Theatricality and Performativity in Hanay Geiogamah’s Foghorn
and Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots
Laila Galal RizkAin Shams University
In recent years, the concepts of theatricality and
performativity have been revisited with renewed enthusiasm.
Performativity, a term borrowed from speech act theory, has
recently come to prominence as Jacque Derrida, Judith Butler,
and other literary theorists have reworked J.L. Austin’s
theories of the performative. Theatricality, described as a
special kind of theatrical stylization through which its
aesthetic and self-referential function is foregrounded, has
constantly been redefined due to the change in the notion of
theatre itself. Indeed, both theatricality and
performativity as concepts and as discourses have been in
flux, and their relationship to each other, and their
meanings and uses, have equally been in question. This paper
explores the notions of theatricality and performativity in
two plays by Native American playwrights, Hanay Geiogamah and
Monique Mojica in an attempt to show how the two concepts of
1
theatricality and performativity interact in a self-conscious
critical practice. The paper begins with a brief overview of
the concepts of theatricality and performativity, with a
special focus on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity.
The second section of the paper examines Geiogamah’s Foghorn
(1973) and Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots
(1990) to explore the playwrights’ use of theatricality and
performativity to respond to issues of racial and gender
identity.
The most widely cited approach to theatricality was
adopted in the 1970s by Elizabeth Burns in her pioneering
book, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and
in Social Life. Burns proceeds from the assumption that the
concept of theatre is historically and culturally determined
and argues that theatricality cannot be defined as a
particular mode of behaviour or expression. Instead, she
suggests that theatricality “attaches to any kind of
behaviour perceived and interpreted by others and described
(mentally or explicitly) in theatrical terms. ….
theatricality itself is determined by a particular viewpoint,
a mode of perception” (13). Burns identifies two sets of
2
conventions related to the audience's reading of a
performance, the rhetorical and the authenticating. She
defines the rhetorical conventions as the implicit agreement
between actors and spectators by which the audience “is
persuaded to accept characters and situations whose validity
is ephemeral and bound to the theatre” (31). The second
convention, the authenticating, are the signs that are
crucial in enabling the audience to "decode" the significance
of a theatre event to their lives, which Burns describes as
"‘model’ social conventions in use at a specific time and in
a specific place and milieu. … These conventions suggest a
total and external code of values and norms of conducts from
which the speech and action of the play is drawn. Their
function is, therefore, to authenticate the play” (32).
Joachim Fiebach, who has written extensively on
theatricality in the 1980s, argues that theatricality is a
process of production, whose product is consumed by the
spectator and once it has been consumed, it vanishes.
According to him, any concept of theatricality should be
based upon “the structural essentials of the specific
cultural production of theater, in its most comprehensive
3
sense. Theater is a type of social communication whose
specificity is, first, the ostentatious display of
audiovisual movements” (17). Erika Fischer-Lichte, however,
reads theatricality through a semiological perspective,
defining it in terms of signs that can or cannot be decoded.
She points out:
… Theatricality may be defined as a particular mode
of using signs or as a
particular kind of semiotic process in which particular signs
(human beings and objects of
their environment) are employed as signs of
signs—by their producers, or their recipients. Thus a
shift of the
dominance within the semiotic functions determines when
theatricality appears.
When the semiotic function of using signs as signs of signs
in a behavioural, situational or
communication process is perceived and
received as dominant, the behavioural, situational, or
4
communication
process may be regarded as theatrical” (88).
Roland Barthes describes theatricality by connecting it
to the creative process. In his definition, Barthes stresses
the visual and auditory aspects of theatre, “It is theater-
minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up
on stage starting from the written argument; it is that
ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice—gesture, tone,
distance, substance, light—which submerges the text beneath
the profusion of its external language” (26). Similarly,
Juan Villegas stresses the above elements in Negotiating
Performance, a study of Latin American and U.S. Latino
theatre, in which he calls for the redefinition of “theatre”
as theatricality to include carnivals, religious festivals,
popular rituals, and political demonstrations. He defines
theatricality as “a means of communicating a message by
integrating verbal, visual, auditive, body, gestural signs to
be performed in front of an audience” (316).
5
Willmar Sauter in his study, The Theatrical Event (2000),
defines theatricality as the communicative intersection
between the performer’s actions and the spectator’s
reactions, which he describes as characterized by “three
interactive levels, called the sensory, artistic, and
symbolic levels of theatrical communication. These levels
can only be activated during the process of a theatrical
event. It is the very “eventness” of all theatre, the
interaction between performer and spectator, which
facilitates theatricality” (63). In defining theatricality,
Josette Feral agrees with Sauter in underlining the bodily
presence of the performer and spectator and their
relationship to each other. She argues that theatricality is
to be found in the relation between two spaces: the real
space and a fictional space. The real space is the actual
physical one, while the fictional space is a virtual or
imagined space created either by the actor, or by the
spectator alone (“Performance and Theatricality” 171-72).
