Kaneza Schaal, 2021 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Theater recipient, sits down with CNP Producing Artist Daniel Alexander Jones.
Kaneza Schaal, recipient of the 2021 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Theater, joins a conversation with CNP Producing Artist Daniel Alexander Jones. Schaal's performance works function as profound acts of invitation, presented in a wide range of contexts. The two artists, whose friendship has been furthered by their professional collaborations, discuss Schaal’s many fluencies—of language, history, form, cultures, and aesthetics—that have served to build her lexicon as a maker of theater.
Hosted by Marissa Chibás, this podcast was produced by CalArts Center for New Performance, the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts, Travis Preston Artistic Director and Dean of CalArts School of Theater. Produced by George Lugg and Rory James Leech. Editing and sound engineering by Duncan Woodbury. Podcast theme music by Cristian Amigo. Special thanks to Ravi Rajan, President of CalArts.
For more information on these artists and their work, as well as other CNP projects visit centerfornewperformance.org.
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KANEZA SCHAAL
with DANIEL ALEXANDER JONES
Kaneza Schaal:
As an artist, you can be working in genealogies, particularly as people of color, particularly as women, particularly as queer folk, we are necessarily most often frequently working in traditions where we have not even encountered the full lineages that we are practicing within.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
That's right.
Kaneza Schaal:
But we are practicing within those genealogies. That is some shit. And that is something that I try to share with you anytime I'm teaching or working with younger artists is, is to know that and to trust that and to, and then, and to do the work, to find the shadow under the letters.
Music:
(intro music)
Marissa Chibas:
Welcome to CalArts Center for New Performance—where we follow the artist. I’m your host, Marissa Chibas, speaking to you from our home at California Institute of the Arts—where for five decades a community of artists has come together, where artistic practice knows no bounds. Our podcast is a place where you can encounter visionary artists, as they lead us into creative dialogue, and discuss generous acts of world-making. In this episode, Daniel Alexander Jones, who recently joined CalArts Center for New Performance’s staff as a Producing Artist, sits down with Kaneza Schaal, winner of the 2021 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Theater, whose performance works function as profound acts of invitation, presented in a wide range of contexts: in New York squats, amphitheaters in East Africa, European opera houses, courtyards in Vietnam, and rural auditoriums in the United Arab Emirates. The two artists, whose friendship is furthered by their professional collaborations, discuss Schaal’s many fluencies—of language, history, form, cultures and aesthetics—that have served to build her lexicon as a maker of theater. Their conversation flows easily as they discuss the lineages she carries forth—in her name, and in her work. Explore her efforts to expand both theater’s and the United States’ imagination of itself, and ways we might rehabilitate the narratives that are killing us.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
So, yeah, okay. Kaneza Schaal.
Kaneza Schaal:
Hello, Daniel Alexander Jones.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Hello, Kaneza Schaal. So, we are here together. And I will identify myself by saying I'm Daniel Alexander Jones. I'm a performance artist, playwright, teacher, human. And I'm in this conversation in part in my new role as a producing artist with the Center for New Performance at CalArts, and a fellow Alpert Award winner with one of this year's winners, the incredible Kaneza Schaal. So, I introduce you.
Kaneza Schaal:
I'm so glad to be here with you, Daniel and so excited about your new posts, and what excitement, magic and chaos can be rot. My name is Kaneza Schaal and I make performances.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Yes, you do. And they are sublime. So, I want to start by throwing some questions at you with the knowledge that you can throw them right back in my face or transform them when we can definitely be in a dialogue as spirit moves. But Kaneza Schaal, tell me the origin story of your name. What does it mean and what is it meant to you to walk with that name?
Kaneza Schaal:
Well, thank you for asking. My first name, my first name is actually Mukaneza. My family would fight with me about my pronunciation. They make fun of me for speaking my name as an American. But it was my grandmother's name. So, I'm named after her. And I do have a resemblance towards her, people tell me, and I carry that with great honor. And the name more or less means a person of goodness. And she was a very important figure for the whole community around her and obviously, our family. So, it is a great honor to be bestowed with her name.
And my middle name, Rutagengwa, was my father's name. And the family left Rwanda in the '60s during the earlier political exile genocide, depending on whose language gets used. So, they fled Rwanda and were refugees in Burundi. And he was the first born in Burundi and it was just after Burundi had received independence. And so, he was given the name Rutagengwa, which means one who cannot be ruled by another.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Yes, yes.
Kaneza Schaal:
So, that's my middle name.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
And I must say you walk with that middle name proudly, too.
