The phone call came to me just as the opera Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars (Hopscotch, 24 October to 21 November 2015) had gone into previews. Yuval Sharon, the opera's director, explained that a small group of interlopers at Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, had interfered with Hopscotch's previews and complained about its portrayal of people of colour. Sharon explained that everywhere else that Hopscotch was being performed, people met the cast and creative team with enthusiasm, encouragement and support. He asked me to join the production team and help him communicate with these interlopers. As a site-based performance scholar and practitioner,Footnote 1 I was thrilled to become a part of what I thought an ‘unprecedented, beautiful and historic event’.Footnote 2 How could I not be? This was an audacious, unconventional, ambitious and perhaps extraordinary artistic experiment, and if anyone thought differently, I would help change their mind. In my view, Sharon was bringing art to the masses and developing best practices for performing opera outside traditional theatre venues and among communities of colour in a respectful and collaborative way. I proudly added my voice to this opera. Mea culpa.
One of the first things I did after agreeing to come on board was to see the production in its entirety; if I was to help the opera, I needed to see not only what the community was taking issue with, but other moments along the show's routes where the production could be vulnerable to similar accusations of ‘occupying a historically oppressed neighborhood’.Footnote 3 I set out to speak to individuals at the park, one of whom was a food vendor named Maria. She was in her late 50s and sold fresh tamales and drinks out of a shopping cart for a living. When I asked if she knew what the group of people with instruments in the park were doing, she said, ‘It looks like a tour. Those people have been here for six weeks, but I do not understand what they are doing. They buy nothing from me.’Footnote 4 Maria was one of the many people from some of the most disadvantaged ethnic neighbourhoods of Los Angeles cast as mise en scène, i.e., free and mobile backdrops, for a paid cast of more than a hundred actors, dancers and musicians.
Hopscotch was a site-based technetronic opera that employed an episodic model of geographical and narrative fragmentation to tell its story. It aimed to bring visibility to both opera and Los Angeles's rich cultural heritage, but it did so in a manner that caught it in what feminist scholar Peggy Phelan calls ‘a trap’ that ‘summons surveillance’, ‘provokes voyeurism’ and whets the colonialist ‘appetite for possession’.Footnote 5 The concept behind this production and the process used to implement it ostensibly objectified, belittled and enraged Boyle Heights residents and stakeholders, partly due to its overlooking the possibility that site-based performance requires a more robust sensitivity and respect to the community in which it occurs. By not properly reaching out to all members of the key groups directly and from the start, Hopscotch claimed the realm of creativity as a property of the cultural elite, and became vulnerable to the accusations hurled against it. The result was a set of confrontations that tested the very premise of the dissemination of opera and performance outside spaces of privilege. This article examines the mobilisation of opera as a tool of the neoliberal capitalist agenda to privatise public space. Through examining the way in which this opera behaved specifically in one of their performance locations in Boyle Heights, I will illustrate a way in which even arts non-profits can behave like large corporately minded concerns, and harness the power of classical music not to elevate but to displace.Footnote 6
This production provides a valuable opportunity to examine the implications and complications of staging site-based work inside communal spaces without first considerately communicating with those whom the performance most directly affects. Hopscotch also illuminated the way in which neoliberal forces position the wealthy as creators of aesthetic value, and the autochthonous economically disenfranchised as background extras who obscure the cultural, economic and social realities. In what follows, there is an examination of questions about what responsibility, if any, site-based artists have to engage community members and stakeholders in ways that will construct a mutually beneficial relationship. What gains (or losses) result when one achieves what Miwon Kwon calls ‘a more meaningful and relevant connectedness with an audience’ in a site-based context?Footnote 7 Finally, what are the best practices for contemporary site-based artists to employ when performing for an audience in a way that acknowledges a community's sense of ownership over a place?
While tackling these questions and issues, I hope to give the subtleties involved in implementing transit-oriented performance techniques the attention they richly deserve, given their part in creating a situation that exotified economically disenfranchised people who lived in a historically immigrant municipality, populated primarily by Mexican Americans, Latina/os and Chicana/os.Footnote 8 It was this opera's execution, then, that created art reifying a virulent version of social pornography, which performance studies scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett theorises as an exploitation of private and public disparities in class and culture.Footnote 9 In practice, social pornography is a public, pronounced, voluntary and compensated community participation in an artistic performance where an audience can gaze upon an artwork featuring community members as participants.Footnote 10 Herein, I extend the concept of social pornography to account for cases, such as the one in Hopscotch, where community participation is involuntary and uncompensated, to highlight both the passive role as commodities that subaltern subjects are called to inhabit in neoliberal domains in general and in Hopscotch's scopophilic, colonial and sonic enactments in particular.
