Performative

Let's talk about the power of words.  Words can become stand-ins for whole ideas, even whole histories, which makes certain words really powerful.  But strangely these power-words have a half-life, a point at which they lose any actual meaning.  At that point they become simply markers of identity or tribe, if they maintain power it is the power to exclude or ridicule.

Here are some easy examples: sustainable, capitalism, embodiment, spiritual, relax. Feel free to add your own examples in the comments and to devise poems out of them.

After a word has journeyed to meaninglessness it can sometimes be reclaimed.  'Elightenment' is a good example of this.  The word got so over used that it hit the point of self-parody.  But I discovered that if I started using it to mean something real, immediate, present and available, people had to stop and try to figure out what I was talking about.  Suddenly the word had power again, not the same power it once had but at least the power to trigger a deeper conversation.

The paper I wrote last spring which is hopefully going to be published next year is called:  "Cracking the Code, Taijiquan as Enlightenment Theater."  At the same time as I came up with that title I realized the power of another word: Performative. 

The word 'performative' has been framing my teachings and arguments for about six months, it is a powerful word.  Of course I know it is going to become meaningless eventually, but while it still has power I'm trying to get as much use out of it as I can.

The word highjacked my vocabulary because the most common (and effective) argument against the notion that martial arts, theater and religion are a single subject is that performance is differnt from real fighting. 

There are many versions of this argument, for example, "The way people fight on stage is different than the way they fight in real life, therefore performing artists need to train differently than martial artists do."

My response is, no, that is a misconception, a blind spot.  In fact that mistaken view creates training artifacts which prioritize the illusion of utility.  If we start from the correct historically accurate assumption that martial arts are performative, then we won't create false answers to the "why" questions that constantly come from students who don't have experience with lethal violence.  (Another way for teachers to avoid this problem is simply to admit they don't know.  Hey, a guy can hope can't he?)

There is a lot packed into that last paragraph, let me try to unpack it a little.  What is the basic structure of martial arts, be they from Chinese theater or (to take an outlier example), Japanese operant conditioning for living in a castle where assassination is a regular threat?  The basic structure of martial arts is that we train the body to be able to perform certain operations which can be executed under extreme stress (be it the immediacy of a threat or the rigors of physically staying in-character for six hours at a time).  A prince living in a castle has to learn highly specific ritual responses with his body, when to bow, how to bow, what to do with his eyes,  what to do with his sleeves, how to walk into a room.  In Japan, operant conditioning was simply integrated into these exacting protocols.  If someone draws a sword from the left while you are sitting, you do this.  If you both draw at the same time you do this.  If the attack is at this distance you do this, if it starts closer in, do this instead.  It is performative.  It is exacting.  It is all in response to specific "what if's." But it is also part of a much larger performance.  It is the basic training for performing a prince.  

My favorite "why-question" training artifact to make fun of is "the chambered fist!"  This is the idea that the reason people pull their fist back to their hip is so that it will be cocked and loaded, ready to fire!  The real purpose of that whole body posture with the fist at the hip is performative.  As operative conditioning it is a position one fights to, not a position one fights from. As theatrical training it is the base for performing a character.  The core skill one needs to be able to physically stay in character is the ability to keep returning to the same exact body shapes but with specific communicative variations, like context specific walks, mimed actions, or altered facial expressions.  

Enlightenment is perfromative too.  One of the big misconceptions about enlightenment is that it is some sort of process, some type of reactive or responsive way of seeing the world and then acting in it.  I would even argue that the most important element of enlightenment is its performative nature.  Enlightenment is immediate, that is, it is completely un-mediated by any process, it is instantaneous.  

The same is true for gender.  Gender is completely performative.  I can perforom as a woman or a man if I practice those gender norms.  Performing like a woman won't actually change my sex or my biology but it can be liberating to question what is performance and what is biology.  

Identity isn't real; performance is.  "Reality-Based" martial arts aren't real; performance is.  Earthly hierarchies of superiority aren't real; performance is. 

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Now for fun try replacing various subject words from the classic "mystical" chapter 6 of the Daodejing with variations of the word "performance":

The Valley Spirit is Deathless,

It is called the Dark Mare,

The door of the Dark Mare is the root of heaven and earth,

Lingering, it only seems to exist,

Yet in use, it is inexhaustible.  

--Laozi, Chapter 6

Translation by Ellen M. Chen, In Praise of Nothing; 2011: p. 93.

Operatic China

A popular scene staged by professional Chinese theater companies in San Francisco during the second half of the 1800’s was a male actor, portraying a woman giving birth.  Was it comedy? drama? or socio-political commentary?  It was probably all three.  This I learned from reading Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)  by Daphne P. Lei.   This work is a powerful contribution to our understanding of the culture of martial arts.

As an aside I also learned what coat check girls were for!  See every man in the early days of San Francisco carried either a gun or a bowie knife--or both--and these were not allowed to be carried into a theater, restaurant or a hotel.  Also someone skilled in the grit of fighting could also use a hat to great effect and a coat of course could conceal more weapons, and with muddy streets that were in total darkness at night, people generally carried canes.  So all these things had to be left with the coat check girl.  Coat check was the whole pre-1900 security apparatus.

