“Spooky Entanglements”

I had the joy of reencountering Arthur Jafa’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago recently. Jafa is an American artist known best for his piece entitled, Love is the Message, The Message is Death, which is set to Kanye West’s song, Ultralight Beam, and stitches together film of the Black experience in America. Jafa juxtaposes things like footage of police brutality with clips of Black pop-culture, creating a heart wrenching tension between the two opposites. Both times I have seen this collage-like video-essay, it has stayed with me for days after. And the emotional impact it has on me would not be possible if it weren’t for the layering of disparate elements and jamming of content together that manifest in a videographic collage of what Jafa has termed, “spooky entanglements”. 

This got me thinking about collage more broadly and its presence in other art forms. It dawned on me how connected I feel to collage as a theatre artist, and how there is a kind of “spirit” of collage that I really value in collaboration with others. Collage, after all, is unknown, which I think is part of what excites me so much about it in regards to composing original theatre. It requires me to do away with planning and create in the heat of the moment, because it's impossible for me to predict the end result. I pull this from here, that from there, and voila, a new piece of theatre has emerged before my very eyes! And I managed to do it in 5 minutes with a group of other artists, creating something far more interesting and dynamic than I would’ve ever been able to dream up on my own, endlessly swimming around in the eddies of my mind behind a screen. By its very nature, collage in the theatre has to be spontaneous and intuitive. If you overthink it, you’re dead in the water. Only once you’ve assembled your elements and actually tried something can you take a step back and really think curatorially. 

It just so happens that Jafa’s term “spooky entanglements” appears in quantum mechanics as well, coined by Albert Einsten more specifically as, “spooky action at a distance”, or “quantum entanglement” in which two particles remain connected and react to one another, even at a great distance, seemingly faster than the speed of light. Maybe Jafa was inspired by this theory, or maybe he arrived at that language on his own, unknowingly entangling himself with Einstein and quantum mechanics. Isn’t that life after all? I seem to constantly encounter bizarre coincidences in my daily life, and perhaps that’s why the approach and aesthetic of collage serves as such a great mirror to our forever entangled stories. 

When it comes to “spooky entanglement” in the theatre, my mind can’t help but turn to the famous SITI Company, who practically changed the landscape of American Theatre by popularizing their approach to creating original work which was at times notably collage oriented, especially in their work with playwright Charles Mee, who was a company member since its infancy. What SITI Company invigorated in me as a young artist was precisely this ethos of collaboration that I am attempting to capture. Through the small snippets of their work I was able to glean from the internet, conversations with company members, books, articles, and podcasts, it not only seemed to me that the work they made was supremely theatrical, embracing the spirit of collage, but that the WAY in which they made the work was their truest legacy. In the article, The Legacy of Radical Presence, Charles Mee is quoted discussing SITI’s unique approach, “It’s a new way of making theatre. They put together some text and something visual and some activity and that’s called a composition, and then they proceed to make 47 compositions and then put those in the order they want—that’s a whole new kind of theatre. There are a lot of people hugely influenced by that—people who are not so much working with a plot line—you know, A causes B causes C—but really putting together a piece that feels like spring, summer, autumn, winter, oh, spring rebirth. That’s really what SITI Company did.” This approach to composition in the theatre spread by SITI Company instilled in me a culture and philosophy as an artist more than anything else. It showed me the sacredness of creative collaboration, the ensemble being of paramount importance to them over their 30 year history as a company, as well as what the magic of the live performance can truly entail. Not only does this approach to making theatre foster a culture of sharing, of embracing the unknown and the mess of the creative process, but collage as an aesthetic in the theatre bursts open the possibilities of the art form, making the stage a place of greater metaphor, poetry, and mystery, all things Jafa was able to pull off so effectively in his video essay. 

In a 2024 interview on the podcast Actorcast with co-artistic director of SITI, Anne Bogart, she explains how she feels that at a theatre performance, the audience is subconsciously and simultaneously witnessing the social system present between the actors onstage on top of the relationships between the characters. If the rehearsal process were a particularly clunky or negative one, she says, the audience picks up on this through how the actors relate to each other and the space they inhabit. She also believes that part of the theatre’s job is to propose new or alternate ways of being with each other and sharing space. It proposes new social systems, or reveals the dysfunction of our own ones, all while we subconsciously experience what it’s like to be with that specific group of people for that ephemeral moment in time. If our job as theatre artists, as Anne so beautifully states, is to propose alternate ways of being with each other, then it serves our best interests to think long and hard about how the work we make materializes. 

What I find so deeply powerful about the spirit of collage is that it allows for the hierarchy of a creative space to become more lateral, where every element and idea can hold equal weight and possibility. It is a method of scavenging and hunting for the thing that is going to be in service of what you’re trying to say, inherently involving stealing and repurposing ideas from others. Playwright Charles Mee says as much regarding his work existing in the public domain on his website, “...Pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new piece—and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.” Collage, across many art forms, but especially in the theatre, asks us to use the raw materials available to us and reconfigure others' thoughts into something new. I’ve realized that, in my artistic process, it’s always there for me when I need it, even in subtle ways in how I show up as a collaborator and contribute to or propose the micro-social system in the rehearsal room. I long to be the artist that steals passionately and gives wholeheartedly, that is unafraid to begin again, time after time. Theatre can only become more meaningful and important to society if we are steadfast in our commitment to being with each other more generously and honestly. Our actor social systems have to set a good example! How we make work matters. So, with that said, let this “blog” be a commitment to staying awake as a spectator and artist and engaging with my work in a meaningful, critical way. Allow it to be dedicated to connecting the dots and uncovering the “spooky entanglements” between all things, art and life. Please check back for more later!