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Beyond the Stage
The Fascinating True Stories That Inspired Each Illuminations: “Fractured History” Performance
The Fascinating True Stories That Inspired Each Illuminations: “Fractured History” Performance
Understanding history, from foundation to fracture.
Our understanding of history is neither static nor complete; rather, it is dynamic and ever-changing. Examining historical narratives often entails re-evaluating what we consider to be fact, and finding new sources and voices with the potential to evolve our perspective. This year’s Illuminations theme of “Fractured History” unites the power of the performing arts with UC Berkeley scholarship to delve into what we truly know of our past, and how that understanding shapes our present and future.
To guide us in this season-long exploration, Cal Performances presents eight distinct performances, each with their own historical reference point. In this article, we will introduce the Illuminations performances on our 2024–25 season and probe the history that serves as backdrop and context for each work.
Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi, an American Modern Opera Company Production (Sep 27)
Harawi, directed by Zack Winokur and performed by Julia Bullock (soprano), Conor Hanick (piano), Bobbi Jene Smith (choreographer/dancer), and Or Schraiber (choreographer/dancer), reflects a new staging of Messiaen’s song cycle, originally written in 1945. Harawi is part one of Messiaen’s “Tristan Trilogy,” artistic works inspired by the myth of Tristan and Iseult. This myth is thought to be rooted in Celtic tradition as early as the 12th century, though scholars have drawn parallels to earlier romantic tragedies born out of Persian and Roman storytelling, among others, as possible inspiration for Tristan and Iseult. Variations in Tristan and Iseult’s story circulated in different regions in Europe during the medieval period and, around the 13th century, would frequently be woven into Arthurian legends.
The traditional plot centers Tristan as the nephew of Mark, King of Cornwall, whose kingdom is threatened by Ireland. A skilled swordsman, Tristan defeats the Irish King Morholt in battle but is severely wounded, and it is only by the magic of the Irish sorceress Iseult that Tristan is healed. Upon being healed, Tristan returns to Cornwall and speaks so highly of Iseult to King Mark that Mark wants to marry the sorceress. He tasks Tristan with returning to Ireland to retrieve Iseult and escort her to Cornwall, which Tristan accepts. During their journey, however, Tristan and Iseult unknowingly drink a love potion and, though the two try to act honorably and Iseult goes through with the marriage to Mark, their forbidden love remains a source of incredible longing.
Intrigued by the myth as well as by musical cultures across the world, the French Messiaen decided to write a song cycle based on the Celtic legend in the style of Peruvian harawi, a genre of music and literature that originated from Indigenous peoples in the Andes that often contemplates life, tragedy, death, and connection to nature. (You can listen to an example of traditional harawi here.) Messiaen wrote the libretto primarily in his native French, though he weaves in bits of Quechua, a family of Indigenous Peruvian languages.
This performance involves multiple layers of rediscovering and recontextualizing history: not only do audiences encounter the myth of Tristan and Iseult through the lens of Peruvian harawi, but also Messiaen’s own interpretation is recontextualized by AMOC* ( American Modern Opera Company), which draws out nuances in the work and adds original choreography to accompany the 12 songs.
Step Afrika!’s The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence (Nov 2–3)
Step Afrika!, the Washington DC-based dance troupe, has a unique movement vocabulary that pulls from “percussive dance styles practiced by historically African American fraternities and sororities; traditional African dances; and an array of contemporary dance and art forms,” according to the company. In this production celebrating their 30th anniversary, the troupe explores the history of the Great Migration as depicted by artist Jacob Lawrence in his famed 1940s painting series.
In the US, the Great Migration refers to the movement of approximately six million Black people out of the South to other regions from the 1910s through the 1970s. The first period of the Great Migration (referred to simply as “the First Great Migration”) lasted from the 1910s–1940s and is the subject of Lawrence’s vibrant artwork. The migration itself was a result of a push and a pull: the pull of new job opportunities in cities outside of the South (given that many industrial laborers had vacated their positions to join WWI), as well as the push of racial violence and discrimination that, though a reality throughout the US, was particularly egregious in the South. Black people who settled in new cities—most popularly Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Milwaukee (The Bay Area would become a considerable destination during the Second Great Migration!)—did tend to have greater access to financial, vocational, and educational opportunities, though they continued to face challenges such as poor housing conditions and racial segregation and discrimination by Whites who saw with concern the cities’ demographic shift. This demographic shift would also inspire significant developments in Black art and culture, such as the Harlem Renaissance, which describes a flourishing of “poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance” that reflected Black experience at that time.