For theatricality to happen, the spectator must see the
"real" space through a fictional framing, which makes this
6
space occur differently. In the Foreword to the special
issue of SubStance on theatricality, Feral argues:
Theatricality is not a property, a quality … that
belongs to the object, the body,
the space or the subject. ... It is only graspable as a
process. … It has to
be actualized through a subject as both the starting point of
the process and also as its end. It is
the result of a definite will to transform
things. It imposes a view on objects, events, and
actions that is made up of
several cleavages: everyday space/representational space;
reality/fiction;
symbolic/instinctive. These impose upon the spectator’s
gaze a play of disjunction/unification, a friction
between one level and another.
In this permanent movement between meaning and its
displacement, between the same and
the different, alterity arises from
the heart of sameness, and theatricality is born. ( 12)
7
Performativity, a much more elusive term, derives from
speech act theory, particularly the work of J.L. Austin who
distinguished in his 1955 book, How to Do Things with Words,
the reflective or constative function of language from its
performative function. According to Austin, constatives are
descriptive utterances that report a state of affairs; on the
other hand, performatives are utterances that do not inform
or describe but they accomplish an act through the very
process of their enunciation. Ironically, Austin excluded
theatrical utterances from his definition of performativity
and described theatrical language as “hollow or void”. He
excluded such hollow utterances from consideration precisely
because he finds them “parasitic upon [language’s] normal use
—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of
language” (22).
Judith Butler and other literary theorists have reworked
Austin’s theory of the performative. Butler's theory of
performativity, developed in her books, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That
8
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993) and Excitable
Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), helps explain
how we come to know who we are and how we are produced as
subjects within prevailing power structures. Butler builds
on constructivist notions of identity to elucidate her theory
of performativity, which holds that bodies—whether those of
race, gender, or nationality--have no ontological status
apart from the ongoing repetitive semiotic acts that
constitute their reality. Identity, Butler argues, is
"performatively constituted, be it the identity of gender,
race, class, profession, or social function (Gender Trouble
25).
In Bodies That Matter, Butler argues that gender and
other identities are constituted through repetition.
According to her, performativity is not “a singular ‘act,’
for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and
to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the
present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which
it is a repetition“(12). Butler therefore distinguishes
between performativity which is a multiple act, a
9
“reiteration of norms,” and performance, which assumes “will”
or “choice.” She further distinguishes between performance
as bounded "act" and performativity, insofar as the latter
consists in “a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain,
and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as
the fabrication of the performer's "will" or "choice; … the
reduction of performativity to performance would be a
mistake” (Bodies that Matter 24). Bultler therefore suggests
that performativity cannot be understood outside of a process
of “iterability,” which she defines as “a regularized and
constrained repetition of norms” (Bodies that Matter 95).
Butler believes that this repetition of norms, rather
than institutionalizing gender and other identities, suggests
the possibility that these norms can be subverted. According
to her, the possibility of agency is located in the process
of reiteration and resignification, which is a process of
change that can be either stabilizing or destabilizing, that
is, reinforcing or undermining signifying conventions. Butler
draws attention to the possibility of the resignification of
identities, and therefore, possibilities for resistance and
10
change. Debby Thompson, discussing African American
playwright, Anna Deavere Smith’s performances on racial
performativity agrees, “Resistant or subversive performative
repetitions, always done, of course, under surveillance and
the threat of potentially severe punishment, are nevertheless
possible” (137).
Theatricality in Butler is a citation of a norm that
"mimes and renders [it] hyperbolic" (Bodies that Matter 232).
She considers theatricality and what she calls, "theatrical
activism,” as a way of contesting prevailing power
structures. To Butler, theatre is a “necessary type of
hyperbolic gesture, a spectacle that might expose habituated
citational scripts” (Jackson 190). In Bodies that Matter, she
discusses the political implications of resignifying the
category “queer” and presents theatricality as a form of
public resistance to the stigma of AIDS and queerness.
Butler suggests that a parodic reiteration of the term
‘queer’ can unseat the term’s derogatory meaning and
potentially invest it with new meanings. She points out,
“Mobilized by the injuries of homophobia, theatrical rage
11
reiterates those injuries precisely through an ‘acting out,’
one that does not merely repeat or recite those injuries, but
that also deploys a hyperbolic display of death and injury”
(233).
