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So Close to Burning: Intermedia andDocumentary Solo Performance in Juanand John (1965)Lara D. NielsenPublished online: 15 May 2014.

To cite this article: Lara D. Nielsen (2014) So Close to Burning: Intermedia and DocumentarySolo Performance in Juan and John (1965), Text and Performance Quarterly, 34:3, 286-303, DOI:10.1080/10462937.2014.913808

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So Close to Burning: Intermedia andDocumentary Solo Performance inJuan and John (1965)Lara D. Nielsen

When the display of documentary images attenuates solo performance, photographyand other documentary media do not simply supply historical evidence; they tell storiesabout, interpret, and delimit horizons of interpretation, rather than “prove” it. Thepageantry of archival recorded images in documentary performance supplies a silent ifalso resounding kind of intermedia genre that plays in relationship to the stagedmonologues of solo performance. In a project that aims for “forgiveness, redemption,and healing,” Roger Guenveur Smith’s first explicitly autobiographical work indocumentary solo performance, Juan and John, revisits the televised 22 August 1965baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, whenJuan Marichal “clashed” with John Roseboro. The projection of photographs and othermedia recordings throughout the performance fix Smith’s meditations about the game,and the 1960s more broadly, as both fact and fiction, in a coming-of-age “memoir”that is punctuated by the rhetorical repetitions of the image. While breaking in and outof remembrance’s affective repertoires offers a technique for resistance to documentaryand other reinscriptions of historical violences, the serial and sequential intermediacuts bespeak latent images of historical pasts, at once the burned and burninginstruments for and bearers of memory.

Keywords: Intermedia; Documentary; Performance; Memory; Cultural labor

Roger Guenveur Smith performed his first explicitly autobiographical monologue,Juan and John, at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre Lab in December 2009. From theaward-winning A Huey P. Newton Story (1997) to Frederick Douglass Now (2009)and his most recent work in solo performance, Rodney King (2013), Smith’s stageworks perform interpretations of people who Smith describes as Americans. Smith

Lara D. Nielsen is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance and Latin American Studies at Macalester College.Correspondence to: Lara D. Nielsen, Department of Theatre and Dance, Macalester College, 1600 GrandAvenue, Saint Paul, MN 55105, USA. Email: lnielsen@macalester.edu.

Text and Performance QuarterlyVol. 34, No. 3, July 2014, pp. 286–303

ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) © 2014 National Communication Associationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2014.913808

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insists, “We are in and of America” (Fusco and Smith 64), and in Juan and John thequestion of racial transcriptions, in an always already transnational America, takescenter stage as the stuff of intermedia convergences, or the interplay of representa-tional genres that layer codes of repetition and difference. Shifting his study of blackradical traditions in the United States to the no less political site (and sights) of“memoir,” Smith revisits the heat of the televised 22 August 1965 game between theSan Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, when Juan Marichal infamouslyhit John Roseboro on the head with a bat. In 1965, Smith tells audiences, he was soshaken by what he saw on television that he burned Giants pitcher Juan Marichal’sbaseball card. Smith was ten years old, loyal to Los Angeles Dodgers catcher JohnRoseboro, and working the pedagogies of the 11–17 August 1965 Watts Riots: Burnbaby burn. Forty-four years later, Smith returns to the residues of 1965 that neverstop burning, pairing documentary images with autobiographical research. Movingfrom televisual and photographic image to memory and spoken performance, Smith’ssignature visceral and smoldering sentiment remains the means of connection to theways in which the past persists. Rage, regret, and forgiveness do not simply or seriallyresolve, as denouement; there is no exit.

As might be expected, it turns out that summoning the evidence of televisual andphotographic “documents” in performance—discursive objects of representation indocumentary and autobiographical works alike—garners both precious and littleproof. Because photography and other documentary media do not simply supplyhistorical evidence (they tell stories about, interpret, and delimit horizons ofinterpretation rather than “prove” them), the pageantry of recorded images indocumentary performance reports a silent if also resounding kind of intermediaintertextuality that plays in relationship to the staged monologues of solo perform-ance. Coined by Dick Higgins in 1965, the term intermedia refers to interdisciplinarymedia convergences and immersions that are characteristic of artists working amongand between genres, including performance. Reflecting back on Los Angeles in 1965,a blaze of feeling shoots intermittently throughout Smith’s idiosyncratic and tenderwork to make the past and present palpably, persistently, immersively framed in (andas) the lived “now.” Smith remembers the ballgame in relation to his childhoodexperience of the Watts Riots:

I had just been in front of my family business on Western Avenue and saw otherbusinesses being burned down firsthand and hearing people scream “burn babyburn.” And when Marichal hit my hero upside the head with his bat I burned hisbaseball card and said “burn baby burn.” And so that was the great traumatic eventof my childhood. Now fast-forward to 1992 and I am a young adult and guesswhat? Boom!… Los Angeles is on fire again! (Gagnier)

In everyday violences as well as those made into spectacle, Sadiya V. Hartmansuggests that “the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witnessand spectator” is at issue (4). For Smith, breaking in and out of remembrance’saffective repertoires offers a technique for resistance to the representational

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reinscriptions and violences that Hartman warns against, which can predictably fixand frame events, as well as bear witness to them.1

