dance Deal Foundation, where I did a three-year course, which helped me master the art of choreography. Now I’m a freelancer in Nigeria, working with dance directors across the country and internationally, and I facilitate dance workshops and awareness programs. This is a project that I think girls like me need and deserve, to share my experience and give back to the community that nurtured me.
How did you get involved in this project?
Profit Lucky: I got involved through Valarie Miquel and some dance friends I made in École des Sables in an exchange dance program in 2019. They all sent me the dance audition post for The Rite of Spring and they asked me to give it a try. I sent my application, travelled to Senegal, and did my auditions. Luckily (just like my surname!) I was selected.
Gloria Biachi: A friend who I met in a dance workshop sent me the application, saying “Gloria, I know you can do this. Go for it!” After being selected for the auditions, leaving Lagos to go to Senegal was a challenge. I checked in on the Goethe-Institut in Nigeria, and they sponsored me with the costs. The auditions lasted for four days, with hundreds of African dancers. In the end, 38 were selected, and I was among them, not because I was perfect, or had the best dance movement—when someone asked why we were chosen, one of the restagers said it was because of a uniqueness within each of us.
How does it feel to dance in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring?
Profit Lucky: My experience has been amazing, magical, intense, filled with lots of learning and growth, and humbling. I got to know about Pina Bausch through my Ghanian friend, so it feels like a dream has come true. It feels very humbling to finally dance The Rite of Spring after so many years of watching videos.
Gloria Biachi: My experience has been a work of patience and trusting in the process. When the pandemic broke out, it was disappointing because we had done so much rehearsal to get ready for the tour. Now we’ve had performances around Europe; I take any opportunity to perform the work. It takes a lot of tolerance and patience to be able to dance this piece, and it takes a lot of ‘YOU.” This project is a legacy, a way of showing my versatility, and that I’ve come a long way. It speaks volumes on where I’ve come from and how much I can achieve.
What do you look forward to most about touring?
Profit Lucky: I am always looking forward to the physical challenges of the piece and how best it can help me progress and develop as an artist. I’m very much more open to different lifestyles, traditions, cultures, perceptions, communications, languages, foods, and histories of the different theaters, venues, cities, and countries we visit.
Gloria Biachi: I look forward to the wonderful audiences, the instant feedback we get from them, and connecting to many professionals around the world who ordinarily wouldn’t see my work. These are career-defining moments for a young girl from Nigeria, and it does great things for me and resonates with the young dancers I mentor. This tour keeps inspiring me every moment and every minute. I can’t wait to be back on stage!
Profit Lucky is a Nigerian dancer who began his dance training in Nigeria, before moving to Ghana to train with Ghana Theatre & Contemporary Dance under the artistic direction of Valerie Miquel, where he was a soloist in two productions for the company. Profit was awarded a full scholarship to Eric Scott Underwood’s Online Summer Intensive Program and the Alonzo King Lines Ballet online summer program. Outside of Dance, Profit also worked as a model dance-model in Nigeria and Ghana, and completed an exchange dance program with École des Sables and Amsterdam University of the Arts.
Gloria Ugwarelojo Biachi, who hails from Delta state of Nigeria, is a Lagos-based dance artist, teacher, choreographer, fitness instructor, actor, and costume designer. Her training includes several national and international residencies/workshops with choreographers and companies from around the world. She completed the AWA Dance mentorship program as part of the class of 2021. Her body of works include stints in theater, television, and motion pictures, and working with children of all ages. In 2021, at the Institute Francaise in Burkina Faso, her solo ILE made its performance debut at the Fido International Festival of Dance. Her latest acting credit is recorded in the Netflix original, Mystic River. Gloria just concluded an Artistic Development Residency at Dance Base Studio in Edinburgh in 2023.
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Photo Gallery: A Day in the Life of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Photo Gallery: A Day in the Life of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Capturing the embodied beauty, precision, dedication, and pure joy of the Trocks.
