The Relevance of Tokens |
by Sarah Bryant
From an anthropological point-of-view, the spectacle has been a part of our collective body and mind from the dawn of human time. We are storytellers, movers & shakers. The magic comes in sharing the spectacle with our fellows. Last March, when the surging pandemic got a name, COVID-19, and random people started acting weird, both in an empathetic & sharing way and in a defensive & mean way, I felt the swell of fear & confusion. I felt my body relax & slip into a kind of measured autopilot. I’d been here before. As I looked around me, I thought, Yep, Tokens prepared me for this 35 years ago. That was six months before I learned of the idea to relaunch Tokens.
Tokens, A Play on the Plague, was a massive production about what happens to a community when the wrath of nature befalls them. The spectacle took place in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-eighties. I was one of 60 performers, a dancer & member of the chorus. Even though the story is about the Great Plague of London, we were going through the breakdown of our society in the face of AIDS. Everyone involved, writers, producers, performers and spectators, were pulled into a confrontation with the depths of our human experience and breadth of the human spectrum. The object lesson of such a spectacle is to rattle your cage. The correlation between the devastation of AIDS and the Black Death of mediaeval times was no mystery.
In the Great Plague of London of 1665-1666, two forms of the plague were recognized. The bubonic variety caused massive swelling in the lymph nodes that bruised the skin with great purple splotches & rosy spots. The pneumonic form caused the patients’ lungs to fill. They sneezed a lot, suddenly coughed up blood, had uncontrollable fits of fever & chill, and eventually sipped into a deep, usually irreversible sleep & suffocated. Contagion was feared, and authorities ordered the stricken to be separated & the general populace to quarantine at home. Fear mongers breathed fire & brimstone. Others downplayed the danger & resigned themselves to fate. Meanwhile, those with means fled to the countryside. Law & order was in disarray.
The visuals of horrifying purple blotches & rosy spots of bubonic plague strikingly parallel Karposi’s Sarcoma lesions we saw on the bodies of our friends during the AIDS epidemic. The pneumonic variety is mirrored in our current fear of COVID-19 carriers we may cross on the street, their sneezing & coughing evokes images of intubation. The public sphere has almost completely shut down, as it did in London. Fear mongers want to close our ports of entry. The economy tanked then, as now. We scurry to a safe distance 6 feet apart. Cottage industries pop up. In Tokens characters were “nurses” & “preachers” who took advantage of the plague. My character made & sold sachets of amulets & herbs to hang around our necks with the hope of warding off evil spirits & illness. In mediaeval London you recovered by the grace of God. During the time of AIDS we fervently hoped for treatments, and now in the time of COVID we pray for a vaccine to make it to us before the virus does. Tokens as a piece of theater is as relevant today as the subject matter.
I remember the venue was in the huge open theatre of Project Artaud, and the audience had to walk through the gates of London & follow the action through the acts of the story. They were confronted with the teeming inhabitants, were jostled & prodded, and made to watch victims die of the inexplicable malady. Interestingly, the French for audience (an amorphous blob of distanced observers) is les participants (participants). The audience had a visceral experience, which is the purpose of the spectacle in all its human forms. Tokens forced you to step out of yourself to find your relationship to the circumstances, to see your human condition & recognize your fellow humans standing next to you.
The spectacle is about how we face adversity from different angles. We want to explain everything around us, find meaning & connection in every event. Now in the time of COVID we create & perform rituals for everything in our lives: what we wear to the dentist to what we wear to places of worship, how we speak to the plumber to how we speak to our father-in-law. Everything is a piece of theatre.
A revival of Tokens is an opportunity to confront a vision of past plagues - London in 1665 and San Francisco 1985 - and use the spectacle to evolve as a society. We need the spectacle so we don’t lose our minds.
Original Ring around the Rosie song:
The London Plague “… was remembered only for the fact that no herbs could cure it and for its symptoms - the rosy rash or the sneezing - recorded in the song which, a long time after, the children began to sing.
Ring a ring o’ roses
A pocket full of posies
Atishoo, atishoo
We all fall down.
…in North America, the ‘Atishoo’… was changed to ashes.” The sneezing having been forgotten.
