[STAGE]
NAKED JOY
THE U.S. WAS LARGELY BUILT ON SQUATTING.
{BY BILL O’DRISCOLL}
DRISCOLL@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW 8 p.m. Sat., March 30. New Hazlett Theater, 6 Allegheny Square East, North Side. $20-25. 412-237-8300 or www.warhol.org
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[BOOKS]
THOUGHTS OF
HOME {BY BILL O’DRISCOLL}
Y
OU MIGHT assume it’s illegal to live
Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show
By forcing herself to explore subjects she’d rather not, and using theatrical forms that discomfit her, playwright Young Jean Lee pushes her work in fascinating directions. Previous touring shows by the Brooklyn-based Lee have addressed Korean-American stereotyping (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven) and, in the searing The Shipment, racism. “I have a tendency to be somewhat apolitical, and so I tend to do a lot of political work,” says Lee in a phone interview. Her latest is 2012’s Untitled Feminist Show, part of The Andy Warhol Museum’s Off the Wall series. It’s virtually dialogueless — daunting enough for a playwright — and all six women performers are nude throughout. Partly, Lee meant to correct a theatrical bias. “I had never seen female bodies that deviated from an idealized norm [and] that I wanted to be like,” she says. “What could the world look like if people with female bodies had no shame and felt free to behave however they wanted?” Lee developed the show with performers from dance, cabaret and burlesque. “They were just really huge personalities, which I needed if they were going to be nude,” says Lee. The Pittsburgh show features four original cast members: cabaret artist Amelia Zirin-Brown, dancer Katharine Pyle, trans performer Becca Blackwell and performance artist Hilary Clark. Improvs were shaped by Lee and co-creators Faye Driscoll (choreography) and Morgan Gould (direction). The hour-long show, with music and video projections, unfolds as a series of scenes, from a ritualistic entrance to sequences in which pink parasols are used either as cabaret props or weapons. The show (co-commissioned by the Warhol) has gotten mostly positive reviews. New Yorker critic Hilton Als called it “one of the more moving and imaginative works I have ever seen on the American stage.” Lee says the nudity hasn’t distracted audiences very much. In fact, absent gender signifers like clothing and make-up, she says, “There’s something about nudity that makes the performers less gendered.” Some viewers, she says, have objected that a “feminist show” should be more politically confrontational than this one. But Lee says that criticism is itself telling. “I realized joy makes people uncomfortable,” she says. “Joy is seen as feminine. … People equate power with aggression.” But her performers, she says, “are powerful in their joy.”
in someone else’s abandoned property without permission. But things aren’t always that clear-cut in the world of squatting as explored by Hannah Dobbz in her engaging and provocative new book, Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States (AK Press). “Property,” in the contemporary American mind, is sort of sacredly ossified, with legal title-holders assumed to have nearabsolute rights to use it — or not — as they wish. But in Dobbz’s historical panorama, from rural rent strikes to contemporary urban squats, the U.S. has been home to very different conceptions of the land. The local author is a former squatter who sees squatting as everything from a form of resistance to capitalist culture to “a pragmatic alternative to the housing crisis.” Given that Native Americans in colonial and frontier times had no notion of personal property, let alone “title,” the U.S. was largely built on squatting. Europeans erroneously called the land wilderness and claimed it by right of “civilization.” But as Dobbz writes, there was a twist: Land that colonists and, later, the U.S. government traded for or seized was assumed to have a market value. In other words, even during the government’s long history of awarding land to illegal settlers, that land’s “use value” as farm, ranch or timberland didn’t sufficiently account for its price. U.S. law gives primacy to market value, and that results in speculation and hoarding of land and buildings, even ones long abandoned. Highlights of Nine-Tenths of the Law include Dobbz’s account of an anti-rent movement in mid-1800s upstate New York, where for 26 years a sometimes-
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 03.27/04.03.2013
Hannah Dobbz, author of Nine-Tenths of the Law
violent popular uprising fought a feudal arrangement under which a single wealthy family held vast tracts of land in perpetuity.
HANNAH DOBBZ speaks 3-5 p.m. Sat., April 6, as part of The People’s University series. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh — Main Branch, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Free. 412-622-3151
Although that particular landholding practice had been outlawed in England centuries earlier, the law and its armed deputies backed the property owners. Squatters’ associations that promoted squatter rights at the state and federal
level persisted into the 20th century. And the issues remain. To discuss challenges facing contemporary squatters, Dobbz draws on her own experience squatting in an abandoned Oakland, Calif., warehouse several years ago. (The experience inspired her fine 2007 short film “Shelter: A Squatumentary,” which in turn sparked Nine-Tenths of the Law.) In the wake of the 2009 mortgage meltdown, about 10 percent of this country’s 132.5 million housing units are vacant yearround, according to U.S. Census figures. The housing market is driven by what Dobbz calls “the myth of scarcity.” But in reality, she says, “There are more buildings and resources than can be utilized.”