Photos by Brittany Hosea-Small
On Saturday, January 27 and Sunday, January 28, 2024, the world-renowned and Berkeley-beloved Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo returned to Cal Performances as part of their 50th anniversary celebration. An all male drag ballet company, the Trocks are known for their combination of laugh-out-loud comedy and their unrivaled technical skill as dancers. For the Saturday performance, Cal Performances had the distinct pleasure of commissioning photographer Brittany Hosea-Small to go behind the scenes to capture typically unseen moments in rehearsals, fitting, drag transformation, and more. In this blog, we have compiled some of the most compelling images that capture the beauty, precision, dedication, and pure joy the Trocks embody—moments that words alone could never do justice!
Thank you to Brittany for lending her artistic eye to this project, and to the Trocks for being such incredible, long standing partners to our Cal Performances audiences!
Company Class
Shoes, Makeup, and Costumes
Moments Before Curtain
On Stage
Before and After
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Bark of Millions: Fantasy and Mystery, Rooted in Queerness
Bark of Millions: Fantasy and Mystery, Rooted in Queerness
“We are part of that same energy, we are the dust from these ancient creative events. And thus we are all tied together.”
By Thomas May, Cal Performances-commissioned writer, critic, educator, and translator
“All we do is sing songs,” says Taylor Mac about Bark of Millions, the new show he and composer Matt Ray have created together with their team of like-minded collaborators. “But there’s something about the ritual of song after song after song inspired by different queer people from world history that is really liberating.”
The link shared by the 55 songs comprising Bark of Millions is the recognition and celebration of queer trailblazers—historical, contemporary, and even from world mythology. Using the Stonewall Riots from the summer of 1969 as a starting reference point, Mac and Ray created one song for each year that has transpired since then.
The world premiere at the Sydney Opera House last October, which marked the 50th anniversary of that landmark venue, was included in the Guardian’s list of Australia’s best stage productions in 2023. Cal Performances presents the West Coast premiere of Bark of Millions (February 23–25, Zellerbach Hall) as one of the highlights of this season’s Illuminations programming on the theme “Individual and Community.”
“We didn’t know what this show would be when we invited Taylor Mac,” says Jeremy Geffen, executive and artistic director of Cal Performances. “But it seemed like the perfect opportunity to introduce the theme ‘Individual and Community,’ which is very much of the moment and informs our national and international dialogue.” Illuminations programming in general, he adds, “was created as a way to reflect on pressing issues of our time through the performing arts, which invite us to become empathetic: you’re quite literally seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. The direct, emotive connection that comes through the performing arts is a powerful tool.”
“My intention is usually just to make something beautiful,” Mac remarks. But his definition of “beautiful” encompasses “the wide range of what beauty can be. It’s not a reductive idea of beauty.” A “fringe benefit” of what such beauty entails in Bark of Millions is that “it feels like we’re purging all of that oppression from growing up queer and then celebrating our survival and our thriving.”
Multifaceted Theater
Mac himself grew up in Stockton in Central Valley, California—he fondly refers to San Francisco as “my first city” (“It always feels like I’m coming back to a better version of home than what I grew up with”)—and gravitated to New York City in his early 20s, shortening his name from Taylor Mac Bower. (Mac also uses “judy” as a pronoun.) Now 50, he has pursued a versatile career as an actor, singer-songwriter, playwright, director, producer, and drag performer. Mac prefers the catch-all term “theater artist” and describes what he does as “an act of consideration and wondering” with regard to other people, to society, to the world around him.
It’s one of the paradoxes of the era we are living through that Mac’s project has become even more necessary in just the last few years, despite the gains in queer rights since the artist came of age. Hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been advanced in state legislatures across the US. Murfreesboro, Tennessee even passed an ordinance last summer banning homosexuality. (It was only recently rescinded.) The state is also among those that have passed laws banning drag artists.
“What I’ve noticed from traveling around a lot,” Mac says, “is that societies that don’t embrace queerness have a low-grade depression to them. The more oppressed the culture is, the more depressed the people seem.”
