Week Three - IDENTITY, PRIVILEDGE, AND OUR SOCIAL-POLITICAL CONTEXTS

Week Three - IDENTITY, PRIVILEDGE, AND OUR SOCIAL-POLITICAL CONTEXTS

After readying both of these articles I struggle to find a straight correlation between the two. As a white American I agree that the aspect of having privilege is overlooked in today’s society. Privilege is a daily occurrence in people’s lives but does not come into focus until what we believe is our privilege comes into question. Every ethnicity naturally comes with privilege and how they are introduced to those privileges stems from historical past. If only there was a way to end privilege, what would that situation be like? To me, if there was no privilege we would all be on the same level. Now, if equal privilege was to happen, society would have no way of progressing. Today we have a leader and the followers, the leader has the privileges to guide the followers onto a new path, and to grant them new privileges. Privilege to me comes from the basis of how you grow up, privilege grows from historical context. 

In our second reading, by Guillermo Gomez Peña, his story of touring resonated with my lifestyle. However, I did not expect his introduction to focus so greatly on how his lifestyle during his tour affected him. As someone who has toured with a non-American/white musical group I rarely stop to think how traveling with an ethnic group effects each tour stop. I’ve spent my time touring with a Persian/Iranian artist, being their lighting director, traveling, eating, and being in company with people who were far away from my White European ethnicity. I never stopped to think how my privileges may be limited due to being around such a ethnic group. The music is sung in Farsi and they speak their language occasionally, but they too speak great English. There was a time when we traveled to Oklahoma City to have a show, a town I thought was very white and would have a poor turn out of from the Iranian population. Little did I know, Oklahoma City had a fairly decent population of Persian families. I think there is a privilege to working with Artist groups, like my tour, of ethnicity where you start to be included in the aspects of how performance is about presence and not representation. Not once was announcing that the Persian’s where here to perform happen. There was only a energetic presence that came about. The local crew had their typical comments here and there which contributes to how Guillermo Gomez Peña felt when he was asked about his heritage with somewhat racist comments. I’ll leave you with a quote from Peña which sums up performance and reflects appropriately my lifestyle of work; “Performance is a disnarrative and symbolic chronicle of the instant which focuses mainly on the “now” and the “here.” Performance is about presence, not representation; it is not…a mirror, but the actual moment in which the mirror is shattered”.