Painter Jacob Lawrence was personally shaped and inspired by the Great Migration. Lawrence was born in New Jersey, after his parents had moved from the South during the early years of the Great Migration. The family relocated to Harlem when Lawrence was 13, providing him with the opportunity to witness and participate in the Harlem Renaissance. He would become nationally recognized in his early 20s for his paintings depicting Black historical figures and modern life. Perhaps most notably, his 60-panel The Migration Series published in 1941 with funding from the Works Progress Administration, a federal government program designed in part to boost employment following the Great Depression. The popular series depicts many elements of life in the South, the experience of transitioning to the North, and the challenges and opportunities faced as a result of the Migration. At the time the series was published, Lawrence was still seeing dynamic effects of these demographic shifts and in fact acknowledged at the end of his series that the Migration was ongoing.
Step Afrika!’s performance meditates on Lawrence’s interpretation of this important period in American history and utilizes direct projections of the paintings throughout the performance. Notably, as part of “Fractured History,” this dance performance adds a new artistic lens through which to contemplate both the Migration and Lawrence’s renderings in the present day.
Dover Quartet in works by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, Pura Fé, Jessie Montgomery, and Dvořák (Nov 3)
The distinctly American Dover Quartet—founded when its members were students at the Curtis Institute of Music—returns to Cal Performances with a program comprising four works, each with its own perspective on what defines American sound.
The oldest of these works, Dvořák’s American Quartet, was written during the Czech composer’s years in the United States, when his main goal was to discover and engage with American music. One of the most popular chamber pieces played today, Dvořák’s twelfth string quartet was inspired by his trip to the small Czech immigrant town of Spillville, Iowa, on vacation from his position at National Conservatory in New York City. Of his piece, Dvořák wrote: “As to my opinion, I think that the influence of this country (it means the folk songs as are Negro, Indian, Irish etc.) is to be seen, and that this and all other works (written in America) differ very much from my other works as well as in couleur as in character…” Dvořák was particularly inspired by Black and folk musical traditions, so much so that, when String Quartet No. 12 was first circulated, it was nicknamed “Negro” (despite lacking an authentic connection to or collaboration with the Black community) before it came to be known as “American Quartet” in the 1950s. Though many have questioned whether traditional American melodies can truly be distinguished in the quartet, the work is a unique reflection of a newcomer’s perspective on what he understood American sound to be.
The first work on Dover’s program, Strum, is similarly inspired by “American folk idioms” as well as “the spirit of dance and movement” in the US. Composer and violinist Jessie Montgomery finalized the work as part of a performance for the 2012 Sphinx Competition, an annual competition for Black and Latinx string players. Born in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1981, Montgomery was raised in an environment that was at once musically and socially engaged, and she infuses her comprehensive understanding of the American experience—including its cultural heritage and sound—into her work as a composer, educator, and advocate.
The two remaining works on the program speak to a Native interpretation of American sound, thanks to the artistic vision of Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Tate, who identifies as a “Chickasaw classical composer,” has made it his mission to spotlight and modernize Indian musical traditions for a contemporary audience, and uses tribal melodies, rhythms, and stories to raise awareness of Indian artforms and culture as well as to draw out poignant messages he feels are universally resonant. The first half of Dover’s program features an arrangement by Tate of Pura Fé’s Rattle Songs. Pura Fé (who performed with The Silkroad Ensemble as part Cal Performances’ 2023–24 season) is a Tuscarora artist and co-founder of the Ulali Project, self-described as “the first Indigenous women’s group to create their own sound from their strong traditional roots and personal contemporary styles.” As the title suggests, Rattle Songs, composed for Ulali, features traditional Native rattles as part of its instrumentation. Additionally, the program features Tate’s own composition of a new work to be announced, which will add yet another lens through which to understand American musical traditions in the present day.
William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No (Mar 14–16)
Multidisciplinary South African artist and recent Cal Performances artist in residence William Kentridge returns to UC Berkeley for the Bay Area premiere of a new chamber opera that reimagines a historic sea voyage of cultural refugees from WWII-era Europe. Historical figures of both “New World” and “Old World” are imaginatively put in dialogue with one another to engage ideas that remain important for modern audiences, most notably, colonialism.