Neoliberalism's infrastructure, as outlined by geographer David Harvey, is useful to this analysis for the way in which it articulates this ideology's power to orchestrate human thought, practice and action in favour of privatisation, finance and market processes at the expense of safeguarding the public's welfare, thereby leading to a situation where, as Harvey observes, ‘The freedom of the masses would be restricted in favor of the freedoms of the few.’Footnote 11 This way of reading our current historical moment enables this article's interrogation. Hopscotch's conduct established a need to consider issues such as California's increasing wealth gap and how the creative economy interacts with people of colour and their spaces according to their wealth-generating capacity. The portion of Hopscotch that took place in Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights sparked an uprising because community members and stakeholders saw its all-white production team as agents of and for gentrification. The concern in this case seems justified, since communities of colour in general and Chicana/o communities in particular have seen the most drastic increase in homelessness in the past few years.Footnote 12
Crucial to this enquiry is musicologist Marianna Ritchey's incisive work, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era, in which she underscores the relationship between neoliberalism and gentrification, framing Hopscotch as ‘opera and/as gentrification’.Footnote 13 I follow Ritchey by problematising the idea that a place's, product's or person's ability to generate profit in the competitive free market is a suitable index of social value. As Ritchey points out, classical music ‘regularly deploys some of the central keywords and values of neoliberalism, using them to exemplify how [it] can be regenerated by exposure to market forces’.Footnote 14 Then there is Patricia A. Ybarra, who points out neoliberalism's ability to behave as not only an economic but a ‘“political philosophy”, which promises to be the best way to reach prosperity and democracy’.Footnote 15 This case study reveals such a promise to be bankrupt and undemocratic.
Site-based performance in the United States of America is an under-investigated field of study, and transit-oriented performances such as Hopscotch are even more so;Footnote 16 however, American site-based performance has also begun to show up as a ‘catalyst for revitalization’ that elected officials and developers gradually deploy.Footnote 17 Michael McKinnie points out that in cities around the world, ‘site-specific performance’, as he calls it, ‘has become tied up with the political-economic management of the city’ and accordingly, not all site-based performances are singularly and necessarily valuable (or detrimental) to a community purely because they take place at sites within its borders.Footnote 18 Artist Thomas Hirschhorn puts the unpredictable nature of site-based work in the following way: ‘Work in public space is never a total success and never a total failure.’Footnote 19 However, as contemporary performance scholar Bertie Ferdman points out, the field's failure to discuss problematic issues around space, access and privilege remains a most pressing issue in site-based work.Footnote 20 Thus, knowing when a site-based, transit-oriented performance becomes valuable or detrimental is important, and learning how a site-based, transit-oriented performance specifically means is critical.
Hopscotch was performed along three separate routes through which audiences travelled to unknown destinations inside various limousines.Footnote 21 It was the limousines in Boyle Heights, a Los Angeles neighbourhood at the forefront of Los Angeles's anti-gentrification movement, that represented the overall failure of the production team to understand, and proactively engage, the residents and stakeholders whom the performance would most directly affect. It is this deployment of a vehicle as both a centralising motif and a primary means of delivering a narrative that makes Hopscotch a transit-oriented performance.Footnote 22
The Industry, an opera company founded in 2011 by Sharon, produced Hopscotch as a large-scale collaboration between composers, dancers, musicians and actors.Footnote 23 It commissioned six librettists and six Los Angeles-based composers to write original music to create and texture the production's soundscape. The musical compositions were to be modular to enable them to accommodate unexpected delays. In keeping with the connotations of The Industry's nomenclature, the show was written much in the same way as a television series: that is, Hopscotch's writers gathered in a room and brainstormed the main story's arc.
The production organised its 24 episodes or ‘chapters’ into a triadic format comprising a Green, Red and Yellow route. Each route contained eight distinct chapters with a dedicated assistant stage manager, who usually sat in the front passenger seat with that episode's promptbook. An audience of only four people would board a limousine at the designated starting point for their coloured route and travel as a private party in either a clockwise or an anticlockwise direction. The performance order of the chapters was non-chronological, and each route lasted approximately 90 minutes and ended where it began. The performance locations for the opera varied from the inside of apartment buildings to the newly refurbished Los Angeles River Trail and to other notable Los Angeles locations such as Mariachi Plaza and Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights; the opera staging also included architectural landmarks such as the Million Dollar Theatre, which is a two thousand-seat venue in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, and the much-filmed Bradbury Building, a historical landmark also located in the downtown area. At one location, the audience followed a guide through a luxury apartment complex and up to a rooftop pool lounge via a warren of hallways and a cargo elevator.
The day's final performance on each route ended in a grand finale scene at the central hub, where the paying audience members, along with selected performers, exited the limousines onto a reserved space where a waiting crowd of non-paying audience members provided this privileged group with readymade witnesses to their limousine debarkation. Audience members could experience Hopscotch in one of two ways: free at the central hub, which was described as ‘a large pop-up outdoor structure’, in the parking lot of the Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles, or by purchasing a ticket to experience Hopscotch for $125 during a regular performance and $150 for the finale. Tickets were for specific routes, and a limousine would transport the audience along one of three routes, each consisting of different episodes of the overall narrative; the routes included audiences seeing performers suspended from rafters, standing atop buildings or sitting inside their limousine. Though the show dedicated part of their eight rehearsed performances to spaces outside the vehicle on each of its three routes, the audience enjoyed most of the show from the interior of the limousine by peeping out into the street through the limousine's dark-tinted windows.
Hopscotch enjoyed effusive if not oleaginous publicity in the lead-up to its opening and during its run, with coverage from major newspapers and magazines across the country.Footnote 24, Footnote 25 According to The New Yorker magazine, Hopscotch moved people according to an ‘ingenious scheme’,Footnote 26 whereas The New York Times called it ‘a trippy exploration of time and memory’.Footnote 27 The Los Angeles Times heralded Hopscotch as ‘a transformative moment for an art form’.Footnote 28 Despite this uncritical critical acclaim, Hopscotch vitiated its art by failing to be sensitive to the political history and the socio-economic realities of all people. As Soyini Madison articulates the responsibilities involved with site-based work, ‘Entering a public sphere enlivens scrutiny, enlarges responsibility, and cracks open into plain sight hidden wrongs.’Footnote 29 These wrongs have consequences that can shift a place's safe inhabitability.
