{"id":2065,"date":"2023-02-09T00:04:41","date_gmt":"2023-02-09T00:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/ase\/?page_id=2065"},"modified":"2023-02-17T00:53:08","modified_gmt":"2023-02-17T00:53:08","slug":"statement-by-dorinne-kondo","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/ase\/statement-by-dorinne-kondo\/","title":{"rendered":"Statement by Dorinne Kondo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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I wrote these words in 1993, almost exactly 27 years ago: excerpts from the program notes for the world premiere of Anna Deavere Smith\u2019s \u201cTwilight: Los Angles 1992\u201d at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles. Smith interviewed over 200 Angelenos to craft her play. I served as one of the dramaturgs on this landmark work, that remains\u2014alas\u2014all too salient in our current moment. Nothing appears to have changed on a structural level since that time, as the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and countless others so searingly demonstrate.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps a few glimmers of hope break through the darkness: the possibility of more police reform across the country (Minneapolis still permits the choke hold!), a more multiracial group of protestors than in\u00a0 \u201992 or \u201865, the use of social media (double-edged sword, to be sure) to document acts of brutality, the activists\u2019 savvy decision to extend marches to affluent, whiter communities, thus implicating whiteness and class, while averting the destruction of South Central and parts of K-town and the East Side.<\/p>\n

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Amidst the relentlessness of physical death, I look at one level to community organizing\/ recrafting policy and legislation\u2014i.e., the political as conventionally defined. I also look to the arts to redress psychological and what I call affective violence, the slow leaching of life and energy through relentless, everyday interactions and oppressive exclusions, including \u201crepresentations\u201d on stage, page, and screen. At their best, the arts can be life-affirming; they can \u201cgive you a lift,\u201d \u201cchange the air,\u201d in a world that would choke the life from so many. \u00a0Artists of color and other minoritarian artists can enact visions of possibility in acts of what I call reparative creativity. \u00a0They can help us to imagine otherwise.<\/p>\n

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Here are my notes for one artist\u2019s attempt at reparative creativity.<\/p>\n

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Los Angeles, City of Angels. Repository of dreams, allegorical site of the race and class wars of the late twentieth century, multicultural utopia. A place where no single racial majority will exist by the beginning of the 21st century, Los Angeles is witness to the transformative impact of these demographic shifts. In Los Angeles, the \u201cOther\u201d is beginning to speak back, and all of us acutely feel the resulting tensions and contradictions. But equally compelling are historically unprecedented possibilities that speak eloquently to me as a woman of color, an Asian American, a Japanese American. Its sprawling inexhaustibility, its daunting complexity, even its wrenching contradictions, make Los Angeles a place I love, with tenderness and passion, like no other. It is the only place I have ever felt at home.
\n\u2026
\nApril 1992 was symptomatic of historical legacies of conquest, colonization, racism, and class warfare. It was a moment when the fortress mentality and violent repressions of a police state combine with often poignantly misdirected cross-racial hostility. For a moment, the unique cultural possibilities that exist here seem crushed, aflame, fractured. At the same time, the continuing \u2018state of emergency\u2019 in which we live was never so clearly thrown into relief.\u00a0Twilight<\/i>\u00a0insists on bearing witness to this \u201cstate of emergency\u201d. People of all colors, genders, ages, tell their stories, giving meaning to the violence and bristling tensions of last year\u2019s events and to the predicaments and possibilities of life in our late twentieth century worlds\u2026
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\nAnna Deavere Smith\u2026 eloquently demonstrates that difference is not simply a proliferation of exotic flavors and colors, but marks unequally weighted positions in a matrix of power.<\/p>\n

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One shouldn\u2019t, of course, make too much of the ability of one production or one person to encompass problems that are deeply, structurally embedded in our nation\u2019s history. Still,\u00a0Twilight<\/i>\u00a0sharply articulates many of the urgent dilemmas animating our lives at this historical moment. It\u2019s my hope that\u00a0Twilight<\/i>\u00a0offers one opportunity for Angelenos to envision a Los Angeles that can be a home to all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Located in Kaprielian Hall on the University Park campus, ASE faculty, graduate students, and staff are available to assist you with information and resources about our academic programs and research specialties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n

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