VENUS

Dramaturgy site for a production of Suzan-Lori Park's VENUS at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Department of Dramatic Art, April 11-15, 2013. Curated by production dramaturg, Jules Odendahl-James.

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To be sure, the desire for big butts isn’t new. Large booties long have been preferable in Latino and black communities, says Dr Dionne Stephens, an associate psychology professor at Florida International University who has researched sexuality in popular culture. And this is not the first time big butts have been in songs. (Think: Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-A-Lot in the 1990s.)

But recently, the desire for a bigger bottom became more mainstream, in large part due to pop culture influences. Mainstream celebrities like Ms Lopez and Ms Minaj accepting their ample assets on camera have given the butt cachet.

‘When people see things repeated on TV more and more, it becomes normalized,’ Stephens says. French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann says this is true overseas, too: ‘In Europe, and in France especially, there’s a trend to show off the buttocks in place of breasts. This has to do with Latin American influences, but also the rise of Beyonce and stars like Rihanna,’ says Mr Kaufmann.

(via "Booty is Big Business: How Companies are Cashing in on a growing trend for bigger butts" from Daily Mail, UK).

An article from November 2014, though it makes no mention of the Venus Hottentot it engages the same discourses about race, gender, sexuality and beauty that pulse through Parks' play.

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Poster!

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(via Cliteracy 101: Artist Sophia Wallace Wants You To Know The Truth About The Clitoris)

An amazing sexual literacy project that once I read about I couldn't help but think about Venus and the way her body was dissected and displayed ostensibly to "further anatomical research" but instead enshrined ignorance and scientific racism. 

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ICYMI Miley, Minstrelsy & the cult of deliberate Misreading (not Rosen but Rosen's critiques)

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“Testify: The Booty don’t lie.” This line bespeaks another truth that Black girls need to tell: the radical truth that Black girl’s asses are not merely archives of pain, but active sites of pleasure. Because of the ways Black girl booty has been treated at least since the days of Sarah Baartman, we’ve engaged in a collective, respectable kind of denial about these other truths that Black girl ass can tell. But here’s the point: they tell the truths that are true for us, to us, when we twerk in the front of the mirror, by ourselves or with other Black girls. What I love is that while we can acknowledge that the mirrors (and hands and policies) of others have been quite brutal to us, we can also tell a different story about what the mirrors in our own lives say to us. But my mirrors are not only stationary pieces of decor. I also have human mirrors, in the form of other Brown girls who reflect my truths back to me, often when my own view has been distorted. Sometimes that distorted view keeps me from reveling in Black girl joy. But I’m so glad that Janelle Monae’ won’t be denied! And for those of you who are mad that I would put Kelly and K. Michelle in the same stratosphere as a talent like Janelle Monae’, I say simply to quote my homegirl Kaila Story, “there is no singularity of Black girl truths.” And quoting my damn self: “there is no justice without pleasure.”

“The Booty Don’t Lie”: Kelly, K. Michelle, & Janelle Monae’ Sing Black Girl Freedom | The Crunk Feminist Collective

Again, I keep telling myself that this Tumblr is done since the production closed over 4 months ago, but I keep finding things that pull me back in. Given the recent Twerk debates (both about Black girl booty appropriation by white artists and Black girl booty hypersexualization), I thought this was a wonderful dissection of some of the same dynamics that flow through Parks' VENUS. The idea that Parks insisted in showing Venus experiencing and pursuing pleasure (even pleasures that eventually took their toll) within an oppressive circumstance was controversial at the time of the play's debut and continues today in multiple other domains. What Parks so brilliantly illuminates is the very thin line between our own presumably personal pleasure and objectifying ourselves for someone else's pleasure. VENUS forces us to consider how structures of privilege allow or disallow our negotiation of that line.

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Are there certain ladies who are hard to find? Like, do rappers say to you, “I want an Eskimo girl with a Lisa Simpson face tattoo and a medium-size donkey butt who can twerk while making ice sculptures”?

