Still, half being able to sympathize with a preference that only those reviewing something in the arts have some background in the arts so as to review, the functionally elite and elitist nature of such a request seems hard to escape..
In Pacific Northwestern tribal contexts you wouldn't just be allowed to hear any old song. Songs could often be considered gifts from spirits and PNW tribes frequently had a very strict sense of what in contemporary Western thought would get described as intellectual property. So there's all sorts of ways in which Bonnell's case can be understood as tied to spiritual concerns and traditions that may seem opaque to someone with absolutely no Native/First Nation background.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/dygxgw/why-im-asking-white-critics-not-to-review-my-show
...
As part of our efforts to decolonize art and foster culturally informed criticism, my theatre company, mandoons collective, run by Cole Alvis and I, requested that only Indigenous, Black, people of colour (IBPOC) folks review the show.
To be clear, white people are welcome to attend the show. It’s important to have witnesses present to understand the ongoing effects of colonialism. And we are totally fine with a person of colour giving us a bad review. It’s not the review we’re worried about, it’s the voice behind it.
Indigenous performance has been grossly under-reviewed and while the tide is shifting, the lens with which predominantly white critics view the work has been problematic. The lack of IBPOC voices in the media—at a time when arts’ coverage is shrinking—means white critics are often the gatekeepers of success.There is often a tone along the lines of “I don’t understand this, therefore it’s not valid or good art.” Aspects like style, movement, language, and music are at risk of being dismissed. There are so many different styles of theatre or storytelling. Can everyone be proficient in all of those? Probably not. But as reviewers, I think there’s a responsibility in acknowledging that you may not understand certain cultural aspects of how the storyteller is choosing to tell that story.
...
Michael W Pisani has written a book on the debates within the United States about what Euro-Americans thought about Native American music, if it was even what they thought ought to be called music, how Native Americans were depicted in European musical traditions and attempts by some Europeans and Americans to take the musical traditions of Native Americans seriously. It's a dense book and I'm still working through it but perhaps I'll manage to write about that book at some point in the future. There are plenty of white people who simply refuse to consider the possibility that Native American music is music worth taking seriously as music. I hope that changes and it provides some context for the half of me that understands the idea Bonnell seems to be getting at in wanting those whites who have no demonstrable history of taking Native American/First Nation cultures and histories seriously to just not be involved in reviewing something they've never been interested in before or to expect the usual free review tickets.
On the other hand, as Adrian Jawort put it not so long ago, an impulse in Native American arts to censor at the point of production may seem well-intentioned but unavoidably more than flirts with chilling effects on speech.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/10/at-larb-adrian-l-jawort-discusses-ya.html
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-dangers-of-the-appropriation-critique/
Jawort, however, was discussing the way cultural appropriation has been a concept employed as a cudgel to stifle publication of works before they can enter the market. That is in many ways a profoundly different scenario than Bonnell's request that only black, indigenous, and people of color reviewers be allowed to review her work. Yet the core question in terms of freedom of speech, or perhaps to make this point delicately, freedom of sufficiently educated speech, remains. One of the risks in a knee-jerk or "hot take" reaction to the explicitly race-based request that white theater reviewers not review the work is to consider the formidable educational/cultural ideal against which the request seems to have been made. If there were a journalist who might "read" as white but who is familiar with the negative effect of the Burke Act and the Dawes Act in promoting the disenfranchisement of Native Americans through the partitioning and fractionation of land ownership then, who knows, Bonnell might consider such a journalist to maybe acceptable if said journalist had some Native ancestry.
That it can look like "one drop" in reverse is obviously hard to avoid.
Since I'm something of an anime fan I can get how readily and how dismissively Western cinematic journalism is full of people who don't know and don't even care to know enough about Japanese cultural, political and religious history to get anything about, say, the sunshine girl folklore that is necessary to get what's going on in Weather With You, which I saw earlier this year. I admit I liked Your Name a lot more but the new film is gorgeous, as I expected it to be, in terms of visual design, color design, and there's a lot i liked about the film. I did sigh a few times when the action and character development came to a screeching halt for what amounted to an anime episode that would be a radwimps music video, though. I'm not making up that band name, by the way, but I digress, as I get to do in a weekend blog post.