Bark of Millions was not, however, created with the intention of being didactic, of preaching a sermon or imparting a lesson in the history of queer contributions to correct what has been erased from the mainstream. That would in any case call for a more conventional format. Bark is liberating—and subversive—not only in its topic but its presentation.
Ritual is merely one angle from which to consider the dazzlingly multifaceted, abundant theatricality that has become Mac’s signature—as manifested in his largest-scale and most widely known project to date, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (2016). With its roughly four-hour duration, Bark of Millions is “only” one-sixth of the earlier work’s marathon length but promises to offer a similarly immersive blend evoking aspects of cabaret, musical, song cycle, rock concert, opera, blues jam, nightclub, salon gathering, house party—and, on the “sacred” side of the aisle, a requiem, even a passion play. The list is not exhaustive: surely other performance formats will be elicited according to each participant’s unique experience. Shared with the rest of the audience, however, Bark of Millions is designed to encourage a state of collective trance. Indeed, Mac’s playful subtitle is A Parade Trance Extravaganza for the Living Library of the Deviant Theme.
Mac extends the phenomenon of queerness, which by definition resists being defined, to the work itself. Bark correspondingly revels in being uncategorizeable, irreducible, a joyous hybrid. Such festive polymorphousness—he refers to “everything squished together”—boldly defies the homogeneity of commercial theater. Bark instead resembles something closer to the motley energy of a Pride parade. It’s an analogy Mac likes to make, adding that each of its songs is akin to a float passing by in this extravaganza. This sensibility echoes something of the anarchic, camp-fueled creativity that Charles Ludlam and his co-provocateurs pioneered with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York beginning in the late 1960s.
Niegel Smith, who has collaborated with Mac for the past decade, is one of the show’s trio of co-directors, alongside Mac and Faye Driscoll, Bark’s choreographer. He sums up the one-of-a-kind work as “a highly theatrical event: a community of singers and musicians coming together to get deeper into an experience, a knowledge, a practice of queerness—complete with dance and ritual and a great deal of performance for each other and for the audience.” The songs take shape as scenes that “evoke the deep desire to play inside our queerness but also to share inspiration, to share challenge, to portray worth, to indulge in pleasure, to share beauty.”
A New Queer Canon
Because of its song-based format, Bark of Millions suggests a parallel with A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which interrogated and reconsidered two centuries of American history by queering popular songs representative of each year. A 24-Decade History in fact planted the idea for Bark, since the former involved refashioning songs that already existed in the canon—which are “mostly from a heterosexual or cis perspective,” Mac explains. “I was queering them by performing them, but they weren’t necessarily queer from the get-go.”
Matt Ray, who began collaborating with Mac more than 15 years ago as a music director and arranger, was tasked with creating fresh arrangements of these songs. “We found it disappointing that few songs written by queer songwriters were well enough known to be part of that show,” recalls Ray. “We asked ourselves: Where is the music honoring queer history, where is anything musically related to queer people who have been here from the beginning of time?”
So he and Mac decided to create a canon of their own for Bark of Millions.
Matt Ray, Taylor Mac’s longtime collaborator and the composer and music director of Bark of Millions
It was during the multi-year process of putting together A 24-Decade History, according to Ray, that he and Mac became “true collaborators.” The pandemic intensified their creative relationship even further. Ray began composing to Mac’s lyrics with their acclaimed jazz opera The Hang (premiered in 2022), a retelling of the trial and death of Socrates. “I would write music and record all the parts in my studio and then send a demo to Taylor. We’d go back and forth like that. Along the way, I started getting lyrics for this other project. As soon as we finished The Hang, we jumped into Bark of Millions.”
Ray points out that while Mac is at heart “a creature of the theater, I come from the music world and was a gigger, toiling away in bars and nightclubs playing keyboards with jazz bands and doing the occasional tour. The more I got pulled into theater, the more I started to understand there was a larger collaborative world out there.” He considers his ongoing work with Mac “the best creative relationship of my life. We’re always stimulating each other, always thinking, always wondering about what’s possible. Taylor makes the impossible seem possible.”
