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The Past as Performance
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Madeleine Bair
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February, 27 2008
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Ariel Luckey has been exploring cultural roots since he was a little boy in Oakland. The performance artist began studying West African dancing and drumming in elementary school two decades ago. By high school he was performing in hip hop talent shows, and since then he has traveled the Caribbean and Latin America studying African-based music and dance. But despite an upbringing immersed in the multicultural traditions of the Bay Area, Mr. Luckey started to feel something was missing. "As a white boy, I have struggled with identity," the twenty-eight year old reflected one recent morning at the Oakland Rose Garden. "There's all these other cultures – where's my culture? What are my roots?"
From that question began a journey that took him to his last living grandparent's home in Kansas. Out of the questions, discoveries, and unsavory aspects of American history that his search uprooted, Mr. Luckey created a solo hip hop show, Free Land, which plays this Thursday and Friday at Laney College Theater. |
Ariel Luckey has been exploring cultural roots since he was a little boy in Oakland. The performance artist began studying West African dancing and drumming in elementary school two decades ago. By high school he was performing in hip hop talent shows, and since then he has traveled the Caribbean and Latin America studying African-based music and dance. But despite an upbringing immersed in the multicultural traditions of the Bay Area, Mr. Luckey started to feel something was missing. "As a white boy, I have struggled with identity," the twenty-eight year old reflected one recent morning at the Oakland Rose Garden. "There's all these other cultures – where's my culture? What are my roots?"
From that question began a journey that took him to his last living grandparent's home in Kansas. Out of the questions, discoveries, and unsavory aspects of American history that his search uprooted, Mr. Luckey created a solo hip hop show, Free Land, which plays this Thursday and Friday at Laney College Theater. Using a mixture of humor, spoken word, storytelling, and traditional acting, the performance depicts his self- discovery. The piece wants to challenge its audience, particularly its white audience, to look back at its past, despite any unflattering realities they may unearth.
Like any family's history, Mr. Luckey's lives on through myths shared with the younger generation. As a young boy growing up in Oakland, he had heard stories of his grandfather riding horses on a ranch in Wyoming, "basically being a cowboy." And so, he set out to visit his grandfather's home in Lawrence, Kansas, five years ago to learn about the family ranch.
As he traveled, first with his mother and grandfather to Wyoming, and then on his own, each answer spawned more questions. When his grandfather, now eighty-eight years old, explained that his father homesteaded the land from the government, Mr. Luckey asked who inhabited the land previously. "It was empty," his grandfather replied. Unsatisfied with that answer, Mr. Luckey decided to investigate further. Through visits to the ranch, online research, and meetings with the people who live there today, Mr. Luckey unwound a complicated story where the American government's policy of Manifest Destiny coincided with Mr. Luckey's family's pursuit of success. One of the most startling revelations for him was that the land his great-grandfather homesteaded lay within ten miles of the site of the last major battle between the U.S. Army and the Northern Cheyenne tribe.
"All of a sudden, there was this direct connection between me, and this huge history of genocide and colonization in this country," Mr. Luckey says. His research, not only of the history of that conflicted patch of Wyoming, but of the land underneath his Oakland home, united Mr. Luckey with American Indian activists and resulted in an unlikely encounter with the cowboy who now lives with his young family near his family's ranch in Wyoming. Like Mr. Luckey, his great-grandfather homesteaded the land. Meeting that man, close in age to Mr. Luckey, inspired him to imagine an alternate rendering of history. "Maybe if my family had made it economically, I would have grown up in Wyoming instead of Oakland. I would have been that cowboy."
Instead, Mr. Luckey is a performance artist who decided early into his research that his story needed to be shared with others. "Ten percent of the United States was homesteaded," Mr. Luckey says. "And most white people walking around today have no clue, just like I had no clue."
It's not that he hadn't studied homesteading in American history in school. "It was boring. It was irrelevant. And never for a second did I think that my family was involved."
In its performances around the country at high schools, colleges, and anti-racism conferences, Mr. Luckey says that Free Land creates a safe space for white Americans to consider and begin to discuss the dark shades of their legacy. Inevitably in the discussions that follow each performance, people approach him with their own stories of an ancestor who homesteaded, or who fought in battles against American Indian tribes.
This is Mr. Luckey's personal journey to understand how his ancestors fit into American history, and it's one he hopes other Americans undertake.
Free Land plays Februrary 28 and 29 at Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St. Oakland. Doors open at 6:30, show starts at 7. Tickets are a sliding scale, $5-$15 for Laney students and teachers, $10-$15 for the general public. |
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