Summary Post on Race Prompts

I’m overwhelmed by everyone’s thoughtful and impassioned responses to the prompt of Race in Theatre. A number of you mentioned the universality of story and helped to lift up the idea that an ”every man” story can and should by portrayed by “any man.” While recognizing that there is an ever important and relevant place for cultural storytelling, several of you noted that it gets dicey in the Western world when that becomes the singular expected product from persons of color. One conclusion was common throughout everyone’s posts: change is desperately necessary and must be imminent. The following summaries (and stand-out quotes) will highlight possible “road signs” that could lead us towards that place of change. Your offerings create a wonderful bouquet of possibilities. The future smells so much sweeter know that the nine of you will emerge from this institution with the convictions and enlightened expressions you have shared. Let us go forth!

Mark speaks of the “overdetermined quality” of the diversity issue in theatre. That is to say, “there are more causes present than are necessary to cause the effect.” He then goes on to explain that by virtue of that fact, and the reality that there are so many collaborative stakeholders involved in making theatre, the burden of creating change rests on all parties. It takes the entire village, so to speak, and Mark notes that the process is altogether tedious, gradual, and important. This directly connects to his opening declaration that culturally specific theatre companies/initiatives are indeed still necessary if the goal is to create and maintain sustainably representative theatre.

Dharmik hits us with some cold, hard data from the U.S. Census website regarding race percentages in the United States, but makes a strong and heartfelt shift to focus more on the issue of casting actors that are assumed to be “automatically authentic” (as Herrara puts it) based on physical appearance. To be more specific, he takes issue with specific “race designation” being included in a casting call unless it is a story that is specifically about that particular ethnic/racial group. Although he doesn’t seem hopeful that this change will happen, Dharmik ends by offering thoughts on what might be a solution to this issue of flawed selection and unbalanced representation.

Sarah shares a bit of her personal journey and how she has maneuvered the anthropologic gaze…and perhaps how it maneuvered her at times. In beautiful openness she talks of how both her lenses to view the world and self-imposed responsibility of serving as an “authority on the ‘African Experience’” were changed when she viewed Lupita N’yongo’s speech on black beauty at a Hollywood Essence event. The necessity of an artist to have their work deemed credible, especially if what that artist’s cultural aesthetic (based on physicality) can offer is seen before what their mind/craft has to offer, is why Sarah feels culturally specific establishments are still in desperate need.

Erica shifts our focus to perspective and the universality of the human experience. After reading her post it almost is a microcosm of the very process by which she proposes positive change might happen in the theatre world regarding race representation. After questioning if her dream to produce a robust and ethnically diverse theatre season may be naïve, she pushes forward and delves into how that might be approached on the university level. Rather than employing coalitional casting, she feels that a curriculum that exposes young actors to the variety of cultural perspectives from which universally relatable stories can be told may prove to enlighten young artists, letting them know that stories can (and should) be told differently than they’ve been historically told. By the end of her post, it seems Erica found a bit of hope that her ideal theatre company maybe isn’t just a dream.

In his blog post, Mike uses an example from his undergrad experience to explain why he feels coalitional casting is sort of an “easy out.”  Rather than their production of Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act being about the illegal relationship between a white, female librarian and a married black man, it instead became about how brave the two white actors were for appearing naked on stage for most of the show. He states that this left the play with almost no purpose. Certainly not the purpose the playwright intended.  Mike says that reassessment of university structure and season selection need to take place if shows cannot be cast in such a way that ethnic-specific casting (if integral to the story) cannot be honored. No easy outs to scratch a “we realllly wanna do this” itch. Mike simply says to make a different choice.

Andréa presents a somewhat more optimistic view of the agency of coalitional casting. She shares that Ybarra’s creation of the term/practice relied heavily on the actor’s commitment to the cause of “telling a marginalized story…someone else’s story. And it requires realizing that no single story is universal unless every story is.” Drea states that if handled correctly and ethically, coalitional casting can increase exposure and work towards making diverse representation a reality. She also acknowledges trepidation surrounding the “code of honor” central to coalitional casting that, by virtue of financial reasons or even irrationally cathartic desires, could be glazed over. As a woman of color, she shares how she has been the subject of pan-Latinx casting (both to fruitful and not fruitful ends) and the frustrations that accompany it. She stresses how, even in those circumstances, it is important to be a culturally sensitive ally.