The setting of this work is an ocean liner called Paul Lemerle, which took multiple real life voyages of refugees from Marseille, France, to the French colony of Martinique in the Caribbean during WWII between the winter of 1940 and spring of 1941. At that time, Marseille was considered a “Free Zone,” meaning it was not under German occupation, though the fact that much of France was already occupied by Germany led to a collaborative policy between the French Vichy government and the Nazi party. While concentration camps—populated primarily by Jews but also Roma and Sinti people, individuals with disabilities, political dissidents (including communists and socialists), members of the now-LGBTQ+ community, and outspoken cultural opponents of the Nazi regime, among others—were already in use by this time, the official Nazi policy still endorsed expulsion of “undesirable” groups. The trips promised to take refugees from Marseille to Martinique as a pathway to the US, though the latter leg of that journey was often unrealized.
The specific 1941 voyage that serves as the historical backdrop for Kentridge’s work is documented as carrying 222 refugees. Though most would not be recognized today, among them were a few notable cultural refugees:
- French writer André Breton, who co-created surrealism as a means of “resolv[ing] the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality” following the shock of WWI;
- French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would later introduce structural anthropology as a means of identifying similar patterns between different cultures;
- innovative painter Wifredo Lam, who grew up in colonized Cuba and whose Afro-Cuban and Chinese heritage made him particularly intriguing to European artists;
- revolutionary Russian novelist, journalist, and historian Victor Serge, who supported Marxism and was particularly critical of Stalin in his works;
- and exiled German author Anna Seghers, a Communist who had warned of the dangers of Nazism in The Seventh Cross, a novel she penned nearly a decade prior to the voyage.
In his opera, Kentridge represents some of the aforementioned figures who made the historic journey to freedom by way of colonized land; but he also introduces a number of additional historical figures who were not on the original voyage, but whose voices represent philosophies that mingle and conflict with others’ on board. Captained by Charon, the ferryman of the Underworld on the River Styx, Kentridge’s vessel also includes:
- French writer Suzanne Césaire, who championed feminism, anti-colonialism, and surrealism;
- French poet (and husband to Suzanne Césaire) Aimé Césaire and French writers Paulette and Jeanne Nardal, who would contribute to the Négritude framework for “raising Black consciousness” as part of the African Diaspora in Paris during the 1930s;
- French Empress Joséphine Bonaparte, the first wife of infamous Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military conquests had ramifications for nations across Europe, the Americas, and parts of Africa;
- French philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who developed strong Pan-African, anti-colonialist, Marxist views that inspired movements for political freedom in multiple countries across Asia, Africa, and the Americas;
- American-born, French performer Josephine Baker (nicknamed “Black Venus”), who, in 1927, became the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture;
- and Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who played a critical role in a number of Russian wars as well as in the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922; to name just a few.
All these characters combine in poetic scenes that explore what freedom may look like on the other side of their journey, and invite us to consider, too, the movement and exchange of ideas that have informed our consciousness over time.
Visit the performance event page for The Great Yes, The Great No.
Story Boldly’s Defining Courage (Apr 4)
Defining Courage is a multidisciplinary production by Story Boldly, an organization dedicated to “tell[ing] engaging stories about important chapters in history and teach[ing] others how to use digital media to share stories that matter.” The performance combines cinema—both historic footage and recent eyewitness accounts and reflections—with narration by Los Angeles-based news anchor David Ono and live original music to share the traditionally overlooked experiences of soldiers of Japanese descent fighting on behalf of the US during WWII.
Roughly two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces in December 1941—the act that pushed the US to actively fight with the Allied Forces during WWII— President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order to force the incarceration of 122,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to promote “protection against espionage and against sabotage to national defense…” Of the 122,000 individuals who were split between 75 incarceration camps throughout the US, approximately two thirds were US citizens.
Furthermore, in March 1942, Japanese and Japanese American men in the US were deemed “enemy aliens,” meaning they were barred from military service. And yet, despite the criminalization and intense discrimination they faced, despite being forcibly relocated and locked down by the country they called home, many Nisei (a term referring to second generation Japanese Americans) clamored for the opportunity to join the US military. In February 1943, the government reversed its decision to bar Nisei enlistment, in part due to attrition on the battlefield, and in part due to the incredible service record of the Nisei division of the Hawaii National Guard, known as the 100th Infantry Battalion, which had been specially permitted to continue after the service ban. This second wave of Nisei soldiers formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a new, all-Japanese military unit. Together they formed the 100th/442nd, with more than 12,000 men volunteering from Hawaii and the mainland—roughly 2,300 of whom came directly from incarceration camps.
While the 100th/442nd fought their way through Europe, there was one other unit made up exclusively of determined Nisei young men called the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), who served in the Pacific. The MIS used their Japanese language skills to crack into Japanese transmissions, sneak behind enemy lines, and provide other intelligence that gave the US an invaluable advantage.