In her introduction to Seventh Generation, an anthology
of Native American plays, D’Aponte argues, “The performative
origins of Native American theatre lie in traditional ritual,
public ceremony and storytelling … in the work and guidance
of spiritual leaders … in the oral tradition of storytelling
by tribal elders; storytelling rich in spiritual legacy, in
mythology, in transcendent values” (xi). Contemporary
Native American theatre has indeed adapted and fused such
elements from the oral tradition with Western theatrical
approaches. Both Geiogamah and Mojica belong to what Jaye T.
Darby calls “fourth wave Native theatre,” a contemporary art
form that aims at “re-imagining the stage through a holistic
fusion of tradition and transformation. Grounded in the oral
tradition and the generative power of Creation stories, such
theater integrates ancient conceptions of story, community,
performance, ritual, and ceremony with contemporary issues
12
and more recent performance styles” (“Re-Imagining the Stage”
76).
As playwrights, Geiogamah and Mojica share many concerns,
including issues of identity, assimilation, race relations,
cultural heritage and artistic expression. Geiogamah’s work
attempts to reclaim the image and identity of the Native
American in order to “preserve living Indian traditions and …
demonstrate the facts of Indian life in America today,
unvarnished by either Indian or non-Indian romanticizers”
(Huntsman xi). Geiogamah believes in the challenging task
of the new Native American theatre to help Native Americans
understand who they are and the impact of the changes
occurring at the beginning of the 21st century on their lives.
He sees that the role of Native American artists is to
“establish a strong identity base in their work to help
confront and clarify the endless confusions resulting from
non-Indians’ beliefs and misperceptions of Indian life. … to
help untangle the mass of confusions that stereotyping,
assimilation, and acculturation have created in the minds of
Indians themselves” (“The New American Indian Theater” 163).
13
Similarly, Mojica believes that Native American artists are
creating exciting new theatre, resulting in the possibility
of offering “an alternative world-view (one in which many
worlds co-exist); the possibility of another interpretation
of ‘historical facts’; the validation of our experiences and
our images reflected on stage” (“Theatrical Diversity on
Turtle Island” 1).
Native Americans, like many minorities, have often been
victims of bias and stereotyping. As Darby points out,
“Pervasive stereotypes found in popular Western literature
and media include multiple variations of the bloodthirsty
savage, noble savage, simpleminded Indian, drunken Indian,
Indian princess (Pocahontas), vanishing Indian,
environmentalist, and New Age spiritualist” (“Introduction”
v). Native women have also been portrayed as either one of
two stock types, the romanticized “Indian princess,”
Pocahontas, or the baser “easy squaw”. Geiogamah and Mojica
believe that such images are ultimately dangerous because
they deny Native people their humanity and justify political
and cultural oppression. In their plays, both playwrights
14
employ humor and parody to cut through the many myths and
legends in an attempt to subvert negative stereotypes about
Native Americans.
Geiogamah’s Foghorn (1973) and Mojica’s Princess
Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1990) explore Native American
culture and history drawing on a rich range of traditional
experiences. Foghorn, a multi-media extravaganza of short
scenes, complimented by music, lights and graphics, draws on
figures from history, myth, and television in order to
deconstruct the Indian of popular culture. It is a play
about Indian stereotypes ranging from the time of Columbus to
the 1973 incident at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, in which a
large group of armed Native Americans reclaimed Wounded Knee
in the name of the Lakota Nation. In his note to the play,
Geiogamah writes, “Almost all the characters in this play are
stereotypes pushed to the point of absurdity” (49).
Similarly, Pocahontas weaves together past and present, North
and South America, history, fairy tale, documentary and myth
in an attempt to examine the histories, myths and stereotypes
of Native and First Nations women across the Americas.
15
Performed by two actresses who recall the ways that Native
women have been inscribed in Western culture, the play
satirizes colonization and deconstructs stereotypes of Native
women, celebrating them as heroines and healers.
Foghorn and Pocahontas draw attention to their
theatricality: both employ stylized settings, mannered
performances, and exaggerated visual styles. The plays are
made of brief loose scenes, use symbolic props of exaggerated
dimensions, and are characterized by acting that depends on
improvisation and direct addressing of the audience, the
blurring of the space between the actor and the audience, and
the use of audiovisual devices to amplify the dimensions of
time and space.
The two plays are structured round the idea of a journey.
