Print Friendly, PDF & Email Suchy, Patricia A., Lisa Flanagan, Sarah Jackson, Ross Louis (with Lexus Dawn Jordan), Tracy Stephenson Shaffer (with Kd Amond), and David P. Terry (with Paige O’Hale). “Portmanteaux Overflow.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv2n1a7

Portmanteaux Overflow

Patricia A. Suchy (Louisiana State University)
Lisa Flanagan(Xavier University of Louisiana)
Sarah Jackson (Southern University of New Orleans)
Ross Louis (Xavier University of Louisiana), with Lexus Dawn Jordan (Louisiana State University)
Tracy Stephenson Shaffer (Louisiana State University), with Kd Amond (Independent Artist)
David P. Terry (Louisiana State University), with additional photographs by Paige O’Hale

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Click suitcases to watch videos.

Introduction

Patricia A. Suchy

Louisiana State University

This project began as a live performance we made for PSi 23 in Hamburg, hailed by the conference theme of “OverFlow.” When the call for this conference arrived, some of us were still mopping up (literally and figuratively) from the catastrophic flood that hit Baton Rouge in 2016 — the kind of flooding that, most who study climate agree, is likely to become more common, more disastrous, and more difficult to control or avoid as sea levels rise and temperatures increase, creating more powerful engines for storms. We live in a region where coastal wetlands are disappearing and where many of us live below sea level, protected by levees that may or may not hold next time a hurricane sweeps in from the Gulf of Mexico. Here, petrochemical plants inhabit the land once the domain of plantations, and the human geography of slavery is re-inscribed on bodies of color in the concentration of industry in “cancer alley” that amounts to environmental racism. Deepwater oil platforms dot the same waters fished for our regional cuisine and the livelihoods of the folks who fish there. In the same region, we are known for our cultural excesses of carnival (Mardi Gras) and the carnivalesque (regional politics); the vibrant and rich performances of jazz and blue musicians in the city, delta, and bayous where these musical forms first flourished; the colorful intersectional rituals of the Mardi Gras Indians; the rich foodways of Cajun and Creole cuisine — in sum the gumbo of circum-Atlantic culture that landed and transformed here, as Joseph Roach describes in Cities of the Dead (see Roach 1996). So, when we saw the call for a conference around the theme of “overflow,” we thought we had quite a lot to say on that subject.

Moreover, we had material and personal experience of overflows, and we wanted to bring those to the conference. We also thought about containment — the ways the levees contain (or sometimes fail at containing) our region’s waterways, the way a slave rebellion of 1811 is violently “put down” and then re-performed through strange surrogation when protests for environmental justice are shut down or disregarded. Even events like carnival, as Bakhtin reminds us, function as pressure valves; we dress up like flamingoes or sharks or in surreal combinations of gender performances during Mardi Gras so we can then go back to our “normal” lives as orderly citizens, having gotten all the topsy-turviness out of our systems until next year.

How on earth were we to bring all of these ideas, to express this overflow of overflows and its accompanying containment phenomena? We had to be efficient, we knew; TSA and the international airlines don’t permit much in the way of overflow in our carry-on and checked luggage. So we limited each section of our performance to what its primary creator could contain in one vintage suitcase and focused on metonyms for our overflows. These suitcases featured centrally in the performance, expelling sheaves of southern Louisiana flood maps, Mardi Gras beads and feather boas, second-line dance parasols (doubling as umbrellas for the rain), hammers (for rebuilding after the flood), bags of sugar, et al. The suitcases were transformed into projection surfaces (aided by three pico projectors), small architectural structures, and, in one case, a miniature theatre.

To transform this performance onto another stage, a website, we adapted or remixed each section of the performance into a video. We recycled some of the video bits we had projected onto the suitcases, but all of the videos have been made new or considerably remade to play in the absence of the bodies of the performers. The “DIY” bricolage aesthetic present throughout is, we believe, indicative of the motley and contradictory, make-do zeitgeist of our region as well as of the overflow of associations and experiences informing the entire work.

As is appropriate in a work that takes “overflow” as its theme, in “Portmanteaux Overflow” the boundaries between scholarship, artwork, and activism are fluid. Moreover, we understand that works staged in cyberspace may, as Michael LeVan has written, “point to a potential site of confluence for research, scholarly expression, and aesthetic work in the Performance Studies field” (LeVan 209).

 

Works Cited

Albrecht, Glenn. “Solastalgia: A New Concept in Health and Identity.” PAN. 3 (2005), 41-55.

LeVan, Michael. “The Digital Shoals: On Becoming and Sensation in Performance.” Text and Performance Quarterly. 32:3 (2012), 209-219.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead. Columbia University Press, 1996.

Ulmer, Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. Routledge, 1989.