Multimedia Staceyann Chin: Performing and Blogging "Cyberjournal"

 

Jeannine Murray-Román

 

What are the limits and possibilities of interactivity in digital media? "Multimedia Staceyann Chin: Performing and Blogging 'Cyberjournal'" considers the blogosphere, a space in the cyber defined in part by its technological capacity to encourage interaction, in light of live performance. I compare performance and the medium of the blog in order to illuminate the specific ways in which blogging can promote interactivity for I contend that similar needs for connection drive both performance and blogging practices and that the possibility of failing to connect performers/bloggers with audiences/readers likewise drive both activities. I focus on the multimedia work of Staceyann Chin, a performance artist, writer, and blogger, to track how the desire to connect with audiences changes across mainstream media and in her blog, "Cyberjournal." I will explore how blogging transforms her creative production and how "Cyberjournal" serves as a platform for interactivity among her blog's visitors. In part, I use her example as a specific case that demonstrates the ways that "weblog interaction between performer and audience approximates 'the adaptive action of continuous feedback.'"[1] I choose Chin's work as exemplary because she is a performance artist and writer who maintains a poetic blog on her website and her blogged poetry articulates her performing experiences and philosophies and how these intersect with her blogging and print writing. My analysis ultimately brings performance theory to bear on blogs in order to theorize blog as a medium. To this end, I begin with a brief overview of current definitions of blogs. I then introduce Chin's work offline to provide a basis of comparison for the production of the blog in the cyber and the shifting role of bodies in this interactive space.

 

Blog Theory

The ever-increasing volume of an ever-increasing variety of types of blogs that seem to bear little resemblance to one another makes this medium difficult to classify and theorize. Within blogs themselves, reflections on "blog theory" tend towards the self-reflective, concentrating on the author's own relationship to his/her own blog, most often explaining changes in the site, technological difficulties, or inattentiveness to the blogosphere due to the distractions of non-digital life. Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs, the editors of Uses of Blogs, suggest that the term "blog" no longer has a concrete meaning and instead describes an activity that must be qualified with a description of the specific sub-genre (i.e. diary blogging, corporate blogging, community blogging, etc)[2] while Kurt Lindemann cites Langellier and Peterson as defining the practice of blogging as "short bursts of writing activity."[3] Nevertheless, Adrian Miles's list of blogs' constitutive elements offers a useful way of distinguishing blogs from other media: composed of short entries that are individually written and self-sufficient, blogs are date and time-stamped, ordered according to a reverse chronology, display permalinks,[4] and support trackback[5] and comments.[6]

 

The trackback and comments sections enable blogs to serve as platforms connecting reader-commentators to one another and to the blogger. In this light, I would add to the blog's definition its need for readership. This desire is legible through constant assumptions that—or wistful queries if—the blogger is engaging an interested audience. Often named things like "Talk to Perez" or other phrases that imply a conversational exchange, the comments section at the end of each and every post asks readers to justify the blogger's raison d'être and fend off the dark abyss that is the possibility that no one is reading. And yet, it seems rare for the blog's author/moderator to engage actively in the comments-based conversations that ensue between readers, spammers, and flamers. [7] This space is reserved for readers. Staceyann Chin is no exception in this regard as she responds to comments not in the comments section, but in later posts. What makes blogs an attractive forum for publication is the very rapidity of the exchanges between bloggers and readers, which theoretically allows readers to move from "passive audience to active participants," or "produsers."[8] What is most salient in this discussion on defining blogs is how they are technologically organized to permit instantaneous feedback with its attending possibility of creating conversations and creating communities. The potential for interactivity defines the medium.

 

Introducing Staceyann Chin

Despite Bruns and Jacobs's negative comparison between the passivity of audiences in contrast with blogs' "produsers," I will argue that performance theory can illuminate the interactions that take place in blogs through an analysis of Staceyann Chin's search for interactivity in print media, performance spaces, and the Internet. When on the lecture circuit, she articulates her activist dedication to working in the community as part of her responsibility as a performer and a global citizen. How does her presence on the Internet reflect this interest in community-building? Moreover, what kind of performing persona does she craft through her website and how, or if, does this differ from her offline self-representations? Chin became well-known first at the Nuyorican Poets Café, then as a member of Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on HBO and Broadway. Of Jamaican birth and claiming Brooklyn fiercely, brief summaries of her work associate her with this particular geo-cultural combination as well as her very sexual writing. Chin articulates these identity constructions as dynamic with varying degrees of sophistication in different media. The blog's formal qualities enable it to gather individual facets as posts into a loosely-unified entity. I will argue that the medium of the blog affords a more nuanced persona than other mainstream media where considerations of space and ideology limit Chin's creative production.

