Brandon Woolf | New York University (original) (raw)
Articles/Essays by Brandon Woolf
With this essay, my hope is to contribute to recent conversations about art and its supporting in... more With this essay, my hope is to contribute to recent conversations about art and its supporting infrastructures — discussions that are working, I believe, to unsettle a kind of anti-institutional prejudice that has haunted performance studies. As the rather polemical title hints, I enter these discussions by revisiting an older set of debates that arose in the annals of cultural studies in the 1990s. I argue that Tony Bennett’s controversial claim — that we put policy into cultural studies — unintentionally invites us to examine how ‘policy’ itself might continue to serve as a generative term to further unravel unhelpful dichotomies and persistent predispositions. By tracking a critical genealogy of these so-called ‘policy debates,’ I contend also that we move beyond the acknowledgement – or avowal – that arts of institutional thinking are essential in and for performance studies. Ultimately, I want to suggest that performance as policy has a unique capacity to inspire experimental modes of social organization and perhaps even an overhaul of our institutions of public life. My hope is that an examination of the ways a notion of what I call ‘institutional (dis)avowal’ is already embedded in the history of contentious conversations about culture and administration will both bolster this claim and open avenues for further inquiry.
Firstly: The political can appear only indirectly in the theatre, at an oblique angle, modo obliq... more Firstly: The political can appear only indirectly in the theatre, at an oblique angle, modo obliquo. And second: The political has an effect in the theatre if and only if it is in no way translatable or re-translatable into the logic, syntax, and terminology of the political discourse of social reality. What then follows, thirdly, is the seemingly paradoxical formula that the political of the theatre must be conceived not as a reproduction of the political, but as its interruption. 1
Gob Squad—love children of the contemporary European performance scene—have “occupied” the Berlin... more Gob Squad—love children of the contemporary European performance scene—have “occupied” the Berlin Volksbühne for their newest action: Revolution Now! So let the Molotov cocktails fly: “this revolution will be broadcast live!”
A lovely stream flows through the campus at UC Davis. While it is widely believed to be filled wi... more A lovely stream flows through the campus at UC Davis. While it is widely believed to be filled with dangerous agrochemical runoff, this stream offers an idyllic place for students, staff, and faculty to stroll or sunbathe. One day toward the end of the spring quarter of 2010, a young man stood in that beautiful but toxic water, protected by hip-high waders. He wore a cowboy hat and overalls and looked like a character from the 1849 Gold Rush. With a pan in his hands, he called out to passersby to watch as he demonstrated his solution to student financial problems. A sign planted in the ground near him said: gold: the tuition solution. He cried out to passersby, “It's an old California tradition, and it's the only way I can pay for school!” He had several gold-painted rocks to prove that one could still strike it rich, and he offered them to passersby. As a small crowd gathered around to observe this Swiftian “modest proposal,” he made his point about the desperate situation students have found themselves in at the University of California.
“Black folks passing for black folks. That’s a trip!” A trip is just what we get in Passing Stran... more “Black folks passing for black folks. That’s a trip!” A trip is just what we get in Passing Strange, Stew’s Tony Award–winning piece of “genre-defying rock-pop-funk-punk-cabaret.” Stew and his band, The Negro Problem, serve as tour guides on a semi-autobiographical “pilgrimage” beyond the tightly patrolled borders of the North American continent, the traditions of black musical theatre performance, and the “chains” of a rooted, African American authenticity. Passing Strange renders a musical critique of any traditional or idealist rendering of “double consciousness” and explores the negative—and hybridized—nature of black identity formation. In turn, this essay employs a dialectical and diasporic vocabulary to situate Stew in problematic yet productive relation to critical interlocutors like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Gilroy among others in order to articulate the complex relations between racial and national identity that Passing Strange performs. It maps the varied problems of problematization for which Passing Strange is arguing by charting the piece’s often contradictory trajectories. Finally, the essay works to understand Stew where he is most at home, “between the clicks of a metronome”: between black and white, between music and theatre, between the United States and Europe, between past and present, between fictional representation and lived experience.
