Juba Stage Play
JUBA
by Stephen Johnson
This play was first produced in an earlier draft in March 1997 at the Festival of Original Theatre, Robert Gill Theatre, Toronto, with the following cast:
Historian Carm Iachelli;
Document #1 -- Kristiana Painting;
Document #2 -- Julie Payne;
Juba -- Jennifer Johnson.
Original Music and Sound by Simon Wood.
The Stage Manager was Marlene Moser.
This version was first produced at the Edge Festival in June 1997 at the Annex Theatre, Toronto. The cast remained the same, except for the Historian, played by Stephen Johnson. The Stage Manager was Tim Pace.
Note: The two "documents" play all characters except for the Historian and Juba; the number of actors playing these roles may be expanded without approval. Juba does not speak, and may be present only as the sound of tapping, although the presence of a figure to which other characters can react is valuable.
A script of the revised version is available through the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
by Stephen Johnson
This play was first produced in an earlier draft in March 1997 at the Festival of Original Theatre, Robert Gill Theatre, Toronto, with the following cast:
Historian Carm Iachelli;
Document #1 -- Kristiana Painting;
Document #2 -- Julie Payne;
Juba -- Jennifer Johnson.
Original Music and Sound by Simon Wood.
The Stage Manager was Marlene Moser.
This version was first produced at the Edge Festival in June 1997 at the Annex Theatre, Toronto. The cast remained the same, except for the Historian, played by Stephen Johnson. The Stage Manager was Tim Pace.
Note: The two "documents" play all characters except for the Historian and Juba; the number of actors playing these roles may be expanded without approval. Juba does not speak, and may be present only as the sound of tapping, although the presence of a figure to which other characters can react is valuable.
A script of the revised version is available through the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
INVISIBLE BODIES:
Comments on the ‘dramatization’ of the search for Juba, from an address to students given in March 1998
...you must admit, the subject matter is made for the stage. I have had two plays on this figure produced, the first a stage performance at two festivals, and a radio play produced by the CBC. I want to talk a bit about those two quite different experiences, and what they might mean.
The stage version was in docudrama format, and created during a rehearsal process with a group of artists. The way in which I wrote it was to take documents into rehearsal--Juba and Dickens, Juba and PT Barnum, and so on--read through them with the cast and talk through the meaning, intention and theatrical language inherent in the text, try some improvisation. Then I went away and wrote-edited, returning with a scene. I made, in this process, a number of structural and intentional decisions. First of all, I decided that it would not be a work of realism, and it would be about what I have talked about today--the difficulty in understanding what the dance was really like, the prejudice and lies of the documents left to us, and the personal prejudices of historians, why they research other people's lives in the first place.
We got at that in several ways. An Historian acted as the narrator, and took the audience through an introduction to the documents. Two actors played all the eyewitnesses to Juba--the "documents"--and we foregrounded their personal prejudices, especially by pairing figures--hence two performers. So Dickens the soft liberal sentimentalist, the man who describes so poetically the dancer he sees in a slum, has an argument with a man named George Foster, who is disgusted by the same kinds of dances, considering them violent, debased and obscene. Foster didn't see Juba, but he did visit and describe the same dance-houses, and his view counterpoints, makes us question Dickens'. Similarly we present PT Barnum, the famous showman who may have employed and exploited Juba in his saloon, with Thomas Low Nichols, the nineteenth century radical who protests Barnum's exploitative racism, but turns out to be a great defender of slavery himself.
And Juba, in our production, is not exactly Juba--the audience was not supposed to believe that the body on stage had the skills, or was the essence of the dancer. The Historian introduces the actor/dancer as the body that the production will try to make into Juba, using the words of the two actors playing the documents. So the structure of the play has documents presenting and arguing over what they remember, while the third actor tries to perform what they are saying--for Dickens a sentimental happy tap, for Foster something rude and crude. For Barnum a time step for the white audience--and so on. In a sequence including a battery of brief attempts to describe the dance, this actor in quick succession performs a highland fling, a polka, a romantic ballet, and so on. The emphasis is on the inability to "get to" the art and the skill of Juba--although it is possible to catch a glimpse. Finally on this point, the Historian circles the action, interacting with the documents but never able to interact with the Juba-dancer--obviously they can never meet except through the documents. But there is a longing to meet--or at least we hope this was clear--and certain ties, as when the Historian stops scenes that have gone too far in tiring or demeaning the dancer, and the dressing of both Historian and the dancer in drag.
The stage was bare, and was never intended to be anything other than a stage in a theatre. Two long white cloths provided the entire set--a circle represented the slum, or the "dresses" wrapped around the Historian and dancer, or a shroud and skin for the dead Juba. We used four chairs--and that was it. It was most decidedly "poor" theatre, relying on the movement, vocal and character skills of the performers. I would also say that the ideas of Brecht provide a theatrical analogy for the work of the contemporary historian as I've described it, always distancing the audience from the sentimental identification with character, questioning the prejudices of the statements made, focusing on the social contexts, constructs and relationships of the characters, and so on.
As an historian as well as a playwright, there was a corollary advantage to working with these artists. “What kind of shoes did Juba wear?” I was asked. Now there's a useful question. We know some of the music he danced to, but what was the tempo of the music? Was Juba possibly performing a parody of all these dances mentioned in his descriptions? Was the "drag" act a grotesque--like the dame role in a pantomime--or a true female impersonation, erasing rather than emphasizing the disguise, and so raising questions of sexuality as well as race in the performance?