Chalking the lines
In the 1890s, when wealthy landowners William H. Workman and Elizabeth Hollenbeck donated to the city of Los Angeles the 25 acres of land that Hollenbeck Park now occupies, they did so under the condition that the city commit to allocating $10,000 over a two-year period for making improvements to the park. This commitment of public funds seems to have been a key to making Hollenbeck Park a highly frequented pleasure ground. In 1905, Workman and Hollenbeck subdivided their substantial property surrounding the park into the Workman Park and the Hollenbeck Heights Tracts, which they then advertised as ‘situated just east of and overlooking beautiful Hollenbeck Park’.Footnote 30 This business-savvy manipulation of public resources masquerading as philanthropy is articulated by Ferdman as follows: ‘Neoliberal economies have also greatly shifted views of private and public space, in particular as spaces considered public increasingly reflect private-public partnership in the interest of capital.’Footnote 31 This privileging of monied might may be one of the examples that local activists invoked to support their reading of Hopscotch's claims of aesthetic and altruistic motivation. The Industry's significant support from prominent Los Angeles real estate developers was also problematic for many community members.Footnote 32 Perhaps not surprisingly, The Industry's goals, as expressed by Mary Ann O'Connor, who is The Industry's founding board chair, include a distinction between a ‘micro-audience’ and a ‘general one’, representing the concept of an audience as a bifurcated entity and implying a foundational distinction between a privileged few and the average many.Footnote 33 This distinction plays out in Hopscotch's limousine and non-limousine riding audiences.
When asked about Boyle Heights's current battle with gentrification, Harry Gamboa Jr, who grew up in the neighbourhood and is a founder of Asco, a famously confrontational and scatological art collective,Footnote 34 said, ‘Some communities don't have a background of resistance … but Boyle Heights does, and it has an intellectual base that goes back to the Chicano Movement.’Footnote 35 This background of resistance has today been re-manifested in a decidedly more aggressive and still scatological way, evidenced most literally when an arts non-profit was deemed a gentrifying space and had faeces flung at its building.Footnote 36 Today, Boyle Heights is seen by many as a real estate goldmine; thus, Gamboa's invocation represents a call for present-day activists who seek to defend their community to draw upon both Boyle Heights's past confrontational strategies and its rich history of resistance to exploitation. This call has been heard; as Marianna Ritchey has pointed out, ‘Today, Boyle Heights is home to many revolutionary activist groups … [who are] joining together to resist the increasingly powerful gentrifying processes that they feel are transforming their community in harmful ways and without their input or consent.’Footnote 37
A particularly aggressive group that called the opera a gentrifying endeavour was Serve the People, Los Angeles (STPLA), a New Communist Party affiliated group dedicated to serving the people of Los Angeles in general and the disadvantaged residents of Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles and Echo Park, who are subjugated by ‘capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and national oppression’, in particular.Footnote 38 This group has made a name for itself by regularly distributing food and clothes to the needy residents of Boyle Heights and by confronting groups that it sees as gentrifying forces. STPLA's core members are predominantly Chicana/o, with a majority of them having family who live or work in Boyle Heights.Footnote 39
In December 2015, STPLA confronted a group of University of California, Los Angeles urban planning students on a walking tour of Boyle Heights, escorted them out of the neighbourhood, asked them not to come back, and later blogged that Boyle Heights is ‘under attack in the form of gentrification and therefore must be defended’.Footnote 40 It was STPLA's contention that the community was being exploited and was involuntarily (and without remuneration) serving as mise en scène for Hopscotch and that this compelled them to both resist and engage in counterattacks. This ‘group of exclusively white people strolling around the park’Footnote 41 had to be stopped, and they were the group to do it. Members of Hopscotch disputed that STPLA and its members were stakeholders in Boyle Heights, opting to characterise them as opportunistic interlopers and obstructionists instead. STPLA's only response to this claim was to dismiss the accusation as a typical ploy of gentrifiers, saying, ‘They always want to make people with problems seem like they are a problem.’Footnote 42
The first clash between Hopscotch and STPLA occurred during rehearsals on Sunday 4 October 2015, after one of the STPLA members spotted a person they described as being dressed like a pseudo-vaudevillian in front of a paletero (popsicle vendor) cart, playing it like a drum. This representation was offensive to STPLA because they interpreted the casting of a white male in this role as mocking the real-life Chicana/o paleteros who make their living in the park. Indeed, all the performers and production team members dedicated to this location at the time of the clash were white, a fact that soon changed when staff were shuffled around and Sharon called on me. It was after this clash that a confrontation ensued during which a white Hopscotch assistant stage manager produced a city permit, waved it around as proof that the production had a right to use the park, and stated, ‘We have a permit to be here. See this paper? It gives us the right!’ To this declaration of right, a Chicano member of the group responded, ‘We don't need no permit to fuck you up!’Footnote 43
As this interaction demonstrates, both sides of this issue justified and fortified their perspectives and rights to inhabit the same space. One group invoked the unfettered privilege to defend a de facto ownership of the territory, and the other group invoked an official document from the city. In the stage manager's case, the permit was his archival document recording Hopscotch's sanctioned presence, which was purchased months before the event. For the Chicano youth, his and his friend's possession of the park rests on a repertoire of the temporal, historical and corporeal occupation of the park. Caught in the same space, they approach it from opposite sides: one privileges an archive and the other a repertoire.Footnote 44 It was after this confrontation that STPLA cast themselves as the spokespeople for the inhabitants of Hollenbeck Park and the wider Boyle Heights community.