That the critical mainstream or power base is white and male in the United States, the UK and Canada is basically beyond dispute. That writers at/for The Guardian would sound off on the subject was inevitable.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/feb/21/yolanda-bonnell-playwright-criticism-color
When Yolanda Bonnell’s play Bug opened in Toronto last week, she had an unusual request for the media: that only people of color review it.
Bonnell, an Indigenous artist from north-western Ontario, creates ceremonial art. Her new play explores the effects of intergenerational trauma on Indigenous women and aims to focus on storytelling.
Bonnell says she has received a number of racist reviews in the past – including one that suggested her work was more suited to reservations. She received an apology for that article, but after discovering that other artists of color had experienced similar treatment, Bonnell decided to pull the plug on white critics for her current show.
“In Toronto, critics are mostly white and male. They come at Indigenous art with a different lens – that often comes back to ‘If I don’t understand it, that means it’s not good or it’s not a valid form of theatre’,” she says. “I don’t mind being critiqued. But at least let it come from a place of knowledge, of understanding what you’re talking about.”
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But – as [Arifa] Akbar points out – there are intersections, and it’s hard to know where to draw the line: “I am a south Asian born in Britain. Am I going to be attuned to Indigenous experience in a theatre in Canada?”
The profession doesn’t just suffer from a dearth of critics of color but also female critics; disabled critics; LGBTQ+ critics and working-class critics, too. For that reason, Shoard says that Bonnell could end up excluding other minorities, even unintentionally: “It seems counter-intuitive. It’s not like everyone who is in a particular profession who doesn’t look exactly like you is some sort of very privileged enemy.”
In particular, her concern is that limiting a profession on the basis of any demographic is a slippery slope. “You can make logic out of anything. If someone said: I’m sick of everything having to be viewed through a woke, feminist lens, so I only want white guys who are over 55 to review my work, there would obviously be justified uproar,” says Shoard.
Then again, if a publication is only going to send one critic, perhaps demanding that they’re a person of color is at least a short-term fix. As Bakare says: “The current landscape is completely lacking in diversity. So setting up a criteria that says, ‘These are the only people I want to write about this’, [solves] that issue straight away.”
For this reason, Akbar says that Bonnell’s exercise is interesting and important. “You do wonder who will be left to do the review. Just by making this request, she is showing how little diversity there is in theatre reviewing.”
...Depending on how we frame the issues at hand we could ask whether or not the role of the critic as the "gatekeeper of success" has actually been the case. To read some of Norman Lebrecht's rants on the decline of criticism and the demise of the prestige of the critic it could seem as though critics have less power now than ever before in the age of blogging and Yelp. It might be salient to ask whether asking white theater critics to not review bug has come at a cultural moment when theater, which I might note the theater critic Terry Teachout has claimed is more marginal, niche and functionally elite now than it's ever been, when theater itself is somewhat at a low ebb. This seems to be something Bonnell is already aware of.
To put it in terms more akin to the Adorno I've read in the last five years, why is success defined so strictly in market terms that white theater critic reviews are considered? When I was a cub reporter getting my journalism degree I recall a theater prof unabashedly describing any coverage of any theater production at the school as publicity for the play. Whether or not what I wrote was informed or thoughtful was not exactly the point, any coverage at all constituted a kind of advertising for the production. I admitted theater wasn't exactly my thing but I was curious to know more and to understand where artists in that field were coming from. So I sat through a few productions that were interesting at the time even if they don't stick with me now. My affection for chamber music, classical guitar, animation and biblical literature probably needs no more advertising than is already at hand in the blog.
