Choreographed by Tiffany Mangulabnan
Performed by konverjdans
at The Mark O'Donnell Theater at The Actors Fund Arts Center, Brooklyn, on June 1, 2019
Music: The Real Mike Wilson
Text: James Baldwin (excerpts from his speech 'The Artist's Struggle for Integrity', New York City, 1962)
Drums: Christian Lee
Dancers: Peter Cheng, Cortney Key, Tiffany Mangulabnan, Jordan Miller, Amy Saunder, Łukasz Zięba

'The Artist's Struggle for Integrity' (Excerpts from a speech by James Baldwin)

I really don’t like words like “artist”, or “integrity”, or “courage”, or “nobility”; I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what those words mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy”, or “peace”, or “peace-loving”, or “war-like”, or “integration”, mean. And yet, one’s compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are kind of attempts, made by us all, to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that all of these words, the reality behind these words, depend, ultimately, on what the human being – meaning every single one of us – believes to be real. ​The terrible thing is that, all these words, the reality behind them, depend on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day.

By and by, your uncles and your parents and the church – stop praying for you! They realize it won’t do a bit of good; they give you up. And you proceed a little further, and your lovers put you down. They don’t know what you’re doing either. And you can’t tell them, ‘cause you don’t know. . . . Then you make – oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, god knows how many broken friendships, and an exile of one kind or another – some kind of breakthrough, which is the first articulation of who you are, which is to say your first articulation of who you suspect we ​all​ are.

When we were all very young; when I was very young – and I am sure this is true of everybody here

– I had assumed that no one who had ever been born was only five feet six inches tall, or been born poor, or been born ugly, or masturbated, or done all those things which were my private property when I was fifteen. ​No one had ever suffered the way I suffered. And then you discover – and I discovered this through Dostoevsky – that it is common. Everybody did it. Not only did everybody do it, everybody’s ​doing it​ . And all the time. It’s a fantastic and terrifying liberation. The reason it’s terrifying is because it makes you, once and for all, responsible to no one but yourself.

“You must remember that most people live in almost total darkness. It is true,” said this friend, “that we drink too much, we suffer from stage fright, and you may get an ulcer, or die of cancer, and it is true, that it is all very, very hard, and gets harder all of the time. And yet, people, millions of people – whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning – live in the darkness, which, ​if you have that funny, terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define, you are responsible to those people – to lighten their darkness. ​And it does not matter what happens to you.

The trouble is that, although the artist can do it, the price that he has to pay himself and that you, the audience, must also pay, is the willingness to give up everything to realize that, although you spent twenty-seven years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position; although you spent forty years raising this child, these children, ​nothing, none of it, belongs to you. ​You can only have it - you can only have it by letting it go​. You can only take, if you are prepared to give. And giving is not an investment. It is not a day at the bargain counter. ​It is a total risk. Of everything. Of you. Of who you think you are. Who you think you’d like to be. Where you think you’d like to go. Everything. And this forever, forever.

Tiffany Mangulabnan