Formally, Smith’s performance is driven by an experience of documentary imageshe remembers, projects, and reperforms on the stage. The act of looking backward athistorical images to compose the work of documentary solo performance mimics andconstructs, in photographic terms, a viewfinder: a seeing apparatus through whichthe artist looks to produce visual compositions. Smith frames public pasts asintimately felt ones, then and now. At issue in Juan and John, then, are theintermedia interpenetrations, or cuts, between the recorded scenes of violence Smithprojects onto the stage, and the polyphonous productions of so many andmultitudinous viewfinders; or in other words, the way intermedia productions framethe political horizons, landscapes, and architectonics of lived experience—and in aperformance that is also a living memoir. The key mediated moments for stagingJuan and John are the Watts Riots; the baseball game at San Francisco’s CandlestickPark; and Smith’s private childhood spectre of “that smiling face going up in flames,”when he burned Marichal’s card in Los Angeles. As markers and memories, themoments to which Smith returns supply acts of grievance and resistance. They areboth everyday and spectacular, and Smith repeatedly shows them in his performanceby remembering them, reenacting them, talking about them, and projecting recordedimages associated with them onto the stage.

Smith’s craft does not present the dispassionate voice of “objective” documen‐tary theatre as Peter Weiss did in another context, in The Investigation (1965).Smith does not report verbatim theatre, and does not work from the transcripts oforal testimony. Crucially, then, Juan and John is not driven so much by therecorded word as it is by the remembrances of visual and televisual culture. Anekphrastic dynamic thus guides Smith’s performance in Juan and John, whereinthe narration and soundings of memory speak with and for the no less talkativephotographic images of the past. Photographs, televisual images, gesture, music,memories, and the speaking voice sustain and transform the performance, alayering technique for reconstituting pasts for the imagined present throughmemory and rememory (Morrison). Whether as actor or audience, this practice isparticularly emphatic in solo performance and performance art, slippery categoriesin which performers and audiences meet through the affective media (andintermedia) of the embodied, corporeal, and ever-mattering individual(see Piper; Gray; Hughes and Román; Bonney; Oliver). But while Smith is rightlyknown as a “shape-shifting” actor (Fusco and Smith 61), Juan and Johnnecessitates considering the materiality of performance differently, less as theexclusive index of Smith’s transcendent presence or absence as an actor, but moreas an engagement with the intermedia frames, convergences, and viewfinders heassembles—and it is in those framing devices that Smith’s performance is both anopening and open to the work of documentary solo performance, queryingcitations, and theorizing cultural labor.

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Citations

Juan and John opens with Smith’s silent and slow-motion imitation of Marichal’sinimical pitch: his windup, release, and follow-through. A video recording ofMarichal’s performance is transposed onto the low-lit stage as Smith silently breathesthrough the movements of the pitch. Watching the two at the same time signals thedifference between Smith’s theatrical representation and recordings of Marichal’sperformance; audiences perceive each as independent forces. Smith’s act ofsurrogation is thus intentionally citational, fragmentary, and inventive, insofar asSmith does not attempt to duplicate the seriality of any one game, or to narrateMarichal’s experience on the mound. If the slow-motion imitation of Marichal’spitch is not quite adulation (an affection reserved for Roseboro, Smith’s childhoodhero), it is a form of recognition, and one with an edge. Implicitly, Smith’sperformance demands attention to the polyphonous reproductions of visualculture—from the projections of the televisual image, to the staged performance, tothe photograph.

Always seeing Marichal through the lens of US national anglophile culturalnarratives, Smith introduces “Juan” as “the Dominican Dandy,” the monikermainstream US presses assigned him, and which he sometimes autographed onphotographs, baseballs, and other Major League Baseball (MLB) memorabilia.Breaking the fourth wall at the Public Theatre prior to the performance to introducethe work, Smith also worked hard to welcome that “Dandy’s” widow and family, whoattended the opening night of Juan and John, staging them as key participants in theproject of remembering August 1965. Simultaneously the year of the Voting RightsAct and the US invasion of the Dominican Republic (the United States also begansending troops to Vietnam in 1965), the stories of 1965 mark just some of thehistorical convergences of African diaspora in the Americas, and beyond. Keeping itpersonal, Smith told audiences that he honored Marichal’s family every night of theperformance. The night I attended, Smith acknowledged another prominentDominican, novelist Junot Díaz, sitting in the front row of the small theatre. Thestaging of Juan and John occasioned yet more public acts of reconciliation andsolidarity than the ballplayers had already cojoined in their lifetimes. It was atRoseboro’s behest, fans know, that Marichal was finally slated for a vote into theMLB Hall of Fame in 1983, the first Dominican (and first Latin American) to win thehonor.

