What to Send Up When It Goes Down (Aleshea Harris)
As far as I know all theater is downstream from religious ritual. Historically, in every culture where we have theater it is preceded by group movement and music in whatever spiritual tradition they have, which is then co-opted by secular interests and often distilled into some other form.
We tend to see our modern dialogue, character, plot theater as inherited by the European tradition through the Greeks partially because that is idiomatically where we trace a lot of our culture from (from the Middle Ages, backwards through Rome, then the Greeks,) and partially because the most known forms of other cultures (say, African or Japanese,) maintain a lot of the ritualistic movement, singing, music, and repetition.
With this in mind we can understand that what we would consider “normal” theater is in fact the outlier, historically speaking.
It has been theorized that being moved by a story is a form of self-hypnosis: you allow your brain to be tricked into accepting the things you’re seeing as real, and then be affected by them. Pardon the expression, but we also know that group hysteria is a real phenomenon, and that in groups moving and sounding the same we can be swept up and feel connected.
If we take that idea we can postulate that the more ritualistic a show, if done well, the higher possibility that it can bypass a lot of the higher functions of the brain, grab your by your empathy, and produce a more powerful change in the viewer than a “regular” show might. So then, taking the form of a ritual or a dance or a group chant, is an effective choice for the artist who wants to promote guttural understanding.
So I get why What to Send Up When It Goes Down is written like it is, and I can appreciate that fact while simultaneously saying that it isn’t to my taste, frustrating to read, and as a piece of literature has done less for me than say, Fairview (Jackie Sibblies Drury) which has some thematic similarities.
Of course, reading an account, even a well documented one, of a dance is always going to pale to the dance itself. What to Send Up When It Goes Down is “A play. A pageant. A ritual. A homegoing celebration.” meant to draw attention to anti-black action, specifically violence, and molded to shape itself to the audience watching it, with lots of audience participation and discussion.
Over three movements we (the audience) are invited to move and sing, then watch some parodic scenes while we honor the dead and contemplate the future.
Even if the form this play takes was always going to be hard for me to connect with, I don’t appreciate dance as much as I ought, the tone of it is not the tact I’d prefer with these sorts of conversations; What to Send Up When It Goes Down wants to cordon off the human experience and to say “this is a black issue which you [non-black, presumably mostly white] should watch and consider” instead of a “this is a human problem which disproportionally affects certain types of us.”
I mostly consider it ineffectual and not prone to convince anyone, which is to say useless as a political tool, and potentially harmful if it pushes people to consider fewer options for persuasion. That’s my opinion of course, I’m not intimately connected to any of these ongoing conversations.
To put a finer point on it, and to directly state my bias as a reviewer: the parts meant to celebrate and commiserate take forms I don’t personally enjoy easily in theater (song and dance,) and the parts meant to incite and provoke I find largely insulting and closed-off (the scenes that play with white attitudes towards black existence and antipathy,) that is until the third movement where it addresses things more directly and less obliquely.
This isn’t for me in quite a literal sense, the script asks me to be a passive observer without critique, and ultimately I don’t think it does it’s job well for people like me.