Throughout WWII, thousands more Nisei would risk (and at times lose) their lives on behalf of the US. The 100th/442nd would come to be known as some of the bravest, most successful, and most highly decorated military teams in US history. At the time, the sacrifice of these soldiers was credited with “shortening the war by two years and saving countless lives,” per Story Boldly.
Defining Courage sheds light on the complicated experience Nisei soldiers had in grappling with their American identity, and reintroduces nuance in describing the history of a group that is often unacknowledged or oversimplified.
Grupo Corpo’s 21 and Gira (Apr 25–26)
The dancers of Grupo Corpo are known for their eclectic style, which draws on many facets of Brazilian music and dance—a melting pot rooted in the history of diverse groups (indigenous Indians, enslaved Africans, and colonizing Portuguese and Dutch), as well as all of their descendants) who have lived in and occupied Brazil together in recent centuries. Founded in 1975 by Paulo Pederneiras, whose artistic vision and choreography have had a lasting impact on the company, Grupo Corpo identifies foremost as a contemporary dance theater troupe; their heaviest influence is ballet, followed by folk and popular dance from Brazil. In this their Cal Performances debut, the company brings the Bay Area premieres of two works, each drawing on a different aspect of their culture.
In 1992, Rodrigo Pederneiras choreographed the ballet 21 for Grupo Corpo. The score was composed by Marco Antônio Guimarães for his percussion ensemble, Uakti. Named after an ancient legend from the Tukano Indians of the Amazon, the ensemble is known for custom building instruments out of PVC tubes, wood, glass and tin cans for their performances as well as utilizing more traditional instruments such as marimbas, various stringed instruments, and drums. The music and choreography combine in 21 to free the dancers from the tight restraints of traditional form, providing a rhythmic landscape through which to explore deeper meaning and the influence of Brazilian popular dance on their unique movement style.
The second work on the program, Gira, was choreographed in 2017, also by Rodrigo Pederneiras, as a “reconstruct[ion] of the powerful glossary of gestures and movement” original to the rites of Brazilian religious traditions. Specifically, the choreography reflects Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion influenced by Yoruba traditions; and Umbanda, a popular Brazilian religion that combines elements of Candomblé; Kardecism, which is an offshoot of Spiritualism that was founded in France but took root particularly in Latin America; and Catholicism, which was introduced by the Portuguese during colonization. Gira is danced to music by São Paulo band Metá Metá that combines ritual chanting with animal cries, bird calls, and saxophone. Collectively, the staging, costumes, and music emphasize the impact of Brazilian history, culture, and tradition.
The English Concert in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Apr 27)
Handel’s popular heroic opera, Giulio Cesare in Egitto (which translates to “Julius Caesar in Egypt”), was composed in 1724, but has a historical reference point dating back to roughly 48 BC, the year that Roman Emperor Julius Caesar met the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra.
While the opera is, of course, dramatized and romanticized, the union it portrays between Caesar (“Cesare” in the opera) and Cleopatra—both militarily/politically and romantically—is based in truth. At the time that the two met, Caesar, who had over time risen through the political ranks, had achieved a position of great power and influence in the vast Roman Empire. However, Pompey, a respected war hero who had at one time been very close allies with Caesar, now posed a threat to Caesar’s security as ruler. In an attempt to bring down his key rival, Caesar initiated the Roman Civil War in Italy in 49 BC. It was during the winter of 48 BC as war waged on that Caesar met Cleopatra VII (known today simply as Cleopatra), who was herself in a challenging political predicament.
As with Rome, Egypt was politically unstable as Cleopatra grew up, and she witnessed the rise and fall of her relatives during formative years: around the age of 18, Cleopatra was made co-regent of Egypt by her father, King Ptolemy XII, who had recently killed his other daughter, Bernice IV, to oust her from power. When Cleopatra’s father died a year later in 51 BC, Cleopatra’s co-ruler became her roughly 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII (“Tolomeo” in the opera) who would strip her of power in 49 BC to claim more for himself. (It’s worth mentioning that, given his young age, it was likely that his advisors initiated the coup on his behalf.) Ptolemy would go on to authorize the execution of Caesar’s rival, Pompey, striking a friendly relationship between Egypt and Caesar. By 48 BC, Cleopatra was fighting a civil war against her brother, hoping to regain control of Egypt, and viewed Caesar as a powerful potential ally.