It’s my job to be able to provide. If I don’t have them, I’m gonna go looking for them. But yeah, there’s always specifics. Some people want Asians in their videos, some people want Russians—it all depends. And I don’t just do hip-hop, I do rock, pop, or anything else you might imagine. So if they want midgets for the video, I have to provide midgets. I don’t just do females either—my core is females—but I do all types of talent. I’ve worked on Sesame Street! I’ll work on anything that cuts a check.

What do you think of the whole “video ho” stereotype?  That stems from haters. When I say "hater," I mean girls that were not able to be in the videos started that terminology. Now of course there are girls that act out that stereotype because they do some things. But it all originated from girls who weren’t able to be in the videos who started saying “Oh this girl had to do this and that” to be in the video. But you won't say Halle Berry’s a ho, even though Halle Berry is one of those who had to go above and beyond to get where she’s at? It’s a man’s world so there are a lot of things that aren’t as easy for females as they are for men. Its part of the game and it comes down to whether they want to play it or not.

Would you let your daughter be a video girl? That’s a hard question—only if I knew her standards and morals were straight would I allow her to get into that. A lot of people don’t have the guidance. They come into this game recklessly and do things they’re not supposed to and fall for certain things because in this game a lot of people talk a good one. You have to realize who’s fake in this industry.

(via Big Booties Don't Get into Rap Videos Without These Guys | VICE United States)

I know I said weeks ago I was closing this Tumblr, but I could not pass over, without comment, this in interview for VICE with Face Time Agency's co-founder Jeff Janvier. The last Q&A very much reminded me of both the Chorus of 7 Wonders wondering whether they should "warn" Venus about what she was getting into or let her find out on her own and Mother Showman's perspective that she runs a relatively clean and safe corner of a wholly corrupt industry.

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(via Oh Look, It’s Another Blackface Editorial in Vogue | Fashionista)

Thanks to all who came out to see VENUS April 11-15, 2013. Thanks to the cast & crew for such careful and intelligent work and artistry. 

In "closing" this Tumblr, I couldn't miss the opportunity to post one more troubling example of cultural misappropriation, this time from Vogue Netherlands, and a retrospective dedicated to designer Marc Jacobs. According to The Huffington Post:

The idea behind "Heritage Heroes" was to show a collection (in the case of these inflammatory images, Louis Vuitton) in an environment that mimics its inspiration.Marc Jacobs worked with "tribal influences" when designing the clothing in question

In his interview, Jacobs specifically mentions Josephine Baker and Grace Jones as inspirations for his line. Instead of seeking out African or African-American models to reflect the stated cultural lineage of the work, editors chose to hire white models and then use blackface to indicate a white designer's "tribal influences."

I just want to take a pause and consider these images, their justification, the women and photographer who embodied and captured them, and the readers who will consume them.

It seems we end this production process in somewhat the same place as Suzan-Lori Parks starts and ends her play. The Venus Hottentot iz dead/there won't be inny show tonite. Yet the Venus Hottentot plays shows everyday; she haunts every popular culture invocation of black women's beauty and bodies from 1810 on. Sometimes these are subtle ghostings and other times blatant. While she exists in time, place, and convention separate from minstrelsy and blackface performance, this Vogue spread reminds us that America does not have a monopoly on those racist conventions.

Throughout the rehearsal process we discussed the strong senses of subjectivity, desire, and personal choice with which Parks imbues the character of Venus and how other black women artists have also seized and wielded certain race or culture-based fascinations with their bodies and sexuality. We reminded ourselves, however, of the structural limits that controlled Venus and other ethnological subjects then and how some of those same structures control choices and conceptions of self for women, particularly black women, now.

And with that in mind it seems wise to give the last word to Parks, because her words are so wise. This is a small snippet from her essay, "an Equation for Black People Onstage."

I'm continually encouraging myself to explore The-Drama-of-the-Black-Person-as-an-Integral-Facet-of-the-Universe. This exploration takes me, in a very organic way, into new territory; because in encouraging myself to listen to the stories beyond my default stories--because the story determines the shape of the play--the play assumes a new structure.