Kaneza Schaal:
I do, I do, I really do. I cannot escape it. And my last name is Schaal, and it's my mother's name and it runs in her family line. It's from her father, but her mother also took it. And when I think about my mother's family and all of the perverse, obscene and complicated class dynamics of my childhood, one of the things that I am so struck by with my mother's family, regardless of whether I grew up under the poverty line, the fact is she was five generations of college educated women, maybe it's four, but I think it's five.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
That's amazing.
Kaneza Schaal:
What, are you talking about?
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Yeah.
Kaneza Schaal:
What are you talking about? And also, don't try to come for me with any idea of not being a power holding in that way that there was that much a generational kind of access to education for women. It's crazy. But anyhow, I'm going to go to the back rooms to be here with you. So, that's my name.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
You know the back rooms are the good rooms sometimes. But I think I want to just reflect back. We've known each other, I believe, across time, but we've known each other in this form and fashion for several years now.
And those things being a good person, not being ruled by another, by no other and carrying the conviction of the knowledge, the self-knowledge that you come from fully empowered and fully embodied women, fully embodied people who have chosen their own freedom and made their own way, all of that radiates out from you in all respects. I'll call it my nickname for you is K Money, you're the boss. You know what I mean?
And I think it's really important for a listener to understand that you do give off a confidence that's grounded in intergenerational knowledge of self and of journey. And it's also notable that you're dealing with a kind of transcontinental, transcultural, I'm going to say that again because I knocked my phone over. It's also notable that you're dealing with a transcontinental, transcultural background experience. Can you maybe now say a little bit more of the origin story of your journey? Where did you grow up? And when did it become clear to you that you were going to have to be the architect of your own journey?
Kaneza Schaal:
Wow, man. It's so hard. There's the level of contradiction in the lives of the many us's, the level of storytelling that is passed through omission.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Yes ma'am.
Kaneza Schaal:
And the kind of practices of resistance that have been inherent to the survival of the many us's and of our various communities. I always find it so hard to try to generate an origin story. Because that reality exists in a vastness or in a multitude. And I think there's a way that art making gives you a chance to deal with one point in that story.
When I was working on that project GO FORTH that you came to Cairo and did with us. I was really aware of having grown up in the hills of Northern California and the hills of Kigali, Rwanda and what it meant to be from the land of the thousand hills, and then also the hills that I spent my youth in in Northern California, but that both of those places somehow, those hills somehow that's factored into the ecosystem of my imagination.
And then, I think about working in opera now. And I remember as a kid, I had a great aunt and uncle, and they had season tickets, they hadn't really nice season tickets to the opera house. And if they didn't go, then my aunt and her girlfriend would get the tickets. And if my aunt and her girlfriend didn't want to go, then me and my mom were going to get ticket, for a lowest on the chain, but we would occasionally get tickets and get to go sit in the upper house.
And I feel attracted to that form for its bombasity and its bigness and its ability to hold contradiction. There I was, eight years old. My main community was my aunt and her girlfriend and the 10 gay men around her who were the core of our social existence.
They were all dying. It was like the quilt and the upper house were the places that were big enough to hold my life and to hold that amount of death. I remember the smell of death. That is what remember when I was a kid, and the ferocious celebration. I remember the parties when people were dying.
And I was a kid, but I remember this like, people who built community for themselves on their own terms. And we're celebrating it even as people were literally taking their last breaths in these rooms, and the triumph of it and the just ceremony and partiness of it. And it felt like the quilt and the opera house were places that could hold whatever was happening.
And then, I'm not a very funny person, but I like funny people. My partners are really funny person. And I really believe in humor and I care about it in my work. And I think about all of my aunties and the lives that they built coming from growing up in exile, and then what does it mean to repatriate a country so the family left in the '60s. And then all of my aunties repatriated after the genocide in 1994. And they made extraordinary lives. These women, I can't even begin to tell you who these women are. We would need 75 podcasts for each of them.
And there's a kind of playfulness and humor that they all hold. And it is so often in that humor that the most information travels. I've tried to ask them 100 times about when did the family leave? What was the moment? What was the moment that everyone decided to go? Why did went on to get left behind?
And you don't really get a story, but in moments of laughter off to the side, all of this information gushes. And so, there's something about humor as this carrier of the big stories and the hard stories. And again, one of the spaces that can hold stuff that doesn't make sense at the same time, but that is the way we transfer information. That's how I talk about my origins.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
That is a sumptuous origin story. I adore it. And it contains, again, it contains the DNA of who you are, and how you move in the world, and what fuels your work. And I've been at work for quite a while on this kind of evolving theory and set of practices around what I'm calling Afromysticism. And part of what I think about is this reach for the numinous in the spaces between things. And in particular, the dynamic space between contradictory elements.
And so, there's a kind of electricity that that humor you described. That electricity moves us among several points, through several points. It is a connective tissue to say, "I can have a perspective on my own experience. I can remember that experience. I can look at it from a distance. I can comment on it all at the same time." And so, it makes sense that your origin story like you is intercontinental, intergenerational possessed of these incredible stark and vivid contradictions.
