"It's Not About US" - Ferguson shooting reaction

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of participating in a performance piece that was in response to the shooting of Michael Brown, an African American teenager in Ferguson, MO. The Ferguson shooting occurred in August 2014 and sparked a nation-wide response to the frequency of police-shootings involving unarmed African-American males as the victims. When I saw the audition notice it simply said “Ferguson Thanksgiving.” I had no idea what the piece would even be, but was intrigued. I quickly learned that this was to be a performance art piece combined with a loosely scripted scene. And that there would be pie. This piece was the brainchild of Phoebe Bachman, herself a Caucasian woman who had written the scripted scene based on a conversation that occurred among her family members at a dinner table over Thanksgiving 2014. Her extended family was present and the conversation became very polarized as soon as the “first character” gave his first line, “So Ferguson, huh?”

The set-up for the performances was this: The actual venue was an art gallery and when the doors opened, the patrons entered to view the art that had been curated to display works which highlighted themes consistent with the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality issues. While they were perusing, a Caucasian actress and myself began walking through the space serving slices of pie to the patrons. We didn’t speak, we just offered. They happily accepted.  We made several rounds with pie, then entered and began doing a devised movement piece throughout the space and in the midst of the crowd. Our movements were motivated by trust, mistrust, power, push, pull, etc.

All the while there was a table at the far end of the gallery that had been donned with place settings. There was a place setting for each of the 5 actors, plus an extra one for a randomly invited audience member. At the conclusion of the movement piece, the six of us sat at the table and began the scripted scene. The characters ranged from those on the side of the court ruling not to indict the police officer that shot Brown, to those enraged by it, to passive, to peacemaking, to those who simply laid out the facts. The scene concluded pretty open-ended and without a real “conclusion.”

The protest/demonstrations that occurred for weeks after the shooting of Michael Brown were so strong that the National Guard was called in to offer support to local law enforcement. There was fire, tear gas, looting, marching, standing, rubber bullets, etc. Bachman felt that the polarized energies in Ferguson had been channeled into her parent’s dining room at their Thanksgiving dinner. She wanted to bring that to the community and open up a conversation about police brutality and race relations.

With each performance, as with most theatre, the audience response was vastly different. The crowd gathered around the table, some with pie in hand, not quite sure what they were watching. The person at the table was likewise usually pin-drop silent, yet deeply contemplative. There were two nights that the invited audience member interjected into the scene, unable to kept quite when bigoted remarks were made.

This artistic response to a tragic event, in my opinion, was a safer route. She could have chosen to go as far as reenacting the event, which would have undoubtedly caused much upset and been seen as going “too far” by some. The closest she got was directing one of the actors to point at another actor with their hand in a gun configuration. Regardless of the safety factor, it definitely stirred emotions and sparked conversations as evidenced by several post show talkbacks. If she had decided to make the decision to “go over the line” in anyway, the question really is “what is more over the line than the actual event?’”

MANIFESTO

We cannot be silent. Words are the tool to spark awareness. When will the masses awaken from the monotony of “the norm?” When will they hear what’s sole purpose is to break then from their jaded reality? We can wait no longer. They will hear their own words. They will ingest them. They will struggle with them. They will wrestle with them. They will answer for them. They will not go unnoticed nor unanswered. Magnified, words spoken to destroy will serve to correct.