Book Reviews by Brandon Woolf
TDR: The Drama Review, 61.2 (Summer 2017): 180-182.
With this essay, my hope is to contribute to recent conversations about art and its supporting in... more With this essay, my hope is to contribute to recent conversations about art and its supporting infrastructures — discussions that are working, I believe, to unsettle a kind of anti-institutional prejudice that has haunted performance studies. As the rather polemical title hints, I enter these discussions by revisiting an older set of debates that arose in the annals of cultural studies in the 1990s. I argue that Tony Bennett’s controversial claim — that we put policy into cultural studies — unintentionally invites us to examine how ‘policy’ itself might continue to serve as a generative term to further unravel unhelpful dichotomies and persistent predispositions. By tracking a critical genealogy of these so-called ‘policy debates,’ I contend also that we move beyond the acknowledgement – or avowal – that arts of institutional thinking are essential in and for performance studies. Ultimately, I want to suggest that performance as policy has a unique capacity to inspire experimental modes of social organization and perhaps even an overhaul of our institutions of public life. My hope is that an examination of the ways a notion of what I call ‘institutional (dis)avowal’ is already embedded in the history of contentious conversations about culture and administration will both bolster this claim and open avenues for further inquiry.
Firstly: The political can appear only indirectly in the theatre, at an oblique angle, modo obliq... more Firstly: The political can appear only indirectly in the theatre, at an oblique angle, modo obliquo. And second: The political has an effect in the theatre if and only if it is in no way translatable or re-translatable into the logic, syntax, and terminology of the political discourse of social reality. What then follows, thirdly, is the seemingly paradoxical formula that the political of the theatre must be conceived not as a reproduction of the political, but as its interruption. 1
Gob Squad—love children of the contemporary European performance scene—have “occupied” the Berlin... more Gob Squad—love children of the contemporary European performance scene—have “occupied” the Berlin Volksbühne for their newest action: Revolution Now! So let the Molotov cocktails fly: “this revolution will be broadcast live!”
A lovely stream flows through the campus at UC Davis. While it is widely believed to be filled wi... more A lovely stream flows through the campus at UC Davis. While it is widely believed to be filled with dangerous agrochemical runoff, this stream offers an idyllic place for students, staff, and faculty to stroll or sunbathe. One day toward the end of the spring quarter of 2010, a young man stood in that beautiful but toxic water, protected by hip-high waders. He wore a cowboy hat and overalls and looked like a character from the 1849 Gold Rush. With a pan in his hands, he called out to passersby to watch as he demonstrated his solution to student financial problems. A sign planted in the ground near him said: gold: the tuition solution. He cried out to passersby, “It's an old California tradition, and it's the only way I can pay for school!” He had several gold-painted rocks to prove that one could still strike it rich, and he offered them to passersby. As a small crowd gathered around to observe this Swiftian “modest proposal,” he made his point about the desperate situation students have found themselves in at the University of California.
“Black folks passing for black folks. That’s a trip!” A trip is just what we get in Passing Stran... more “Black folks passing for black folks. That’s a trip!” A trip is just what we get in Passing Strange, Stew’s Tony Award–winning piece of “genre-defying rock-pop-funk-punk-cabaret.” Stew and his band, The Negro Problem, serve as tour guides on a semi-autobiographical “pilgrimage” beyond the tightly patrolled borders of the North American continent, the traditions of black musical theatre performance, and the “chains” of a rooted, African American authenticity. Passing Strange renders a musical critique of any traditional or idealist rendering of “double consciousness” and explores the negative—and hybridized—nature of black identity formation. In turn, this essay employs a dialectical and diasporic vocabulary to situate Stew in problematic yet productive relation to critical interlocutors like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Gilroy among others in order to articulate the complex relations between racial and national identity that Passing Strange performs. It maps the varied problems of problematization for which Passing Strange is arguing by charting the piece’s often contradictory trajectories. Finally, the essay works to understand Stew where he is most at home, “between the clicks of a metronome”: between black and white, between music and theatre, between the United States and Europe, between past and present, between fictional representation and lived experience.
TDR: The Drama Review, 61.2 (Summer 2017): 180-182.