The Revolution comes to Juilliard

Through these operas and ballets, Jiang Qing [Madam Mao] aimed to wean artists and audiences alike from what she and the Party saw as the bourgeois themes and trappings of older Chinese art and replace them with a handful of revolutionary narratives, often set on battlefields. 

Racial hysteria is consuming the school; unchecked, it will consume the arts.

A lengthy recounting by Heather MacDonald of the current destruction going on at Julliard’s acting school, but it’s also a dire warning for what’s coming (has already arrived, I think) to the arts in general. Excerpts:

The need to assert victimization at the hands of Western civilization is all consuming, however. It has led Juilliard’s drama students to opt for ignorance rather than knowledge, identity rather than imaginative freedom. Their August 2020 demands call for the elimination of all pedagogy that seeks to enhance an actor’s ability to transcend his particular identity. “‘Color-blind’ casting” (scare quotes in the original) must end, replaced by “color conscious casting practices.” No student of color should “be forced to leave behind their racial/ethnic identity when playing a role.” If a BIPOC student is cast in a non-BIPOC role, the director must justify that choice and reflect that justification throughout the production. The school should not “center” the General American Dialect in its speech and voice classes; doing so is “discriminatory.”

Leave aside for a moment the implications of these demands for dramatic art. They are self-constricting as well. At present, black actors have a monopoly on black roles, since no director today would think of casting a white actor as a black character, but blacks can also play white roles. Now, however, per the Juilliard students, if a black actor plays a traditionally white character, it must be as a black and the rest of the production must foreground that black identity. The musical Hamilton took this tack, but such color-focused dramaturgy would outlast its welcome in Shakespeare’s history plays, say, where the idea of a hip-hop Henry V or Richard III would quickly grow stale.

The essence of the actor’s art is the ability to embody a life radically different from his own and in so doing to take the audience outside of itself as well. It is not an erasure of an actor’s self to learn the General American Dialect; that neutral voicing is merely the launching ground for a range of imaginative possibilities. Peter Francis James’s kaleidoscopic reading of Native Son on Audible uses the General American Dialect for the narrative voice but adopts a stunning range of accents for the characters, each one providing insight into the novel’s fatal drama. But for today’s black activists, their identity is their greatest power and their greatest weapon, and so anything that seeks to subsume racial identity into something more abstract must be beaten back.

The August 2020 demands complain that BIPOC students have “few if any meaningful and authentic performance opportunities” because the curriculum is “disproportionately Eurocentric.” “Authenticity” is now defined by whether a role conforms to an actor’s skin color, not by the human truth an actor may attain within it. The demands do not tell us what ratio of “Eurocentric” to “non-Eurocentric” plays constitutes “disproportionality.” The tradition of performing theatrical scripts written by individual playwrights is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon. African drama was ritualistic and participatory; there was little distinction between the dramatic players and the audience; the rituals were passed down orally, not via writing. So whatever Juilliard’s ratio of “Eurocentric” scripts to “non-Eurocentric” scripts, it would likely not be disproportionate to the actual distribution of written plays in our cultural inheritance.

The Juilliard students use a different measure of proportionality, however: their own representation in the student body. Having engineered a student body that is over 50 percent black, Juilliard must now eliminate up to 50 percent of its classical curriculum to meet the BIPOC standard of authenticity. Thus do admissions quotas everywhere determine the future curriculum.

(Here’s a nice little side note):

Racial identity is also the key to evading colorblind behavioral standards. The drama students demand that every black student on probation for missing or being late to class be taken off probation and his record wiped clean, since Juilliard’s attendance policies have a disparate impact on black students. Any white students on probation for missing class will stay under discipline. Juilliard’s self-described “rigorous” class schedule is “deeply rooted in capitalist and white supremacist hegemony.” It, too, should change to “prioritize the physical and mental health needs of the student body.”