Lisa begins by taking a look at Ybarra’s definition of coalitional casting and teases out the idea of privilege for us a bit. Torn by the word itself, she referred to a New York Times article and quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that “privilege blinds, because it’s in its nature to blind,” as she searched for answers. In the end she concludes by asking whether one can truly find equality without understanding one’s own privilege. In part two of her post, she shares her process and involvement in casting a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. The majority of the student population was “Hispanic” and she questions if she misrepresented the show by “choosing and directing it with a demographic of students that wasn’t physically, culturally, or experientially authentic.” She views the show as one with a universal story of suffering and searching for what’s most important in life. There’s that word again – universal. She doesn’t answer her questions within the post, yet is grateful for the contributions of Ybarra and Herrara to the topic of diversified ethnic representation in theatre.

Emily offers a colorful, media-filled response to this week’s prompt about Race. She begins by using Amber Ruffin’s “safe space” to illustrate the dangers of the anthropological gaze and contends that institutions that are culturally centered help foster artistic freedom, safety, inspiration, and camaraderie among marginalized groups. Emily continues her discussion by sharing how some minorities who are “fed-up” with ethnic pigeon-holing react to troubling monochromatic casting calls and respond by re-creating blockbuster movie posters with people of color in them. Why Photoshop in this way? With minorities making up 40% of the U.S. population yet only being represented in 16.7% of Hollywood roles, that initiative was undertaken as a way to finally see for themselves and show the world what people of color would like in leading roles of mainstream movies. She ends by sharing some worth while links to Alex Chester’s blog “The White-List Cabaret is About to Flip the Script” and a 2013 guide written by Alex Lew entitled, “How to Cast Actors of Color.”

Austin brings us home by jumping directly into identifying what he feels is the root of the problem: racism that continues to persist and re-emerge in various forms in this country. He shares that on Broadway both audience and casting clock-in at nearly 85% white – “Art that exists in an echo chamber,” as he puts it. Austin included a potent 3-minute video of Tim Wise that in no way sugarcoats the development of the historical pedigree of racism in the U.S. This further drives home his point that there is a fundamental American framework that is terribly flawed yet constantly reinforced. He even begins to write about how capitalism plays a part in propagating marginalization, then concludes by stating that this issue is “too large to do an sort of justice to” in a post. Instead he says it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work on dismantling the current power structure that’s in place.

Race Prompt for Week 10

Oh, the tangential paths I’ve trod as I prepared to write this blog prompt… It’s not surprising that a topic such as “Race” would do that, given the ceaseless resurgence of the term, it’s definition, and it’s agency in societies worldwide. And then we meld that with the world of theatre – tangential paths, I tell you. And it all started with Harvey Young.

Al Pacino cast as a Cuban Tony Montana in Scarface

Young primed us nicely for the idea of “theatre and race” as he shared a personal experience in which he was distracted during a production of The Voysey Inheritance when an African American female actor addressed a white male actor as “father.” He questioned the dramaturgical choices and the implications of that choice for the storyline. He also pondered whether it could have just been the result of colorblind casting. You know, the politically correct endeavor to cast the best person for the job regardless of “race.” It’s a lovely idea, and while it is often employed, the question was raised in class – what if it ends up doing a disservice to the plot? After all, we aren’t colorblind [save the 8% men and 0.5% of women in the world who actually are, but that tangent turned into a silly old rabbit hole so I jumped out quick]. But you catch my drift – we see what is in front of us! All of it. Our brains want to make sense of it, and our brains are smart. If it doesn’t compute, we’ve got questions and then all of a sudden our theatre experience turns Brechtian. We’re often “aware” of the “race” of the thespians that tread the boards in front of us, but Young points out that that’s not inherently a bad thing. He highlights a difference between the awareness of race and racism, and refers to “race” as a “concept…that we know does not really exist and is simply a fiction invented to divide people.” [I snapped my fingers to that comment as I made a hard left to follow a path that would lead me towards the origins of the term “race.” If you’re interested, I offer the article “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought” by Nicholas Hudson and available on JSTOR  https://www.jstor.org/stable/30053821?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents as well as a perusing of Ashley Montagu who has declared “the fallacy of race” as “man’s most dangerous myth.”]