So. As a Black person writing for the theater, what is theatre good for? What can theatre do for us? We can "tell it like it is"; "tell it as it was"; "tell it as it could be." In my plays I do all 3; and the writing is rich because we are not an impoverished people, but a wealthy people fallen on hard times.

I write plays because I love Black people. As there is no single "Black Experience," there is no single "Black Aesthetic" and there is no one way to write or think or feel or dream or interpret or be interpreted. As African-Americans we should recognize this insidious essentialism for what it is: a fucked-up trap to reduce to only one way of being. We should endeavor to show the world and ourselves our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety.

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Resurrecting a Bottomless History.

VENUS program note by production dramaturg, Jules Odendahl-James.

Resurrecting a Bottomless History. 

I regret to inform you that thuh Venus Hottentot iz dead. 

There won’t b inny show tonite

Much about VENUS recalls a detective story. Like most mysteries, it is told in retrospective, starting with a death then moving forward to discover the beginning, that is, the cause and motive for that crime. In VENUS, however, the series of debased practices that play out before our eyes were not, in their day, precisely illegal, although they are an affront to us now. Unlike events “ripped from the headlines” that populate crime shows such as Law & Order, Suzan-Lori Parks does not offer a comforting disclaimer such as “The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.”  While identities are blurred and historical sources are not formally cited, the individuals and actions you will see are … were real. We offer an abbreviated version of that timeline for you to peruse in this program.

“The Hottentot Venus in the Salon of the Duchess of Berry” by Sebastien Coeure (1830).

Mural in honor of Saartjie Baartman, Town of Hankey, South Africa. Photo Clifton Crais.

While not part of our nation’s nineteenth century slavery and colonial conquest narratives, the impact of Saartjie Baartman’s story and image exceeds geographic boundaries by the very force of the debasements and the racist ideology embedded in the psyches, disciplines, and institutions of white Europeans and Americans. Parks gives her Venus a strong sense of self and clear expressions of her own desires but she does not … cannot change history. African-American women’s bodies and behaviors still bear particular public scrutiny. Recent examples include debate over the the silhouettes, lyrics, and role model status of entertainers Nikki Minaj and Beyonce to the suspension of a white male Alabama high school football coach who publicly criticized the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” campaign by calling her “fat butt Michelle Obama.” Even as we chisel away at structural racial inequities, too many promises of a post-racial society remain unfulfilled. And perhaps that is the most unsettlingly unresolved crime of all. 

Thuh Venus Hottentot iz dead.

Long live the Venus Hottentot.

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"History is time that won't quit." --SLP

A "reverse" timeline that was included in our program written by production dramaturg, Jules Odendahl-James. 

31. March 2012: South Africa’s Department of Arts & Culture pledges R168-million ($22 million US) to fund the building of the Saartjie Baartman Centre of Remembrance.

30. Sept. 2010: Venus Noire, a film by Tunisian born French filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche, premieres. His body of work explores the immigrant experience in France.

29. Fall 2002: Baartman’s grave is vandalized. Officials erect a metal fence around the site.

28. Aug. 22, 2002: The former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, declares Baartman’s grave a national heritage site.

27. Aug. 9, 2002: After a Khosian cleansing ritual, Baartman’s remains are buried in the area of her birth, the Gamtoos River Valley, in Cape Town South Africa.

26. Jan. 2002:  The preserved body parts, skeleton, and full plaster body cast of Baartman is returned to South Africa from the Musee de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris, France.

25. 1996: Suzan-Lori Parks’ play VENUS premieres at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Richard Foreman. Parks wins a 1996 Obie Award for playwriting. 

24. 1994: Newly elected South Africa’s President Nelson Mandela makes a formal request to the government of France to return Baartman’s remains.

23. 1994: According to one source, Baartman’s body parts are included as part of an exhibition critical of the nineteenth century European artists’ depictions of aboriginal and African peoples.

