Question:
Do you think the coalitional casting process, as discussed in Herrera’s “But do we have the actors for that?”, should be adopted by more universities? Could you see LSU participating in this? Explain.
She copies the video Quinn posted for Wednesday where Miranda discusses casting In the Heights, a topic covered in Brian Herrera's article. About coalitional casting: I'll also post as an optional reading the article by Patricia Ybarra where she first proposes coalitional casting. That may help tie down what that concept means.
Brandon references an extra report article also by Herrera, "Miranda's Manifesto." The article is worth a look if you want to see how Miranda and the Hamilton team navigate casting for a show where not having white bodies playing the characters is central to the dramaturgy (that is, it is both a dramaturgical choice and a production choice). As Brandon's summary says, Miranda faced some pushback about this choice, particularly as he began advertising auditions for the show. Herrera tells especially how at one point Backstage (an online hub for posting auditions) required anyone posting auditions to check an ethnicity box for each role. Yet there was not an "any nonwhite" box. There was "all" or "none of the above." So what Miranda did at that point was simply check all the boxes except "white," "all," and "none." Here's Herrera:
Compare the breakdown for Angelica Schuyler, the role originated by Renée Elise Goldsberry. In the broadly circulated nonwhite version it reads: “angelica schuyler: Non-white, 20s – 30s, Mezzo — Soprano, must be able to sing and rap well. Fierce, dazzling, brilliant, can read a room and everyone in it instantly. Deeply in love with Hamilton, who is married to her beloved sister Eliza. Nicki Minaj meets Desiree Armfeldt.” In the Backstage version, the same notice reads “angelica schuyler: female, 20 – 39, African American, Hispanic, Asian, South Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian / Pacific Islander, Ethnically Ambiguous / Mixed Race, African Descent, fierce, dazzling, brilliant, can read a room and everyone in it instantly,” and so on, while still concluding: “Nicki Minaj meets Desiree Armfeldt.” (Brian Eugenio Herrera, "Miranda's Manifesto," Theatre, vol. 47, no. 2, 2017, p. 30.)I note that the Backstage version for the 2016 Chicago call reads differently, with "Ethnicity: all" but also with "nonwhite" at the start of the description.
As Herrera points out, all isn't what Miranda is going for. Viewed in isolation, the act of excluding an ethnicity from consideration seems unfair ("any but white"). But we have to zoom out, taking into account the history and context surrounding casting in the US. Too often--even, alas, here at LSU--saying "any ethnicity" for a role in practice results in "white." A quirk of whiteness in culture is that it can often masquerade as "unmarked," as a neutral or "normal" non-ethnicity ("Do you want this character to be a person of color or just normal?"). Thus, without anyone consciously being bigoted, the structure of casting in US theatre and film can be seen as baking a silent preference for whiteness into its cake. Remember: neutrality tends to benefit the group that's already most privileged. To resist that silent, structural privilege as Miranda does takes extra work.
Brandon asks:
In my mind, I have an idea of who was offended/upset with the original casting call. Why was this such an issue for some people? Would there be the same backlash if a casting call was posted asking for only white actors? Would it have been as big of an issue if the casting call was more specific, asking only for black actors or Asian actor? Could the subject matter of the show have caused the issue? Could the fact that Miranda was "altering history" been the cause of the outrage?Juicy as the question of casting is, I'd hate for us to go without spending time talking about Megan Lewis's riveting article on Exhibit B. Y'all, I can't overstate how big a splash this installation made. I've heard loads of conference presentations and read lots of articles, blog posts, and twitter rants about it. Part of what Lewis does that's so good (from a scholarly point of view) is refuse to make this a simple, either-or, villains-and-heroes controversy. It's deeply complicated and messy. Is it just a racist replication of racist images? No. Does it (can it) avoid replicating the racism it portrays/critiques entirely? Also no? Should it be done at all? Should it be done by a white South African director?
The show/piece raises a lot of questions, among them Can theatre represent the ugliest, most awful parts of human history without participating in that evil? Can you show how evil bigotry, rape, torture, slavery, abuse, and exploitation are without replicating those evils on some level? Staging an extremely graphic scene of torture, for instance, risks becoming--at least for some audience members--something like entertainment (see movies like Hostel). Yet abstraction can sometimes leave people thinking that the evils in the past weren't that big of a deal.
Feminism has a long history of engaging this question. The feminist performance scholar Peggy Phelan (in her amazing work Unmarked: The Politics of Performance) warns that representation is tricky. It always falls short of meaning everything you might hope it does, and it always means more than (or other than) only what you might intend. My ironic criticism of X might be taken un-ironically as endorsement of X.
Add to these evergreen questions the history and context that specifically haunts South African performance and you have a very, very complicated bit of performance to unlock. Take a look.
See you all tomorrow,
JF
PS: it's been a while since I've posted some music, so here: Superorganism. They work remotely from each other, exchanging sound files and ideas until they have a song developed. Despite this, they've worked out a realization of their music live that is so fun to watch. The sound sound effects make me want to see them in person:
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