Robert Branch as MLK, Jr. in Kent State Univ's The Mountaintop

Yes, Young tantalized us with the concepts of racial interpellation, racial socialization, and racial habitus that he esteemed essential to embodying race, however we were left high and dry before we saw how it was applied to theatre [I’ll spare you the full tangent here and simply leave it at this - $10, new on Amazon]. Thank goodness that Michael Greyeyes swooped in and saved the day with his dynamic performative keynote address. As he and Chief Bromden escorted us through his pedagogical evolution, we were privy to both his inner dialogue and outward manifestations. Although he had returned to grad school so that he could interact with roles in classical works for which he “would never reasonably be considered,” he instead found himself drawn to postcolonial theory and postmodernism. Thus he was set on his path to “blow up his program” – rock the boat, question the status quo, reject the preciousness surrounding western fine arts curriculum and teach what would best serve the diverse university students that he taught. When he decided to no longer teach ballet, it caused an interesting wave. Like a Jenga tower, he yanked out a foundational piece of movement training that, in the eyes of his colleagues, prepared the students for Restoration drama. Greyeyes’ position was basically, “I didn’t choose to pull out that particular piece for no reason!” As he’s moved further away from the “false light of the moon,” he’s been awakened and defogged – a reference to a quote from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon.” [Immediate thought as I finished this article: Grass Dancing for Daily Practice = rabbit hole.]

Zoe Saldana in "blackface" for Nina Simone biopic

Patricia Ybarra utilizes Quiara Hudes’ “Elliot Trilogy” to walk us through a methodology to read Latinx plays. She states that the themes and tropes of cosmology, affect, family legacies, a quest for belonging, and hardships encountered in the barrio are common throughout many Latinx dramas. Hudes’ plays are no different according to Ybarra, so she explores how important community and vertical relationships are while also using North Philly [shout-out to the City of Brotherly Love] to represent a “true north” where the characters decide to return to in order to make community and reimagine “the self.” Ybarra notes that in her staging of Water by the Spoonful, she took care not to make the scene where Odessa spoons water onto the floor too poetic because her goal was to show ritual as ordinary. A good summary of this article might be that it is of utmost importance that the Latinx traditions and cultural nuances be seen as ordinary and ever-present within the context of Latinx culture.

Things began to feel especially impactful (as if they weren’t already) when Brian Herrara got our wheels turning about casting again. Alas, this topic that Young got us ready to receive at the beginning of the week was now here and packed in a neat little educational package…well, actually five neat little educational packages. Herrara’s 5-university college tour to view productions of In the Heights served the purpose of investigating the question of culturally conscious casting and more specifically the question, “Do we have the actors for that?” And by the word “we” he’s especially referring to university theatres. The dangers of pan-Latinx casting and assuming “automatic authenticity” are cautioned against on account of the vast and wonderfully unique differences among Latinx ethnicities. In a university setting where the casting pool may not always be sufficient to fill roles for Latinx characters, Herrara maintains that careful adherence to linguistic fluency, cultural competence, and creative coalition can lead to a successful production. Although casting is a rigorous job that’s altogether artistic, pedagogic, and ethical, ultimately the appearance of authenticity lies in the eyes of the beholder. You can bring the audience to the proverbial water, but you can’t make ‘em drink it if they don’t like the taste.