Feeling empowered, STPLA then interrupted Hopscotch's performance by heckling the performers and agitating the nearby ducks into quacking to drown out the music and text of the show. STPLA's contention was that ‘the oppressed nationalities of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles do not want empty art that says nothing of the Chicano/Mexican/New Afrikan struggle and history’.Footnote 45 Unfortunately, Hopscotch's cast inadvertently escalated the situation by reportedly yelling, ‘We're not gentrifiers! We're putting on an art show! We're entertaining the community!’ There is of course a colonial logic at play in this rejoinder, as it highlights an ethnocentricity whereby ‘community’ is redefined not as the people who continuously live, work and play in Hollenbeck Park but as Hopscotch's paying audience. This clash escalated to a more pronounced conflict, leading STPLA to write the following part of a blog post about Hopscotch:
Boyle Heights is not a safe space for their circus, that the masses of Boyle Heights won't tolerate gentrification, that they are, in fact, in danger, that they will get physically hurt. Not by us. But by the people … And for the sake of their safety, they should immediately leave.Footnote 46
STPLA would then overlay their repertoire of live verbal threats with threatening images and an archived and more direct message to Hopscotch: ‘Death to gentrification! … It won't stop unless you stop it!’Footnote 47 Here, STPLA considers threats of violence as an appropriate means by which to arrest Hopscotch's performances in this community. This aggressive rhetoric is quickly becoming a hallmark of the activism in the Los Angeles anti-gentrification movement, and the Los Angeles Police Department has investigated some anti-gentrification activity under the classification of ‘hate crimes’.Footnote 48 Thus, STPLA's summarising of Hopscotch as nothing more than door jambs for ‘white artists and hipsters and gentrifiers and city council sellouts and city agencies who don't give a fuck about building proletarian power and preserving community’ emerges from the idea that gentrification is threatening enough to merit being stopped by any means necessary.Footnote 49
Casting the first stone
A foundational problem with Hopscotch was its staging, which made it difficult for the show staff and the audience members in their limousines to connect with community members outside the insulated and exclusionary moving environment of luxury cars. This staging also prevented producers from fully recognising that even the poor and disenfranchised can lay claims to a site and that, as Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik have stated, ‘engagement with place has its political consequences’.Footnote 50 Though the disenfranchised may not control the historical archive, their repertoire of daily activities composes the cultural definition and ownership of an urban site.Footnote 51 Moreover, as the performers of Hopscotch learned, when the resident's ethnic identity enmeshes itself with a location, the community forges a powerful affiliation with a site that outsiders, who attempt to resignify its meaning, must register. As Elin Diamond aptly articulates, no artist ‘can shake off the referential frame imposed by text, mode of production, and spectator's narrativity’.Footnote 52 When a site-based production chooses, as Hopscotch did with my help, to appropriate cultural space, stories and symbols, it should do so judiciously or risk serious visceral resistance.
According to its commemorative programme, Hopscotch ‘help[ed] Los Angeles get to know itself better, to rejoice in the diversity and character that distinguish this city’.Footnote 53 Hopscotch facilitated interracial encounters, but the encounters did not foster much visible rejoicing by any Boyle Heights community members. What Hopscotch did in effect was to expose fissures in the show's core concept, namely, that an opera could step into the streets of one of the most dynamic and ethnically rich cities in the world without a planned engagement with the disenfranchised members of the communities in all the locations where the opera took place. Omitting a thoughtful consideration of diversity, aesthetic representation and strategic interaction with Los Angeles's massive ethnic diversity ultimately proved to be problematic. The events caused by this omission also brought into question Hopscotch's goal of dissolving the isolation, that is, of driving into ‘an ecstatic vision of community in Los Angeles’.Footnote 54 According to a group of Boyle Height's stakeholders, it takes more than an assemblage of ‘all-white performers … all-white staff and … all-white audience members’ to bring art to Boyle Heights.Footnote 55
‘First Kiss’ was the episode of the opera that took place at Hollenbeck Park. At the top of the show, two soon-to-be lovers began their first date. Lucha (‘battle’ or ‘struggle’ in Spanish), played by Sarah Beaty, and Jameson, played by Victor Mazzone, awaited the audience.Footnote 56 Two other key players, Stephanie Williams, a parasol-twirling roller-skater, and Linnea Sablosky on the cajón, awaited just outside the audience's view. This chapter's full cast wore late 1950s outfits inspired by The Pajama Game, a Hollywood musical for which a large musical number (‘Once a Year Day’) was shot on location at Hollenbeck Park.
After the four-member audience exited their limousine, their guide encouraged them to stroll behind accordionist Isaac Schankler as he and his legato melody snaked their way towards the front of a band shell, picking up Jameson and Lucha on the way.Footnote 57 This part of the show took the audience towards the park's prominent lake and then to a patch of grass approximately 20 feet away from the front of the band shell. In the park, the amphitheatre stage sits approximately four feet off the ground with a band shell as a backdrop. At this stage and in front of the lovers, Williams and Sablosky had a choreographed musical interaction that involved Williams gracefully gliding on her roller skates as Sablosky tapped a barely audible rhythm on her cajón. Lucha and Jameson watched this duet as part of their date while they continued to engage in their recitative.