22. 1985: In The Flamingo’s Smile, renowned paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould writes about Baartman’s skeleton and dissected genitalia residing in jars amongst the preserved brains and skulls of white European male subjects in the archives of Paris’s Museum of Man. He describes the scene as a “chilling and immediate insight into the scientific racism of the nineteenth century.”

21. 1985: In “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” cultural and literary historian Sander Gilman analyzes how Baartman’s body was objectified in life and death: “Sarah Baartmann’s […] genitalia and her buttocks, serve as the central image for the black female throughout the nineteenth century.”

20. 1981: In Mismeasure of Man, Gould mentions the display of Baartman’s preserved skeleton. According to one source, this provokes curators to move all of the materials into the archives.

19. 1974 or 1976: Baartman’s skeleton, preserved genitals and brain are placed in the museum archives. A full plaster body cast of her partially naked figure remains on public display.

18. 1815-1970s: Initially kept in the private rooms of naturalist Georges Cuvier, the “father of comparative anatomy” and Napoleon’s Surgeon General, Baarman’s body parts and plaster cast eventually become part of the Museum of Man’s permanent collection.

17. 1815: Cuvier petitions Napoleon to take possession of and perform an autopsy on Baartman, “to determine her relationship between animals and other human beings.” He casts the corpse in plaster, macerates the body, preserves the skeleton, removes and “pickles” the brain and genitalia.

16. 1815: Baartman dies. Reports conflict on whether the cause was alcoholism, venereal disease, pneumonia (due to the particularly harsh Parisian winter that year), or a combination of all three. 

15. 1814-1815: It is unclear when Cuvier first saw Baartman but it is around this time that he “rents” her for study, which includes extensive sketching and measurement of her body by him and his colleagues at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturell in Paris.

14. 1814: Emmanuel Théaulon’s vaudeville play, The Hottentot Venus, entertains Parisians. It tells the story of a French gentleman, Adolphe, who declares his intent to marry “une femme sauvage” but recants when he sees a portrait of the real Hottentot and is horrified at her appearance.

13. 1814. Cesars sells Baartman to an animal trainer, Réoux, who displays her across France. 

12. 1811-1814. Cesars tour Baartman across England. Initially an extremely popular attraction, especially after her court case, public interest and revenues lag.

11. Dec. 1811: Baartman is baptized by Chaplain Joseph Brookes.

10. 1810: A court case is brought by abolitionists arguing Baartman is being held against her will. She gives her testimony in Dutch, saying her treatment is acceptable. The case is dismissed.

9. 1810: With help from a British Army medical officer, Baartman is brought to London by the Cesars brothers. She begins her career as “The Hottentot Venus” in Piccadilly Circus.  She is advertised as “a most correct and perfect Specimen of [the Hottentot] people,” exemplified by her large posterior (or steatopygia).

8. 1807: The Slave Trade Act is passed by British parliament but slavery does not officially come to an end across the Empire’s homeland and holdings until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

7. 1806: British forces occupy the Cape colony and missionaries petition the British government for special protection of the Hottentots “because of their general imbecile state.”

6. 1800-1820: Displays of human “curiosities” draw large crowds in Georgian London.

5. 1805: After her parents die, Baartman moves to Cape Town and becomes a servant in a series of houses including that of a Free Black man named Hendrik Cesars and his brother Pieter.

4. 1770 or 1789: Saartjie (Sara, Sarah) Baartman (Bartmann, Baartmann) is born 400 miles from now Cape Town.

3. 1650-1700: The Dutch tighten their control over the “Hottentots,” from the Dutch hateren (to stammer) and tateren (to stutter). Hottentot representation changes in European accounts from violent to indolent savages whose lack of work ethic necessitates the appropriation of their land.

2. 1652: The Netherlands East India Company establishes a rest station at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, bringing smallpox and forced labor to the “nomadic pastoralists” Khoikhoi.

1. 1400 (and before)-1650: The Khoikhoi populate areas between what is now Northern Bostswana and the Cape. Their carefully modulated language of click sounds and violent actions against foreigners are characterized in European accounts as proof of their position on the lowest run on the Great Chain of Being.