Ray shares with Mac an omnivorous curiosity: “Both of us constantly consume information, and then rearrange it and expunge it.” He adds that they have in common “a highbrow-lowbrow sense of humor” as well as “our little obsessions.” Ray’s songwriting in Bark shows the influence of “everything I grew up with.” Its sound world comprises a spectrum of American styles, with Ray performing on piano and keyboards with a touring band. The singers include such distinctive artists as Thornetta Davis (“Detroit’s Queen of the Blues”), drag personality Le Gateau Chocolat, Jack Fuller (who commands a five-octave range), and the “gender-transcendent diva” Mama Alto, among others.
Although the revolutionary moment of Stonewall in 1969 is posited as the embarkation point, the queer figures represented in Bark of Millions range across the planet, from the beginning of time to the present. Mac explains that the notion of starting with Stonewall “was just a private organizing principle for myself and Matt while writing the show.” According to Ray, the idea was to honor Stonewall “as a beginning of what we could say is contemporary queer history, but it’s also a bit of Taylor winking at the world”—driving home the point that, despite what the history books seem to tell us, queer people have been here since the beginning.
Figures from recent history like Marsha P. Johnson (of Stonewall fame), Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, or Mother Flawless Sabrina are juxtaposed with others from the ancient world (Sappho and Socrates) and even mythic divinities. The show’s title alludes to an ancient Egyptian creation myth involving the progenitor god Atum, who combines male and female aspects and is reborn each morning, traversing the sky in a boat known as the “Bark of Millions of Years.” (Even Tu’er Shen, the Taoist rabbit god regarded by some as a patron of gay male love, makes an appearance.)
What criteria did Mac use to select this trans-historical, trans-cultural pageant of queer icons? “The intention was to consider queerness in song, and so I chose all these people throughout world history as a way to ground our consideration and how it could be varied,” Mac responds. “They’re not all utopian figures we want to look up to. Some of them are in fact real assholes. The show is more a consideration of queerness.”
As Geffen observes, “the spectrum of queerness Mac has brought together is an extraordinary feat. He has tried to be as all-encompassing as possible, underscoring that queerness is not a monolith, that there are many paths within it. He’s trying to give as big a picture as possible.”
Chockablock Maximalism
The epic dimensions of Bark are another Mac signature. The embrace of the large scale, of durational events, in part stems from the artist’s rejection of homogeneity. “We live in a culture that asks us to reduce ourselves to one thing. Usually, when we go to see work that has a community aspect to it, it asks us to root for one team—like a sporting game or one god in church. Art can break up the concept of homogeneity. It can complicate things.”
Taylor Mac (center) and the cast of Bark of Millions
That happens, in Mac’s philosophy, through the process of consideration and wonder—which requires investing time instead of quick, pre-digested consumption. When he was growing up in Stockton, his mother ran an art school that was “chockablock full of artworks in progress.” Mac is convinced this encouraged his belief that “a roomful of things actually helps you focus as opposed to dismantling your focus.”
The acceptance of multiple simultaneous stimuli and inspirations underlies Mac’s collage-based aesthetic. “The more I’m in therapy, the more I realize that the pain you feel in any given moment isn’t just that pain. It’s all that historical pain. ‘What’s hysterical is historical.’ There is a real sense that all of the sex, joy, pleasure, and celebration, all of the artistic ideas around queerness—these are available to us. You lose sight of them sometimes, but if you focus in on certain aspects, it opens up a whole history to you.”
By nature averse to tags and categorizations, he has come to accept the label “maximalist” with wry bemusement: “Minimalism is in it, whereas minimalism doesn’t have maximalism. I don’t want a homogeneous experience and I don’t want, as a queer person, to feel like I always have to be large and I always have to be maximalist.”
Bark of Millions thus contains moments of great intimacy within its extravagance of time, of staging, of musical expression, of costume and choreography. The image of simply “hanging out” is another favorite expression. “A longer show allows you to express the full range of a thing,” Mac says. “Every so often in the show, I like to get as small as I possibly can. I want the audience to feel like we are hanging out and experiencing each other, being spontaneous with each other. Part of the art of it is the hang of it.”