The scene staged the first date between Jameson and Lucha as they greeted each other with all the trepidation and seduction of many a first date, with no inkling of the abandonment that was to come or, in keeping with Hopscotch's simultaneous format, the abandonment that had always and already happened. In the staging of this moment, Hopscotch provided a scene that Phelan would classify as both ‘alluring and violent’ for the ways in which ‘it touches the paradoxical nature of psychic desire’ and promises ‘reciprocity and equality’ but fails and ends by producing ‘violence, aggressivity [and] dissent’.Footnote 58 The Anglo Jameson's seduction of the Mexican Lucha recalls a ubiquitously known cultural archive for the Chicana/o community of Boyle Heights and beyond, the story of La Malinche, in which an indigenous slave girl is seduced, impregnated and abandoned by Hernán Cortéz.Footnote 59 This is a central motif of colonial seduction and abandonment, played out in Hopscotch as a romantic date in the multicultural city of Los Angeles in the new millennium and before a Chicana/o community who are in effect the cultural progenies of La Malinche. Hopscotch's reiteration of this seduction and abandonment then took on bottomless resonances, as it reified a lasting legacy of exploitation.
As Lucha and Jameson continued their path, leaving Williams and Sablosky behind, the audience shadowed them as they strolled towards the lake, now holding hands. At this point, Marc Lowenstein's musical composition was played the loudest, and a small band was formed with the addition of Logan Hone's saxophone and Stefan Kac's tuba to Isaac Schankler's accordion in the romantic texturing of a conversation and song inside the covering of a boathouse. Erin Young wrote the text that was spoken along the stroll, and the text did not help to ameliorate the communities’ concerns about The Industry ‘bringing opera to the masses, whether they want it or not’ (emphasis mine).Footnote 60 At one moment, Lucha praised the beauty of the Park's avian residents, only to have Jameson respond loudly, ‘Yeah, but it's horrible how those children throw rocks at them.’Footnote 61 Independently of whether or not this specific line referenced reality, it constituted yet another articulation of a colonialist mindset that privileges the European over the native. The natives in this case (i.e., the community residents) did not understand how to manage the natural resources, including and perhaps especially the real estate, around them as well as the colonisers did (i.e., Hopscotch's audience, cast and crew). After a performance inside the boathouse, Lucha and Jameson began a walk back towards the street, stopping for what was the scene's climax, complete with a musical crescendo that added T.J. Troy's percussion, who, until this point, had been observing the scene as an anachronistically dressed ice-cream cart attendee. Troy used his ice-cream cart as a drum set, and his rhythm led our lovers to their first kiss.
Jumping the line
On typical weekends, there are at least half a dozen vendors spread across Hollenbeck Park, selling everything from shaved ice to churros to tamales. The vendors cater to the constant stream of people enjoying the park, mostly by strolling along the lake's pedestrian bridge and using the park's features as backdrops for various in situ photography sessions. The final day of performances for Hopscotch occurred on 22 November 2015. This day found me driving towards the central hub to await the grand culmination of Hopscotch's run. Hollenbeck Park was already filling up with its usual traffic: vendors prepping for a regular Sunday in the park, families lounging near the lake and a group of Roosevelt High School marching band members rehearsing on a hill off in the northern section of the park. These Roosevelt High School students would reify their school's motto of ‘Don't flinch, don't foul, hit the line hard’ by playing the most significant role in the day's protest.
All looked normal but for a Chicana female, described by a park employee as a local community member, who arrived at approximately 10 a.m. equipped with noise makers and a handmade sign proclaiming the day's performance and the production as unnecessary, unwanted and unwelcomed. The sign read ‘Your “ART” is displacing people of Color #AntiGentrification’. As the performance began, the woman with the sign approached the scene to disrupt it by heckling and blowing on a whistle. At this point, an altercation developed that saw a violent reaction against the woman's body and its performance of resistance. According to a park employee, audience members (perhaps thinking the woman a cast member) engaged her in earnest conversation, and others using threatening language informed her she had no right to disturb the performance. During one such exchange, a white male audience member stepped out of a limousine in his role as a passive observer and advanced towards the Chicana female protestor to silence her through physically menacing behaviour and expletives. The exchange was serious enough to warrant an intervention from both Hopscotch's security guards and the park's on-site representative.
In this scenario, the white male audience member embraced his role as what John Berger calls a ‘spectator–owner’ as he actively protected the integrity of his purchased opera experience, mounting an aggressive and abusive public defence against the Chicana female, who injected herself too much into the action of the performance.Footnote 62 Through her action, she simultaneously worked for, with and against Hopscotch to play a functioning role in recasting her own and, by extension, her community's identity. She challenged the white male by transforming his investment into a struggle to maintain his positionality as the unquestioned dominant observer. The Chicana female thus placed the white male audience member in a paradoxical situation. He needed her in the present to adorn his shows’ background with her exotic figure, but he also needed her to be silent. She disruptively proffered her voice, though the only part of her that was of value to the opera was her body.