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I wonder if we can get someone in power to declare April Suzan-Lori Parks' month. In the spirit of 365 Days/365 Plays I think she's shown many theaters doing the work of one author can work. : )

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In the play, Colin Teevan’s adaptation of the Franz Kafka story “A Report to an Academy,” Ms. Hunter stars as Red Peter, a West African chimp who is enslaved by sailors and adapts the speech and mannerisms of his captors to survive. He then becomes a sensation on the music hall stage. (via Kathryn Hunter in ‘Kafka’s Monkey’ at Baryshnikov Center - NYTimes.com)

I could NOT miss posting this review ... not just because the solo performer's name is Kathryn Hunter(!) ... but because of the echoes of a "creature" who transforms imprisonment into empowerment through performative mimicry of his captors and becomes a sensation/curiosity on a music hall stage. The actress, Kathryn Hunter, describes the piece as an "allegory for immigration and the perils of assimilation." Of course, as we've discussed over the past months, it's one thing to immigrate it is another to be bound by dependence, imported, and then try to craft a life as a fully recognized subject.

LAST PERFORMANCE OF VENUS TONIGHT 5PM ELIZABETH PRICE KENAN THEATER UNC-CHAPEL HILL! 

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3 more chances to see!

Performances today, April 14 at 2pm and 8pm, and tomorrow, April 15 at 5pm. 

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The photoshoot is gorgeous. Gorgeous colours, gorgeous lighting, gorgeous and inventive haute couture clothes. Everything’s chill… until… you hit the 2mins13sec mark. Then shit gets weird and I go ballistic.

Yet, no one here (France) seems to think…

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At last night’s talkback an audience member asked about the different awareness of Saartjie Sarah Baartman in the US vs Europe (esp France where her remains were dissected and displayed). I spoke in generalities about the differences in colonial histories and slavery/the slave trade between the US and Europe. This story about a Beyonce photo shoot for French magazine L'Official illustrates some contemporary effects of those differences in pretty stark detail.

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(via Stages of Decay)

This is part of a project by photographer Julia Solis. This image in particular reminded me of the VENUS set ... but years after, abandoned and forgotten. Almost like Saartjie.

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Wanna know more about Saartjie Baartman?

Reading/Viewing list of contemporary sources we found helpful in preparing this production:

"Display of the Body Hottentot" by Z.S. Strother in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business ed. Bernth Lindfors (Indiana UP, 2009): 1-61.

African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus by Rachel Holmes (Random House, 2007).

Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully (Princeton UP, 2009).

FREAKERY: Cultural Specatcles of the Extraordinary Body ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (NYU Press, 1996).

Venus Noire a feature film by Abdellatif Kechiche (2010).

The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould (Norton, 1986).

Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (Norton, 1981).

Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Cornell UP, 1985).

The LIfe and Times of Sara Baartman, The "Hottentot Venus" a documentary film by Zola Maseko (1999).

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Sadiah Quershi (U of Chicago P, 2011).

Freaks: We Who Are Not Like Others by Daniel Mannix (Juno Books, 1999).

Seeing is Believing: America's Sideshows by A.W. Stencell (ECW Press, 2002).

Monsters: Human Freaks in America's Gilded Age by Michael Mitchell (ECW Press, 2002).

"The Bottom of Desire in Suzan-Lori Park's VENUS" by Greg Mitchell. In Modern Drama 45.2 (Spring 2002): 125-37.

Venus Hottentot: Poems by Elizabeth Alexander. Original publication in 1990 (Graywolf Press, 2004).

Black Venus 2010: They Called her "Hottentot" ed. by Deborah Willis (Temple UP, 2010).

Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture by Janell Hobson (Routledge, new edition 2005).

Human Zoos: Science and Specatcle in the Age of Colonial Empires ed. Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard (Liverpool UP, 2009).

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Opens tomorrow!!!

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Here's how you can get your tickets to VENUS! April 11-15 in the Elizabeth Kenan Price Theater in the Paul Green Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill Campus.