Costumes and Choreography
Bark of Millions also reflects the intensely collaborative aesthetic Mac has developed with his colleagues. Along with his songwriting partner Matt Ray, he enlisted members of the creative team he has worked with for years. Costume designer Machine Dazzle (aka Matthew Flower) wonderfully complements his sensibility of “queer maximalism” (to quote the title of his first solo exhibition last year at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York).
Machine Dazzle describes his role in creating costumes for Bark as follows: “I’m providing a tree for the songbirds to inhabit, nest, and fly in and around. The costumes change throughout and get smaller and less grand as the show itself builds and gets more grand, one icon at a time.” Over the course of the show, there is an overall transformation toward “less costume and more skin.”
Rather than attempt to represent a specific figure through visual cues, Dazzle says that he is more interested in having a performer “wear something ‘other.’ Other means undefinable, questionable, not this or that, something we can’t exactly figure out. Queerness is expressed through unusual silhouettes, surprises, unapologetic forms and flesh. Shapes that are both familiar and unfamiliar share space and provide a human skyline that is both tangibly whimsical and fantastically earthy.”
Machine Dazzle, Taylor Mac’s longtime collaborator and the costume designer of Bark of Millions
It’s no surprise that dance is an integral component of Mac’s theatrical extravaganzas. Bark of Millions is, on one level, “a hunt for something authentically queer,” as Mac puts it. “Exploring that through song does something physically, because song is really just vibration.”
Faye Driscoll, a linchpin of the show as its choreographer and co-director, recalls the questions that helped her form “conceptual frames” when she was designing Bark’s dance dimension: “Some of the practices we did early on were more like inquiries: what is a queer gesture? What is one that perhaps we saw in the world and mimicked and imitated in order to connect to a community? What is one, like a swish of the hips, perhaps in a male-bodied human, that might incur rejection? How is gesture gendered? What are gestures we might gift to the future?”
She sought a choreography that would “illuminate what’s already occurring inside the music and sometimes pull out more playful aspects or undertones or subtleties. When to get fun and playful and flamboyant and wild. How can our eccentricity be actually deeply strange, not just kind of Queer Eye for the straight guy—these ways in which queerness has become a part of our marketing and capitalist machine?” Driscoll says she was inspired by Mac’s insistence that “we are seeking and wondering about what it means to inhabit a queer spirituality, that we are doubting where we are not in certainty.”
Producing the Unconventional
Another layer of the complex art that a Taylor Mac show entails remains hidden behind the scenes: the art of producing a work of independent theater with such unusual parameters, under impossible odds and pressures. Mac singles out his creative production team at Pomegranate Arts—a frequent artistic collaborator with Cal Performances—as unsung heroines “who are doing something that nobody else is doing in the industry.”
Pomegranate Arts founder Linda Brumbach says she relishes “the challenge of helping to bring work that changes the way we think about the world to fruition.” The imperative to follow an artist like Mac means there is no “conventional investor model” to follow. “The key is looking deeply into the world and finding your village to help lift the work and stay the course. This is community … with all its complexities, deep joy, and resilience.”
Alisa Regas, managing director of Pomegranate Arts, points out that “creative producers play a vital role in making possible work that has existed and might need to exist outside institutional structures.” A central challenge with producing Bark of Millions has been to find ways “to bring this very diverse group together, which comes from many different frames of reference. As a producer, you have to think a lot about the audience and the institutions you’re working with, but especially about the artists who are trying to create their best work.” The fact that these are unique individuals “with very different needs and backgrounds and ways of expressing their artistry and at the same time part of this community” requires careful attention to every step along the way of bringing a show like Bark of Millions to the public and to the stage.
What no one—neither performers, producers, nor audiences—can rely on are simple formulas or predictable patterns when dealing with such an exuberantly innovative, anti-consumerist, anti-naturalist way of making art.