Had the Chicana female disappeared from the scene completely, however, so would have a key element of the performance that Sharon had envisioned and that the white male audience member had purchased. In this way, the logic of the attack on this Chicana female is comprehensible as an assertion of ownership, she and her community are little more than show extras, and so Sharon's vision and the white male's actions were simply putting this woman in her place. There was no room in Hopscotch's score or aesthetic concept for her monody – thus, she had to be silenced. After this altercation, the woman, who protested the show, posted a mass invitation to Facebook for people to come to Hollenbeck and protest against gentrifiers.
Hopscotch's production manager, Ash Nichols, was the first member of Hopscotch's production team to arrive at the scene to help manage the situation, which was relatively benign in the initial moments but escalated quickly after his arrival. It fell to Nichols to activate safety precautions, including calling in another limousine in case of a potential cast and crew evacuation. After the first break taken by the cast, the woman approached the band shell where approximately fifteen members of the Roosevelt High School marching band were now rehearsing, and she briefed them on the issue. This quickly mobilised the youths, and the band geared up their instruments, now determined to do their part to defend Boyle Heights against the encroaching forces of gentrification.Footnote 63 During the time that the students were preparing themselves, Hopscotch's leadership held a hurried vote among the cast and crew and decided to continue with the show. At this time I was still at the central hub awaiting the show's grand finale; I did not get a call on this day asking for me to help or to inform me of the situation. However, months later, I would be called on to defend The Industry, which I did, even though Sharon felt the tone of my response to be too ‘apologetic’ and thought the focus needed to be on the fact that ‘whether right or wrong, an aggressive attitude against peaceful citizens that have consistently attempted dialogue is not a tactic we condone’.Footnote 64 I took his notes and changed my tone.
As the students approached the performance area and played from their musical repertoire to disrupt the performance of Hopscotch, the musicians picked up the students’ melody and increased their instruments’ volume to subsume that of the marching band, thereby integrating the students’ protest into what had now become not a performance of an opera but an assertion of dominance. After an initial period of disorientation, the students decided that this engagement cast them as mise en scène for the show, just as their neighbourhood had been. The students refused to embrace Hopscotch's casting of them as extras and chose to play themselves instead; they took the lead in an aggressive musical performance. The marching band began to play in a mode of counter-identification by taking the same notes the Hopscotch players were using and distorting them in what José Esteban Muñoz might call ‘a strategy of resistance’.Footnote 65 Hopscotch's musical director Marc Lowenstein framed the sonic clash between the student band and the cast as a reconciliatory gesture on the part of the Hopscotch performers, telling The Guardian: ‘I asked our own musicians to play along with the high school players, to engage them.’Footnote 66 Lowenstein's attempt to engage the marching band students read to them as a trivialising of their grievances and protest, which in effect caused an escalation that manifested as a cacophonous battle.Footnote 67 When the two sonic repertoires collided, Hopscotch betrayed its specified desire to archive the community by using its repertoire to drown out the community's autochthonous music.
STPLA arrived just as the marching band students were leading the confrontation with their instruments at full volume. During a break in the action of Hopscotch, a cast member made a sign reading, ‘I am a Boyle Heights resident. We are not rude.’Footnote 68 The sign was held aloft and waved, and he then approached the group of youths and brandished the sign in one of the youth's faces, at which point the youth slapped the sign out of his hands and stomped on it. In the ensuing moments, one protester struck a female Hopscotch stage manager on the arm. Despite this, Hopscotch continued its performances with the adjustment that audience members would no longer exit the limousine. Instead, the performers would only gather at the limousine's windows and play. However, when the opera members attempted to implement this plan, the students could not be ignored; they participated in Hopscotch, but they did so by playing an unscripted score of their own. Ironically, in this way these students contributed the only voluntary, authentic and passionate example of true community engagement that Hopscotch ever earned.
When the Hopscotch cast went to the limousine's window for the next performance, approximately twenty activists and student band members loudly and menacingly surrounded the Hopscotch cast, first corralling them and then trapping them inside a small space between the limousine and a crescent of bodies, brass and sound. It was not until this moment that a retreat began, and the audience and performers hurried to get into a backup limousine as the community of protesters cheered, jeered and waved their middle fingers, and the marching band played a mocking tune and then a victorious march. As the last performer entered the limousine, the group of community activists expectorated at the limousine and pelted it with dirt and pebbles. Vera Caro, one of the community organisers present at the site that day, posted a video of the incident and summed up the day's events as follows:
Let this serve as a reminder that Boyle Heights does not want gentrifiers in the community, and that residents aren't going to sit idly as gentrifiers try to Columbus their neighborhood. Such a brilliant intervention, and one of the white males [sic] gentrifiers had the audacity to tell protesters that they were ‘trying to bring art to Boyle Heights!’ Hahahaha. Some people have no sense of history.Footnote 69
Here, Caro's version of history and the events is clear. She both transformed ‘Columbus’ into a verb and invoked the performed, embodied, lived and familiar repertoire by dismissing the idea that Boyle Heights invites, wants or needs imported art. According to Lowenstein, the ultimate loss was for the students, for as he put it after the confrontation, ‘We could have helped those kids, given them classes on how to play music, but now they can forget about it; they don't know how to act.’Footnote 70
Losing balance
Hopscotch's inattentiveness to the inhabitants of the space they worked to arrogate manifested in the claims of Hopscotch actants that community members were not active partners and collaborators but rather clusters of benign logistical obstacles or, in some cases, pests to be eradicated. An illustration of the consequences of this inattentiveness lies in the way in which reporters represented the community. New Yorker staff writer Alex Ross described a quinceañera during a scene from Hopscotch in Hollenbeck Park as ‘a young woman who had just been married, in a flamboyant purple dress’.Footnote 71 As a Catholic coming of age ritual, a quinceañera is actually a popular religious and social event in the Chicana/o communities in the United States, not unlike a Jewish bat mitzvah. Ross's misidentification could be an innocent example of how our experiences carry with them the limitations of the categorical systems of which are aware, as in the story of Marco Polo who, upon seeing a rhinoceros for the first time, mistook it for a unicorn.