Maybe another thing to share with the listeners, I know very few artists as disciplined as you. And it is something that I adore about watching you work and getting the opportunity when I do to work with you, is I know you're bringing your A game. I know you're bringing this word that is often linked with white supremacy, this idea of rigor, which I think of as the kind of virtuosity that suffuses Black culture, where it's like, you've got to know how to play your notes. Then you can play any note you want to but you got to know how.
Kaneza Schaal:
Go ahead, Daniel.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
And so, I'm curious if you can talk about how did you cultivate your discipline as an artist? Were there traditions, schools, companies that you dipped in and out of or trained with or walked with? And what did they offer you? What were the tools that you gained?
Kaneza Schaal:
I think there's an origin story there as well.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Great.
Kaneza Schaal:
Which is when I got out of school, I moved into my father's squat in the East Village. And it was a squat that he took over after Tent City. He'd been living in the park and a bunch of artists took over this building. And at that time, it was one of the last holdouts of sucker to the man. We'll do the work ourselves. We're not going to cut a deal with the city.
And the story of that building goes that they went in after they busted up tent city. They took over the building. They worked all summer. They moved everything out of it. It was just piled with garbage and debris, cleaned the whole building out. Working, working, working. First snow fell, winter comes, winter comes. No electricity, no heat, no way to get through the winter. The first snow falls, they're opening a door in the basement, banging on the walls. They opened a wall to clear it out and they find $3,000 in cash hidden in the wall.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Wow.
Kaneza Schaal:
And that was the money that allowed them to go to the hardware store and buy all the equipment they needed to illegally tap into the city's water and electricity.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Wow.
Kaneza Schaal:
So, when I moved into the squat, that's still the situation. And it was this like fierce contradiction to the developer empire that was taking over the neighbourhood. And even to the squats who had made deals with the city, we eventually devised to change a bunch of inclusionary zoning laws. We ended up making a deal with the city and the life of that building has transformed.
But I think that the community of artists of folks from all around the world who against all odds decided to build a vision in opposition to the capitalist empire around them and to create lives on their own terms and ways they wanted to live, and then that being the bedrock from which I was developing practice in the world for the first time, that is a foundational genealogy in my practice of making.
There's a thing that you and I have talked about a lot and one of the many blessings and extraordinary possibility makings that knowing you has offered me is the idea that we are often working in traditions before we know who we're in conversation with because many of our foremothers did not make it into the history books.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
That's right.
Kaneza Schaal:
And there are the shadow on the pages have the letters of what we studied in school or what got talked about at a party depending on which party you were at. But that has been such an awesome information gathering for me that has happened in dialogue with you, where some of the shadows on the page, some of the genealogies that I was making in relationship to in part no doubt because some of those fools have passed through that squat or the fools of the squat pass through the places that these other people were at, like the genealogy is literal. It lives in physics. It lives in our material world.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
And in kitchens in the lower east side.
Kaneza Schaal:
And in kitchen, and in kitchens. But the idea that as an artist, you can be working in genealogies, particularly as people of color, particularly as women, particularly as queer folk, we are necessarily most often frequently working in traditions where we have not even encountered the full lineages that we are practicing within.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
That's right.
Kaneza Schaal:
But we are practicing within those genealogies. That is some shit. And that is something that I try to share with anytime I'm teaching or working with younger artists is to know that and to trust that and to do the work to find the shadow under the letters. Okay. Some of the letters for me when I was in school, the Wooster Group came up to my college.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
And you were at Wesleyan?
Kaneza Schaal:
I was at Wesleyan University.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Got it.
Kaneza Schaal:
Yeah. Liberal arts school in Connecticut. And the Wooster Group came up. They were talking about a piece. They weren't performing. And I remember, Kate Valk was there and one of the founding members of the company and actress. And she had these headphones on, and I can't remember what's happening, but it was a conversation, but she had these headphones on. And she was clearly listening to something else.
And I remember it was like, "Oh, so rude. Why is she on her headphones." And I was captivated. I was like, "What is she doing? Who is she? I want to know everything about her. I can't take my eyes off her." And I knew I wanted to work with kids when I was graduating. And one of my professors was like, "Wooster Group has a summer program for public high school students. Let me call them. See if they need your help."
So, I got a job working on the Summer Institute and moved into the squat. And then I got asked to be the company manager. And I didn't know what a company manager was. I was like three weeks into doing the Summer Institute. I was 21 years old. I was like, "I don't know what a company manager is." It was an office job. And it's like, "I don't want to work in an office."