Shortly after their initial encounter, Caesar and Cleopatra became romantically involved and he did help restore her to power. In 47 BC, Cleopatra gave birth to a son believed to be Caesar’s; and in 46 BC, Caesar named himself lifelong dictator of Rome following his success in the civil war. Though the Queen of Egypt and Roman Emperor were not longtime lovers, they inspired interest and mystery even as they lived.
As one might expect, historical documents dating back to 48BC are extremely limited and leave much to the imagination when crafting a cohesive narrative. In fact, even during their lifetimes, the absence of reliable vehicles for mass communication meant that Caesar and Cleopatra were at once real leaders as well as mythicized characters among their people. In Handel’s opera, though key pillars of historical context (such as the fact that Ptolemy had Pompey executed and that Caesar struck up a romantic and military alliance with Cleopatra during civil war) remain themes in the artistic work, the details of how events unfold are often fabricated to create a more dramatic and compelling experience for the audience. Added elements include scenes of passion and seduction, complex revenge schemes, and ample opportunities for characters to reveal impassioned motivations for their actions, which is something that historic sources have generally lacked. As part of “Fractured History,” The English Concert’s performance invites audiences to consider how Handel’s opera expounds upon the military motivations of its main characters and tells a compelling love story that gives new meaning to Caesar and Cleopatra’s legendary bond.
Visit the performance event page for Giulio Cesare in Egitto.
This Land is Our Land Featuring Martha Redbone Roots Project and the American Patchwork Quartet (Feb 28)
American Roots singer and songwriter Martha Redbone and the American Patchwork Quartet are both known for melding various genres of music to share their own stories and to celebrate the musical heritage of many peoples in the US. In This Land is Our Land, the collaborators weave together a musical tapestry that showcases the rich cultural traditions comprising American sound.
Martha Redbone is of eastern Cherokee, Choctaw, and African American descent. Redbone was born in New York City and spent much of her childhood between her home in Brooklyn and her grandparents’ home in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. She has shared that her family is one of the “original Cherokee families” still living in Black Mountain, Kentucky, and has explored much of their history in her music, including in her work Bone Hill, which follows four generations of Cherokee women in her family. Growing up in Black Mountain, Redbone was surrounded by mountain folk, gospel, and roots music that continues to influence her sound in combination with the musical traditions of her Native ancestors.
Of her own history, Redbone has shared how, throughout her life, she has been in between worlds, seen in some circles as “not Native enough” and in others as “not African enough.” She has made it a point to use her voice to educate audiences, not only on the resilience and lasting culture of her people (having realized while touring internationally that many audiences did not even know Native peoples in the US still existed), but also to express her unique identity and personal family history, stressing the importance of using music to “tell our own stories.”
She is joined by American Patchwork Quartet (APQ), which is “on a mission to reclaim the immigrant soul of American Roots Music.” APQ was founded in 2020 by South Carolina native Clay Ross, who is at once a jazz/roots guitarist and vocalist and a teaching artist, and who has served as an American Cultural Ambassador through multiple collaborations with the US State Department. He is joined by three artists who represent a broad range of ancestral and musical backgrounds: Falguni Shah, a Hindustani classical vocalist; Yasushi Nakamura, an Issei jazz bassist; and Clarence Penn, a drummer with roots in African American church traditions.
Though the group is committed to fostering unity through their music, they take the term “patchwork” seriously, thoughtfully curating pieces that honor the specific history, struggle, and triumphs of each culture being explored rather than blending them into one homogenous narrative. Stylistically, APQ serves as ”a potent symbol of unity in diversity” by tapping into a combination of American folk, jazz, country, West African, and East Asian musical traditions.
The performances described in this article only scratch the surface of all the fresh energy and perspectives being shared onstage during the 2024–25 season. Explore the rest of the events on our season here.
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Inspiring Joy: Performances that Amaze, Entertain, and Uplift
Inspiring Joy: Performances that Amaze, Entertain, and Uplift
“…Many of us first fell in love with performances because they can also bring a pure and profound sense of enjoyment, a chance to be amazed simply at the talent and spectacle of what we see on stage.”
In this video, executive and artistic director Jeremy Geffen shares seven performances, each offering a very different yet equally uplifting experience in the theater. From tap dancing to circus arts performance, from sing-along concerts to miming, the season has something for everyone—including, in many cases, young ones in the family, too! Watch below to get a sneak peek of:
Transcript
Jeremy Geffen:
We often talk about the arts’ ability to expand our understanding of the world and to unpack complex issues. Indeed, the performing arts can and do routinely do all of the above, and yet many of us first fell in love with performances because they can also bring a pure and profound sense of enjoyment, a chance to be amazed simply at the talent and spectacle of what we see on stage. In this video, I’ll highlight a few performances of our 2024–25 season that will leave your eyes sparkling, your jaw dropping, and your smile stretching as wide as it can go.
