2016. A year and a half had passed and I was barely hanging on from a two year onslaught of murder after murder after murder of black people, children, boys, girls, men and women in America, on the the news, on social media, in real life. Unacquitted, unreconciled, unjustified bombardment of public murders presented to us all in every small and large space to be consumed as a collective download of our exact location. This is where we are. Black people, this is where you are ending up everyday. Dead. Hunted. Gone.
I remember sorely throughout my body and soul, the utter depression I felt during this time. And then, some bleak day in November, Donald Trump became President. I couldn’t watch the election results, the world was darkening all around. The lily whiteness of his Amerikkkan victory couldn’t even shine its usual shine because our dense blackness couldn’t muster a response for it; maybe because too much blood had been shed. Maybe because we were either mourning or dead. The morale of our Blackness was running out. American blackness had been ripped open and photographed dead on the jailhouse floor, time and time again. Everything was blood red now, and blood red don’t reflect white. Once again we could see how Dark the world truly is.
I remember sitting on my couch the day after the election results, wondering how long I would survive in America, when I received an email from Ivan and Pablo from Democracia.
They made a comment about the travesty of the election from their distant land of Spain. They had an ask. Would I come to Europe to film Act 3 of their manifesto? They had personal access to a different group of powerful and elite individuals on to whom we could stage the performance. The caveat was that I would have to decide nearly immediately and I would have to get there within weeks. I agreed. Wouldn’t you? And I sold my presence for way less than market value, because let’s be honest. The price of being black is going up. The price of surviving in America as a Black person, let alone a woman in the south, that can sing operatically, that’s an artist, that is fluent in concept, is going up. But I went, and they asked me to consider their overall costs when quoting my fee, because obviously black bodies in space can afford so much. And I went, so that I could get out of this country. I asked the artists if I could just perform the manifesto as myself. Was it necessary to struggle with the cliche’d trope of masquerade, or slave revolt or underdog uprising? Isn’t my blackness enough for the concept of inequality? Can’t I just be myself, alive, black, and singing opera?
Wasn’t their text enough?
They declined my ask. Conceptually, they understood it was a cliche’ but in their reality the idea of subverting the power dynamic around race and class was still too fantastically satisfying. (I’m intuiting the sentiment behind their commitment to this idea.) The ORDER manifesto has very strong, intentional language, emotionally charged and accusative. I understand that this is part of the performance and I don’t have to believe in what I perform. But there is only so much space to install vocal performance in the body. When committing vocal works to memory, it helps if you use your heart and soul to store some of the meaning or interpretation, especially when dealing with a time deficit. I know this about my craft, I also know the power of my energetic practice to call things into being. There were so many negotiations that I had to make, on what manifestations I could make real by simply transversing the idea through my body. I recognized the need for very clear boundaries about what was being asked of me and what wasn’t being asked of me but being accessed from me, tucked behind the topical ask.
My gift of declaration can make things that aren’t so, be so. Maybe this is a phenomenon of being a black body in space surviving aeons of dark energy, I don’t know. But because I am aware of the power of my vocal authority, I tempered and tuned my spiritual and energetic body towards intentions of healing and understanding before I allowed these words to be filtered through my particular vehicle which has been known to turn shit into gold. I’m not here to do anyone’s magic spells, as magical as I may seem and as magical as blackness is. The manifesto also equates obesity with the lower class and I am in fact a Fat Black Magic, which appreciates my value as the best casting choice.
I am a director and I usually self direct and produce myself and my work. I am a performer and I am also a composer. I entered into the project excited to experience taking direction from another artist so I could focus exclusively on performance. It took awhile for the director to send me the parts that I was to memorize. And when he did, he asked me to make demos of myself singing the parts so he could get an idea of what I was capable of creating vocally and improvisationally. This did not sit well with me because I was not being hired as the composer, I was being hired as a performer and I still had not received a contract although I was already being asked to work, prove, create and deliver. I obliged because conceptually, I sometimes like to imagine what it’s like to not have my blackness be exploited. And realistically, people don’t like a black girl who is too professional or too self aware and I needed to leave the country.