The stage directions of the opening scene in Foghorn require
that the scene be performed against “a background of
progressive electronic sound, one that evokes a journey
through time and space … The costumes and movement should
suggest a forced journey … spanning the centuries from 1492 to
the present and stretching geographically from the West Indies
16
to Alcatraz Island” (51). Geiogamah points out that, rather
than a linear plot, rhythm and repetition serve to undergird
the circular structure of Foghorn, “In creating … a
performance context, of course, I went to the structure of the
rhythm, of the beat. … this beat ramifies out into one, two,
three, four; one, two, three, four. It’s very, very basic
stuff. And repeat and recapitulate, turn around, reverse,
turn around, reverse, recapitulate, reverse, recapitulate,
reverse, etc., etc.” (qtd. in Darby “Come to the Ceremonial
Circle” 200).
Pocahontas is also a journey into the past in
which Contemporary Woman #1, accompanied by Contemporary Woman
#2, search through myths and legends of Aboriginal women, both
fictional and actual to “recover the history of … grandmothers
as a tool toward [their] healing” (136). The two actresses
who play the two women continually shift characters on stage
as the scenes change. Similar to Foghorn, Pocahontas does not
have a linear structure, but is based on the theme of
transformation: 13 transformations or scenes, one for each
moon in the lunar year. In her description of the set, Mojica
17
writes in the introductory note to the play, “The theme of the
set, costumes and props is also transformation; objects and
set pieces appear to be one thing but become something else,
they can be turned inside-out to reveal another reality”
(138).
The opening scenes of the plays examine the legacy of
colonialism in a number of racial images and stereotypes.
Foghorn opens with a large, painted Indian face,
apparitionlike, moving slowly as it is projected about the
stage, gazing towards the audience. In his note to the play,
Geiogamah points out the function of the visuals, which is to
“counterpoint the action and to give a feeling that the
audience is actually present yet not directly participating in
the action of the play” (49). The performing group play the
opening scene against a background of recorded soundtracks in
a hint at the destruction of native culture at the hands of
the colonizers. The Native Americans’ forced journey from the
West Indies to Alcatraz Island is accompanied with progressive
electronic music and stylized choreography patterned to follow
the electronic score. The scene opens with the landing of
18
Columbus and the discovery of Indians by a Spanish sailor who
exclaims, “Los indios! Estos hombres, cho-co-la-tes!” (52).
The Indian face fades to show white settlers castigating
Indians and shouting different kinds of racial slurs, ranging
from a list of stereotypes to condescending dialogue that
exemplifies racial and colonial oppression, “Don’t talk back!
Vermin! Varmits! Vermin! Varmits! Filthy savages. Murderers!
Scalpers! … I say let’s force them off the land” (52). The
scene ends with a US senator announcing, “The Indian problem
is a matter for the courts and the Congress to deal with.
We’ve been victorious over them on the battlefield, now they
must settle on the reservations we have generously set aside
for them” (52-53).
In a similar manner, Pocahontas starts in a journey
imbued with a sense of physical and spiritual displacement,
the result of years of colonization and oppression. The
scene opens with Contemporary Woman #1, on her hands and
knees, searching:
No map, no trail, no footprint, no way home
19
only darkness, a cold wind whistling by my ears.
Nowhere to set my feet.
No place to stand.
No map, no trail, no footprint, no way
home. (140).
She announces her search for her roots and identity through
the myths and legends of the past, “It’s time for the women
to pick up their medicine in order for the people to
continue. … The women are the medicine, so we must heal the
women” (140). Similar to the opening scene of Foghorn, this
scene ends with Contemporary Woman #2 firing a series of
popular racial and gender stereotypes of Native women:
Princess, Princess, calendar girl,
Redskin temptress, Indian pearl.
Waiting by the water
for a white man to save.
She’s a savage now remember –
Can’t behave! (141)
20
In both scenes, Geiogamah and Mojica re-cite and re-
perform a chain of racial and gender citations in order to
expose them--what Jackson describes as “racial performativity
via racialized theatricality” (197). In those scenes, racial
and gender identities are exaggerated, reworked and
resignified. Because these identities are constantly made
and remade, there is potential for change. This practice of
incorporating racist discourse rather than eradicating it
exemplifies Butler’s call for the resignification of hate
speech. As she argues:
An aesthetic enactment of an injurious word may both
use the word and mention it,
that is, make use of it to produce certain effects but also
at the same time make
reference to that very use, calling attention to it as
a citation, situating that use within a citational
legacy, making that use into
an explicit discursive item to be reflected on rather than a
taken for granted
operation of ordinary language. Or, it may be that an
aesthetic
21
reenactment uses that word, but also displays it, points to
it, outlines it as the
arbitrary material instance of language that is exploited to
produce
certain kinds of effects. … Such use renders the term as a
textual object to be thought about
and read, even as it also implicates us
in a relation of knowingness about its conventional force
and meaning. (Excitable
Speech 99-100)
In reproducing these racist and gender slurs and stereotypes
in the text, Geiogamah and Mojica display them as
resignifiable terms.