Both fact and fiction, Smith shows what he has seen in the recordings ofMarichal’s assault on Roseboro, signified in a single black-and-white image projectedonto the stage. More precisely, in the performance Smith shows an experience ofwhat the image conveys, one that is literally and figuratively both moving and still.What everyone knows is that at the top of the third inning in the 22 August 1965game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers at CandlestickPark, and after a series of retaliatory Giants–Dodgers games in the National Leaguepennant race, something flipped—something bad happened. Every attempt tonarrate or explain the moment compromises it, and yet this is what Smith means

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to do.2 Ten years old, Smith saw the broadcast: Roseboro returned a ball to SandyKoufax, close enough that Marichal could hear it. Marichal said it ticked his ear, andhe whirled around to confront Roseboro, spitting rage. Roseboro sent the heat rightback at Marichal, who, in an exceptional loss of cool, beat Roseboro over the headwith his bat. It all happened in a few seconds. Players from both teams sprintedacross the field to home plate. Sandy Koufax ran to protect his catcher (Roseboro).Willie Mays “crossed team lines” to help his friend (Roseboro). There was a brawland a game delay. Roseboro needed fourteen stitches for his head wound. It was aSunday afternoon. In the next decades, lawsuits followed and were abandoned.Apologies issued forth. Friendship displaced enmity.

Where does one cite or fabricate a point of origin for the resonances of the image’sstories? Back to 1865, a period of Civil Wars in the Dominican Republic and theUnited States? To the nineteenth-century Giants–Dodgers rivalry? To coloniality inthe Americas, writ large? To the racial division of labor that so peculiarly defines thehistory of “freedom” in the United States, and its corollary anti-Haitianismo in theDominican Republic? To the Cy Young award-winning pitching competitions of the1960s (Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, and Don Drysdale)? To MLB “outsourcing” thetraining and recruitment of Dominican players in the 1960s? To the 1965 NationalLeague pennant race, when (it is rumored) Marichal threw at batters, and Koufaxwould not retaliate? To the nine-inning confines of this August 1965 game, when(Marichal says) Roseboro set him up? (Marichal 128). Is it to the photographic stillthat affixes the fight “as” history? To the digital availability of that one television clipon YouTube, haltingly repeating a censored and censoring camera recording intoeternity? Or, to all and every prolix potentiality?

Like written and spoken words, documentary images reveal and conceal.Critiquing the historian’s habitual deferral of meaning to the events “themselves,”as if there were such a thing, Allen Feldman thus understands “the event” not as whathappened, but what can be narrated (13). In documentary solo performance it isneither one nor the other, but the surplus accumulation of debts such acts of transferincur. In Juan and John, Smith foregrounds an ongoing struggle with and within thecitationality of things by repeating and projecting citational images. It would seemthat the inventions of “origins” stories are precisely the kind of nut this performanceseeks to crack. No one rhyme or reason will do; and yet, performance cannot butrepeat the violences of both rhyme and reason. As memoir, it is Smith’s memory ofthe television broadcast that drives Juan and John. Smith is forever situated, in thatscene from the past, as a ten-year-old who knows and cares that Joe Louis andRoseboro share a birthday, in July; who knows what happened in that game becausehe saw it with his own two eyes; and who knows (like Goethe) that the hardest thingto see is what is in front of your own eyes.

While Smith at ten years old demands recompense for what he saw, the burnedand burning televisual image also animates the force of memory and rememoryforty-four years later in a documentary solo performance that has toured theatres inthe United States and the Dominican Republic. Just as surely, that burning trips upthe act of formulating a history of the present, because in every present, that thing

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will have happened, and will mean something new (Spillers). A televised beating,“live,” the recorded scene (seen and unseen) unleashes racial and nativist furies, fuelslabor competitions, and conscripts conflicts between labor and capital. Projecting theimage of Marichal’s bat raised against Roseboro, Smith overtly reflects on the crossesof race, class, language, and ethnicity in the United States, and, what they can meanfor players competing in MLB’s global labor market in 1965. Smith is at pains toemphasize that Juan and John means to inspire a meditation on forgiveness,redemption, and healing. As image-cipher, the scene simultaneously contains andactivates the citation that ignites the live wire of colonial machineries, which meansthat it also simulates and refuses the trafficking in appetites for those “scenes ofsubjection,” re-emplotting constellations of transnational citizenship toward a senseof communion with “our cousins. All our friends” (Harney and Moten 52).

Photographs

A curated exhibition of photographs pauses audiences before entering the theatre tosee Juan and John at the Public Theatre. The hallway is a vessel of passage convertedinto a gallery, simultaneously still and moving in literal and figural senses, a liminalspace for transit into performance and away from it, between the Public Theatrelobby and the theatre itself. Coding visual rhetorics that situate audience interpreta-tions of the performance in advance, “1965 Yearbook: A Companion Exhibit to Juanand John” offers a spread of images documenting the 1960s. On one wall, there arephotographs of Civil Rights Protests in Alabama, 1963; Mohammed Ali standingover Sonny Liston, 1964; the assassination of Malcolm X, February 1965; aerial viewsof Watts, Los Angeles, during the August 1965 Riots; protests against the war inVietnam; the “Black Power” gesture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at theOlympics, fists high in Mexico City, October 1968. Each photograph interprets anddocuments public performances that have made history. Together, they frame andsupply a way of seeing and reading a set of themes that Smith has chosen for theperformance, and, although the images are technically silent, they most certainlyspeak. Centered on the opposite wall are a late photograph of Marichal andRoseboro, friends reconciled, and their early baseball cards, framed—beginnings andendings duly declared.