However, I refused to commit the text of the manifesto to my memory until I had a contract, letting them know that the security of their artistic material being installed in my body in a timely manner was contingent upon when they sent the work in its entirety and also when they sent the contract. Occupancy of my mental capacity is temporary at best and requires preparation, reorganization, and delegation of inner space, access to which is completely per my discretion and authority, and I just honestly don’t have the time to explain.
On Space.
When I arrived in London, I checked into an airbnb where I was staying alone, and I prepared to rehearse with the composer who was finally commissioned to compose the musical score. I had only received a recording of the music two days before I left America, but the director wasn’t convinced that he actually liked the composition. So he told me not to commit the music to memory all the way, in case we changed it. I explained to him that melody greatly assists in the memorization of text, especially text of this magnitude and it’s not so easy to install dual language of text and music into your brain, only to unzip the files and keep half of the structure, saving the words and discarding the music. It’s a waste of my time, it’s counterproductive, and it is eating into the time budget of developing the performance which happens after the installation of the score into my body. I was not being compensated for these new proposals nor for all of the explaining I had to do already and I knew it. But I am an artist as well as a collaborator and I want to perform to the best of my ability, within reason.
I spent two days in rehearsals with the composer, a London based woman who trained classically at the conservatory. I rehearsed with her and drilled the nuances of her work into my body and mind. I respected her, her time, and her craft and as a fellow musician, she understood, as did I, the technique that was required to solidify this score into me, to be able to perform it precisely in one take, on film. The director was present at my rehearsals, giving me blocking along the way, setting emotional responses and telling me exactly when to look at a person directly in the eyes, which seat, and on what line. The intensity of the rehearsals made me feel secure about the performance. The only thing that was missing was the camera crew and the audience.
After each rehearsal, the director would privately remind me not to be too committed to the musical notation, after he watched and supported the composer for hours in rehearsal, as she carefully insured that I was performing the score verbatim.
I thought the secret asking was irresponsible and negligent, damn near kinky, and I told him that he had extended his production budget when it comes to time, access, and physical ability. I simply could not afford this. If he would like, I could cut my production cost by having a script that I could refer to and negotiate these directives around a fixed object. He declined, stating that this option would compromise the concept of the work. On the second day of rehearsal, I was informed that my counterpart, a white male opera singer who was to sing the first part of the Manifesto, pulled out of the engagement and we were being sent a substitute the day of the performance. The substitute would have to have a script, improvise his vocal lines, and show up to the performance as himself: a white male opera singer who was invited to perform a new work by these artists at this party.
The performance.
The night of the performance, the composer, who I thought was a very nice person, told me that she would be at the dinner table amongst the guests, and that I could look to her if I needed any help or if I got lost at any point. Before I went on to perform, the director whispered to me to forget all of her composition and create something new on the spot.
By the time the guests arrived for hor d’oeuvres, I had already done some pre-performance staging with the camera crew and I began greeting them as their Maitresse d’. The kitchen and the waitstaff also believed that I was working on the service side of the event, even though they saw the cameras following me around. The guests had already agreed to being filmed in some sort of spectacle when they RSVP'd to the party. The white male opera singer who had just arrived in London, had cocktails and small talk with the guests introducing himself as himself. My cue to enter was when I heard him finish his improvised aria. I went out into the dining room and began to sing “Repent, yes repent!” It felt awkward. I felt like I had to work harder to almost save the chasm of confusion that the piece already presented. I felt like I had to work harder to justify my presence in the piece, in the room, in London for two days already. I also had to make it worth my while and to do that I had to be extremely present, engaging with and attaching to the text to deliver a performance that was worthy of me. It was the most excruciating experience I have felt so far performing. The audience knew there was a performance happening of course, I was the response to the call. But I was also the trickster, in a very intimate space, removing my mask only to reveal another mask, my voice being controlled by another. What I could not do was reveal myself, but I had to publically engage my whole body, mind and memory to access the words. The words were so new to my being, that I had to process them live, unzipping them away from the musical notes that helped me download them into place. These ugly words that were not from my heart. These vile words, translated from Spanish, insulting these people, these strangers, violating my voice, body and mouth from the inside out. I wanted to sound my best. And I can definitely perform as a villain and act impeccably for an audience who came to see me play the villain. In this instance though, it felt as if I had to play the magic mirror, morphing their gaze on my black body right before their very eyes. Or was the mirror playing me? This was not energetically received by the audience and I realized that we never practiced the reveal. The reveal is what I needed to prepare for, revealing to the upper class how the lower “really” felt about them. The reveal is why we were all there. To capture the reveal on film. I had only practiced the reveal to those who knew it was coming. My antagonization sparked a different response from this small audience, one I have never shared with an audience before: they blocked me.