Butler’s concept of performativity insists that identity
is socially scripted, prescribed, and learned. However, she
maintains that scripts can be resisted and changed, that the
individual has agency and can act beyond, or in excess of,
the script ("Performative Acts" 281-82). In Foghorn and
Pocahontas, Geiogamah and Mojica are interested in their
22
characters’ struggle within and against scripts. Script,
scripting and role-playing are evoked in both plays. In
Pocahontas, Mojica explores the trauma of Native women
through the story narrated by the three versions of
Pocahontas: the legendary Storybook Pocahontas, Lady Rebecca,
her name after she converted to Christianity and married John
Roffe, and Matoaka, her name as a child. Through the
interactions of these three Pocahontases, we witness the
considerable disruption and loss that Native peoples suffered
as a result of European exploration. The story-line becomes
multiple, disrupted, fragmented, and on-going, resisting
closure right up to the final words, which signal the
beginning of a new story, with the child Matoaka saying,
“Dark skies, the moon is mine / stars travel / woman’s time”
(152).
Geiogamah’s Pocahontas in Foghorn attempts to resist the
colonial script by rewriting it. In the play, he attempts to
deconstruct the popular Pocahontas stereotype of the gentle
innocent princess or heroine by showing us a sly Pocahontas
telling her handmaidens about her sexual encounter with John
23
Smith and describing his sudden impotence. Pocahontas tells
her eager handmaidens, “And the big captain was standing
above me, looking down at me, breathing like a boy after a
footrace, and I saw that his … He said to me, I love you,
dear Pocahontas. I promise you it won’t happen the next
time, I promise, I promise, I promise” (64-65). Through the
story of the Captain’s impotence, Geiogamah deflates the
theme of white superiority underscored by the popular images
of Pocahontas.
Princess Buttered-on-Both Sides, one of the many faces of
the Trickster and a well-known icon of Native women, is
another example of a woman resisting scripts. In Princess
Pocahontas, Mojica shows her as a contestant in the Miss
North American Indian Beauty pageant. Stuck in the talent
segment, she is seen rehearsing her role / song trying it out
with “a drawling country and western feel” (146). Her
song/script is a satirical critique of the white captain and
colonization:
Captain Whiteman, I would pledge my life to you
24
Captain Whiteman, I would defy my father too.
I pledge to aid and to save,
I’ll protect you to your grave.
… Captain Whiteman for you, I will convert,
Captain Whiteman, all my pagan gods are dirt.
If I’m savage don’t despise me,
‘cause I’ll let you civilize me.
Oh Captain Whiteman, I’m your buckskin-clad dessert.
(146)
In the light of Butler’s definition of identity as
reiterative, as a stylized repetition of social norms through
time, Mojica is trying to unmask these norms and their
coercive effects.
The cultural collision of stereotypes from both the White
and the Native worlds is also echoed in Foghorn. In one
scene, a clownish and hysterical white schoolteacher attempts
to civilize Indian children through teaching them the English
language, which, according to her, is the first step to the
‘civilized’ American way of life. She addresses the class
25
with this ready made script, “Good morning, savages! … You
are going to learn the English language. … The most
beautiful language in all the world. The language that has
brought hope and civilization to people everywhere. … OUR
language! …Hello. Hell-o. It’s the first word of the
American way. The American way begins with hello. Say it,
children, say it. Hell-O. Hell-O.” (61). As she tries to
coax the class one by one to say hello, they close in on her
and attack her. This scene contrasts ironically with another
scene, in which Native Americans land on and occupy Alcatraz
Island in reference to the incident when the American Indian
Movement militants occupied Alcatraz in 1969. A narrator
reading the Native American declaration promises the majority
inhabitants of the country:
… a portion of the land … to be held in trust by the
American Indian people— for as long as the sun
shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea! WE will
further guide the majority inhabitants in the proper way
of living. We will offer them
our religion, our education, our way of life—in order to help
26
them achieve our level of
civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers
from their savage and unhappy state. (55-56)
Performativity is a metaphor that dominates Foghorn and
Pocahontas. Identity as a species of performance is a major
issue in the plays which focus on performed constructions of
marginalized identities The characters perform their
Indianness around myths, tales, slogans, and songs because
they are removed from the center of the action. Jackson
points out that in feminist and anti-racist theatre,
performance “was repeatedly invoked as the vehicle by which
fragmented identities were made whole, the silent given voice,
the invisible made visible, and the injurer targeted by the
injured” (190). In both plays, Geiogamah and Mojica battle
with a number of racial and sexual stereotypes, juxtaposing
cultural archetypes from both the White and Native Worlds.