 

Chin's opinion piece for the "City Weekly" section of the New York Times, for example, celebrates the joys of immigration while glossing over much of exile's complexity. Living in New York City, she intimates, allows you to have it all: a freedom of sexual expression and practice that is impossible in Jamaica, as well as the taste of Jamaica made accessible by the strong and lively presence of this community in NYC.[9] On the lecture circuit, Chin presents a more complex narrative: after college, she left Kingston for Brooklyn because it is illegal to be gay in Jamaica. However, upon arriving in New York, she discovered what she terms "the illegalities of blackness in the United States," or a different racial regime than the one to which she was accustomed in Jamaica. But within this chronological narrative, Chin implicitly separates and distinguishes each form of discrimination by mapping them onto separate geographical and temporal spaces. With this stark division, she articulates a sense of alternation that always involves some measure of both loss and privilege. She introduces this ideological landscape to each specific audience, whether public lecture or interview, by dividing up her world based on what location she came into the consciousness of each different aspect of her political identity.

 

Staceyann Chin On Stage

The theme of migrating bodies, a constant source of attention and exploration in the blog, undergo another amplification in Chin's one-woman show, Border/clash.[10] In the show's opening statements, she introduces another set of gazes—that of North American tourists who visit "the Islands," and that of Jamaicans who migrate to the United States. From a critical distance, she analyses what Jamaica signifies in the North American cultural imaginary: "Come to Jamaica and feel alright,"[11] she sings. She transforms her clipped speech into a stereotypically relaxed Jamaican patois to emphasize the commodifying nature of this gaze when she introduces the song as a commercial: "everybody know the ad, ey?" In this caustic exposition, any relationship to Jamaica is strictly temporary. Her poetic blog will allow us to explore whether a different circuitry can foster a different kind of circulation between Jamaica and the United States.

 

If the first section of Border/clash references the site of emigration, the second turns to the immigrant's destination and its disappointments. Among them, is an evident discomfort with how identity politics limits the possibilities for her self-representation:

 

Here, the under-represented provide fodder for academic conversations about power and powerlessness, for discussions around economics and brown bodies… Here, all the parts of me catapult exotic into the hodgepodge of identities to be found in my cultural collage.

 

In her op-ed piece, interviews, and Border/clash, Chin responds to these restraining demands for exotic personalities by both criticizing such limitations and abiding by them. This passage hints at the short attention span that "the under-represented" can command in mainstream media. How does the Internet's staging platform change Chin's articulation of the "cultural collage"?

 

Staceyann Chin On the Internet

The New York Times online offers a first consideration of how digital media differs from traditional print media. While the bulk of its content consists of reformatted print articles, it makes use of the possibility of links, thus providing an in-house bibliography of relevant articles and, in Chin's case, a multimedia audio-slide show. Originally linked to a review and feature article,[12] the multimedia piece gives visual evidence to reviewer Jason Zinoman's comment that Chin is "a caricaturist's dream." The slideshow glides between still-frame images of extreme emotion: the selection provides visual evidence of Chin's vitality; it also creates a skewed impression of an un-nuanced performer for whom "loud" is the only register. These moving stills accompany Chin's voice, which explodes tinny and shrill out of computer speakers, challenging listeners to consider their own relationships to vacation- or migration- driven travel.