Before I could finish the last stanza of the manifesto, my memory was so fragmented by adrenaline, telecommunication across the room between individuals, and vibrational crosswaves, I could not access any more memory that was new or local. I could only access my body and soul for the purpose of surviving. So I stopped singing and I left the room.
I went into the control room with the all white male camera crew and the director asked, “How did you do?” With a racing heart, I said I felt like I just escaped a lion’s den and that we would just have to do the last stanza in post-production. This director looked me in my face and said, “No. You have to go back out there right now!” to which I replied definitely, “Absolutely not.” I could not even believe the gaul. It took an executive producer to say “Wait, look at this. I think we got it. We got!”, and then show the director the playback of the authentic silence of my memory loss and subsequent exit, for the director to back up and shut the fuck up about the considerations I was left to make alone concerning the safety of my person.
For his art.
Before I left America, I accounted for the fact that I would need personal space after such a performance experiment and requested that I have a room away from the guests that I could retreat to when I exited the scene. I had no room waiting for me. I waited in the coat room with fifteen European men calculating in front of me how my body had just navigated through space and how effectively they were able to capture it in a frame. My body was still in fight or flight mode.
THE DIRECTOR DID NOT EVEN NOTICE THAT I DIDN’T SAY THE LAST STANZA UNTIL I SAID SOMETHING.
Because he wasn’t listening to his own words. He was doing something else. We restaged the last part, which I knew we could do because I am a fucking director and a filmmaker.
I was approached hours later near the elevator by guests who walked straight up to me and asked, “Is that how you really feel? It sounded like that’s how you really feel about us.” I acted like I didn’t understand the piece and like I hardly understood English. I acted ignorant like I was abducted and I pointed and laughed nervously, “There’s the director over there. Ask him what he meant. I still don’t understand!”
At the end of the night, the crew and I left to have dinner and decompress before parting ways. In the taxi, the director tried to say something to me about, “Next time, I’m going to make sure your contract says you memorize the whole piece.” That’s when I realized that I had made the mistake of traveling alone by myself to participate in this performance. I did not have one person in that country that was there specifically on my behalf. If I was not in that country alone by myself, if I was not from a country where I could easily disappear or be murdered in broad daylight, if I was not the only black person, woman, black woman in that space, I would have had a different reaction. I assured him that I memorized the whole piece and that there was a lot that would be included in the contract if there was a next time which there will not be a next time.
At the restaurant, I was asked if the sound engineer and his wife could stay at the airbnb where I was staying for the last night because they had an early flight and it would be helpful and convenient for them. There was an extra room, so I agreed.
That night, I bled. It wasn’t time for me to bleed. I bled because of the amount of cortisol released in my body due to the performance. Due to the stress. This had never happened to me before. The next morning, I made sure everything was in order and checked out of the airbnb. I got a text in the afternoon from the director, asking me if I spilled something on the rug in the Airbnb. I never even wore shoes in the airbnb, and he is texting me saying the airbnb host is claiming there were stains on the white rug and someone was going to have to pay the charge.
“Don’t call me anymore. The performance is over.” I didn’t answer any more texts or calls. I spent the next three days sleeping long, fasting, and then engaging in my restorative self-care practices of drinking natural root vegetable juices and eating vegan soup that I prepared for myself in Willesden Green.
-Lisa Harris
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