In October, Swiss mime troupe Mummenschanz returns to Cal Performances as part of its 50th anniversary season with a program ripe with visual spectacle. In the magical hands of Mummenschanz, toilet paper rolls transform into animated faces, pipes enjoin to create workable arms and legs, and clay masks are formed and deformed live on stage. Deeply imaginative, energetic and witty, this production will enchant audiences of all ages.
Theater and circus arts collide, quite literally, in SLAM!, a one-of-a-kind collaboration between Quebec-based Ex Machina and Cirque FLIP Fabrique. Under famed director Robert Lepage, circus artists dynamically interpret wrestling cultures from around the world, pushing the boundaries of the ring in this dramatic and electric extravaganza.
In November, Disney Concerts will bring Encanto: The Sing-Along Film Concert. This immersive and heartwarming concert experience invites Encanto lovers of all ages to sing along with a live band while watching the full film. The Grammy-nominated soundtrack features eight original songs by songwriter-composer Lin-Manuel Miranda with a score by composer Germaine Franco. Truly a treat for the whole family.
Just in time for winter holidays, New York’s Dorrance Dance returns to Cal Performances. Known for redefining tap dance, the company applies its playful and innovative spirit to transform a Christmas classic, The Nutcracker. Co-created by Michelle Dorrance, Hannah Heller and Josette Wiggin, this dazzling saucy satire is set to hot jazz rhythms that melt into the mesmerizing tapping on the stage.
In Japanese, the word KODO means “heartbeat,” as well as “drum” and “child.” In January, the revered taiko drummers returned to Berkeley for their Warabe tour, which honors the group’s desire to “play the drums with the simple heart of a child.” Drawing on more traditional origins of the art form, both musically and aesthetically, Warabe promises to envelop audiences with percussion that is seen and felt, just as much as it is heard.
Since their formation during a dark time in South Africa’s history, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has used their distinctive voice to encourage, inspire, and unify. In March, this multiple Grammy award-winning vocal harmony group will combine their powerful sound with a powerful message of freedom, hope, and love, as uplifting today as it has been for decades.
Broadway legend Patti LuPone leaves her program up to fate in Songs from a Hat. Stripped down in an intimate setting, fueled by music, banter, and unscripted storytelling, LuPone will, quite literally, draw from a hat titles of songs that have made her a household name, as well as a Tony, Olivier and Grammy Award winner. Her dynamite combination of powerful vocals and beguiling charm is sure to delight.
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The Making of William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No
The Making of William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No
William Kentridge and Nhlanhla Mahlangu talk music-making and translation, imagery, and historic inspiration.
In March 2025, William Kentridge’s The Great Yes, The Great No makes its Bay Area premiere at Cal Performances, which is also a co-commissioner of the work. Multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge—who was also UC Berkeley artist in residence in 2022–23—worked with theater maker Phala Ookeditse Phala and choral conductor and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu to create this new chamber opera, which fictionalizes the historic wartime escape from Vichy France to the colonized Martinique by, among others, the surrealist André Breton, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam. The surrealist production makes additions to the real life passenger list, introducing such notable figures as Aimé Césaire, Josephine Baker, Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Joseph Stalin to explore the relationship between surrealism and the anticolonial Négritude movement as these passengers travel from the “Old World” to “New World.”
In Kentridge’s hands, the ship becomes a fantastical menagerie of thinkers, makers, and revolutionaries that combines lush South African choral music, dance, poetry, and anti-rational approaches to language and image, as well as Kentridge’s unique brand of animated drawings, video projection, masks, shadow play, and bold sculptural costumes.
See the performance event page, and read more about the true history that serves as the backdrop of the opera in our Illuminations blog article.
Transcript
William Kentridge:
It’s March 1941, a cargo ship filled with refugees escaping Vichy France. Surrealists, communists, André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, and on board the ship also is the captain who in fact is Charon, the ferryman of the dead, who not only are transporting these people across the Atlantic, but is able to call up historical characters from the past and even some from the future to reflect on the shift between Europe and its colonial past.
He calls up the great Martinican poets and philosophers, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire.