Conversely, this misidentification of a sacred ritual for young Chicana girls could be a sign of a much more detrimental semiosis, one that is unwilling or unable to account for any phenomena outside its privileged colonial and Anglo-normative structure. Although Ross was not directly involved with the production of Hopscotch, his article was an important part of its overall signification as interpreted by STPLA and other Boyle Heights readers. Many other individuals involved with Hopscotch suffered just as much, perhaps even more explicitly, from the same cultural myopia as Ross did. This myopia was evident, for instance, in one usher shooing away an older Chicano man who came too close to one of Hopscotch's limousines during a performance,Footnote 72 and in an interaction that occurred between Ashley Allen, one of the many non-Chicana woman who played Lucha, and Sharon.Footnote 73 In an ad lib moment while riding in a car through an ethnic enclave, Allen said, ‘My dress is way better [than] that’, as she spotted a quinceañera dress displayed outside a store, which caused Sharon to laugh excitedly.Footnote 74 What Sharon and Allen accomplished by this speech act and laughter was the legitimisation and reinforcement of Hopscotch's position of power over the communities it exploited as mise en scène. Allen was in this instant articulating a moment that Taylor describes as moving from the ‘here to an exotic there, transferring the not-ours to the ours, and translating the other's systems of communication into one [Allen] claim[s] to understand’.Footnote 75 That Sharon found Allen's comment funny is not surprising, since the opera he constructed also enjoys subaltern subjects and their cultural productions most and best when they can be laughed at from the back seat of a moving limousine.
Furthermore, Sharon's risible attitude towards Hopscotch's backdrop turned out to be profitable; after the opera's success he won the MacArthur Grant, became the first American director at the venerable Bayreuth Festival in Germany, and had one of his other operas nominated for a Grammy,Footnote 76 all accolades that were not disconnected from Hopscotch. Far from having a personal animadversion towards Sharon, I want to highlight the fact that though I never rode in that car, I amplified the laughter, since as neoliberalism poignantly teaches, ‘each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions’.Footnote 77
The previous examples, however, are tame when compared with a New Yorker story in which Jonah Levy (a trumpet player in the show) equated himself to a ‘musical sniper’ who waited on a building rooftop until he received the ‘go’ signal. Just what or whom Levy was shooting from his perch was not made explicitly clear, although Ross ventured to double down on this unfortunate metaphor by calling Levy ‘an assassin of the ordinary’ at the close of his article.Footnote 78 Just what exactly ‘ordinary’ means in this case is not clear, but this metaphor is exemplary of how, as Ritchey puts it, ‘art can indeed be a weapon’ and that part of practicing thoughtful citizenship under neoliberalism entails acknowledging this fact, as well as clearly identifying what such a weapon ought (and ought not) to be aimed toward’.Footnote 79 Here, Ross's allegiance to Hopscotch led him to privileging opera as a civilising force and positioning it as a grand occurrence in the battle between civilisation and barbarism.
Ross also evoked the historical violence used by colonising forces to subjugate people deemed uncultured and uncivilised. STPLA would frame it in just this way when they wrote that Hopscotch's ‘inaccessible, white high-art is a cultural attack on the history and contemporary culture of Boyle Heights’.Footnote 80 The polemic tone of this quotation aside, it is not accurate to position Mexicans and Chicana/os as being hostile to opera, since Mexican participation in opera is not only historic, as Manuel de Zumaya suggests, but also current, as scholar Tania Arazi Coambs's work establishes.Footnote 81 Arazi Coambs argues that operas celebrating Latinidad, or the Latin/o-American experience, as a subgenre that have emerged out of opera companies’ desire to ‘reinvigorate the art form and combat declining numbers of audience members’. Her research also valuably points out that Latin/o-American characters and themes related to their unique American experience have been a part of American operas and operettas ‘since at least the turn of the twentieth century’.Footnote 82
It is the framing, however unfairly, of opera as an art form rooted in the communities of elitist nobility that allows one to see and understand why and how Hopscotch could not have had much more than a cosmetic impact on bringing opera to those who would otherwise never have experienced it. This was not its goal in the first place but rather part of the narrative it deployed to obscure the actual goal, of providing its clientele with the most exclusive and customised experience possible at the expense of many of the city's most vulnerable residents. The best it could do for the community people in this context was to make fragments of the opera available to the city overall via monitors at the central hub, while preserving the intimate experience inside the limousine primarily for its more well-off audience members and people like myself who took the most exclusive seats that Hopscotch offered. However, this discrepancy of reserving the live repertoire for its boutique-audience while offering the general audience an artificial digital archive may be part of the reason why the show provoked STPLA to demand that the opera leave immediately. They articulated their reasoning as follows:
[W]e spoke to the local park vendors, the families and other regular park visitors. There was a consensus of negative feedback about Hopscotch's unwanted presence at the park. The vendors complained that they couldn't understand what the singers were singing about. The vendors, much like the rest of the regulars at the park, are exclusively Spanish-only speakers. The vendors are predominately Mexican immigrant women. Several of the women complained about recent rent increases, about not being able to afford to pay rent and how Hopscotch Los Angeles and their supporters do not purchase anything from them.Footnote 83
The water and snacks given to the cast and crew at this location were not purchased from the vendors at the park (despite my recommendation). The producers did, after the onset of the conflict with the community, provide a few tickets via an online lottery for Boyle Heights residents, invite key stakeholders to see the show, and agree to purchase advertising space in a local community newspaper. When I suggested more substantial investments in the community, they encouraged me to focus on strategies that would not cost any money, which I did.
