Please join the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop for:
Marissa Fenley
PhD Candidate, English and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago
Who will Present:
“John W. Cooper’s Minstrel Ventriloquism and the Politics of the Color-line Barbershop”
Wednesday, January 15th,
4:30 – 6:00 PM
Logan Center 603
There will not be a pre-circulated reading for this workshop. This workshop is co-sponsored by the 20th/21st Century Workshop.
This event is free and open to the public and light refreshments will be served. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to the workshop coordinators, Arianna Gass (ariannagass@uchicago.edu) and Eva Pensis (pensis@uchicago.edu).
Bio:
Marissa Fenley is a PhD candidate in English and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation project, currently titled, “Puppet Theory: Aesthetics of Adjacent Intimacy” takes account of the puppet as a structured relation that moves between the material object, its aesthetic image, and its conceptual significance. She is interested in the ways that puppets aesthetically represent dynamics or what we might call affects of relation: structures of feelings that resist embodied forms of display because they exist in between bodies. Her first chapter looks at the techniques and mechanics of ventriloquism and analyzes how ventriloquism is distinctly invested in possession.
Abstract:
John W. Cooper, born in 1871, was the first black American ventriloquist of record. A gifted singer, Cooper launched his performance career with the minstrel troupe, The Southern Jubilee Singers, until four years later, in 1900, when he landed his own ventriloquist act with the Richard and Pringle Minstrels. Cooper migrated from the minstrel troupe circuit to Vaudeville during the “white rats strike” around 1901—a moment in history when black performers were offered the opportunity to appear on Vaudeville stages to replace white strikers. While the residue of minstrelsy hung on Cooper as he transitioned from one venue to the other, it did not linger on his skin, as it did for so many other black performers who continued to black-up on the professional stage after the minstrel show’s decline. Cooper performed his act “Fun in a Barber shop” from 1900 until around 1925, just before Vaudeville’s decline, a time where the racial politics of the black barber shop were highly contested and under rapid transformation. In his ten-minute sketch, Cooper plays a color-line barber, or a black barber who serves exclusively white clientele, accompanied by five figures rigged with fishing line and operated with foot pedals. Cooper’s act repurposed minstrel tropes, namely the lazy slave or “Sambo,” the wisecracker, the mulatta wench as well as the non-blacked-up interlocuter or straight-man who introduced the minstrel show and set up the jokes of the “endmen.” While the white, dignified interlocuter and wise-cracking minstrel continue to structure much of ventriloquist performance today—as do the racial, power dynamics inherited along with these tropes—Cooper disorganized minstrelsy’s given terms in order to break apart the inherited spatial and social dynamics of plantation life in antebellum America that minstrelsy perpetuated. This workshop will first offer a presentation of the historical account of Cooper’s barbershop act and then explore a few different possible analytics for approaching this material in discussion.