Foghorn includes a scene of Tonto, the “friendly Indian
companion” of the Lone Ranger, an Indian caricature based on a
popular television show. As Kaufmann describes Tonto,
27
“Whatever the Lone Ranger was, Tonto was less—less fast, less
a sharpshooter, less domineering. Even his horse, Scout, was
less white” (122). In this scene, we see Tonto with his
clipped baby talk, listening to the Lone Ranger and shining
his boots. A dull and inefficient Lone Ranger feels insecure
because the Indian usually comes to his rescue in a crisis,
and therefore suggests an episode in which this time Tonto is
shot by a bad Indian and the Lone Ranger tries to save him.
As he tells Tonto, “It looks maybe like I’m not too smart
having to rely on an illiterate Injun like you to do all the
clever thinking, and even outsmarting the white man. … Tonto,
can you think of any way that I can come to your rescue and
save you from the hands of death?” (65-66). The scene ends in
ironic reversal where Tonto, tired of shinning the Lone
Ranger’s boots, cuts the man’s throat.
Geiogamah also provides an ironic commentary on colonial
appropriation through the reconstruction of the Wild West
Show. In the 1880s, the Wild West Show, a combination of
circus, parade and carnival that displayed Indian activities
and artifacts, was very popular. In these shows, real
28
Indians were shown as “exotic and savage beings … rarely were
the Indians given the limelight but were on the fringes as
marauders attacking the Prairie wagon train, the Deadwood
Mail-Coach, or settlers’ cabin …. When given a special place
in the entertainment, it was to demonstrate Indian ways, most
frequently games, war dances, and fighting techniques…”
(Wilmeth 139). In the 1890s this practice was criticized for
exploiting Indians and perpetuating stereotypes of the Indian
people. However, the Wild West Show became “the source of
images, staging techniques and personnel for the major medium
that replaced it—the Western movie” (qtd. in Wilmeth 140).
Geiogamah’s farcical scene of a ridiculous Wild West Show
starts with an announcer’s voice promising the audience
“fascinating true-to-life scenes of this vanishing specimen
of primitive mankind” (78). The choreography and music for
the scene provide the actors, according to the stage
directions, with “wide latitude for clowning” (77). Using
props of slapstick proportions, the Indians wear fake war
bonnets, ride stick horses, yelp their war whoops, and do a
scalp dance. In an interview with Kenneth Lincoln, Geiogamah
29
recalls the enthusiasm of the performers and the energy
released by them as they played this scene, “We’d turn the
sound up just as loud as we could without breaking the
limits. We had the visuals as big as we could magnified in
zoom reverse. Everything was just wild, absolutely wild, and
it got wilder and wilder” (79).
The Wild West Show scene merges into a somber scene where
the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 is enacted. In contrast to
the recorded soundtracks of earlier scenes, traditional
drumming and the AIM unity song about Wounded Knee are
performed live, but are interrupted by rifle shots during the
siege of Wounded Knee in 1973. A drummer is shot and carried
by the performers in a funeral procession while the Marshal’s
voice announces that they are all under arrest. The play
ends with each performer thrusting his hands towards the
audience giving the name of his tribe as the Narrator asserts
“We move on” (81). The last lines are the words of the
Spanish sailor, “Los indios” that opened the play, followed
by the Narrator’s “I am … NOT GUILTY!” (82) speaking for the
defendants in the Wounded Knee courtroom and for all Native
30
Americans. The closing scene echoes the opening of the play:
the colonial oppression and the pursuing killing and
confinement of the first scene are seen again in the drastic
measures taken by the US government following the incident at
Wounded Knee in 1973.