These questions came out in rehearsal, among other reasons because Juba was played by a woman. Why? Primarily, I'm ideologically predisposed to colour- and gender-blind casting. Not universally--but in the kind of theatre I do, it has the advantage. I cast the very best person to explore this character, this exercise, and this challenge. But also, in this case, all sorts of issues of gender, of the male gaze, and by analogy the white gaze on the non-white, the old gaze on the young--it all came out in ways that, quite simply, would not have happened in a more traditional casting.
...I'm proud of these productions, of course; but more important, I believe they exemplify the integration of history, theory and practice that theatre studies represents for me--the exploration of historical context, the legacy of the past in the present, and the wrestling with theoretical issues. On one's feet, in rehearsal and performance.
Comments on the ‘dramatization’ of the search for Juba, from an address to students given in March 1998
...you must admit, the subject matter is made for the stage. I have had two plays on this figure produced, the first a stage performance at two festivals, and a radio play produced by the CBC. I want to talk a bit about those two quite different experiences, and what they might mean.
The stage version was in docudrama format, and created during a rehearsal process with a group of artists. The way in which I wrote it was to take documents into rehearsal--Juba and Dickens, Juba and PT Barnum, and so on--read through them with the cast and talk through the meaning, intention and theatrical language inherent in the text, try some improvisation. Then I went away and wrote-edited, returning with a scene. I made, in this process, a number of structural and intentional decisions. First of all, I decided that it would not be a work of realism, and it would be about what I have talked about today--the difficulty in understanding what the dance was really like, the prejudice and lies of the documents left to us, and the personal prejudices of historians, why they research other people's lives in the first place.
We got at that in several ways. An Historian acted as the narrator, and took the audience through an introduction to the documents. Two actors played all the eyewitnesses to Juba--the "documents"--and we foregrounded their personal prejudices, especially by pairing figures--hence two performers. So Dickens the soft liberal sentimentalist, the man who describes so poetically the dancer he sees in a slum, has an argument with a man named George Foster, who is disgusted by the same kinds of dances, considering them violent, debased and obscene. Foster didn't see Juba, but he did visit and describe the same dance-houses, and his view counterpoints, makes us question Dickens'. Similarly we present PT Barnum, the famous showman who may have employed and exploited Juba in his saloon, with Thomas Low Nichols, the nineteenth century radical who protests Barnum's exploitative racism, but turns out to be a great defender of slavery himself.
And Juba, in our production, is not exactly Juba--the audience was not supposed to believe that the body on stage had the skills, or was the essence of the dancer. The Historian introduces the actor/dancer as the body that the production will try to make into Juba, using the words of the two actors playing the documents. So the structure of the play has documents presenting and arguing over what they remember, while the third actor tries to perform what they are saying--for Dickens a sentimental happy tap, for Foster something rude and crude. For Barnum a time step for the white audience--and so on. In a sequence including a battery of brief attempts to describe the dance, this actor in quick succession performs a highland fling, a polka, a romantic ballet, and so on. The emphasis is on the inability to "get to" the art and the skill of Juba--although it is possible to catch a glimpse. Finally on this point, the Historian circles the action, interacting with the documents but never able to interact with the Juba-dancer--obviously they can never meet except through the documents. But there is a longing to meet--or at least we hope this was clear--and certain ties, as when the Historian stops scenes that have gone too far in tiring or demeaning the dancer, and the dressing of both Historian and the dancer in drag.
The stage was bare, and was never intended to be anything other than a stage in a theatre. Two long white cloths provided the entire set--a circle represented the slum, or the "dresses" wrapped around the Historian and dancer, or a shroud and skin for the dead Juba. We used four chairs--and that was it. It was most decidedly "poor" theatre, relying on the movement, vocal and character skills of the performers. I would also say that the ideas of Brecht provide a theatrical analogy for the work of the contemporary historian as I've described it, always distancing the audience from the sentimental identification with character, questioning the prejudices of the statements made, focusing on the social contexts, constructs and relationships of the characters, and so on.
As an historian as well as a playwright, there was a corollary advantage to working with these artists. “What kind of shoes did Juba wear?” I was asked. Now there's a useful question. We know some of the music he danced to, but what was the tempo of the music? Was Juba possibly performing a parody of all these dances mentioned in his descriptions? Was the "drag" act a grotesque--like the dame role in a pantomime--or a true female impersonation, erasing rather than emphasizing the disguise, and so raising questions of sexuality as well as race in the performance?
These questions came out in rehearsal, among other reasons because Juba was played by a woman. Why? Primarily, I'm ideologically predisposed to colour- and gender-blind casting. Not universally--but in the kind of theatre I do, it has the advantage. I cast the very best person to explore this character, this exercise, and this challenge. But also, in this case, all sorts of issues of gender, of the male gaze, and by analogy the white gaze on the non-white, the old gaze on the young--it all came out in ways that, quite simply, would not have happened in a more traditional casting.
...I'm proud of these productions, of course; but more important, I believe they exemplify the integration of history, theory and practice that theatre studies represents for me--the exploration of historical context, the legacy of the past in the present, and the wrestling with theoretical issues. On one's feet, in rehearsal and performance.