During the performance, Smith uses several kinds of recordings to tour the times,selecting from popular music, photographs, radio and television broadcasts, as well asfamily photographs to illustrate and corroborate his storytelling. Smith stands on hisfeet as he shares a life history, interposing public and private images as he wandershis pasts. A family photograph of Transfiguration High School locates Smith in spaceand time as a seventh-grade student. From the sky, aerial photographs map Watts,feigning objectivity like military intelligence. Insinuating the differences between twosuch seeing machines, Smith cuts back to street level with a photograph of the familybusiness—a Los Angeles hotel—which sparks his grinning quip, “Capitalism, that’sthe best revenge.” And then that grin frowns as Smith is perplexed by what heperceives to be the generational distance between his California childhood and his

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daughter’s. Smith says she is not busy learning about “history,” be it Watts, 1965, theDominican Republic, or baseball, but listening to Lil’Peaches.

Associating what he takes to be institutionalized amnesia with the burn of napalm,Smith flashes to 1972, when the United States authorized its use in the Vietnam War.He projects Nick Ut’s iconic photograph of Phan Thi Phúc in Trang Bang, a girlrunning in the terrorizing afterglow of a South Vietnamese chemical weapons attack.The cut from baseball and daughters in Los Angeles to war games and daughters inVietnam makes for a brutal if not gratuitous visual montage. Interspersing so manyfraught and burning images with photographs from Smith’s family albums (andmemories of conversations with his daughter), the documentary solo performanceJuan and John—like the “1965 Yearbook” exhibit—invokes the ethics and theaesthetics of witness, spectatorship, remembrance, and performance evoking “theaftermath of catastrophe” (Hirsch, “Generation” 104). The performance’s visualarchive has the effect of repeating and destabilizing the exact evidence it hails.3 Forinstance, while Smith’s sly declarations about middle-class capitalist success at onemoment can in the next moment rub raw against images from the US war againstcommunism in Vietnam, the alliterative pairing of his daughter with a girl fromanother time and place yet again troubles and exceeds contained narratives about thepolitical geographies of war zones, records, and their pasts and futures. The indices ofspace and time conceal as much as they reveal; wars abroad also turn out to be warsat home, and long after they are “over.”

According to Jacques Derrida, photographs are “both aphoristic and serial”(Athens 1), which is to say they denote ordered and ordering truths. When Derridawonders, what does the photograph bring to light, Avital Ronell rearranges thequestion and interprets Derrida as leaving open and ambivalent the question ofwhether and how audiences are allowed to view what is being exposed (132). Ronell’sinsight is pertinent for reading documentary solo performance, as it returns us to acentral question in performance studies: what is made to be seen? In Juan and John,what does the photograph bring to light for Smith and his audiences? W. G. Sebaldstates that for artists in the precarious position of working in a “discredited society,”and who do not (cannot) reveal enough about what they saw in it, it is always amatter of “looking and looking away at the same time” (ix). There is something ofthis reflex in Smith’s insistent photograph exposures. For audiences to considerSmith’s gesture of looking and looking away is to slip into that gap postulating thematerials of the document on the one side and those of performance on the other, toattend to the ways each locates techniques of knowing and theorizing the past, or asRoland Barthes might say, hallucinating it (115).

Like photography, documentary solo performance appears to offer an experienceand a representation of reality, but at the same time initiates and regulates techniquesfor theorizing it (Benjamin; Sontag; Berger; Mitchell What). Resenting the serial andappropriational rhetorics of the photograph, which can only construe information(rendering its subjects empty and absent signifiers), Susan Sontag writes, “the cameramakes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which deniesinterconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a

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mystery” (23). By contrast, Barthes insists on reader or viewer agency, which isalways fundamentally theatrical, as “every photograph is a certificate of presence” (5).Refusing the injunctions of absence and presence alike, Derrida summons theinscriptions of certification in what is exposed (Athens). The photograph, like anydocument, can be decompositional and un-make its status as a subject and object ofhistory as much as it overdetermines it; each maneuvers situations, performatively. Inthe cinematic context, Brian Winston elucidates Grierson’s documentary as “thecreative treatment of actuality,” liberated from the predilections of commands andauthorizations defining norms of documentary journalism in favor of its morephantasmatic fiction-making enterprises (11). In each case the documentary artifacttempers and tampers with evidence. “Skeptical of discourses of absence andnegativity,” Derrida seeks to open texts to their prolix alterity (Brunette andWills 27).

For many artists who work with the body in performance, the flux of memory is aresource for resistance against institutionalized knowledge industries and theirmedias (Spillers; Pollock). Thus, like so much documentary practice, Juan and Johnaudiences witness Smith’s efforts to participate in and locate himself within theoperations of Derrida’s parergon (Truth), or, the inside and the outside of thoseincendiary knots, rubrics, and flows that frame and make history fluid in itsdocumentations, dreams, and dementias—the inside and the outside of those alwaysshifting conflagrations and their residues. When Smith groans about being“conscripted to read Spalding Gray” (he does not mention Higgins), he jabs at theway US avant-garde performance histories are written as the domain of particularNew York canons of solo and documentary performance (its “canons” andconventions), which he nevertheless deliberately envelops into his craft. Standingplainly on the stage, Smith layers the speech of personal storytelling across anassemblage of images, sounds, and memory—the quarrel between New York and LosAngeles “schools” seen anew, from baseball to performance.