In a similar manner, Mojica examines a number of cultural
icons of Aboriginal history, looking at the symbols of the
indigenous as a form of resistance and cultural
reaffirmation. The play appropriates the Malinche myth, a
symbol of the enslaved, violated and abandoned woman in
Mexican culture. Malinche, a Nahuatl woman, was the
interpreter and mistress of the Spanish conquistador, Hernan
Cortes, during the conquest of Mexico. Named Doña Marina by
the Spaniards and La Malinche by the Aztecs, her role as
interpreter, mistress, and mother to Cortes’ son, the first
"Mexican,” still stirs up controversy. Many Mexicans
continue to condemn the woman, labeling her a traitor and
whore for her role as the alter-ego of Cortes as he conquered
Mexico. In the play’s list of characters, Mojica notes,
“Throughout Mexico and much of Latin America, she is referred
31
to as “La Chingada”—the fuked one, and her name is synonymous
with traitor” (136).
Mojica shows Contemporary Woman #1 as Malinche, cursed and
spit at as a traitor and whore. Malinche challenges those
accusations by denying the colonial identities imposed on her
and claiming her Native one, “My name is Malinali. Not Dona
Marina, not Malinche, La Chingada! The fucked one! … I wear the
face of Malinali Tenepat. I see this face reflected in the
mirror” (143). In narrating her story, she counters the
charge of being a traitor, acknowledging her role as
interpreter that saved thousands of Native lives by enabling
Cortes to negotiate rather than slaughter, “I am the only one
can speak to the Maya, to the Mexica. It is my words that are
of value. … They call me ‘Princess.’ I am a gift, claimed as
value by this man in metal. I can change the words. I have
power” (143).
Malinche also challenges the stigma of being called a
whore by exposing the violation she was subjected to, given to
Cortes as a gift from local Indian leaders, “What is that they
32
say about me? That I opened my legs to the whole conquering
Spanish army? They were already here. I was a gift. Passed
on. Handed on. … Stolen! Bound! Caught! Trapped!” (144). The
Malinche archetype takes on political and social significance,
and the violation of the body is associated with colonial
subjectivity. As Octavio Paz writes:
If the Chingada is a representation of the violated
Mother, it is appropriate to
associate her with the Conquest, which was also a violation,
not only in the
historical sense, but also in the very flesh of Indian women.
The symbol of this violation is
dona Malinche, the mistress of Cortes. … Dona
Marina becomes a figure representing the Indian women who
were fascinated,
violated, or seduced by the Spaniards. (77)
Malinche’s narrative ends in a tone of resistance that conveys
pride in her Native roots and provides ethnic verification,
“Born from the earth, fed with my blood, anything alive here
33
is alive because I stayed alive” (144). Through such a
narrative, Mojica’s text appropriates the Malinche myth that
has helped perpetuate the passive role of women in colonial
sites as well as the tendency to feel ashamed of their
indigenous origins.
In another scene, Mojica explores the suffering of the
indigenous Metis (mixed-blood) women in the Canadian west
through the three narratives of Marie, Margaret and Madelaine.
The three Native women tell of their suffering and humiliation
at the hands of the European colonizers:
We die from
smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, childbirth.
We claw at the gate of the fort or we starve and
freeze to death outside.
We birth the Metis.
When there is no more to trade, our men trade us.
(160)
34
The women’s narratives tell of the lost heritage and the
subsequent destruction of personal and cultural identity.
The women are portrayed as divided selves and the binary
opposition between the indigenous and the foreign is clearly
marked. Margaret laments her usurped identity and the
destruction of native traditions:
I am the third and youngest wife of a captain of the
home guard.
I have no children of my own. I help care for the
children of the other wives.
… The women, not from my people, but from the other
side of the river,
They unbraid my hair and wash it with harsh, lye soap.
They wash me.
… They take away my deerskin clothes except for my
moccasins.
They put on me clothing made of cloth with little
flowers …
My name is Wapithee’oo! They call me Margaret. (159)
35
Madelaine tells her story of being “turned off” and replaced
by a white woman after 15 years of marriage to James Johnston,
“Disposed of, discarded, replaced, after the white women came”
(161). Contemporary Woman #1 concludes the scene, “In the
middle of my dream I came face to face to face and the copper
hand reached to touch my back. I awakened sad, cold,
confused, for the journey had been long and far … avec Marie,
Margaret et Madelaine… ” (162).
Pocahontas ends with Contemporary Woman #1 singing while
emptying a bucket of sand centre stage, making footprints, to
emphasize the importance of maintaining one’s culture with an
eye to the future. The feeling of displacement and
dislocation that Pocahontas opened with turns in the play’s
final scene into an awakening and a call for solidarity,
“Wake up! There’s work to be done! We’re here” (166). A long
line of Native women, “The weight of our history on our
backs, the tiredness of the struggle we shared” are
celebrated as the centre of the “hoop of the nation” (164).