Jonathan Pryce in "yellowface" for Miss Saigon

Mark Lew’s blog tackles the topic of “race and theatre” from a different angle. As co-director of the very successful Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the largest collective of Asian-American playwrights ever assembled, he questions whether ethnic-specific writers’ groups are even necessary any more and then immediately answers his own question in the affirmative. He speaks of an anthropological gaze that pigeonholes writers of color into a culturally biased lane that restricts them to driving at the speed of “family history drama.” A great quote that stands out to me is, “Inside the Lab: inter-dimensional time travel. Outside the Lab: ethnic family dramas only, please.” He states his disdain for the lack of diversity in theatre and offers a number of scenarios that would increase the representation of people of color in theatre. Oh, and after an entirely too long a list of recent examples of yellow face, he shares that he despises it…unless you’re talking about David Henry Hwang’s political satire of that same title. Check out this article about Hwang’s Yellow Face for another interesting read: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/may/12/david-henry-hwang-miss-saigon-yellow-face-racial-casting

All right folks, we’re doing choose your own adventure this week. Choose from one of the following to delve into for this week’s prompts. Or you can be like me and follow all the tangents. Feel free to really share and engage with each other in the conversations that our 50-minute classes felt way too short to accommodate this week. Happy musings!

Herrara speaks about coalitional casting beginning on page 31 of his article. Have you ever seen this “non-minority ally” approach in action? What did it look like? Did it serve to leverage the “privileged ubiquity of whiteness”? Do you think, like Herrara, that the coalitional casting approach can effectively balance out “privilege to amplify awareness of racial and ethnic inequality rather than efface it” OR do you think it’s a bunch of hogwash? If hogwash, what about it turns your nose up? What alternatives would you suggest when people of color are not available in the casting pool? (Let’s talk university level.)

OR

What are your thoughts on this “anthropological gaze” that Mark Lew speaks of? What do you make of the ethnic family dramas “lane?” Are culturally specific theatre companies and initiatives such as the Hispanic American Arts Center and Ma-Yi Theater still necessary? On whom do you feel the responsibility lies for creating more opportunities for persons of color to be more represented, and more accurately so, in theatre? Actors? Educators? Playwrights? Reviewers? Production Staff? Casting? Expound!

You took the words right out of my mouth...kinda

Verbatim Theatre: the land where the phrase, “you took the words right out of my mouth” can’t be thrown around lightly. This became especially clear as I progressed through the class readings assigned last week. At first glance, verbatim theatre seems a simple concept - a work that shares the exact words that were spoken by others at some point in history. Thinking about this re-telling of stories can almost begin to feel all warm and fuzzy as you ponder stories you may have heard a family elder recite over and over…until Carol Martin and Robin Soans unwrap the warm, fuzzy nostalgia blanket and hand you the words "exact," "precise," "accurate," and "literal" in it’s place. Anyone else feel that draft?

Like many of the concepts we have studied thus far, the depths to which one can reach when striving towards the true essence of this theatrical style intrigued me. But Martin and Soans have a valid point – verbatim theatre and documentary dramas need a shape of some sort (i.e. selection, order, etc.) and when these dramaturgical choices are applied, then all of a sudden the play doesn’t seen as uniquely different from a conventional play as the playwright might have hoped.

Last year around this time I had the honor of being a part of a Lynn Nottage world-premiere entitled One More River to Cross: A Verbatim Fugue. This was not a play written by Lynn Nottage, but rather a work that was adapted by her. Nottage sifted through thousands of interviews (2,300 to be exact) that were conducted as a part of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) between 1936 and 1938. The FWP was an effort of the federal Works Progress Administration similar to the Federal Theatre Project mentioned in class. During that two-year span, writer-artists were sent to the homes of emancipated slaves in the post war South to interview them regarding their experiences and memories of slavery. They included first-hand experiences as well as stories that were told to them by those who had passed before them. Nottage chronologically arranged the accounts from the beginning of the slave trade through emancipation, without changing the narrative text as recorded. In the "Verbatim Fugue" the narratives are periodically divided by Negro Spirituals that topically correspond to the stories being told.