Testing the grounds of theatrical solo performance with documentary mediacorralled from family albums, photojournalism, and broadcast television, Smithremembers watching the ballgame, broadcast from Candlestick Park, in thechronological afterglow of the riots in Los Angeles. The ballgame and the riotseach posit traumatic disruptions to his middle-class childhood, at once close and farfrom home. Taken separately and in conjunction with one another, the events ofAugust 1965 are evidence for US national antagonisms about race and citizenship feltlocally and globally. For Smith and his audiences, they are the very material stuff ofgrowing up. For baseball, the game demonstrates emerging tensions in MLB’sparticular (and popular) entrepreneurial performance industry, in which the risksand rewards of the international division of labor was apparent to players and fanslong before theorists linked neoliberalism with the political legacies of the 1960s and1970s. Performing 1965, Smith moves between memory and archival documentation,eliciting the mutually constitutive force fields of autobiography and the sanctionednarratives of “history” in his effort to stage an affective reckoning with race, nation,and baseball; with radiance, solidarity, and play.

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Documentary and Performance

Juan and John vividly demonstrates a solo performance approach that is recognizablefor the way it stages the active process in the creation of meaning, foregroundingaffect, subjectivity, and interpretation in relationship to the antiseptic “facts”documentation seems to supply. Considering neither “history” nor “sources” thepassive depositories of unassailable archival objects, oral historians likewise “hear”techniques of remembrance (and rememories) as a process that is authorized bycontingency and constitutes identity (Morrison). Like a night at the theatre, it is “neverthe same twice” (Portelli 39). Like solo performance, the narrator is recognized as oneof the characters, and speaks (41). A participant in the story he tells, documentary soloperformance is Smith’s method for staging what will always be a reflective processbetween baseball records and publics, for whom something is at stake in rememberingand encountering Juan Marichal, John Roseboro, and 1965. Flaring in and out ofofficial and family “history” with affective rhythms and tellings, Smith performs aprocess of remembering that foregrounds lived experiences: emotive, tactile, changing,full of consequence—and finally ambiguous. Collectors and archivists may wince, butthat burned baseball card speaks to another kind of evidence, a burned and burningdocument that eludes the usual archivizations of memory and language, makingpalpable (if inaccessible) the blaze of their insides and outsides as ashy trace—even asit mobilizes a story for documentary solo performance.

What links documentary media with performance studies is the groove betweenartifice and the real, otherwise known as the boundary between art and life. Rangingfrom fictional to empirical data, that groove conjures the possibilities of intermediapresence and participation, locating performance among other medias that frame anddislocate the experience of corporeality. In a lively intervention in the debate aboutwhether documentary media and corporeal performance make the absent body realand present (or, make its subjects even more absent, the document as a shroud),Amelia Jones suggests that the body and the document subtly reinstate the authorityof each in the other, as the body is never an unmediated event. Documentary soloperformance hence incurs mediality as the certificate, and as Barthes argues, the veryambiguous “certification of presence” (11), which is not finally verifiable, butnevertheless stages its theatrical claim.4 From the beginning of Juan and John, thatclaim was burning.

Documentary solo performance frames and produces historical propositions;assembling intermedia and viewfinders, it theorizes by connecting selected objects ofevidence in narrative and montage sequences. The materiality of already archivedand authorized evidences repeats and produces difference, revealing its status asmimetic. It manages what is inside and outside the image and rearranges what isinside and outside performance. What it domiciles and exiles reveals a logic ofperception—not only a representation, recounting, or memory, but also anintermedia technique for seeing and conceptualizing each. The oscillation betweensubject and object is creative. Repeating, refusing, and deconstructing perception inthe admixtures of gesture and evidence, intermedia performance introduces new

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forms of documentary evidence that may not be so readily controlled. If it isfrequently noted, as Jacques Le Goff observes, that “today, documents include thespoken word, the image, gestures” (xvii), then it is to make the argument thatdocumentary performance in turn mediates discursive truth-claims precisely in andthrough acts of repetition that produce difference in performance. Hence, MatthewReason understands the document, and performance, as complementary modes ofdistortional artifice. In Smith’s efforts, they literally and figuratively light up andburn. What I mean to call attention to here is Derrida’s challenge to studies inperformance, for whom performance’s ruptures and breaks make it clear that thebody is an experience of frames and dislocations (and so too, disidentifications).“Skeptical of discourses of absence and negativity,” Derrida suggests attention be paidinstead to the dissonances of intermedia apertures (Brunette and Wills 27).