“I’m much more interested in mystery right now than I am interested in knowing things,” Mac emphasizes. Elsewhere, in a personal artistic credo, he has stated: “I believe my job as a theater artist is to remind my audience of the range of their humanity. I believe the more personal risk I take in the work, the more the audience will relate and see the whole of their humanity reflected back at them.”
“We’ve all been oppressed by people trying to oppress queerness,” adds Mac. “Straight people and cis people are oppressed by that as well.” Bark of Millions is “an invitation for people to let go of the way that they oppress or have oppressed themselves. If it’s liberating for you, then you don’t have to clamp down on other human beings and you don’t have to clamp down on yourself in order to clamp down on other human beings. So it is about trying to expand our understanding of humanity.”
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Illuminations Artists and UC Berkeley Professors Discuss Individual Liberties and Community Needs
Illuminations Artists and UC Berkeley Professors Discuss Individual Liberties and Community Needs
How do we reckon with the tension between individual liberties and community needs?
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
In this video, Illuminations artists and distinguished UC Berkeley faculty explore the longstanding and complex tension between individual liberties and community needs. On one hand, individual liberties are important for protecting individual autonomy and ensuring that people have the freedom to pursue their own goals and values. On the other hand, community needs are also important for promoting the common good and ensuring that society as a whole functions smoothly and fairly.
In many cases, individual liberties and community needs can be balanced through thoughtful and careful decision-making. However, there are also situations where individual liberties and community needs may come into conflict, such as in cases of public health emergencies or national security concerns. In such cases, difficult choices may need to be made to balance competing interests and priorities. In this video, artists and UC Berkeley scholars discuss the key to creating policies and practices that promote the well-being of all members of society while also respecting individual rights and freedoms.
Topics include:
- 0:00 – Intro
- 0:14 – Individual Liberties & Community Needs
- 1:55 – Free Speech
- 6:36 – Tradition & Values
- 8:46 – Liberty & Equality
- 12:29 – Spirituality & the Science of Awe
This video features Dacher Keltner, PhD, Professor of Psychology and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center; Charles Hirschkind, PhD, Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies; Magdelys Savigne and Elizabeth Rodriguez of OKAN; Juana María Rodríguez, PhD, Professor of Ethnic Studies; Erwin Chemerinsky, JD, Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean of Berkeley Law; Taylor Mac, writer and co-director of Bark of Millions; and Mame Diarra Speis, Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women, and Courtney J. Cook, Associate Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women.
Learn more about Illuminations: “Individual & Community.”
Additional Credits:
- Directors of Photography: Heath Orchard, Avery Hudson, Ethan Indorf
- 1st Assistant, Cameras: Jared Tabayoyon, Aja Pilapil
- Special thanks to the UC Berkeley Library for hosting faculty video interviews.
Transcript
Dacher Keltner:
One thing we do know is music has very clear effects on the body. It opens your body up, activates the vagus nerve. It makes you feel open to the world rather than closed. It synchronizes us. It turns us into a collective.
Charles Hirschkind:
Community is a term that makes anthropologists quite nervous, particularly for the way in which it occludes the kind of operations of power by which collectivities are created and formed.
Magdelys Savigne:
Women were hidden and it was dangerous for us. In Santiago, it was very dangerous to be called a lesbian.
Juana María Rodríguez:
People want to feel a part of something. The nuclear family is not enough. We need bigger, more expansive structures.
Erwin Chemerinsky:
The relationship between individual and community is always a very complex one. There’s often a tension between wanting to protect the freedom of the individual and what’s best for the community.
Taylor Mac:
It all comes from a concept that my drag mother gave me, which is like, if you’re not having fun at the party, go make another party.
Mame Diarra Speis:
So essentially what we were doing was breaking the fourth wall with the audience and saying, “Hey, you are a part of this as well. If I’m examining and if I’m unpacking, then let’s ask these questions of you.” Because at the end of the day, we’re trying to lift up everyone’s humanity.