He calls up Frantz Fanon, the philosopher and psychoanalyst, he calls up the Nardal sisters, even calls up Josephine Bonaparte, Napoleon’s wife who came from Martinique. We have a duet of Joséphine Bonaparte and Josephine Baker, another transatlantic voyager.
Nhlanhla Mahlangu:
The creative process for making the music and the sonic landscape for The Great Yes, The Great No is quite unique. The Great Yes, The Great No is composed, is performed using the found text, the text from Aimé Césaire, the text from Fanon, the text from other great writers during the Surrealist movement and the Négritude movement.
William Kentridge:
We’re looking at the shift between a rationalist view of the world and the openness that the surrealists suggest and bring, and that is there in the poetry that comes from Martinique of a different world, of a different world to be made.
Nhlanhla Mahlangu:
There are different musical styles that we have chosen to make The Great Yes, The Great No: The sound of Martinique, the beguine music of Martinique, we are appropriating or borrowing from those influences. We are also looking at the French music of that time and also, not just taking it as it is and reproducing it, but how does it influence and how do we respond to it as South African performers or performers from the USA because it’s quite a big mixture in the collaborative process, so how does it speak to you as a composer, how does it speak to you as a performer, and how does it speak to you when you are translating it in your own language or in your own style? It’s a constant provocation, it’s a constant challenging what we are actually given.
William Kentridge:
We’re looking at the ways in which a certain kind of logic can be broken and a new way of thinking arrived at.
Nhlanhla Mahlangu:
There is a thing about translation that is a big part of The Great Yes, The Great No. The translation process to say, what is it that you find the text in French, with what happens to it when we translate it to English and then, from English we translate it back to Zulu, Tswana, siSwati, and then, what is the rhythm of the language? We are following the rhythms of the language when you have translated. That informs the melodies of how the chorus delivers the performances.
William Kentridge:
We use the Ship of Fools as a way to allow all questions to bubble and find potential answers.
Nhlanhla Mahlangu:
We are creating a surrealist piece and therefore, we have a great artistic license where different things that wouldn’t live together at the time, for us, there’s always juxtaposition of sound, juxtaposition of movement, juxtaposition of image that is going to be a gift for our audiences.
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Dance Excerpts and Insights From Across the Season
Dance Excerpts and Insights From Across the Season
Movement Vocabulary in Action
Cal Performances’ 2024–25 dance season offers an incredible range of dance styles, with each company bringing works that highlight what make them unique contributors to the field. For this article, we asked each company to provide a clip of a piece they are bringing to Cal Performances, and to briefly talk us through how the video exemplifies an element of the company’s distinct style or perspective.
Dorrance Dance
This clip features an improvised solo danced by Josette Wiggan from The Nutcracker Suite, which is co-created and co-choreographed by Wiggan, Hannah Heller, and Michelle Dorrance of Dorrance Dance, a company known for redefining tap dance for modern audiences.
From Josette Wiggan, choreographer and dancer: “[This] rendition of the Sugar Plum Fairy—or, as Duke Ellington renamed it, the Sugar Rum Cherry—is sultry but inviting, rhythmical but always cool and collected. The movement is rooted in the intersection where vernacular jazz meets tap dance. And it is inside of this intersection that the choreography and movement of the entire Nutcracker Suite lives and breathes. From the opening scene where we meet Claire and her family, down to the final number in the show where Claire returns home from her journey, the style of this show is rooted in this blend of jazz and tap dance. We wanted to create a whimsical world where jazz was king and could be felt in every aspect of the show. The set design, the costumes, as well as the choreography itself, all pay homage to the movers and shakers/creators of the early to mid 1900s. It was these players who set the bar for what jazz is, and we are merely drawing from and reflecting upon the world that they so brilliantly created.”
Dorrance Dance performs their tap rendition of The Nutcracker Suite in its Bay Area premiere at Cal Performances December 14–15, 2024, just in time for the winter holidays.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
This clip features an excerpt from Revelations, company founder Alvin Ailey’s most iconic work and one of the most recognizable modern dance pieces today. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, who has an annual residency at Cal Performances, is known for fusing a number of styles in works that shed light on the Black American experience.
From the company: “In this section of Revelations—‘Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel’—the dancers extend their limbs to extremity, they move through wide-legged stances as their spines twist and curve into inverted T positions, they hinge at the pelvis as their knees descend to the floor—all signatures of the Horton technique that company founder and choreographer Mr. Ailey learned from his mentor, Lester Horton. Other modern techniques that influenced Mr. Ailey include those of Martha Graham, seen in the strong contractions undulating the torso. In Mr. Ailey’s work, however, these torso articulations are given a rhythmic significance—pulsing to the rhythm of the spirituals—revealing that such pelvic and torso contractions, often credited as Martha Graham’s invention, have deeper roots in African dances. This forging of modern techniques with dances rooted in African traditions is what established Mr. Ailey as a singular voice in 20th century dance. Finally, the clip demonstrates Mr. Ailey’s use of universally understood iconography—the dancers’ hands clasped together, arms extended, heads thrown back, necks exposed—communicating an agonized pleading and a deep-rooted strength.”