 

In navigating away from the Times's encapsulation of Border/clash to Chin's web page[13] you become the audience to a very differently-framed production, one in which interactivity of live performance may become more significant than in print media or its multimedia online accompaniments. As Chin's official web page loads up, the same voice, still tinny and shrill begins, "Am I a womanist or a feminist? The student needs to know if I do men occasionally and primarily, am I a lesbian?" The voice trails off into a softened laugh as the sound applet comes to an end. The website opens with a statement not on issues of migration, but sexuality, and the ways in which Chin's own queerness becomes a topic of public discussion. In comparing these two sound files, we retain the sense of identity politics as a collection of disparate and disjointed elements that emerges from Chin's chronological narrative of self-discovery. These audio introductions do not yet create a space for the articulation of intersectionality that Chin desires.

 

 

 

www.staceyannchin.com: Connecting through "Cyberjournal"

Chin's website is organized as a portal for connecting Chin with her online visitors.[14] Clicking on the "Cyberjournal" link allows you to interact with the blog by bringing up a new window. This screen loads up the text of the most recent post on the left side and a calendar of the archives on the right, which allows visitors to replace the latest post with a previous one and its accompanying comments. While many blogs incorporate emoticons, images, imported YouTube videos, screencaps, sound files, and other audio-visual media that represent images of moving bodies within the blog writing, Chin's blog features only words. I argue that Chin's mode of referencing her body's position and involvement in writing the blog asks readers to reflect on her performing body. In analyzing select poetic posts from "Cyberjournal," I will consider what possibilities the media of the blog affords Chin in writing how bodies relate and move through a physical space and the space of the cyber; moreover how do reader-commentators interact with the site and respond to her posting gestures?

 

"Cyberjournal": Physical Distance, Physical Proximity

The Internet is celebrated precisely for the capacity to overcome physical distance in connecting individuals and information. The poem, "Atlanta," from December 7, 2004, explores the play between absence and presence in its content and use of hyperlinking mechanisms. This post ends with the link, "Click here to check out maya's interview." Reference to this interview also invades the body of the poem, reflecting an internal digression in the creative process. The dominant theme of the poem anticipates a family reunion in a space foreign to her and explores the regrets and forgiveness that these family reunions bring about. But in the center of these nostalgic reflections of past separations, Chin breaks from a temporality that looks backwards in preparation for a future event and locates herself in the moment of writing: tonight. Using the present continuous, she breaks from her present activity of writing to embed into the poem the action of reading: "tonight/I am reading your article/thinking I should have said so much more/ (maya you made me stunning)." The distinguishing light blue color of this underlined stanza denotes that Chin has associated a link with it and invites the blog's reader to interrupt the poem with the interview—just as Chin has interrupted her own writing.

 

Following Chin's path across the Internet, we arrive at an interview she did with Maya Trotz at jouvay.com,[15] a website dedicated to Caribbean entertainment in the United States. Here, Chin discusses the various contradictory aspects of her relationship with Jamaica. "You do a lot cause you in foreign," Chin comments bluntly on the importance of remittances to the Jamaican economy. Her capacity to contribute to social progress in other ways is more constrained: first, she asks, How do you address questions of sexuality when people are hungry?; second, What voice should she claim, now that she is "in foreign"? This physical distance results in Chin's being, as she says "out of touch with the politics of the poor." Trotz suggests that being "in foreign" changes the stakes in that, "you are speaking for the many Jamaican friends who are afraid to speak out about their sexuality, but you can since you are on a plane off the island in the morning." Trotz implies that the physical separation of being "in foreign" provides a freedom of expression impossible in Jamaica. This charge corresponds exactly with the reasoning Chin provides in the story of her migration, but as a vignette from Border/clash explores further, it is not exactly true: Chin may be on a plane in the morning, but this will not protect her from the bottles occasionally thrown at her after a show that night.

 

Nor does it protect her from psychic damage, the proof of which rakes across pages of poems that describe how the flesh remembers the posture of fear and how the body responds to that memory at the present moment of writing.[16] Chin invests the digital media of her webpage with reminders of the body that produces it. In "Atlanta," her body is, with regards to her family, "not quite home"; it is just as much "my own/tonight." This poem articulates the body's multiplicity in relation to multiple locales. By linking to an interview that discusses the consequences of migration and the changed relationship to Jamaica this distance creates, the poem uses the Internet's linking capacity to model how Chin negotiates physical distance: while offering Chin some protection through physical absence, the Internet can still extend the possibility of connection to those Jamaicans who have access to it. www.staceyannchin.com seems to inhabit a space that evades the dangers of physical distance and proximity, enabling Chin to safely explore political stakes and aesthetic projects in the company of a global audience from any moment of her journeys in displacement. But while access is not geographically determined, as this third space in the cyber is theoretically no closer to Brooklyn than to Kingston, economics disrupts this mode of connection. The Internet may overcome physical distance, but it is subject to the temporal frustrations incurred as slow connection speeds refuse to load pages at a reasonable pace.