Both the expensed and gratuitous gestures of engagement proved to be too little and come too late, and the community felt justified in criticising Hopscotch because ‘none of those funds (from this million dollar opera) are going to the community’.Footnote 84 How the author of this quotation knew the cost of the opera is unclear, but the 2015 total revenue for The Industry was in fact $1,120,131.Footnote 85 Again, tickets were $125–$150, well beyond the reach of the people who make a living at the park and who served as Hopscotch's backdrop. This fact exacerbated the perception that Hopscotch was scarcely more than a tool through which the haut monde could revel in the scopophilic consumption of an unfamiliar but potentially lucrative real estate topography from the safety of a limousine with dark-tinted windows.
Sociologist Andrew Ross articulates this dynamic as ‘a rubric to convert large sectors of social housing into luxury residences for prized beneficiaries of the creative economy’.Footnote 86 In another independent but relevant example of this desire to monetise dormant value, a Los Angeles-based realtor invited clients to tour Boyle Heights for ‘bargain properties’; however, after a flood of threats, she cancelled her tour as she feared violence.Footnote 87 In the context of the real estate market's increased interest in Boyle Heights, Hopscotch's audience in their limousines resembled people who were prospecting for investment properties or surveying a new investment terrain, not people enjoying art. Thus, Hopscotch was an event designed to enable an affluent audience to gaze upon such neighbourhoods and, more importantly, to see mostly without being seen. Thus, what was at the core of this opera's artistic concept was an uneven encounter that required that the audience scrutinise the ‘images of others, so that the spectator can secure a coherent belief in self-authority, assurance, presence’.Footnote 88 It was not enough for these spectators to rule the known; unfamiliar hinterlands had to also be made known, in more ways than one.
Falling down
Through the audience's participation in the opera's format, they engaged in the classic dynamic of pornographic consumption, with the consumer protected by darkness and the consumed visible and fully exposed for most of the performance. This dynamic of anonymous gazing enabled the audience to penetrate the community's space without losing their place of privilege, which Hopscotch rendered mobile through the use of the limousines. The audience members were thus empowered to evaluate, value and judge. Therefore, Hopscotch became a metaphorical victory march into communities that could disrupt but never join the penetrating audience's tour, as only the audience could afford the cost of gazing out at the community. This exclusivity was apparently evident to Hopscotch's creators since their title omitted the one element without which the show would not have been what it was: as Christopher Hawthorne put it in a Los Angeles Times article, ‘the opera as Sharon envisioned it simply would not have been possible without limos’.Footnote 89 This choice to deploy sign vehicles that exuded exclusivity and privilege and to then design routes that drove these vehicles into and through gentrifying neighbourhoods was not an accident or even a mistake: it was Hopscotch's true raison d’être.
Thus, the limousines are seen as a fleet of Trojan horses filled with delegations ready to devour the little spaces that the Hollenbeck community had all to its own; neoliberalism tolerates no refugia. The audience then became heralds of the evils of gentrification and, by extension, of an urban colonialism that reduces community residents to found objects and then, when the time comes, removes them in the name of neoliberalism masquerading as progress. Consequently, the built-in exclusivity, both actual and perceived, that Hopscotch embodied asserted itself in an unfortunate steady and undeniable pentimento. As Ritchey stated, ‘Hopscotch aestheticized and glorified the processes of gentrification that are currently displacing many working-class and minority communities from the very areas the opera was meant to celebrate.’Footnote 90 This situation leaves one hoping that future artists will realise the importance of moving within communities in sensitive, productive and beneficial ways for the individuals most affected by their art. As scholar Erin Mee sagely points out, ‘site-based performance loses a lot of its strength when it uses the site simply as a backdrop or a set piece, rather than … in fact responding to what is actually there – which includes the resident community’.Footnote 91 Just how much artists will heed this advice and how much the sensitivity manifested in the future will foray into public spaces depends on the strength of the outreach made before the artists strike the first key of any composition.
Maria, the woman in her late 50s who sells food out of a shopping cart, no longer works in Hollenbeck Park. After the incidents discussed during the run of Hopscotch, a ‘no vending’ sign appeared at the park. Thus Maria had to take her cart elsewhere, rolling her makeshift food cart away to both make room for neoliberal art to ride in on luxurious vehicles and to find another park that site-based, technetronic, transit-oriented opera has yet to enrich. Mea maxima culpa.Footnote 92
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to several people for their generous time, support and feedback throughout the many stages of drafting this article, including Sue Ellen Case, Suk-Young Kim, Michelle Liu Carriger, Sean Metzger, Carla Neuss, Farrah O'Shea, Richard Schechner and Jenna Tamimi, as well as to the editors and anonymous reviewers of this journal. This research is also greatly indebted to the residents of Boyle Heights.
