By Lorcan Otway and Sruthi Pinnamaneni
A minstrel in blackface singing “Mammy” — in 2007? Young women drinking carbolic acid? A stark naked man dancing in Tompkins Square Park?
After a one-year hiatus, the HOWL! Festival returned to the East Village earlier this month. With new thinking on the board and a director who wanted to push the limits, the last installation of the Ginsberg-inspired festival offended some and thrilled others — and plans to do more of both in years to come.
“We’re back up and running, and we’re as controversial as ever,” said Bob Holman, a board member of Federation of East Village Artists, which presents the Howl! Festival.
Festival director Marguerite Van Cook asked Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell of Jackie Factory fame to create a spectacle that “wasn’t just a drag show.” And what she got was “Low Life,” 13 acts with 35 performers who envisioned a bygone Bowery — the “birthplace of nightclub performance traditions from vaudeville to neo-burlesque.”
“We wanted ‘Low Life’ to be an homage to the glorious past of the neighborhood, but to show how much great modern talent is still here today,” said Valenti.
But the infamous history of the Bowery is not all glitter and feathers. Some of the “Low Life” acts, such as “Minstrel Madness,” touched raw nerves, even those of East Villagers who thought they were open to anything.
Michael T, playing the part of the minstrel, looked the proper dandy with a bow tie and coattails — but he also was crowned with a wig of frizzy black hair and his face was smeared in cork makeup. In other words, Michael T, a drag queen known for high heels and outrageous parties, played a minstrel in blackface. Flanked by two African-American performers, also in blackface, he lip-synced and danced to a recording of “Mammy” by Al Jolson.
Standing in the predominantly white audience, Scott Crary, a film director, felt alienated by the crowd’s reaction.
“[The show’s producers] were beckoning a bit of postmodern awareness to mock history,” said Crary. “But the satisfied laughter and cheers from the crowd were uncomfortable to listen to.”
The history Crary refers to is a complex one. Al Jolson began his career as a busker on the Bowery. He was one of the singers and comedians who roamed from saloon to saloon, performing for coins from the crowd. In New York City, the first white minstrel group performed “Dixie” in blackface in 1843. Decades later, when minstrelsy had become a dominant entertainment form, Jolson found his signature mark — blacking up and performing with an energy that turned him into a household name.
Blackface acts were common at the time, and Jolson was friends with other black performers. Still, not many artists condone such acts today.
“It fixed the tradition of the Negro as only an irresponsible, happy-go-lucky, wide-grinning, loud-laughing, shuffling, banjo-playing, singing, dancing sort of being,” according to “Black Manhattan,” a history of blacks in New York City, by James Weldon Johnson.
But the blackface minstrels weren’t the only unsavory part of the neighborhood. As Luc Sante describes in the book “Low Life,” there was also McGurk’s Suicide Hall, a notorious brothel in the final decades of the 19th century. McGurk’s owes its macabre name to a spate of suicides by young girls who worked there, some of whom took their lives by drinking carbolic acid.
McGurk’s shut its doors more than 90 years ago, and its ghosts only just recently finally succumbed to the wrecking ball.
In re-creating the acts of that Bowery era, HOWL! director Van Cook said she was aware that some people wouldn’t want to glorify those ghosts.
“The act is about something unsavory, and the statement it makes is complicated,” Van Cook explained of “Low Life.” “Our roots weren’t all lovely and our artists aren’t always saints.”
Van Cook said she talked to Valenti and Dynell about her concerns on how people would react to a blackface performance. But in the end, they decided that the show would go on.
After all, the show’s curators pointed out, this was the Howl! Festival, not Disney World. In their view, the depiction of events should be true to spirit and challenge the audience.
Named after Allen Ginsberg’s epic beat poem of the same name, the HOWL! Festival began in 2002 as a celebration of the arts and counterculture of the East Village and Lower East Side. When the festival decided to take a hiatus in 2006, some wondered if it would ever return and blamed certain FEVA board members for mismanaging funds.
“Coming back from almost two years of consideration on what is the meaning of this damn thing,” said Holman, “we realized that HOWL! is about people — the artists of the neighborhood — who were on display, onstage and on the tables and just walking around.”
While past festivals saw more than 200 events each year, this last installation was the smallest ever — Holman called it a “Baby HOWL!”
For HOWL! 2008, expect to see more poetry readings, book fairs, events that collect money for the new artist healthcare fund — and more “challenging” performances.
But, for some, the “Mammy” performance went beyond challenging.
Even some people who got the context and respected the intention of the “Low Life” show, felt unsure about the minstrel act. Mashala, a photographer and dancer, said he enjoyed the show and understood what the producers envisioned. At the same time, however, as a black man from the Deep South, he felt uncomfortable.
“I think Al Jolson offered people of color an opportunity to perform commercially,” Mashala said. “But it’s still hard for me to digest the visual of a man in blackface.”
Others in the audience felt decidedly insulted.
“I didn’t like it,” said James Bedford, a building superintendent who has lived in New York since 1988, and is originally from Georgia. “They never miss a chance to make black folks look bad.”
But Valenti explained that blackface comes with different geographical contexts. Both she and Dynell consider New Orleans to be their second home and have long been a part of the Zulu Parade, marching in blackface alongside scores of African-Americans.
Valenti added that she could not rewrite history by omitting an act that was part of an era she was re-creating.
“If that was the biggest problem the audience had with our show, then I’m happy,” she said, referring to the full frontal nudity and re-enacted suicides in other acts.
Meanwhile, as Michael T shouted, “Mah Baby! Mah baby!” to a white baby doll painted in blackface, the audience hooted with laughter. And whatever the historic context or artistic intention, some still questioned the point of it all, the reflex behind the laughter.
“I can’t admit to being entirely in on the joke,” Crary, the film director, said.
Holman, proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, takes a different view. Before “Low Life,” he had never seen “Mammy” performed live — and now the image is burned into his brain. He, like others in the audience, was confused by how he felt, but thinks that confusion can be a good thing — and perhaps a fitting reaction to the HOWL! Festival.
“In the safety zone of the L.E.S., there is no censorship,” Holman said. “I’m grateful that I could see arts that horrified me, and arts that were hilariously brilliant and inappropriately fantastic.”