But it was an opportunity to stand around the work. It was opportunity to tour the world and to be around this work, be around this community of artists and enter the world. And that's a company run by three women. And it's a company that owns their own building and has created this home from which a genealogy of white avant-garde artists have been born.
If you name any white avant-garde artist, I'm using avant-garde loosely. But if you name a white experimental performance maker in the United States, that chances are they physically went through that building, that they are directly tied to the lineage that that building bore.
And something that I think a lot about now is how does home function? And how does home function differently for the us's for whom our survival has always been dependent on community, dependent on the economies of generosity and the alternative economies that exist within our communities. And how does home and the birthing of genealogy relate to the us's when it comes to home? And how does that also a model to look at in terms of what home looks like?
And then, there's so many artists around that company. So, that's how I met John Collins, and Elevator Repair Service and Richard Maxwell and New York City Players and spent several years on that kind of European tour circuit making and sharing work, which is kind of crumpled, doesn't really exist in the way it did when I was touring with those companies.
And being in that tour circuit, also made me think a lot about what does it mean to develop places where creative conversations happen in south, south contexts, so that it's not, I go to Belgium, and see the Sri Lankan dance performance, and the South African puppet show down the street, and we all talk to each other at a cafe in Brussels.
But what does it mean to take my work to the festival to the Ubumuntu Festival in Kigali, Rwanda, and then to the festival in Cairo that we went to together? And then through that, to get artists from the festival Cairo to go to the festival in Rwanda, and the kind of building of network and building of south-south conversation that happens when we get to share our work in south, south contexts?
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Absolutely. There's one of the things is so evident in your description is that for those of us who are in that process. So, I'm going to go back to your deeply pointed and insightful statement about what it means to recognize yourself working in lineages that you haven't yet discovered the lineage for. That what one finds when you do start to uncover those names and uncover those practices.
There's a recuperative part of that, that you have to go back and you have to remember it quite literally. Bring it back into embodiment. And along with it comes the history, the context, the cultural context, the perspective to say, "My goodness, you recognize that we have," I'm going to call it south-south to use your language, we have long deep histories of our aesthetic traditions that are concurrent with. And in some cases source for the western avant-garde, the western white avant-garde.
And so, it's a very powerful thing to feel. And so, I hear that in your journey here. And I think I very much appreciate that you've been part of multiple worlds. So, your choices now as a mature artist are grounded in your political and cultural ethic.
And so, I'm curious if we might do a little bit of a dive into some of the pieces themselves, so that I might ask you about some of the gifts that making these works gave back to you. And I have a leading question for each one, but you can toss that aside, if you wish but I want to come back to GO FORTH. I want to start actually with JACK &.
And so, this is an extraordinary piece that you made that in many ways was an embodied collaboration, not only with your direct collaborator and dealt with questions around imprisonment and around captivity and around release and about integration and reintegration and the notion, the nature of freedom and freedom of the imagination, freedom of the body, all of these incredible things.
But it also was a chance for you I think as an artist to collaborate with different strata of the culture in the country, the nation. What does it mean to center your art in conversations and to demand that the process of that art making live in ways that make the result not simply a curiosity to be consumed, but rather a deeply rooted process? Can you speak to JACK & and speak to what did it teach you as a maker, this thing? And if you want to describe it in whatever way that feels true to you.
Kaneza Schaal:
We make through collectivity. We create from collectivity and we give on to a collectivity. And anything that tries to bend us towards the singular genius, white western logic of singularity obsession with fixedness, obsession with the individual is just an erasure of everyone else's labor in any enterprise. And I say that across the arts, whether you are a writer or a painter and you work alone in your room, or whether you're us, who literally work through collectivity, and give them to collectivities.
So, for me, the baseline of my artistic practice is the collectivities through which I work and engaging with people and building community and building relationships and thinking with people and figuring out artists that excite me and who do I excite, and how do we get together and think about ideas together and make things. So, that is always the bedrock.
And JACK & happened because I met an artist. I met this incredible artist, Cornell Alston. I saw him perform when he was serving prison time in Upstate New York. And he played Ma Rainey in August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in full drag at an all-male correctional facility, and the performance was...
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Genius.
Kaneza Schaal:
... overwhelming, overwhelming. He's extraordinary. And I was like, "What an incredible artist." And I found out a while later that he had gotten out and finished serving his 33-year sentence. And I tracked him down and was like, "Yo, you want to make some art together?" And it was this sense of I didn't know what would come of it. But it was a sense of invitation into community and curiosity.
And he was so excited to be like, "What? You want to pay me to act? Great." He'd been acting for 20 years and a gifted and deeply practiced artist. And we actually started working on GO FORTH together. And this is a long way to get to JACK &, but I think it talks about practice and the how of the work.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Please.