The cast consists of 2 men and 2 women who tell the stories of multiple former slaves and a chorus. My character was Woman #1 and I shared narratives of 13 different ex-slaves. It was a most humbling and chilling experience to speak those words “knowing” that they had been spoken by actual people who lived those experiences. But to be honest, more than the “verbatim” aspect, what really shook me at my core was the substance of the stories. Whether the interviewers recorded a “de” versus “the,” etc. didn’t really bother me at the time as I took the "verbatim" claim with a grain of salt.
Interpretation is another factor to consider in Verbatim Theatre. I remember a particular rehearsal where Man #2 said the word "galluses" in one of his narratives and the director found it necessary to explain to him that galoshes were footwear and that it had probably just been spelled differently on account of the interviewer trying to capture dialect. The actor then went onto explain that in his research he found that galluses were actually suspenders, which made sense in the context of the text and created a completely different visual enactment of the story.

The Library of Congress has done a fabulous job of documenting and making these narratives accessible to the public. In light of this week's blog prompt, it was interesting to read what has been written about the accuracy of the narratives that Nottage then adapted,

"In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to write down their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. John A. Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP (and the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress), was extremely interested in the ex-slave material he received from these states. In 1937 he directed the remaining states involved in the project to carry out interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may sometimes be offensive to today's readers. The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of informants and their houses. The interviewers then turned the narratives over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C."

-- Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938, Library of Congress Link

Lynn Nottage, Playwright

So in addition to the selection, order, etc. of the narratives that Nottage had to arrange, there was skepticism regarding the accuracy of the narratives to begin with based on the phrases that I highlighted in bold text above. So can One More River to Cross really be called “A Verbatim Fugue?” Consider the following insights into the process:

"The Slave Narrative Collection in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress consists of narrative texts derived from oral interviews. The narratives usually involve some attempt by the interviewers to reproduce in writing the spoken language of the people they interviewed, in accordance with instructions from the project's headquarters, the national office of the Federal Writers' Project in Washington, D.C.

The interviewers were writers, not professionals trained in the phonetic transcription of speech. And the instructions they received were not altogether clear. "I recommend that truth to idiom be paramount, and exact truth to pronunciation secondary," wrote the project's editor, John Lomax, in one letter to interviewers in sixteen states. Yet he also urged that "words that definitely have a notably different pronunciation from the usual should be recorded as heard," evidently assuming that "the usual" was self-evident.

In fact, the situation was far more problematic than the instructions from project leaders recognized. All the informants were of course black, most interviewers were white, and by the 1930s, when the interviews took place, white representations of black speech already had an ugly history of entrenched stereotype dating back at least to the early nineteenth century. What most interviewers assumed to be "the usual" patterns of their informants' speech was unavoidably influenced by preconceptions and stereotypes.

The result, as the historian Lawrence W. Levine has written, "is a mélange of accuracy and fantasy, of sensitivity and stereotype, of empathy and racism" that may sometimes be offensive to today's readers. Yet whatever else they may be, the representations of speech in the narratives are a pervasive and forceful reminder that these documents are not only a record of a time that was already history when they were created: they are themselves irreducibly historical, the products of a particular time and particular places in the long and troubled mediation of African-American culture by other Americans."

-- A Note on the Language of the Narratives, Library of Congress Link

This is really interesting stuff - click here for more information on The Limitations of the Slave Narrative Collection

As the Pickering and Thompson chapter on Verbatim Theatre states, at it’s core documentary and verbatim theatre “attempt to represent events objectively for the audience.” Saidiya V. Hartman seems to agree as she assess the limitations and usefulness of the FWP Slave Narrative Collection,

"How does one use these sources? At best with the awareness that a totalizing of history cannot be reconstructed from these interested, selective, and fragmentary accounts and with an acknowledgment of the interventionist role of the interpreter, the equally interested labor of historical revision, and the impossibility of reconstituting the past free from the disfigurements of present concerns. With all these provisos issued, these narratives nonetheless remain an important source for understanding the everyday experience of slavery and its aftermath.... I read these documents with the hope of gaining a glimpse of black life during slavery and the postbellum period while remaining aware of the impossibility of fully reconstituting the experience of the enslaved."

-- Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997), 11.

Basically, acknowledge that one should take in Verbatim/Documentary Theatre with a “grain of salt” but also acknowledge that taking it with that bit of salt is probably more useful than not taking it at all. 

She took the words right out of my mouth.