Free Speech
Elizabeth Rodriguez:
People are just literally taking to the streets. They are tired of 62 years of a dictatorship that has lasted way too long. People are hungry. People are dying. People got tired, finally, and woke up. We are supporting them from all over the world. Cubans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Cubans all over the world are supporting them because the government actually cut off internet for a few hours. So we didn’t know what was happening.
So we had to let the world know that Cuba was on the streets. And that’s what we’re doing here. We cannot go to Cuba right now, but we’re here supporting our people, and supporting them and saying that this is enough and the time has come.
We are very open in our career about what the real situation in Cuba is. My name is Elizabeth Rodriguez and I am a violinist and a singer.
Magdelys Savigne:
I’m Magdelys Savigne, percussionist and composer. We have a band called OKAN. It means “heart” in our Afro-Cuban dialect.
Elizabeth Rodriguez:
It has always been a mission of mine to tell people around me that don’t know much about Cuba, about my country, what really goes on there. It’s not always been well received, but at least in my band, I finally was able to have my own voice, so I can tell the truth, and the real story behind the Cuban lives.
Erwin Chemerinsky:
In November of 2019, Ann Coulter came to speak on the Berkeley campus. Some who went to hear her were assaulted. They were punched and shoved, water was thrown at them, they were spit at. I remember then issuing a statement within the law school, saying that all ideas and views can be expressed on campus. If you don’t like a speaker, a peaceful protest is appropriate. If you don’t like a speaker, invite your own speaker.
But it’s inappropriate to punch, or shove, spit at those who are going to hear a speaker. I got substantial pushback from some of the students. They posted on every bulletin board in the law school, “Dean Chemerinsky stands up for Ann Coulter but not for the students.” And yet I think that they missed an important point. If we’re going to be a campus, views have to be able to be expressed that we dislike as well as we like.
The only way your speech or my speech will be secure tomorrow is to protect the expression of views that we don’t like today. We don’t need the first amendment to protect what we want to hear. That would occur anyway. We need the first amendment to protect the speech we don’t want to hear.
And there’s always going to be a tension between wanting to be open and allowing speech, and the reality that speech can be destructive and harmful to students as well.
Juana María Rodríguez:
I think one of the things that the university can do is be an incubator for ideas. In my classrooms, we get to take an idea and push it until it falls apart. And so, very often, those are the places where we think about the tensions between individual and community, where we think about what it means to negotiate different, sometimes conflicting needs live and in person, in a space.
We need to bring the ideas that maybe aren’t so great. We need to see them fail. We need to try on ideas and see where they take us. I think the idea of being intellectually curious about the world, reading promiscuously—I am an ethnic studies scholar, and I really take in information from all the disciplines. I love literature, art, performance, but I also think about sound, and texture, and the fabric arts, and textiles.
And I think each one of these things is a different way to see the world, to engage the world. And so I think the university becomes this wonderful place of exploration, that’s also where we are really exploring our own values, our own sense of what we hold dear, what we’re not willing to let go of.
Tradition & Values
Charles Hirschkind:
Tradition allows you to get at the way in which we depend on each other in creating conditions that uphold a valued form of life. Think about generosity, charity, modesty, humility, all of these very classic religious virtues. Those are ones that sustain relationships and create positive conditions of relationships by which people craft a valued and sustained form of life.
So by highlighting tradition, it focuses on the ongoing project of securing the interdependencies by which our lives are held together, and therefore by which our communities are created and sustained.
Courtney J. Cook:
We are opening the door for other folks to also see their experiences reflected, or find a connection in some way that ties everything together. So seeing the individual as a reflection of the community, and vice versa, the community as a whole, it also reflects on the individual, those things being connected.
We going to put in those truths from my ancestors. We going to do the hard work of understanding and undoing racism. And we going to fold in the sweet spirit of change.
Liberty & Equality
Elizabeth Rodriguez:
I didn’t have permission to even question it, because in Cuba, I wouldn’t even dare to—
Magdelys Savigne:
—Explore.
Elizabeth Rodriguez:
… to explore it, because it was so taboo. And people are—there’s so much shame around it.