Kaneza Schaal:
And the why of the work. So, we were working on GO FORTH before he came to the residency at Baryshnikov Art Center with a few other artists. And ultimately, as we were figuring out how that work was going to premiere, so many issues came up with the New York City Parole Board that Cornell wasn't able to premiere GO FORTH.
And so, it was like, wait, we have all this unfinished artistic business. In order to pursue this collaboration, in order to answer the questions we started in, like, hey, what does it mean to share practice for some time? We have to make a piece in which reentry into society after serving time is part of the bedrock of how we are making and how we are thinking.
The fact is, New York State is one of our collaborators, and they are a shitty collaborator. The New York City Parole Board is a shit collaborator, but they're on our team. And we actually can't get away from them. So, what does it mean to build a work through that creative ecosystem?
And it brought up all kinds of questions for us in how we were making things. And ultimately, we got to this question of how do you think about not only the time someone has served but the measure of internal life that gets given to the state that which cannot be measured?
There all these grants with the metrics and demographics and art, and prison and artists were like, we just like started filling some of those out. We're like, we can't even try to communicate what we're thinking about through these measures of success or through this reduction to numbers that is part of the violence that we're trying to think about together.
So, I made this piece, JACK &, which was our asking you that question, how do you think about not only the time one serves but the measure of dreaming that is given to the state? And that's also with every piece in some way, it's an essay for me. Every project is an essay. And this one, and an essay pointed at how we rehabilitate the narratives that are killing us.
So, for this piece, we are obsessed with this guilt innocence dichotomy in which the greatest miscarriage of justice is the sentencing of an innocent person. And every now and again, a project or an initiative tries to think about, "Okay, what are the other demands? What are the societal influences that weigh in to an individual's guilt or innocence? What are the hundreds of years of history that weigh into individual's guilt and innocence?" But at the end of the day, we are obsessed with that guilt-innocence dichotomy.
And that dichotomy doesn't sit so easily on millions of people who are in prison. So, if we are a nation of dreamers and we are imprisoning that amount of our population, what is the debt we pay as a society for that dreaming, for that dreaming that is taken, that is co-opted by the state, and then the dreaming that continues to be taken?
So, it's like, how many lawyers does it take to get a work release to premiere a work? It turns out, it takes seven lawyers, the amount of collaboration with the state that it took for that piece to happen, and understanding that as the work and understanding the lexicons that we all brought together.
I think that part of the reason I started making my own work is because I'm excited to speak a lot of languages. I speak a lot of languages, and I believe great art requires speaking a lot of languages, historical languages, cultural languages, aesthetic, formal, experiential languages.
And so, with JACK &, we really started with building that lexicon that we'd all work from. And we had everything from feminist, minimalist painters to the honeymooners, thinking about kind of American sitcoms and dreaming cultures to John Canoe traditions and traditions around African diaspora, centering in West Africa moving outward, but ways that ancestors are welcomed back into society or cotillion balls as a reentering into society. So, I think ultimately, the thing with JACK & is that there was no metaphor. It was a practice of reentry.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
That is so beautifully said. And it was again resonant in the room. I was fortunate enough to see it many times. I became a bit of a JACK & groupie. And part of why I wanted to go back was because it felt so holy to me.
And again, when I talk about that, this question of mysticism, it is never within I would call an afro-diasporic conversation about the idea of escape from reality or some desire to move away from life's contradictions, but rather how is our reality suffused with our capacity to experience across past, present, future to welcome, as you're saying, the ancestral presence and to tell the truth, give testimony inside of those spaces between.
And what really hit me I remember so vividly as well as, the sense of Cornell himself and the way that you attended to the environment and populated that environment with some things that marked his before and his after even down to an orange quest soda can was an old fashioned can from when he would have gone in. And what was the difference when he came out.
And the idea that not only are we dealing with that individual's dream, over time, what that as you're talking about the imaginative toll that is given away to the state. But we're also recognising the passing of heroes and the ways in which in the midst of them, there is a power to having someone "reenter" and witness what has changed.
And not all of those changes have been for the better by a long shot, so that I felt also his authority, his wisdom, and his read, if you will, on all of us in that room. And all of us were implicated together in that conversation.
And yeah, I mean, I also felt like there's something that you've done in GO FORTH and something that you've done as well in JACK &and I think it is part of CARTOGRAPHY, which I would like to get to in a moment as well, which is, I see in your work, when I see Black men in your work in particular, I see them whole, I see them resonant and multidimensional. I see them they're sovereign on their own terms, in a way that brought me to tears when I first saw it in GO FORTH, and I said, "My god, I don't get to see this very often."
Where the world is such that the mirror is full, and reflective and clear, and is not born from or moored to a narrative that is a killing narrative. There's no place for that in your world. You are making the whole thing.