Time and Theatre...and music videos

Ok, let’s see if I can get these thoughts that have been swirling around in my head out in a coherent manner…..

Theatre and time. Time and theatre. There were so many interesting readings this past week, and admittedly I too cried out into the ether many times with my grievances. Particularly chaffing was the article referring to Single-Tweet Plays. Maybe it’s my constant internal struggle with social media, but I found it so hard to wrap my head around 140 characters being a piece of theatre. What? Just writing that sentence almost pulled me back into hysteria. I don’t aim to put limits or edges on the definition of theatre – that’s not my place. Good for those who find fulfillment in utilizing the least amount of keystrokes possible. But my definition of theatre requires a bit more substance – there’s a journey that visual elements and plot development takes me on that I simply do not get with 140 characters. I will say that long-form Twitter theatre is more to my liking, although rather than theatre it feels more like an adventure book. There is an organic quality that live theatre offers that, again, I miss with Twitter theatre. With that being said, I’ve bitten the bullet and attempted to write a single-tweet play:

[Girl enters]
Girl: (elated) Where did you find that?!
Friend: Five-below! Was only like 3 bucks – cool, huh?
Girl: (deflated) Oh.
[Girl exits]

Now that that’s done, I’ll move forward to a topic that really threw my mind for a loop – the notion of lengthened time in art. It amazed me to think that in La Monte Young’s work to develop the musical concept of stasis, a form that allows time to “stand still,” one chord of two notes can be held for up to 45 minutes! My first thought was, "Yeah, that's not a piece of music - that's two notes being held for 45 minutes." Why did I feel this way? Because there were no variations, no changes, no heightened skill level required (especially if played on the piano, just about anyone could do it), no journey. But perhaps if I sat in a room for 45 minutes, listening to a sing continuous chord I would have an experience. I can't say for sure because I've never done it, but it's seems that experience might drive me a bit insane. 

Why?" was my resounding question all week. Why attempt to manipulate time in the extremity? The answer, based on the readings and class discussion, seemed to be, "because it can be done." As the Adam Neely YouTube video said, it's like climbing Mount Everest - you put a lot of effort into it just to see if you can do it (paraphrased). A lot of effort is continuously going into ASLSP written by John Cage. The centuries it will take for that piece to be concluded boggles my mind. I was almost intrigued to go witness a key change one day, but then I learned that it's possible the song could be in a "rest" for a number of year (as it is currently) and suddenly I was cured of that desire. After the deliberations over what might be the slowest music, in the end it comes don to what one chooses to pick as music. What counts to them, Neely stated. He asserted that music is often used to express what cannot be expressed in words. Yes!! Finally something I completely resound with!

There was a thought that I had during class that reminded me of that very concept. I recently had the privilege of doing a reading of a colleague's new script entitled, "Trophy Room." (wink wink) One of the characters loved Bill Wither's song, "A Lovely Day" but one of the younger characters could not comprehend how that extended note at the end was even allowed to be recorded! In effect he was questioning if it was even music. Being someone who personally loves that song, and that part, I can relate to Bill Withers and his creative team. When you get to that point of the song, there is a joy that resonates throughout all 18-seconds of that note - which he holds straight, no chaser, no vibrato. To me, it's reminiscent of a child who is let loose on the play ground and rounds full force, head to the sky, releasing an exclamation of pure happiness. To each his own. But I couldn't stop there. I had to ask the question, was that the longest note ever sung? Well, I'm not the only one who asked that question...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_jnASqj3xk

This led me down the YouTube rabbit hole and I began to search for the longest music video. This has been debated at length - cyber insults being thrown left and right. There are those who insist that Michael Jackson's 1997 video "Ghosts" takes the record at 39 minutes, 32 seconds even though Pharrell Williams created a 24 hour music video of his song "Happy" on loop. Those in the Jackson camp feel that "looping" doesn't count, where as critics of Jackson say that it was not not the length of a single song, but rather more of a "film." Check them out for yourself below

Michael Jackson's "Ghosts"

https://vimeo.com/233465951

Pharrell Williams' "Happy" - 24 Hour Music Video

http://24hoursofhappy.com/