 

"Cyberblog": Instabilities

The uncertainty of total access plagues not only the possibility of reception, but also questions of production. This theme dominates Chin's very first post in this incarnation of "Cyberjournal." In "Up and Down…" from October 29, 2003, Chin expresses much anxiety as to whether technology—and her capacity to wield it effectively—will create a version of the community to which she aspires to belong. The incomprehensible technological failure of the "hosts and servers and whatnots" entail the loss of her creative production. Having experienced the consequences of the blog's mishaps causes her to approach writing posts as generating material that may never be accessible again: "no luxury of a continuance / a thought carried over / a brooding given from one frame to the next." This reflection on writing the blog concords precisely with how reading the blog functions: taken as a whole, the blogger's persona emerges, but the posts do not promise to connect to one another or provide stylistic unity. Beginning the blog's first post with a poem on the medium's instability, Chin also previews the ways in which visitors will engage the website: as a disappearing form. All websites present content in segments and abruptly refuse continuity between each post and page. Chin highlights the blog-reader's interaction as one of continuous break; for while a website is constantly accessible, once accessed, its content is constantly interrupted. The poem's imagery reflects the medium for which it is written, as it suggests that the instantaneity that characterizes its accessibility also requires its constant disappearance.

 

As if to counteract this very transience, Chin dedicates the last section of the poem to her new P.O. Box, a symbol of stability that, ironically, points to Chin's own physical instability by implying that she might not be at her actual home often enough to pick up her mail. As such, the lines "PO Box 130459 / Brooklyn NY. 11213" prosaically reinforce her narrative of a life of travel. They also invite readers to connect with her in a physically tangible form of communication. Inserted into a medium of virtual surrogation, this surrogate for physical presence demonstrates Chin's desire for an address with more permanence than a URL that depends on the caprices or loyalties of its readers for its fully-realized existence. The form of the blog, then, both limits and fuels and Chin's creative impulses as she chronicles them in "Up and Down." It also articulates the dynamic of absence and presence that structures the blog-reader's experience as audience.

 

As described earlier, blog-readers can interact with the blog beyond the function of readership and as contributing participants. Chin specifically requests that her blog's readers participate as a generous test audience and community of supportive friends. From May 2004 through June 14, 2005, two days before previews for Border/clash begin, she interweaves burgeoning ideas for the show in "Cyberjournal," requesting comments and suggestions, going so far as to inquire "I am looking for a director, know anyone? Call 212 253 7017."[17] Chin first mentions the show as Border/clash in "Warm Rain," posted on May 11, 2004. I will argue that, through the interactive readers' comments to "Warm Rain"—itself a miniaturized poetic version of what will be Border/clash, Chin and her blog's reader-commentators jointly transform the blog into a quasi-performance space.

 

"Cyberjournal": Situated Intimacies

"Warm Rain" is highly invested in its situatedness, setting a scene in terms of politics, location, and literary influence. Brooklyn, the radio show "Democracy Now" online, June Jordan, summer—they all make up the world of creative work into which Chin ushers us. She links to "Democracy Now" twice in the first two lines, beginning the poem with the latent potential of its interruption, embedding into the poem the sources of her own productive distractions. After pointing us to the online streaming of the show,[18] she continues:

 

just alone with the click click of these keys // and Amy Goodman guiding me through the maize / of this hard // rain of politics / and finding out how Jamaican / I am // how America has inserted itself into my mouth // my body twisting / with the clash of these borders // how is Border/clash as a title for the new show? // we trying to mount this motherfucker / at 45 Bleecker // in August / 2004

 