It's so important to recognize that this is a global conversation. And that I'mma call Black aesthetics a global aesthetics. They are things that stretch and inform and teach and draw from and contribute to. And are durable and dynamic. Can you speak to what drew you to that project? And maybe what was your process and maybe one moment that really rises up to you a story that really says, "Ah, this is the why."
Kaneza Schaal:
So, CARTOGRAPHY came out of time that I spent in Germany with Christopher Myers, my artistic partner, and person who I like to spend my time with and collaborate with on life. And we went to Germany in 2016 to Munich. It was that moment where our headlines here read not unlike they read now, 30,000 people arriving a day.
And at that time, the perception was that that was primarily folks coming from Syria. When we were in Germany, the young people who we worked with were from all over the world. They were from Somalia and Afghanistan and Iraq and Eritrea and Nigeria. And we were there to kind of lead creative workshops and be in conversation with young people. For us, we were thinking about what are the tools as artists that we have to kind of offer to moments of crisis, we call doctors, we call lawyers, and what are the tools that we have.
And if there were one story, there was a moment where these two girls, this girl from Nigeria and this girl from Syria, we had been doing a kind of drawing and mapping exercise all together. They've been living together for three months. But everyone's scared to help them talk about things. Everyone's scared to talk to them. So, there are a lot of platforms for exchange.
And so, ultimately, all we were doing was kind of providing a platform for the young people to have creative conversations with one another. And the girl from Nigeria turns to the girl from Syria and says, "What? You two were on a boat on the Mediterranean. You two were on an inflatable raft on the Mediterranean. You know exactly what I'm talking about. We have to go tell our sisters not to get on these boats."
And the thing that was meaningful in that moment was the platform for exchange, the platform for the young people to talk to each other. And so, CARTOGRAPHY was our way to kind of answer that work and continue making a platform for all folks to think about the histories of migration that have led to the moments that we're in, whether those are recent or many generations past.
And so, CARTOGRAPHY was a theater piece that we made towards those ends. And I think the essay in CARTOGRAPHY is particularly in the United States, the kind of amnesia of the crises that have led people to the US on boats for hundreds of years fleeing crisis, looking for opportunities to build new lives, the Huguenots.
But this sense of, if we can begin to understand that we all have histories of migration that have led to this historical moment, that perhaps we can begin to think about this historical moment more precisely, more humanely, and in ways that facilitate greater communication and care for people who are in crisis now.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
One of the things is typical, if I can say that of your work, because each piece is so distinct, but I'm thinking about your description of the crises, and I'm thinking about duration. And I always, in my experience of sitting in a room that you are running, that where you're making, watching a show that you've created that has one of the things that typifies your work is an incredibly rigorous and deep visual language always. There's one that it feels like it's so generous for whatever piece you're making.
But there's some way that you put on stage, those who are no longer living. I always feel the presence of the ghosts, of the ancestral presence of spirit, and it doesn't feel like a shadow, as much as it feels like I'm being given an opportunity to understand interdimensionality, that there are more ways of understanding our reality available to us at any given moment than our material adhesion would allow.
So, what you do is you loosen that. You stretch it. And sometimes it's the way that light will move across a wall. Sometimes it has to do with the tempo with which you score your actors moving in space. Sometimes it has to do with even a shift in perspective in language that tense changes very subtly.
And yet, I always have this sense that you're teaching us about time. And you're teaching us about the changes that time maybe both engenders and bears witness to. And to dive into the next show, which I think this podcast will come out before folks get an opportunity to go see your incredible exploration of King Leopold.
And I want to talk about that because that piece is a very particular history that you decided to engage. And I'm curious about if you take my premise that you do work in and across time, then what does it mean for you to make work? In this case, King Leopold is about a very particular historical figure, particularly impactful story about the roots of and the architecture of the kind of global cataclysmic violence that we saw in the 20th century and that we're seeing now.
But also, you could, if you want, also go back to GO FORTH, where you're dealing with ancient world and you're dealing with stories funerary texts that have been there for thousands of years. But you bring a very particular thing to your study of history. And I'm curious if you can talk about how you engage it, why you engage it, and how you animate it.
Kaneza Schaal:
Maybe because I was around a lot of death and there's been a lot of death around my people. Maybe because my dad died when I was 25. And the presence of his absence was already a massive part of my making. And then I had to encounter that again when he was physically absent. Maybe because both of my parents, while their spiritual practices didn't adhere to majority spiritual practices, they were both very spiritually-led people who often lived in other dimensions. My mother, I would say continues to.
In many ways, I feel like I've really chosen this dimension that we're in right here. And with that, I can't help but be in some way consumed by the presence of the absent, or by the presence of that which cannot be seen. I also think that again, so much of the us's survival, the many us's survival has been built, carrying and communicated through that which cannot be seen.