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to Cal Performances for their annual residency April 8–13, 2025. Though program details will be announced later in the season, we are sure to see multiple performances of Revelations across the various programs.
Step Afrika!
This clip, which highlights elements of Gumboot dance from South Africa, shows an excerpt of Step Afrika! dancers in “Wade” from The Migration: Reflection on Jacob Lawrence. Based in Washington DC, Step Afrika! pulls from step dancing popular with Black fraternities and sororities in the US, as well as African dances.
From the company: “’Wade’ is Step Afrika!’s tribute to the Black church. It is a percussive merger of stepping, tap, and the South African Gumboot dance with the African American spiritual. Step Afrika! is unique in its blend of percussive dance styles practiced by historically African American fraternities and sororities with traditional African dances, and ‘Wade’ is a perfect example of the company’s ability to merge various art forms into a cohesive, compelling artistic experience.”
Step Afrika! will perform The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence on November 2–3, 2024, kicking off Cal Performances’ 2024–25 dance season.
Grupo Corpo
This clip showcases Grupo Corpo dancing in Rodrigo Pederneiras’ Gira. Grupo Corpo, which makes its Cal Performances debut on the 24–25 season, is a Brazilian troupe with a distinctive style rooted in ballet, as well as folk and popular dance in their country.
From Rodrigo Pederneiras, choreographer: “Gira was inspired by the movements used in Umbanda during the incorporation of entities [religious ritual]. These movements are blended with classical ballet techniques. Umbanda is an essentially Brazilian religion, with elements from African Candomblé, Catholicism, Kardecism, and rituals of native Brazilian peoples. It is important to emphasize that Gira is not a literal representation of what happens in the ceremony, but rather an artistic interpretation of the rituals and movements.”
Mark Morris Dance Group
This clip from Pepperland, choreographed by company founder Mark Morris as a tribute to the Beatles, is entitled “Wilbur Scoville,” named for the man who invented the scale that measures heat levels in hot sauce. Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) has been an annual visitor to Cal Performances and is one of the preeminent modern dance companies of our time.
From Sam Black, company director and former MMDG dancer: “‘Wilbur Scoville’—or ‘The Blues,’ as we call it—is my favorite section of Pepperland, both to dance and to watch. Everyone, band and dancers alike, gets to improvise within a set rhythmic structure, so every performance is different. Mark provides a video of the blues dancer Al Minns as inspiration, but otherwise it’s completely open. As Ethan Iverson [composer] writes in his liner notes for Pepperland, ‘The first thing we hear on the LP is a guitar blues lick, here transformed into a real blues for the horns to blow on. Wilbur Scoville invented the scale to measure heat in hot sauce: The original Sergeant Pepper?’”
Mark Morris Dance Group makes its annual visit to Cal Performances May 9–11, 2025.
Pilobolus
In this special clip, Pilobolus company directors talk through the inspiration and meaning behind “Noctuary,” part of the company’s re:CREATION program. Pilobolus is a highly imaginative dance theater company known for the physicality of its dancers.
From Renée Jaworski and Matt Kent, artistic directors: “In our piece, ‘Noctuary,’ which means ‘a journal of the passings of the night,’ we use the Pilobolus dancers’ strength and agility to create a world in which they float, invert, and traverse time. Our Pilobolus dancers can move with grace and apparent effortlessness through their incredible and rigorous study of technique and physical strength, stamina, and flexibility. Pilobolus dancers use strength and agility to create the illusion of flight, of falling, and of a buoyant atmosphere, much like a dreamscape… The movement evokes flight and the impossible task of shifting time, but it also has moments of humor and the dancers playfully engage with each other.”
Pilobolus visits Cal Performances with its re:CREATION program November 30 – December 1, 2024.
In addition to these six dazzling companies, the Cal Performances dance season is rounded out by Twyla Tharp Dance’s Diamond Jubilee (Feb 7–9, 2025) and Batsheva Dance Company performing the Bay Area premiere of Ohad Naharin’s MOMO (Feb 22–23, 2025).
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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.”