As in Chin's article for the New York Times, where she is able to "[buy] a little bit of home" by frequenting New York's Jamaican restaurants, she employs the trope of representing immigrant culture with food in Border/clash. Here, she does not critically disrupt the nostalgia that metonymically representing Jamaica with ackee and saltfish feeds. Rather, she will revive the metaphor of cultural consumption by noting the ways in which her own performances—and her own self—are consumed by mainstream American media. In "Warm Rain," Chin considers the possibility of reversing the roles of consumed and consumer, and a different form of oral fixation emerges: unlike immigrant cultures, "America" is not chewed up or digested; rather, its presence transforms the shape of the mouth and in so doing redirects its modes of consumption. The corporeal response to these force-fed modifications transitions into a meditation on the incipient show's possible titles. The somewhat abstract "clash of these borders" impels the intimate physical transformation. Compressing the phrase into two juxtaposed nouns in conflict separated by the slash as border, Chin's tone shifts from the poetic to the logistical with a query about the show's tentative title. The details are brief and brutal, reminding us that the creative work of poetry is rarely devoid of the stresses of production, and she ends this section with the abrupt promise of a date to meet up in August 2004.

 

Chin then leads readers through the central concepts that drive Border/clash in a structure that will exist only in the poetic blog. Autobiographical and proceeding chronologically, each section of the poetic performance sketch revisits and questions the concept of paradise, beginning with the term as a label pasted onto Jamaica. She juxtaposes the visitor's and the migrant's perspectives of the island/the rock in a pattern of alternation that will mark Border/clash. "Paradise redefined," describes the move to New York, and she finally signs off with "peace, poetry, and the pursuit of a non-fictive paradise, Staceyann." Only the fourth section escapes this denomination. Here, where she dreams of a future visit to India, rather than label herself an orientalist and herself become the tourist seeking an uncomplicated paradise, she asks, "Do you smell like Westmoreland? / land of Indians in Jamaica." She seeks out a "south-south" relationship facilitated by diasporic linkages and shared histories of colonized labor.

 

In between sections exploring locations associated with memories, her present and a desired future, Chin experiments with metaphors of travel: a series on tunnels connects and dissociates Jamaica from New York and indicates her paths through New York City; in this sense, she equates travel within her home space of the city to travel between her two national home spaces. She probes the figurative value and the phenomenology of tunnels when she writes:

 

the soft litany of lights / running series along the length of the journey // the hopeful glimmer at the pinpoint of destination / the quiet ensuing // the radio / muted / slow motion of things not quite the shade you know them to be / Tunnels

 

The sensorial distortion that accompanies these liminal moments of transforming travel allows Chin to reflect on her interiority in an articulation of her core political beliefs and her dedication to poetry through performance practices. Nevertheless, the poem's initial question to readers and its closing address that "the silence is as beautiful / as you and me / laughing" creates a first person plural subject and indicates the need for the vitalizing sense of interconnection with a community audience. The commentator who self-identifies as "roots" typifies the responses to this poem in writing: "sounds perfect for your show…can't wait to support you…nyc miss you bad." "Roots" both corroborates Chin's instincts and urges her to reconnect with them online and in the theater.

 

Performance Theory/Blog Theory

The blog, "Cyberjournal," and the responses it garners resemble a performance setting: Chin asks her blog's readers to respond to her posts about the incipient show in development as if they were her audience, and certain "produsers" respond with the intimation that they will join her in the live when she puts up the show. The blog anticipates the interaction of live performance, but more relevant to our questions on digital media and its potential for interactivity, it plays out in a time-delayed and physically distant manner the personal and activist engagements that Chin looks to create as a performer in the live. Both these modes of interaction fit Thomas DeFrantz's model of what he terms "the Black Atlantic performance circle." Grounding himself in Gilroy's work,[19] DeFrantz explores the successes and failures of displacing African-American dance practices to the public, white space of the North American concert dance stage.[20] The shift in genres is an awkward one precisely because the audience's expected participation at the concert dance performance is primarily one of uninterrupted reception. The proscenium stage, with its clear delimitations between dancers and audience, breaks down the physical intimacy of the circle and the constant antiphony that characterizes Black Atlantic performance. This difference in audience behavioral codes parallels the distinction Bruns and Jacobs draw between "passive audiences" and blogs' "produsers."