The concluding lines of the play are uttered by Contemporary
Woman # 1, joined by Contemporary Woman # 2, “A nation is not
36
conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.
… Then, it is done, no matter how brave its warriors, nor how
strong its weapons” (169).
In the closing of Foghorn, with the narrator’s cry “I am
… NOT GUILTY“ absolving himself of some unspecific crime, and
Pocahontas’ Contemporary Woman #1 stepping out of her many
roles/identities and warning us, “Now, I’d like you to take a
good look … I don’t want to be mistaken for a crowd of Native
women. I am one” (168), the audience are reminded, not only
that identity is scripted and performed, but also that the
script can be changed. What we have been watching is not
fixed, stable, accessible, or true. It is a story, a script;
we can buy into, accept, and enjoy it, or we can resist and
struggle to re-write it.
In conclusion, as Feral has suggested, theatricality and
performativity are closely related; performativity is indeed
inscribed within theatricality, and is an important component
of it. (“Foreword” 2). Geiogamah and Mojica, by showing
identity as performative and using the power of
37
theatricality to describe and to change the way identities
are performed and received, have succeeded in exploring the
concepts of performativity and theatricality to express
important ethnic and cultural concerns.
Works Cited
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1962.
Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern
UP, 1972.
Burns, Elizabeth. Theatricality: A Study of Conventions
in Theatre and Social Life. New York: Harper &
Row, 1973.
38
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity. London: Routledge 1990.
---. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminism:
Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 270-282.
---. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex.
London: Routledge, 1993.
---. Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New
York: Routledge, 1997.
D’Aponte, Mimi Gisolfi, ed. Seventh Generation: An Anthology
of Native American Plays. New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 1999.
Darby, Jaye T. “Introduction: A Talking Circle on Native
Theater.” American Indian Theater in Performance: A
Reader. Ed. Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby. Los
Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000. iii –
xv.
39
---. “Come to the Ceremonial Circle: Ceremony and Renewal in
Hanay Geiogamah’s 49.” American Indian Theater in
Performance: A Reader. Ed. Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T.
Darby. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center,
2000. 195 – 223.
---. “Re-Imagining the Stage: Tradition and Transformation in
Native Theater.” The Color of Theater: Race, Culture, and
Contemporary Performance. Ed. Robert Uno and Lucy Mae
San Pablo Burns. London: Continuum, 2002. 61-81.
Fiebach, Joachim. “Theatricality: From Oral Traditions to
Televised Realities." SubStance 31.2 & 3 (2002): 17 - 41.
Féral, Josette. "Performance and Theatricality: The Subject
Demystified." Modern Drama 25 (1982): 170-81.
---. “Foreoword.” SubStance 31.2 & 3 (2002): 3-13.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Introduction: Theatricality: A Key
Concept in Theatre and Cultural Studies.” Theatre Research
International 20.2 (Summer 1995): 85 – 89.
40
Geiogamah, Hanay. Foghorn (1973). New Native American
Drama. Three Plays. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1980.
---. “The New American Indian Theater: An Introduction.”
American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader. Ed.
Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby. Los Angeles: UCLA
American Indian Studies Center, 2000. 159 – 164.
Huntsman, Jeffrey. Introduction. New Native American Drama.
Three Plays. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980.
ix – xxiv.
Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the
Academy from Philology
to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Kaufmann, Donald L. “The Indian as Media Hand-Me-Down.”
American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader. Ed. Hanay
Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby. Los Angeles: UCLA American
Indian Studies Center, 2000. 114-126.
Lincoln, Kenneth. “MELUS Interview: Hanay Geiogamah.” MELUS
16.3 (Autumn,1989- Autumn, 1990): 69 – 81.
41
Mojica, Monique. Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots
(1990). Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First
Nations Drama in English. Ed. Monique Mojica and Ric
Knowles. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2003.
---. “Theatrical Diversity on Turtle Island: A Tool Towards
the Healing.” Canadian Theatre Review 68 (Fall 1991): 1.
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Trans. Lysander
Kemp. London: Penguin, 1967.
Sauter, Willmar. The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of
Performance and Perception. University of Iowa Press, 2000.
Thompson, Debby. “’Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deavere Smith and
the Question of Racial Performativity.” African
American Review 37.1 (Spring 2003): 127- 142.
Villegas, Juan. “Closing Remarks.” Negotiating
Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in
Latin/O America. Ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas.
Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 306 – 320.
Wilmeth, Don B. “Noble or Ruthless Savage? The American
Indian on Stage and in the Drama.” American Indian Theater
42