I mention that in passing as a transition. What might warrant mention in a place like Get Religion if Get Religion dealt with arts coverage, would be that there's a ceremonial aspect to Bonnell's work that comes up in coverage about the background for why she has requested that white theater critics not review her work. What seems counterintuitive in terms of the rituals of commercial arts production and presentation isn't counterintuitive at all if we consider a ceremonial/ritual context in which the right to speak is predicated on an invitation to observe or participate in a functionally religious ceremony. Protestants won't be offered Eucharist in an Eastern Orthodox service, for instance, because closed communion is practiced, but they will be offered friendship bread.
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2020/02/10/critics-who-arent-indigenous-black-or-people-of-colour-arent-invited-to-bug-yolanda-bonnell-explains-why.html
Indigenous theatre artist Yolanda Bonnell is opening a show called “bug” this week at Theatre Passe Muraille and I’m not invited to review it. Neither is my Star colleague, Carly Maga.
Bonnell and her company, Manidoons Collective, have invited only folks who are Indigenous, Black or people of colour (abbreviated as IBPOC) to write about “bug.”
This choice might immediately strike some as counterintuitive; it certainly runs against the dominant conventions of criticism, in which theatres offer free tickets to all critics actively reviewing in their market, in exchange for reviews of their shows. Those reviews serve a number of functions including critical evaluation, historical record and support for future funding applications and, more immediately, they help get word out that the shows are happening.
Why disrupt this system?
Bonnell has many reasons, starting with the fact that “bug” is an artistic ceremony, which she says “does not align with colonial reviewing practices.” [emphasis added]
Directed by Cole Alvis, “bug” was nominated for four Dora Awards when it was presented in the 2018 Luminato Festival. I saw it in that Luminato run (it’s also played in Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria, and in Toronto in several developmental contexts). It’s a solo show in which Bonnell plays an Indigenous character called The Girl who is working her way through intergenerational trauma while being pursued by manidoons (Ojibwe for bugs), which represent her addictions.
“Ceremony traditionally is a very spiritual and private ritual,” says Bonnell. “What we are doing with artistic ceremony is bringing more community into the ceremony we are performing and presenting onstage … For me, the idea of critiquing an act that is ceremonial feels very wrong” — when that critique comes from people who don’t necessarily have the experience of marginalization that Indigenous, Black or people of colour consistently face.
Given the show’s ceremonial nature, why not perform it in a specifically Indigenous venue rather than a mainstream theatre?
“Part of why we’re doing this is to bring community into the ceremony; bringing anyone who wants to be a part of it,” says Bonnell.
“Whenever anything I write is being produced, somehow the question gets asked: who is this for? I always have two answers. It’s for Indigenous people, particularly Indigenous women, two-spirit, nonbinary and trans folks who have the most marginalized and silenced voices. It’s important that we be seen and validated. The work that I do, I deeply and primarily do it for those people.
“It’s also for people to understand the effects of colonialism,” she continues. “I am still arguing with racists every day and that fact that I still have to have these conversations means that still people don’t understand those effects.”
Non-Indigenous people are invited into her ceremony, Bonnell says, “to act as witnesses. It’s up to them to carry that story and spread it to other people, to use their platform and privilege to explain what the effects of colonialism are” — the effects that in “bug” are manifest in The Girl’s struggles with trauma and addiction.
But aren’t critics (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) important witnesses — particularly given that our function is to communicate publicly about the theatre we see? Previous experience of being reviewed, as well as recent reviews of the work of other IBPOC artists, has Bonnell wary.
When it was presented at Luminato, “bug” received a review that Bonnell and her collaborators felt was “incredibly problematic”: “The person didn’t do their basic research. They thought it was autobiographical and they said it would be better served on reserves.”
...
Western art-religion in the wake of Richard Wagner has very often been art-religion of a nominalist type, the art itself is the religion more than there is necessarily any explicitly religious/spiritual content to the work. White arts critics with some familiarity with LGBTQ activism may default to an essentially secular/secularist mindset in which ceremonial anything that doesn't default to some vaguely defined backdrop of Abrahamic religions (which may be too readily conflated with "colonial" but that's arguably an entirely separate topic since the history of Western and Eastern Christians rejecting sacralism and conflation of church and state goes back thousands of years despite various bids at explicit Christendom ... ). The default to whiteness may trip things up not at the nonbinary/trans/two-spirit (which, for people not familiar with this Native term, fits within the LGBTQ spectrum) because in terms of sexuality theater critics would likely be on board with that in major urban centers, the trip-up might be a ceremonial Native American context within which experiences of trauma were processed. For white urbanites without much interest in religious traditions therapy would be the ceremony or ritual default, so to speak. That's not necessarily how it will play out for Native American or First Nation people.