As a performer focusing on the hallucinatory authority of intermedia corporealityin performance (a phenomenological engagement, as Janelle Reinelt suggests), Smithhas documented the 1960s before. In A Huey P. Newton Story, which opened at thePublic Theatre in 1997 (and was made into a Spike Lee film in 2002), Smith channeledthe intellectual traditions and urgencies of black radicalism in his incandescentperformance of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense co-founder, Huey P. Newton.Taking on Juan and John in a work of autobiographical documentary soloperformance, Smith remembers burning that baseball card, and again needs to makesense of historical conflagrations. Smith is as aware of baseball’s place in the politicalimaginary of his childhood as he is of US popular cultures. Thinking Watts 1965alongside baseball 1965 in an act of linguistic ventriloquism, Smith switches to thelanguage of Roseboro’s Dominican counterpart, Spanish, to express the flushquandaries: “Tengo una guerra en mi cabeza (I have a war in my head).” He locatesthe possibility of a link with Marichal, in other words, through an acoustic register.

Baseball

Crucially, baseball is also a story of labor and performance (see Nielsen “Riddle”).MLB’s strategy of recruiting foreign national players like Marichal (at lower cost)increased ownership profit and global market reach at the same time that it retainedtight control of US national “domestic” players like Roseboro, who were stillcontrolled by the reserve clause in the 1960s (with the reserve clause, teams reservedthe rights to players even after their contracts ended). It is important to recognizethat Marichal and Roseboro each read as doubling spectres for human resourcemanagement in the global labor economy of the 1960s, a period that is more oftenrecognized for rights legislation than for the rapidly changing horizons of productionthat include workforce efficiency measures. Referencing the lawsuit Roseboro initiallybrought against Marichal, for instance, Smith snaps, “Angela Davis was Roseboro’slawyer,” overtly reading 1965 through the political discourses of Civil Rights Actstruggles of 1964. Smith also reads Roseboro through the spectre of Watts, 1965: apublic response to Los Angeles Police Department violence against the rights ofMarquette and Ronald Frye. Yet like baseball, Watts is also and no less powerfully a

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sign for the systemic conflict between labor and capital (Robinson). No doubt, 1965was fluent in competing rights and resources discourses (Nielsen “Introduction”).While baseball’s monopoly performance industry illustrates shifts in neoliberalgovernmentality that most critics date to 1973 (Harvey), players continue to demanda price for the labor of performance, rejecting property exchange among owners.

To Smith’s “1965 Yearbook” exhibit, then, and to Juan and John, add anothercitational and discursive frame, one clarified by Curt Flood, a Gold Glove centerfielder who played for the St. Louis Cardinals and refused to be traded after the 1969season. Flood’s suit against the reserve clause was heard in the US Supreme Court,but denied in a 1973 ruling, and MLB players did not win free agency until 1975. “Iknew ball players got traded like horses,” Flood recalls, “but I made up my mind thatit wouldn’t ever happen again” (300). Flood’s 1969 Christmas Eve letter to MLBCommissioner Bowie Kuhn read:

after 12 years in the major leagues I do not believe that I am a piece of property tobe bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system thatproduces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with thelaws of the United States and of the several States. (236)5

Flood’s rhetoric is unmistakable: the affirmation of rights rejects the administrationof people as property, the nexus of capital. Kuhn sparred back:

I certainly agree with you that you, as a human being, are not a piece of property tobe bought and sold. That is fundamental to our society and I think obvious.However, I cannot see its application to the situation at hand. (83)

A week after Flood and Kuhn sent their letters, in a column titled “Curt’s 13thAmendment,” New York Herald Tribune sports journalist Red Smith joked at Kuhn’sexpense: “‘You mean,’ baseball demands incredulously, ‘that at these prices they wanthuman rights too?’” The column spins the inequities of baseball’s big-moneyperformance industry with the 13th Amendment (1865), the rise of post-war UnitedNations rhetoric about human rights (1948), and the Civil Rights Act (1964). Theindication is that histories of rights and resources management are alwaysintertwined: the challenge is to recognize their inscriptions across opaque andcertified frames; permeating unofficial and official renderings.6

Always keeping it personal, Smith reports that after Watts, Roseboro came hometo Los Angeles to find his 1963 World Series ring stolen; a few weeks later, HurricaneBetsy hit New Orleans. Based on historical events, documentary solo performance inthe United States often features the performance of first-person autobiographicalwitness (Martin). Of course, performance that reinstates the idea of storyteller asunambiguous truthteller begs patience, and in this vein Jonathan Kalb observes thatdocumentary solo performance endorses “unfettered individualism” (18). Theopportunity, in Juan and John, is to move from the particular to the general, or asStokely Carmichael understands it, to conceive the concerns of the individual tothose of a collectivity (46). In his performance, Smith draws out the affectiveannotations that make the personal political, at the same time that he remembers and

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projects a distinct set of visual sequences that name and frame 1965, cutting fromWatts; to napalm in Vietnam; to “the infiltration” of Dominican baseball players inMLB.7 Audiences might also wish to recall April 1965, when the United Statesinvaded the Dominican Republic (again), heightening militarized US foreign policyin the Americas—violences Dominicans (and critics of the US military industrialcomplex) are unlikely to forget in the context of any narrative about “Juan.”Attention returns, inevitably, to the problem of what is being recorded in thepersistence of such forgetting about shared Dominican and US histories, and the waysuch elisions frame Smith’s documentary solo performance.