(p. 783 London, by Edward Rutherfurd)
From an anthropological point-of-view, the spectacle has been a part of our collective body and mind from the dawn of human time. We are storytellers, movers & shakers. The magic comes in sharing the spectacle with our fellows. Last March, when the surging pandemic got a name, COVID-19, and random people started acting weird, both in an empathetic & sharing way and in a defensive & mean way, I felt the swell of fear & confusion. I felt my body relax & slip into a kind of measured autopilot. I’d been here before. As I looked around me, I thought, Yep, Tokens prepared me for this 35 years ago. That was six months before I learned of the idea to relaunch Tokens.
Tokens, A Play on the Plague, was a massive production about what happens to a community when the wrath of nature befalls them. The spectacle took place in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-eighties. I was one of 60 performers, a dancer & member of the chorus. Even though the story is about the Great Plague of London, we were going through the breakdown of our society in the face of AIDS. Everyone involved, writers, producers, performers and spectators, were pulled into a confrontation with the depths of our human experience and breadth of the human spectrum. The object lesson of such a spectacle is to rattle your cage. The correlation between the devastation of AIDS and the Black Death of mediaeval times was no mystery.
In the Great Plague of London of 1665-1666, two forms of the plague were recognized. The bubonic variety caused massive swelling in the lymph nodes that bruised the skin with great purple splotches & rosy spots. The pneumonic form caused the patients’ lungs to fill. They sneezed a lot, suddenly coughed up blood, had uncontrollable fits of fever & chill, and eventually sipped into a deep, usually irreversible sleep & suffocated. Contagion was feared, and authorities ordered the stricken to be separated & the general populace to quarantine at home. Fear mongers breathed fire & brimstone. Others downplayed the danger & resigned themselves to fate. Meanwhile, those with means fled to the countryside. Law & order was in disarray.
The visuals of horrifying purple blotches & rosy spots of bubonic plague strikingly parallel Karposi’s Sarcoma lesions we saw on the bodies of our friends during the AIDS epidemic. The pneumonic variety is mirrored in our current fear of COVID-19 carriers we may cross on the street, their sneezing & coughing evokes images of intubation. The public sphere has almost completely shut down, as it did in London. Fear mongers want to close our ports of entry. The economy tanked then, as now. We scurry to a safe distance 6 feet apart. Cottage industries pop up. In Tokens characters were “nurses” & “preachers” who took advantage of the plague. My character made & sold sachets of amulets & herbs to hang around our necks with the hope of warding off evil spirits & illness. In mediaeval London you recovered by the grace of God. During the time of AIDS we fervently hoped for treatments, and now in the time of COVID we pray for a vaccine to make it to us before the virus does. Tokens as a piece of theater is as relevant today as the subject matter.
I remember the venue was in the huge open theatre of Project Artaud, and the audience had to walk through the gates of London & follow the action through the acts of the story. They were confronted with the teeming inhabitants, were jostled & prodded, and made to watch victims die of the inexplicable malady. Interestingly, the French for audience (an amorphous blob of distanced observers) is les participants (participants). The audience had a visceral experience, which is the purpose of the spectacle in all its human forms. Tokens forced you to step out of yourself to find your relationship to the circumstances, to see your human condition & recognize your fellow humans standing next to you.
The spectacle is about how we face adversity from different angles. We want to explain everything around us, find meaning & connection in every event. Now in the time of COVID we create & perform rituals for everything in our lives: what we wear to the dentist to what we wear to places of worship, how we speak to the plumber to how we speak to our father-in-law. Everything is a piece of theatre.
A revival of Tokens is an opportunity to confront a vision of past plagues - London in 1665 and San Francisco 1985 - and use the spectacle to evolve as a society. We need the spectacle so we don’t lose our minds.
Original Ring around the Rosie song:
The London Plague “… was remembered only for the fact that no herbs could cure it and for its symptoms - the rosy rash or the sneezing - recorded in the song which, a long time after, the children began to sing.
Ring a ring o’ roses
A pocket full of posies
Atishoo, atishoo
We all fall down.
…in North America, the ‘Atishoo’… was changed to ashes.” The sneezing having been forgotten.
(p. 783 London, by Edward Rutherfurd)
|
|