Then again, when I consider my mixed lineage the white side of the family defaulted to Arminian Pentecostalism while the Native American side tended toward Calvinism/monergistic soteriology within the Christian traditions. One of many white stereotypes about Native American/First Nation people could be assuming that "we" all have religious beliefs that don't map out within the context of Abrahamic religions. As Walter Echo Hawk and David Treuer have pointed out, there are, in fact, Christian Native Americans, so one of the old saws introduced for why they didn't deserve any religious freedoms ran aground on Native Americans taking up religious beliefs white people were trying to get them to believe. If once they also professed Christ how did Christians sitting on judicial benches justify denying them legal rights? That, too, is grist for a whole range of other posts and not really the aim of this post in particular.
Having never actually made a living in the arts or even managed to work in arts journalism, I admit to being on the fence about all of this stuff. In a lot of ways I practically don't care because I realize mainstream music journalism often isn't covering the kinds of stuff I find fascinating, like contrapuntal cycles for solo guitar (six string). I'd rather music journalists wrote about Koshkin or Bogdanovic or Ourkouzounov or Ben Johnston than yet more verbiage about Beethoven and it's not even because I don't like Beethoven. I like a lot of Beethoven's not-choral music. I don't regret seeing a Harold Pinter production but a Harold Pinter production that's riveting one night lapses into "okay, I got it" seeing it the third time.
I don't view the arts in sacramental terms and for those who do I respect that's where they come from and what they believe the arts should achieve. I also try to be at least moderately religiously literate enough to get that a wide variety of religious impulses and experiences can inform work in the arts that aims at a sacramental/ceremonial experience. I doubt whether or not Get Religion will cover this recent situation but it seems as though even in the reporting that has been done on Bonnell's request the "religion angle" has at least come up.
Then again, when I consider my mixed lineage the white side of the family defaulted to Arminian Pentecostalism while the Native American side tended toward Calvinism/monergistic soteriology within the Christian traditions. One of many white stereotypes about Native American/First Nation people could be assuming that "we" all have religious beliefs that don't map out within the context of Abrahamic religions. As Walter Echo Hawk and David Treuer have pointed out, there are, in fact, Christian Native Americans, so one of the old saws introduced for why they didn't deserve any religious freedoms ran aground on Native Americans taking up religious beliefs white people were trying to get them to believe. If once they also professed Christ how did Christians sitting on judicial benches justify denying them legal rights? That, too, is grist for a whole range of other posts and not really the aim of this post in particular.
Having never actually made a living in the arts or even managed to work in arts journalism, I admit to being on the fence about all of this stuff. In a lot of ways I practically don't care because I realize mainstream music journalism often isn't covering the kinds of stuff I find fascinating, like contrapuntal cycles for solo guitar (six string). I'd rather music journalists wrote about Koshkin or Bogdanovic or Ourkouzounov or Ben Johnston than yet more verbiage about Beethoven and it's not even because I don't like Beethoven. I like a lot of Beethoven's not-choral music. I don't regret seeing a Harold Pinter production but a Harold Pinter production that's riveting one night lapses into "okay, I got it" seeing it the third time.
I don't view the arts in sacramental terms and for those who do I respect that's where they come from and what they believe the arts should achieve. I also try to be at least moderately religiously literate enough to get that a wide variety of religious impulses and experiences can inform work in the arts that aims at a sacramental/ceremonial experience. I doubt whether or not Get Religion will cover this recent situation but it seems as though even in the reporting that has been done on Bonnell's request the "religion angle" has at least come up.