This an excellent book which covers Opera as a function of identity and social organization in Southern China and California, and deserves a much more detailed review when I get a chance.  But for our purposes, the most significant idea I got from the book is an explanation of why Southern martial artists almost universally claim northern origins.  This has always been troubling to anyone who has a good eye for movement because there are big differences in the movement languages of North and South China suggesting a long period of distinct development.

In the 1860’s, just before the Tai Ping Rebellion which led to the deaths  of 20 million, there was a smaller rebellion called the Opera Rebellion focused around Foshan on the Southern coast.  It was an alliance of what we today call Triads, or Tiandihua (Heaven Earth Society), and Opera companies.  The Opera companies actually led the rebellion in costume.  They claim to have organized some 100,000 rebels.  They had a lot of ships, it seems all the Opera ships have been destroyed but each of these boats slept about 100 people with the starboard side being for male roles and the port side being for female roles.  About a 10th of the troop members were animal role experts, I don’t know where they slept.  Elsewhere I read evidence that the wooden man used in Wingchun Shaolin was some sort of a upright taffrail for belaying pins, which developed into a training tool for Opera.  

I really shouldn’t be using the word Opera, something like Traditional Chinese Theater Caste Professionals would be more accurate.  But ‘Opera’ is convenient for the moment.    A key point I have been reiterating is that the caste status of Opera people was below thieves and prostitutes, and that it was in perpetuity. One could not just quit and take up shoe making.  Ben Judkins has added to my thinking on this that money wasn’t very widespread for most of the history of martial arts.  It is a hard concept for modern people to comprehend.  I have always lived in a world of money and fixed prices for nearly everything.  Patronage societies took on much of the social organizing functions that stable currency later came to replace.  By the early 1800’s money started to get much more reliable in the South which led to a huge increase in commerce and naturally a diminishing of societies of patronage.  In the North and more interior regions,  where currency was less reliable, patronage societies were probably stronger and lasted longer.  

As Judkins has shown in his posts on martial arts manuals in the South, a commercial market for martial arts teachers was thriving as early as 1800.  How much of an escape window out of Opera caste status this market provided the experts of martial theatrical roles is still an open question.  

The Opera rebellion was a revolutionary struggle for power and perception which consolidated the ru (gentry scholars class), landowners, and wealthy merchants against everyone else.  That alliance had already existed in the South far more than in the North because the commercial vibrancy of the Southern ports was an irresistible source of corruption for government officials and powerful families.  When the Opera rebellion was finally put down it resulted in an outlawing of Opera for some 15 years, a period in which rebel and anyone associated with Opera was hunted down and executed.  There is an estimate in the book (if I recall correctly) of some 1 million slaughtered during these ‘hunts.’  

And this is the great insight that precipitates the foundation stories of all the “pure” martial arts of the South.  They nearly all claim to have come from the North around 1870-1880.  Some also claim origins in the somewhat mythical Southern Shaolin temple which was burned to the ground in the 1860’s.  Of course there was a huge fire at this time, but it was the final battle of the Opera Rebellion in which the Gentry/Officials burned the fortifications of Foshan to the ground, not a temple.  The lineages and the lineage stories were invented in order to completely disassociate themselves from the rebellion.  It was a survival strategy.  

Judkins has also suggested that the divisions and styles of Southern martial arts appear to have evolved as communities in alliance to various social divisions that become apparent in this era.  Wingchun developed as a higher status art than the more popular Choilifut Shaolin.  Interestingly and fittingly, a key founder of the Choilifut system is known as the Green Grass Monk, because he routinely covered his body with a medicinal paste made from green grasses, he had burns all over his body.  Of course it could be true that he was truly a monk from the Southern Shaolin temple, but it seems much more likely that he was an Opera star skilled at playing ‘martial-monk’ roles who escaped the burning of Foshan.  

Four Events at University of San Francisco Worth Checking Out

EMPIRE OF SILVER
A talk by writer/director Christina Yao, with excerpts from her film
http://www.usfca.edu/pacificrim/events/#Silver

Tuesday • August 30, 2011 • 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall
Enter from Parker Street between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco

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An Evening of Enchanting
INDONESIAN ETHNIC DANCE
http://www.usfca.edu/pacificrim/events/#Dance

Monday • September 12, 2011 • 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall
Enter from Parker Street between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco

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A JESUIT IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY:
Matteo Ricci (1552 - 1610)
http://www.ricci.usfca.edu/events/index.htm

Wednesday • September 14, 2011 • 5:45 PM
USF Lone Mountain Campus, Room 100
Enter from Turk Street near Parker, San Francisco

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TURANDOT
"Excerpts and Explanations"
http://www.usfca.edu/pacificrim/events/

Monday • September 19, 2011 • 5:45 PM
USF Main Campus, Fromm Hall
Enter from Parker Street between Golden Gate & Fulton, San Francisco

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