So, the presence of that absence is a material that we necessarily carry when we work in a room. In the same way we carry light, in the same way we carry text, in the same way we carry costumes. KLII is an exorcism of King Leopold II. We rarely look at someone like Leopold without saying he's bad and we're done with him. But they're new Leopold's all the time.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
All the time.
Kaneza Schaal:
And to exorcise these great men and the entrenching legacies of violence and terror that they have wrought to exorcise colonialism, slavery, imperialism, there is a process of looking inward and looking outward that is demanded. And so, with KLII trying to build that process to exercise the residue of colonialism in our everyday lives. A lot of the materials in the show are materials that we encounter daily, that are still remnants of Leopold's reign in Congo.
And the way that the materials, the products and the labor have been transmitted through different western empires but still exist in western empire today in our cell phones and soap in the palm oil across West Africa. So yeah. It's also the first time I'm performing in my own work. I came up performing with all those companies we were talking about before. And in thinking about this piece, I was like, "Oh, that's right for me. I should do that."
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Yeah, it is.
Kaneza Schaal:
It is my role.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
And how, and how.
Kaneza Schaal:
It is my role.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
I cannot wait for folks to see this, this piece. It is an unforgettable evening of theater, I'll say that much like to start with. But I'm really moved by this principle. Number one, I would say as someone who has both made work on other bodies and who has performed in my own work, I do think that there is a tell when you're in your own stuff because there's a way that your performance is a compositional act. There is no way that you're not still making when you're performing.
And so, that every night there is something so spectacular and that that is intentional. That's part of the tradition that, I think about the very often will quote the late great Betty Carter who said, "I never listened to my own recordings because I would run the risk of repeating myself." For her, the emphasis was always what will move the night that I stand in front of that microphone distinctly. What is being called for, even if I might be playing the same setlist so to speak.
In our case, saying the same lines going through the same blocking et cetera. There is always going to be an infusion of the present moment and its demands and its invitations. So, there is a way where I'm watching it. I'm like, oh, yeah, when you watch every gesture, your pinky, your dexterity, the precision of every movement, every breath is itself compositional.
But then the other thing that I really want to lift up and kind of underscore is I think it goes without saying that we are bearing right now the brunt of our desacralisation, our deritualization that not having the rituals to attend to the demands that our world places upon us psychically, emotionally, intellectually only leads to further damage and further decay, really.
And so, I think about what you're doing with this project in light of in the United States, how many Confederate statues have been taken down, for example? But no ritual has been done to exorcise what they stood for. And that you can take the statue away, and the ghost is still going to stand right where it always stood. Its energetic signature remains unchanged.
And so, how your wisdom as a maker is that you know how to take the symbolic language and deploy it inside of a ritual context, so that you actually get into the bone marrow of the thing. And anybody who thinks that this is just thought, go see the show, because you all ain't ready. I'm trying to tell you, you are not ready. Um, I wanna, I wanna read you a thing and get your opinion on it.And then I have a few short questions as we wrap up. So this is from a book that I'm deep in as I'm, as I'm working on the Afromysticism, uh, concept. Um, and I'm invite you to write an essay about this. That's that's off the thing. I have a whole thing to tell you about. But, um, um, in this, uh, Fraya Berkman who is a late musicologist wrote this book, uh, monument eternal, which is the life of Alice Coltrain. And she talks in this particular passage about the moment when Coltrain having inherited, you know, the legacy of her, her dead husband is making her own music. And the expectation that others had, that the music would be like his right. And so I'm gonna deploy this statement to say to you, like you're an inheritor of tradition, but you're doing something very different. You know, you're maybe deploying it in ways that are different. So here, uh, she's quoting, uh, the basis Cecil MCBE, uh, who is talking about the moment when Alice Coltrane's, uh, album Todd, the Alda came out and people were like, wow, what, why is it not doing what we expected to do? And, and he said, um, you know, uh, talking about, uh, there were those who were much more eloquent than we were with words like Malcolm X, Martin Luther Kings, the Angela Davis's. We let them have that verbally, but we said it in music and we were able to say it in music, we got across equally as well as they did with what we expressed. So that's that old school tradition. So Alice Coltrain, when she arrived was more subtle in her statements from a very spiritual point of view, she was very quiet expressing the very sounds and waves of spirits and essence of the God odds and of the earth, where we were trying to come from with the loudness and bombast of our music. She made these statements in a more delicate, graceful, articulate, and uniform way than we did. And so part of what I wanna, I want to sort of observe and also ask is you, you know,
You are, as I stated earlier, I believe someone who is actively weaving new fabric of our tradition. You are extending it. You are moving in ways that are to some, they might call iconoclastic. You are moving in ways that I think of as being deeply integrative.