The infraction between Marichal and Roseboro persists as a popular fragment ofmemory, a fiction and fantasy (a regret) that at once confirms and explodes theconduct of the game, chronicling the international division of cultural labor thatmakes MLB Dominican (Ruck). In turn, Marichal and Roseboro maneuver grids andfolds of meaning, as they are each made to play the role of rights and resourcesexemplar, respectively, in the “American” national pastime. Like his audiences, Smithis confronted by and confronts images that document the proverbial scene ofsubjection, where “crimes are not witnessed but staged” (Hartman 8). While theiconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raising their black-gloved fists in asalute to the Olympic Project for Human Rights (and Black Power) at the 1968Mexico City Olympics performs a quest for civil liberties that mainstream Americareviled for “going too far” (Edwards), the black-and-white photographic still takenfrom the television recording of Marichal and Roseboro’s “clash” stages a raciallycharged televisual space of voyeuristic trauma, violence, and shame, in that it hasbeen made to be given to be seen (Young 12).

And this is exactly the rub. In the photograph that Smith projects, and in theYouTube clip he returns to several times over, Marichal and Roseboro are made torepeat as citational “authors and objects of monstrosity” (Sharpe). As a parable inrace and representation, the story of Juan and John could be simply another study ofan old and repeating record that is no less crucial for its repetition. It is clear thatSmith studies the rhetorics of that repetition, and in a reflex that records hisparticipation in them. Citing Marichal’s pitch in the opening and closing scenes ofthe performance, however, it is important to notice that Smith mimes the actof shattering records. The conjunction is provocative, for as Derrida observes, acts ofsilence and mimicry are redoubling forces:

silent works are in fact already talkative, full of virtual discourses, and from thatpoint of view the silent work becomes an even more authoritarian discourse—itbecomes the very place of a word that is all the more powerful because it is silent.(Brunette and Wills 13)

Documentary solo performance thus ventures, through gesture, the possibility ofbreaking that incessantly muting and immutable mimetic hold; at the same time thatit communicates its foreclosures.

As venerable documentary theatre tradition insists, Juan and John positionsits protagonists as historically located agents of history in a first-person narrative

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that begs the question of taking sides (Weiss). Fixing Marichal and Roseboro asmonumentalized, known, and knowable national subjects, they are made intoinstitutionalized and institutionalizing cultural artifacts. Like MLB’s Hall of Famein Cooperstown, NY, Smith’s performed remembrances of Marichal and Roseboromodel Paul Ricoeur’s observation that “archives constitute the documentary stock ofan institution that produces them, gathers them, and conserves them” (117). On theone hand, Juan and John neatens the flows and transmissions of 1965 baseballperformance by crafting a highly personal reflection of his own life through theunwavering story of Marichal and Roseboro’s conflict and friendship. A labor of love,the performance was attended by Marichal himself, Morgan Fouch Roseboro(Roseboro’s daughter), the President of the Dominican Republic Dr. LeonelFernandez (1996–2000, 2004–2014), and Spike Lee (Burke). That the players,performers, president, and artists (politicians all) are all “present” serves simulta-neously to animate and domesticate the powers of document and performance alike.That the Public Theatre advertised the performance as a “springboard for discussionon rage, retribution, and redemption,” posits the scene of violence (and inquiries intopostmemory) as an originary point of departure for the work. On the other hand,Smith’s reflexive repetition and seeing of trauma mimics the foibles of coloniallooking. In other words, Juan and John indeed delivers the official history of thatscene rather than its quavering “inscriptions at the edge of history” (Taussig 209), aswell as the familiar model of political paradox between rights and resources. In eachcase, these are poignantly apposite exigencies. Casting them so overtly in theirdualistic and oppositional signifying molds, the historical machineries of repetitionand reproduction are sure to crack. That is Smith’s chance, and ours, because thealways already intermedia body in performance is an agential subject and object oftransmission: whether in the ballpark, the photograph, or in performance, it resists(Moten “Magic”). Each iteration demands an account of whether and how audiencesare allowed to view what is being exposed, or to hear its burn.

Reverse

The televised “clash” between Marichal and Roseboro was deemed so dangerous that,according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dodgers organization ordered thedestruction of the videotape that recorded the game.8 Historians speculate the MLB“sanitized” the record (a phrase familiar to those researching carefully controlled USgovernment documents), fearing the Marichal–Roseboro conflict would fan the flamesof the Watts Riots. The Mayor of Los Angeles had invoked martial law and deployedthe National Guard to control Watts, a public demonstration that inspired the wrath ofmainstream media, and politically affirming responses from the Black Panthers andthe Situationists alike (Debord): for staging revolt against the violences of racism and(spectacular) property relations. The 48-second YouTube recording of the game stillomits part of the action: what it records is but a stutter in the recording, the fraction ofaction that censors in order to reveal, an interrupted and interrupting sequence ofblack-and-white stills that will not show—but tells—what is already made to be “seen.”