 

In her own circulation through different media as explored in this article's introduction, Chin has certainly grappled with the need to meet the expectations of "mixed audiences," an experience she relates primarily in conjunction with Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. Chin eventually walked away from the steady income and exposure that her involvement in the project generated for her so as to have greater creative control over her performances—or at least the power to refuse objectionable production practices.[21] Def Poetry Jam combined slam poetry audience expectations of interaction with the setting of Broadway. The interactions between Chin and blog produsers through "Cyberjournal," while still a public platform with a mixed audience, are more appropriately compared to the ring shout than polite applause. Online commentators here feel free to add their own poems and love stories in the Comments section, they take inspiration from Chin, and they give her positive energy in return.

 

Blog produsers take more than inspiration from the "Cyberjournal": in the comments sections they match Chin's description of her peripatetic body by situating their own bodies in relation to the computer and to the blog. They also make the blog the site of a record of their individual political and physical movements. Community-building in the blog is most evident here in the posts throughout the Katrina crisis in New Orleans this past year. Chin's poem, "Floods/Parades…" posted on September 05, 2005, exudes anguish, bereavement and a sense of helplessness. Yet, her audience refused to read her cry of "what can I do?" as an expression of distraught apathy and rallied to her brief plea for "people need suggestions // please post them." This comments page preserves an extensive conversation, with pragmatic and philosophical suggestions of how to approach the crisis. "Cyberjournal"'s  produsers respond to one another as well as to her; they buffer their practical advice with political disquisitions and personal experiences in offering their own engagement with the crisis.

 

"Cyberjournal" Live

If both Chin and her blog's produsers reference their potential meeting in live performance spaces, it is perhaps because Chin creates a feedback loop between "Cyberblog" and her touring. She posts wherever she alights during her grueling travel schedule, and the toll that such constant displacements take on her body thematizes this space in the cyber. As her live performances locate her present and changing writing moments, Chin inserts "Cyberblog" into her poetry performances. On one of Chin's DVDs, filmed in Stockholm, she mentions her blog in order to galvanize her audience into participating more vocally.

 

ok, so I want you to respond, I want you to take part in it, so that it isn't so much me presenting you know because you know I have this online journal where I go to my website and I write about what has happened and I want to be able to say that I was in Stockholm, and that it was good, and that we shared, and that I came away feeling like I had taken a piece of you because when I leave I intend to leave pieces of myself with you, so if you would just spend a moment to share it with me, I know it's very hard because in Sweden you can get harsh social punishment for being like too emotive? [22]

 

Involving "Cyberjournal" in her performances extends the relationships established between herself and her audience in the live once they are dispersed. "Cyberjournal" is an archive of Chin's travels and reflections, her cybercommunity's participation, and here, explicitly, the documentation of her performance-based exchanges. She also uses the possibility of reviving their relationship through blogging re-enactments or recitations as an enticement for her audience to participate while in the live.

 

The medium of the blog offers constant accessibility and rhythmic disappearances. Blogger and prod-user may or may never be online simultaneously, yet the blog lends the time-space delayed interactivity continuous. The seamless availability of discrete contributions differs radically from the preciously delimited moment of connection available in live performances. Chin uses "Cyberblog" to reflect on and develop her performance pieces as well as to experiment in bringing the gestural language that drives her performances into her writing. While her readers are sometimes also members of her live audiences, she uses the conversational elements inherent in the blog medium in order to build relationships with her readers as if they were an audience. "Cyberblog" encourages this overlap between the different genres and media she explores by extending and connecting Chin's audiences in different locales. This speaks to the capacity of the Internet to sustain communities best experienced offline. But Chin's references to her online production during her live readings and performances equally emphasizes her plea to live audiences to become part of an experiment in developing a responsive online community which, due to lag and physical separation, exists in a state of latent potential: a link waiting for a human hand to click and connect.

 

Jeannine Murray-Román is a graduate student in the department of Comparative Literature at UCLA writing her dissertation, "Moving Geographies: Traveling Texts and Performances in Contemporary Caribbean Writing." She focuses on the literary representation of performance practices and the ways in which the turn to performance transforms literary acts.