Magdelys Savigne:
Yes, Cuba, it’s very open about sexuality, and talking about sex and everything.
Elizabeth Rodriguez:
Heterosexual.
Magdelys Savigne:
But straight. As long as it’s straight, you can talk all around about anything you want. But, gay? Forget it. And the only people growing up that I saw that were allowed to perform that sexuality were men.
Erwin Chemerinsky:
There’s always a tension between liberty and equality. Any law that prohibits discrimination limits the freedom of people to discriminate. But our society for decades has made the choice that it’s more important to stop discrimination than protect freedom to discriminate. This is the first time in history the Supreme Court has ever said there’s a first amendment right to discriminate in violation of anti-discrimination laws.
And it’s not just going to be for gay and lesbian individuals. If, for example, a web designer said, “I don’t want to design websites for interracial couples, or for Muslims who are getting married,” they would have the right to do it.
Mame Diarra Speis:
When we think about sex and gender, we think that these are individual things, that sex is something very private that we do within the context of our home. But, really, gender and sex are incredibly public things that have far-reaching public implications, whether it’s about how bathrooms are organized, how different locker room spaces, how athletics are organized, but also, how prisons are organized, how senior centers are organized. And these are all places where sex and gender become regulated. So I think sex is one of these places where we think about who we are as individuals and then that encounters the world. And the world doesn’t always see us the way we see ourselves.
Right now there’s so much anxiety, and really fear around questions of gender, and really attacks on the transgender population where people want to be seen as who they feel they are, and they’re encountering a community that wants to impose something else on them.
Spirituality & the Science of Awe
Dacher Keltner:
It’s so funny as a scientist to study awe, because we start with these definitions that do some injustice to the phenomenon, but then we study the thing based on the definition. And awe is the hardest thing to define of anything I’ve ever studied.
We surveyed 26 countries. Our approach to all was just to have them write: “When’s the last time you encountered a vast mystery?” We got these stories coming in from around the world. They started telling stories of music, and listening to choir in a candlelit cathedral in Europe, singing in a choir in another country, listening to an Indian raga, dancing to music, music in Brazil.
It was everywhere. And the structure of the story felt the same, which was like, “Wow, there’s something about this experience. I get goosebumps, I tear up, I feel connected to other people around me. I feel awe.” And then, as a psychologist, I’m always interested in, how? How does that work?
And we’re so far from really understanding how—you produce these sounds, they hit your ear, they go through your brain, and, next thing you know, you’re transported. The obvious idea that it took psychologists a while to get to is it synchronizes us, it turns us into a collective. You just like—we start moving together, there are studies showing our brain pattern start synchronizing. Next thing you know, the boundaries start to dissolve, and you’re like, “Man, we’re all part of this.”
Taylor Mac:
What we’re trying to do with this show is explore some kind of queer spirituality without heterosexuality dictating what that is—explore some kind of gender spirituality, queer spirituality, without any kind of cis or dominant culture leading us.
And that’s really what it is. It’s really just about hanging out together and wondering together. And we just do it all with music. So I think of it a little bit like a reverse conversion therapy, that the whole idea is that we’re supposed to just make everyone more queer than they were when they entered.
I don’t think we have to do too much to convince people that they’re queer, or to invite them into an experience that is queer, because they already are. So sometimes it feels to me that when people ask me, “How can I make this show universal?” that what they’re saying is, “You’re too odd for everyone. So please help us sell tickets to straight people.”
I make work for queer people. And if the straight people want to come, please do. We will make you queer by the end of the evening. And we don’t really even do it. You do it. You do all the work yourself. All we do is sing songs.
Dacher Keltner:
When I ask people, “Tell me a time when music told you about what life means,” there’ll be one person who’ll say, “Oh, I was at a Garth Brooks concert, and I just started weeping about my life.” And then another person will say, like, “God, I saw this piece of classical music and I thought about who I am.” And I feel like that’s one of the great mysteries that may never be solved, is how it helps us discover who we are.