(And now back to the main theme):

Black drama students have been pushing back on the school’s classical tradition for the past ten years, according to a school observer. A drama division graduate expressed a typical view. His “light” had been extinguished at Juilliard by having to study “about [sic] how great white authors are,” he told American Theater. This self-pity would have astonished the division’s early leaders. James Houghton, one of those early leaders, expressed his goals for the program: “I want to see actors and playwrights coming out of this school with an absolute passion and joy connected to the craft of theater-making.” That black students should feel oppressed by studying some the greatest drama ever written shows how conclusively Juilliard has failed to articulate what were once its core values.

(And where’s all this headed? Here):

Juilliard’s ferment is nothing compared with the theater world as a whole, however (or compared with the classical music world, as described in City Journal’s upcoming summer issue.) During last summer’s George Floyd riots, a manifesto appeared online: “We See You White American Theater” (We See You W.A.T.). Rambling and repetitious, the document justified its redundancies as a “reflection of the significance [of those repeated demands] to the constituents” and as “also due to the interdependent functioning of the theatrical ecosystem.” Its inconsistent “tones and formatting styles” were designed to “retain our orality,” a technique “designed to hold the multiplicity and urgency we lay claim to given the persistent devaluation of our voices.” We See You W.A.T. insisted that “radical change on both cultural and economic fronts” was required to eradicate white supremacy.

….. Regional theaters have been falling all over themselves trying to comply with the usual quota demands: casts, directors, and artistic staff must be over 50 percent minority, according to the online manifesto. There have been purges. In Philadelphia, the nonprofit PlayPenn, which supports the development of new work, fired its associate artistic director after receiving allegations that it “was not meeting community members’ expectations for racial and cultural competence,” reported the New York Times in September 2020. In Georgia, the Serenbe Playhouse laid off its entire staff following allegations of racism.

[Black activist theater group] We See You W.A.T. demanded that half of Broadway shows should be plays “written by, for and about BIPOC.” Every new play on Broadway next season will be by a black author. [emphasis added]

We See You W.A.T. demanded that half of Broadway theaters should be renamed after artists of color and that theaters forswear advertising in any press outlet where the reporters and critics are less than 50 percent POC. Those two demands have been slower to yield results.

One president of a regional theater describes the present moment. This president is self-consciously “bean-counting, trying to hit racial quotas with plays and actors,” even though the community the theater serves is overwhelmingly white. The theater’s young employees “get all het up” over any diversity shortcoming. “Why did you use a white this or a white that?” they complain. The president asked the theater’s financial chief if he could name one “cisgender” white male director the company had hired over the last three years. There were none. On Broadway there have been no straight white guys running things for years, the president observes. Gay white guys will be the next target.

This theater veteran knows 40 to 50 theater professionals who have left the profession or are about to do so, “so toxic” has the environment become. Any alternative perspective or criticism becomes: “You do not respect us.” If a voice coach observes that a student’s voice is not coming from his core, the student will respond: “That is because I don’t feel comfortable in class with you.”

But is this a problem that will cure itself? Sort of: the paying audience will disappear. That, alas, will still leave Soviet/Chinese style state art, attendance mandatory, one presumes.

An arts consultant reports the “unspoken fear” of theater leaders: they will put on quota-filling plays, and no one will come. “I have talked to long time audience members who have no interest in seeing much of this new work,” whose main purpose is to indict white America, the consultant says.

The Black Lives Matter movement in the arts is only nominally about “inclusion.” In fact, it is about exclusion and the power that has motivated every revolutionary mob: the power of negation, the power to tear things down. This purportedly “inclusive” movement will result in a world of constricted imaginative possibility and stunted human growth.

A leader in the arts world, told of Juilliard’s travails, observes: “This is a crucial time to stand up and call out what is an overly emotional and irrational attack on the best of what humanity has to offer.”

He would not allow me to reveal his name or affiliation.

Leaving the theater aside for a moment, I’ll note that these destructive parasites have infested the classical musical world, too, and music lovers will soon be offered a choice of rap, atonal squawk concertos by composers of color, and power to the people operas depicting the heroic struggles of the oppressed. Again, look to any community regime for examples. Who will pay to see this garbage? No one, willing; that’s what the coercive power of the state is for.

Western civilization is being eradicated: 4,000 years of philosophy, art, literature, even free-thinking science, and is being replaced by a system devised by people who hate all of it. “The great reset” is no accident.