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It is hard to imagine that Marichal and Roseboro did not also theorize publicimages, framings, documentations, hearings, and performances with their own, butthis is not what Juan and John is about. It is a memoir about looking, and lookingback, to locate which viewfinders best accommodate and produce the demands ofintermedia performance, memory, and rememory. To this end it may be helpful torecall that most baseball fans access the actual performance of the game through itstelevised or radio stagings. Years ago, Raymond Williams noted that “the televisualimpression of ‘seeing the events for oneself’ is at times and perhaps always deceptive”(42). In particular, sport broadcasts “have increasingly been arranged for television”(61), the “live” and “real” performances orchestrated for the camera and its remoteaudiences. This televisual pageantry records, for instance, “live” evidence of Marichaland Roseboro in performance. At the same time, if televisual documents indeedproduce new excitement, proximity, and visual experience of the simulated “real,” itis only to repeat the license and constraints of representational narratives: in seeing,framing, remembering, and forgetting practices. By means of thoroughly theatricalstagings of photographs and spectacular televisual broadcasts in the documentarysolo performance Juan and Juan, Smith calls forth into the present and past framingdevices and performances that make history.

So when Smith closes his performance by remembering his daughter say—muchto his distress—“I only know you through what you do on the stage,” the problemof documentary fallibility and intermedia frames and assemblages rings close andtrue. As a ten-year-old fan, as a performer, as a father, and as a culturalambassador, Smith plays to the affinities and affiliations of “family” that are alsoalways fraught, and nearly too distant to broach. Replaying the footage of theMarichal and Roseboro fight brings Smith back to what is, for him, the inauguralmoment of that scorching gaze: 22 August 1965, yet again rehashing thesequence.9 Even if Roseboro “forgave” Marichal, Smith says, “I couldn’t do that”(Hoffarth). In a sense, Smith’s burning keeps it “real,” and it is in light of theseremembered inheritances, “this home outside itself” (Derrida and Stiegler 132) thatirregular inscriptions, and the spectres of rights and resources, emerge in Juan andJohn. Homing in at the end of the American century (1865–1965), Smith’smeditations on the “two legends,” Marichal and Roseboro, revisit and reiterateintermedia and the politics of visibility in documentary solo performance.Memory, Smith seems to suggest, is both a technology of freedom and a site ofcultural labor that “has to be worked through interminably” (Mitchell, PictureTheory 189).

Similarly, in The Work of Fire, Maurice Blanchot writes about the obduracy oflanguage, in that

it strives for the impossible. Inherent in it, at all its levels, is a connection ofstruggle and anxiety from which it cannot be freed.… There is no rest, either at thelevel of the sentence or at that of the whole work. (22)

Kinetic, restless, and burning, Smith remembers televisual and photographic imagesfrom the past that honor Roseboro, and ventriloquize, or sound out Marichal. The

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aphoristic and serial framing of the inside and the outside of perception that Derridacalls parergon (Truth) is what Fred Moten also understands as axiomatic of blackperformance (In the Break). Veering among intermedia, affect, photographs, andmemory, Juan and John leaves open and ambivalent the question of whetheraudiences are allowed to view what is being exposed. It is as if the assemblages ofdocumentary solo performance refer spectacle back to the image, in a gesture thatsimultaneously authorizes and deflects attention from performance, and its record-ings. And it is all, as Smith closes out the performance of Juan and John, “so close toburning.”

Notes

[1] While Fred Moten examines acoustic performance, and in relation to “commodities [that]speak” (In the Break 11), Hartman emphasizes the visual: “I have chosen to look elsewhereand consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned…. By defamiliarizing thefamiliar I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit theshocking spectacle” (4).

[2] He is not the first (see Gerlach).[3] Marianne Hirsch asks, “If these images, in their obsessive repetition, delimit our available

archive of trauma, can they enable a responsible and ethical discourse in its aftermath? Howcan we read them? Do they act like clichés, empty signifiers that distance and protect usfrom the event? Or, on the contrary, does their repetition in itself retraumatize, makingdistant viewers into surrogate victims who, having seen the images so often, have adoptedthem into their own narratives and memories, and have thus become all the more vulnerableto their effects? If they cut and wound, do they enable memory, mourning, and workingthrough? Or is their repetition an effect of melancholic replay, appropriative identification?”(“Surviving” 5).

[4] Barthes observes that “the Photograph…represents the very subtle moment when…I amneither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experiencea micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter” (14).

[5] Flood’s suit was endorsed by the players’ union and advised by Arthur J. Goldberg—formergeneral counsel for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the UnitedSteelworkers of America—who, in 1955, was a legal advisor on the merger of the AmericanFederation of Labor with the CIO.

[6] Ever alert to fiction and fantasy, Red Smith’s column closes with the quip, “Thus thecommissioner restates baseball’s labor policy: ‘Run along, sonny, you bother me.’”

[7] Fans recall that when Marichal made his MLB debut with the San Francisco Giants in 1960,he joined Dominicans Felipe Alou and Matty Alou, Puerto Ricans Orlando Cepeda and JoséPagan, and Venezuelan Ramon Monzant. The third Alou brother, Jesús Alou, joined theGiants in 1963. Spanish was barred. The addition of global competitors to MLB rostersdecentered the prospects (and the reverie of authority) for US national ballplayers.

[8] The Dodgers defeated the Giants for the National League pennant, and in October, went onto beat the Minnesota Twins to win the 1965 World Series.

[9] Smith even projects, in reverse, the footage of Trang Bang—he plays it backward as if toundo it, to move back in time to before the burning, and in so doing, make monstrous thegaze in any instance.

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