Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Grace Paley's Political Arts: Text and Ritual Performance in the Women's Pentagon Action

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/cww/vpp023

1754-1484

J. Bell,

Race, History, and American Society

The bright red curtain opens and I am already spinning. I can barely see through the eyeholes of the red-horned demon mask I am wearing, three times the size of my own head. I am riding a hobby-horse dragon in a fringed red devil costume, my left hand gripping the reins, my right arm swinging a wooden sword. On the floor below me is a world of multi-colored flat cutouts: trees, houses, trucks, cars, garbagemen, washerwomen, and children. I am a giant menace to this tiny world; my spinning dance performs my threat. The crash of cymbals and drums builds. I am getting dizzy of course, but if I time it right I’ll reach the climax of the dance without knocking over any of the puppets at my feet just before the last clash cues the curtain to close. It's an exciting evening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1981, and I am in the midst of my career as a member of Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater. Our show, Ah!, or the First Washerwoman Cantata, has caused New York Times critic Mel Gussow to gush that Bread and Puppet is “a national living treasure” (360). The show is unusual for us, not because it is a fantastic story about an everyday world threatened by massive destruction (after all that has been a persistent recent theme), but because it is quite specifically about a real individual – Peter's friend Grace Paley, the writer, who, in fact, is in the audience this night. Our heroine is a woman whose “business of life,” as Schumann puts it in an illustrated program, is concerned with “spaghetti, husband, block associations, children, cops, flower pots, telephone, neighbors, friends, enemies,” (the very things my demon character is threatening) and, most importantly, a “revolution” whose cry is “Washerwomen of the World Unite” (5–6). In our spectacle, the washerwomen are victorious.