But you are definitely harnessing some of those aspects, like the politic is undeniable, but sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it is subtle, sometimes it is about the most tender gesture at the core of one of your pieces. And I'm just curious if you can reflect on that. Where do you feel the interiority, the quiet, the observational aspects of your craft come into play if you do at all? You may not, you may be like, "Daniel, that's bullshit."
Kaneza Schaal:
I am expanding myself to receive your care and love and thought, it is so big and it requires me to grow into myself and I'm grateful and you have given that to me since you came in GO FORTH. And we first met.
Like, quiet on stage, I don't know. They're the ideas for me that drive the work. But the audience doesn't have to think what I think about it. Audiences are collaborators. And that's so much of my work is about not only what are you making on stage, but how are you building the frame? How are you thinking about how the work is made and how the work is going to live in the world?
So, with JACK &, that meant collaborations with everyone from DAs offices to grassroots organizations to serve time to think about what are the kinds of invitation. What is the profound act of invitation required to invite audiences central to the work who have been disinvited for generations into these architectures and the profound act of invitation?
And these are great architectures. This is a great place to go. It's a beautiful ... Take a girl for a night in the theater. Most often I don't think that it's the architecture that is inherently violent. I think it is how the architecture has been deployed for generations.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Exactly. Yes, yes.
Kaneza Schaal:
And so, it is an uphill battle against the forces that render our cultural institutions that ought to serve publics into highly privatized spaces. But what is the profound act of invitation that can move up that crazy ass mountain? And I joyfully run up that mountain slipped down and run up it and slipped down and it is a practice of running up the mountain.
And every time you run up it, you learn a new technique to stick one peg in, so that next time you run up it, you have a peg to hold on and you can get one more peg up the mountain. And then you slipped out, and then you run back up. But now you got 10 pegs.
And that is a joyful practice to be of how do you invite people in the room because that also just helps me want to show up and make the work. When the kids from El Salvador who had just crossed the border show up in the middle of the government lockdown when we premiere CARTOGRAPHY at the Kennedy Center, and the only five of the 75 kids we wanted to come showed up.
But the Salvadorian actress who tells this beautiful story about her family, everyone talking to each other afterwards. And then they go home and all the parents who thought, "Hell no, I'm not letting you go to a government building in the middle of this shutdown over a border wall, that must be a trap. Nobody gives us things for free. Why would anyone want us anywhere? Everyone is very clear. We are not invited anywhere. That's a trap. I'm not sending you."
When the news got out, we didn't get all 75 folks there, but we got like, 35 plus family members to come see the work. And so, that climbing up that mountain of invitation and falling down it is remains a joyful practice.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
And you're so good at it. And you're so good at building human institution. So, I think that if I look back at what you've made in the time that I've known you, I look back and I see that there is a dynamic, vital and durable web of connection that attends each one of these pieces. You've made community everywhere you go, and it's lasting.
And there was that profundity that happens when we say we're all transgressing a little here. We're all reaching a little here. But tonight, we're together and we're going to laugh together. And this is a moment that we'll carry with us of human gathering that led to joy. That is a possibility. It is a potential in our world.
There can be a human gathering that leads to witness. There can be a human gathering that leads to remembering and to consecrating. There can be a human gathering that is an exorcism to make space for us to breathe.
And I feel like you are among the most human artists I know and you are doing this work to help us recuperate our capacity to be with each other in generative and resonant ways by looking at the unspeakable, looking at the intractable and not being afraid to, as you say, be this good person who can be ruled by no other who comes from your lineage of power, powerful women.
I thank you Kaneza Schaal. It is always an honor to speak with you and have any time with my friend K Money.
Kaneza Schaal:
Hear, hear. Daniel Alexander Jones, thank you for the history writing that you make, for the art that you make that inspires us all and for the shoulder standing implied. And thank you for carrying the genealogies that you are carrying and for the work you are doing that they may be on pages, so that some next generations will spend less time digging for the genealogies and more time pointing their arrows forward.
Daniel Alexander Jones:
Ashay. Thank you, my love.
Music:
(Outro Music)
Marissa Chibas:
That was 2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner Kaneza Schaal in conversation with Daniel Alexander Jones for Cal Arts Center for New Performance. This podcast was produced by CalArts Center for New Performance, the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts, Travis Preston, Artistic Director and Dean of CalArts School of Theater. Produced by George Lugg and Rory James Leech. Editing and Sound Engineering by Duncan Woodbury. Podcast theme music by Christian Amigo. Special thanks to Ravi Rajan, President of CalArts. For more information on this and other CNP podcasts, visit centerfornewperformance.org. You can find more episodes and subscribe for upcoming ones at centerfornewperformance.org/podcast or find us on your favorite source for podcasts, including iTunes and Spotify. Thank you for listening. Until next time.