Political theater

Tulsa Modern Movement asks questions to find common ground

In public life, “political theater” means the telling of half-truths for an edge in the power game, the dark puppet show behind the glad-handing scenes. We Americans see it often. In the performing arts, it’s sometimes used with a sniff to denote a work that’s perceived to bludgeon the audience with a political message (usually left of center).

But in a sense, all politics is a kind of theater, and all theater is political. In the ancient world, the connection was more explicit. The best politicians trained in the art of rhetoric, honing their persuasive language with tools like repetition and hyperbole. The Western model for dramatic arts that came from Sophocles and Euripides recognized that theater could benefit a political community by letting it purge itself of emotions like pity and fear—the celebrated “catharsis” that Aristotle described—and thus be ready to enter the field of battle (aka, life) with clear heads.

In his 1997 Kenyon Review essay, “Notes on Political Theater,” playwright Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) writes that, for artists, “the act of wishing away the world of political struggle is a deeply reactionary gesture.”

Storytelling is traditionally healing work, the work of building a container within which to confront (and even conquer) what may be unbearably challenging to face in daily life. The theater is the most subversive kind of safe place, one so safe that almost anything can happen there. It’s where complex paradoxes, truths, and tragedies can play out before our eyes and we can experience them by empathetic proxy. We can go to the depths without leaving our seats. A ticket to a show can become a call to action.

Theater of this sort is as much education as entertainment, as much about changing hearts as changing costumes. Unfortunately, it’s the toughest kind of theater to make.

“[Playwrights] are in the lamentable position of having to eschew most political issues because we simply have no vocabulary with which to discuss them,” Kushner notes. He goes on to argue that theater, which “lives in terror of seeming partisan,” has been “stripped of its pedagogic capabilities” and cannot help but oversimplify a complex world, reduce it to platitudes, and ultimately become cynical about it.

Terror, denial, and complacency are toxic playmates, and we’re seeing an awful lot of them in 2016. Art has a radical responsibility to run a different game.

How does an artist begin to do it differently? By beginning. By trying. By asking questions.

One who’s currently doing that is Ari Christopher, founder and director of Tulsa Modern Movement. Collaborating with writers and spoken-word artists, she’s creating an evening-length dance theater production about racial inequality, particularly as it exists in Tulsa.

The company will show excerpts from the work in progress, with room for discussion, at its annual TuMM Gathering on December 4.

We don’t often think of dance as a political art form, but it can be a uniquely effective one.

“Dance moves an audience's thinking out of their heads and into their bodies,” Christopher explains, allowing people “to engage with the world from an internal and authentic core. All of us respond to authentic human movement. We recognize that we share something so basic, that we're all connected.”

“Some of us have an activist streak and are driven to make work that can make a difference.”

Influenced by political dancemaker par excellence Bill T. Jones, with whom she studied this summer, her goal in this new piece is “to offer permission and to make it feel safer to speak about inequality. Not just speak about it, but to ask questions and find common ground.”

“I believe that every person balances the need for safety with the need for truth,” she says.

“If I take a big risk and give the audience a safe place to sit in truth, maybe people who engage with my work will feel a little safer to take a risk.”

Tulsa Modern Movement Annual Gathering + Works-in-Progress Showing
Sun., Dec. 4, 2016, 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
By donation
Flyloft
117 N. Boston

For more from Alicia, read her article on Echo Theatre Company’s “The Invisibility Project.”