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ADS: Well, did you notice how quickly the word "healing"
came into our vocabulary after the uprising? Three days, and people are
talking about healing. And that too is what I was trying to get at when
I was trying to explain why I do this, why I listen to people over and
over again, and why I repeat their words over and over again. When
I was working on Reginald Denney's material, I started to get very anxious,
and in a way I think that this whole thing that I do is helping me feel
a little bit better about coming into consciousness, because I think that
the process of coming into consciousness means having available to you
this amazing resource of imagery, and much of it is extremely, extremely
painful and distasteful, but full consciousness is being able to—at least
for a moment—evoke the whole trauma. The problem that we have is we weren't
in slavery, so we have to depend on very vivid depictions such as "Roots"
or Conrad's speaking to understand why we feel bad. But in a way, I think
the better we are at—if we have real specifics, we have more authority
over it.
AA: People that went through this, some survived and others
didn't. But I have a responsibility to their legacy, to make sure that
those that have come behind them don't suffer, and I think that it also
can be incredibly motivating as well as painful.
KLF: It seems that a lot of the motivation comes from those
moments that occur in the context of a project, whatever it may be, that
becomes a very real and motivating part of the content, because suddenly
you're painted as a political hothead, "Oh, you're trying to be
political." So you have to develop these underground tactics to get people
to play their politics so that they'll at least listen without realizing
what they're actually listening to, to internalize it and, of course, when
they figure out where the politic is heading, they try to flush it back
out. And the driving force—this motivation multiplies and intensifies,
and you realize that you have to maintain this mode of operating so that
you're not painted as the political hothead as every turn. So when
can I rest?
ADS: You can't rest.
AA: You know, I'd love to ask you something about Reginald
Denney. I couldn't understand at first, why you were laughing, he was laughing,
you were laughing—
ADS: As him.
AA: Yes, as him. And I thought, "Is she making a mistake?"
I don't understand, why is he laughing? Why is he smiling when he's saying
these horrible things that happened to him—why?
ADS: But that's in life. That's the way people actually
write.
AA: Right, and I knew after you'd gone through it,
I knew that you weren't making a mistake, that's what he was doing. I think
that is part of the beauty of live theater because I have to wonder—you
know, it made me uncomfortable. I was sort of moving around in my chair
wondering, "What in the world is he thinking?" And I wanted to know what
you learned from him. I guess you must learn something from all of these
people that you talk to, but him specifically.
ADS: Well, it's interesting that you say this, because
it's also interesting with Reginald Denney. . . even in performance, during
the time that I'm in performance, I'm still sort of listening to the characters,
as I drive in my car, when I'm just walking around with the headphones
on, and as I listened to his tape, there is an enormous amount of pain.
And it's very difficult to . . . with what I do, I can't like act like
he's not . . . he didn't act like he was in pain, but over time, if you
keep listening to the tape, you begin to hear how much pain there is. On
the one hand, you have this man who is behaving mostly like being shocked
at his fame, stunned at his
fame. "Oh, I'm just Reggie, just call me Reggie. I didn't do anything to
get kicked in the head." But at the same time, absolutely stunned
by the fact that the eyes of the world are on him, and that's something
that we can't underestimate. If all of a sudden something happened here
that made the three of us in history for no other reason that the fact
that we're sitting here talking, we're in history, a part of us would be
very surprised and very flattered at the attention. At the same time, he
had to have his whole jaw restructured. I asked him about his daughter,
Ashley, did she come see him in the hospital, and he said, "Oh, she came
once, but she was kind of scared because of all the tubes and everything.
She didn't want to see her daddy like that, so she just didn't come. She
was kind of scared." She's eight or nine. And after a while, all these
realities build up about him, and you realize that there's a discrepancy
between his awareness at this point and what has happened. But he himself
names that as a lucky lack of discrepancy.
AA: I don't know how he watches that.
ADS: He says, "Thank God, my best thing, the biggest blessing,
was I didn't remember a thing." Or he would be completely thrown off.
AA: How do you watch that, how do you watch that? I can't
even watch it.
ADS: But isn't a bigger sort of remark about us—that I
think in many ways may tell the story of "Roots" and watching Kunte
Kinte get his foot cut [off]—is that we live in that type of discrepancy.
We watch these things and they were real, and to a certain extent, we're
able to fully be in consciousness of their reality. When I was a kid I
wanted to be a psychiatrist, and my mother said I couldn't because I was
too sensitive. And what she meant by "too sensitive" was, you know, I would
see a sad movie and I would cry for three days. And part of my becoming
socialized or even becoming what would be considered good mental health
is me having to desensitize myself. I couldn't be that way, I couldn't
be that way.
KLF: What's so powerful about that moment when you're realizing
the magnitude of the pain is that he is, too. The grief, his pain, is so
tremendous, spans a massive scale that you can't even chart any nodes or
points of reference, and he's just starting to get a sense that
he's in deep space, he can't even see any stars he's so far out.
ADS: And then also it's sort of terrifying even in the
story itself, that so much of it is full of "I didn't know," and I was
trying to figure it out. I was trying to figure it out, and everybody else
knew, everybody else knew, the doctors knew, he didn't know. And nobody
was telling him. And I think of all the other problems about Reginald Denney
. . . I mean, let's face it, I think it's peculiar how both he and Rodney
King in society—they're in history forever—are also these icons of innocence.
Rodney King gets up before the world and says, "Can we all get along?"
And there's this way that he's kind of shown to us as childlike, beautiful—he's
gorgeous, physically gorgeous, not this big threatening thing.
AA: Right.
ADS: Even if he was big, his face has got these chubby
cheeks and this sweet, sweet face. A cherub. And likewise with Reginald
Denney. And yet, they are our icons now for this year of outrageously horrible
things that happened. And so I think that's kind of curious that there's
this split between their innocence and the guilts of society.
AA: Do you think that as we feel more guilty about what
is happening and the conflicts, and maybe the hopelessness of this situation,
that they become more innocent as time goes on?
ADS: I think that's really interesting. You could be exactly
right. This whole thing, something gets acted out. But even the way—I don't
want to get off the cuff, but I mean I wish I was a sociologist or something,
because I would love to understand over time just what's happening
with the children right now, the way the children keep popping up as either
victims or demons. And our kind of fascination with that. And it means
to me there is once again a discrepancy, there is something out of balance,
that adults are unable to keep whatever is the child in them alive and
the demon in them alive, our generation, and the generation before it,
and so it's like sending the garbage out, and it's acted out in these children.
But it's really us, we're doing it, it's our problem. And it's our innocence
that we can't own, that it gets shoved onto just a few people. |