TY - JOUR
AU - Klein,, Emily
AB - Abstract This article investigates how Spike Lee’s 2015 Lysistrata adaptation, Chi-Raq, reaches beyond the screen—‘in excess’ of its medium—by using the techniques of immersive theatre to revive Aristophanes’ classical plot as well as his urgent call to citizenly collective action (McGowan, Todd. Spike Lee. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014). Lee’s seductive activist fairytale in rhyming verse imagines a worldwide sex strike led by Chicago’s women of colour. Like its Classical predecessor, the film both critiques and reinforces the spectacular objectification of female bodies; that tension is always in play, even as it successfully brings about a peace treaty between two warring Englewood gangs. To explore this and other socio-political tensions, Lee’s film employs many of the ‘physical, sensual and participatory’ elements that Josephine Machon understands as central to immersive performance (Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xv). Crucial to this immersive adaptation is Lee’s transgressive coordination of sight, touch, and sound to aptly update Lysistrata’s acts of refusal as deeply gendered and racialized calls for intimate justice. In effect, audiences learn, move, chant, yearn, and envision a better world alongside the characters in the film. As a result, the goals of Chi-Raq are achieved in ways that are both more compellingly relevant and more radical than any other contemporary Lysistrata adaptation in recent memory. Lysistrata, Chi-Raq, Spike Lee, immersive theatre, intimate justice, political performance, cinema of resistance, Classical adaptation ‘Artists who harness more than our eyes and ears encourage us to wake up, to be alert to the world around us, and to interact actively with the objects and creatures around us. It is an invitation to live, to feel, and to be part of a larger community’. Stephen Di Benedetto, “Guiding Somatic Responses within Performative Structures” 134 ‘As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible. One of the ways I attempt to do that is by celebrating those victories within the [B]lack community. And I think the mere fact that we’re still breathing is a cause for celebration’. Toni Cade Bambara, “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara” 35 Lysistrata is a protest fantasy play. It is a dream of safe, efficacious resistance where everyone wins. Activists risk little and achieve maximum rewards, and capitulating politicians are paid off with a return to the (slightly sexier) status quo. With its vocal female protagonist who unites Athenian and Spartan women in a sex boycott to end the Peloponnesian war, Lysistrata’s comic explorations of gender roles and female leadership have helped to make it Aristophanes’ most frequently performed play today. Often imagined as a cheeky antecedent to a popular brand of post-second wave girl power, many contemporary US productions, such as Douglas Carter Beane’s recent Lysistrata Jones (2012), figure the play’s hero as a 1990’s Spice Girl look alike, wielding her own incipient sexuality like a weapon while advocating a chaste war against war. Beane’s contemporary rewrite of the Aristophanic plot is set in the cutely cartoonish world of the fictional Athens University. The brief Broadway run of Lysistrata Jones introduced audiences to a group of frustrated college cheerleaders who go on a sex strike until the apathetic men’s basketball team valiantly commits not to winning, but to trying. Similarly, my own college’s 2016 Lysistrata production found its aesthetic inspiration in popular television comedies like Laugh In and Three’s Company, aptly dressing the sex farce’s double entendres in bellbottoms and gold lamé. These lighthearted, low-stakes interpretations of the classical romp make good sense. They’re fun, they promise a safely banal brand of political relevance, and most importantly, their mix of Classical high culture and lowbrow humour is a reliable formula for selling tickets. But in Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, a disruptively unconventional 2015 cinematic adaptation of Lysistrata in rhyming verse, the kid gloves come off, along with everything else, and political protest is not only efficacious—it’s instructive, immediate, and seductively immersive. The film’s activist plot is also creative, inclusive, solidarity building, and life changing for the young African American characters involved. And its trademark Spike Lee-style didacticism gets a theatrical makeover as the film hails its adaptational roots by promoting democratic participation through highly theatrical modalities of affective and sensory immersion. The result merges hallmarks of the vivid, sardonic Spike Lee universe with elements of ancient Greece and modern-day US politics. With, for example, Samuel L. Jackson in the role of the Greek koryphaios, ‘super bad Mr. Dolomedes’ (/‘my black ass was on the first box of Wheaties’, he boasts), our narrating chorus leader becomes a slick and salty observer of Lysistrata (played by Teyonah Parris) as she leads a women’s sex strike to end gang violence in Chicago. Jackson’s performance allows him to reprise the timeless call to ‘Wake Up’! that he’s been delivering to Spike Lee’s audiences since Do the Right Thing (1989), but in Chi-Raq, his wake up call gives way to a more dire siren cry that opens the film: ‘THIS IS AN EMERGENCY’. References to the Black Lives Matter movement are interwoven with the film’s fictional protest, which powerfully anticipates the wave of women-led activism that has fuelled contemporary resistance work like the Women’s March, #MeToo, and the Never Again US gun control movement. To galvanize this contemporary reframing, Lee’s film employs many of the ‘physical, sensual and participatory’ elements that Josephine Machon understands as central to immersive performance (Immersive Theatres xv). Hence, the film’s form and content unite in an urgent parallel; the formal style of immersive cinematic engagement becomes the instructive mirror to Lee’s thematic call for increased civic engagement and political organizing. Crucial to this immersive adaptation is Lee’s transgressive coordination of sight, touch, and sound to aptly update Lysistrata’s acts of refusal as deeply raced and gendered and calls for intimate justice. The fictional strike both critiques and reinforces the spectacular objectification of black female bodies; that tension is always in play, even as it successfully brings about a peace treaty between two warring Englewood gangs. Throughout, the audience shares in the process of activist awakening that Lysistrata experiences. Her intellectual work of observing, researching, and strategizing; her recruitment work and leading of choral oaths; and her dithyrambic protest arrangements are all conveyed through affective signifiers that deepen and complicate the Classical storyline. Thus, spectators are recruited into a productive kind of engagement at both the diegetic level of the film’s protest plot and the extra-diegetic level of Lee’s emblematic political calls to action.1 Just as the exigency and sensory allure of public protest can spontaneously recruit participants at its margins, the film’s various modes of activism recruit viewers into both its fictional and real-world social justice projects, with the US gun control and Black Lives Matter movements figuring prominently alongside the film’s own #NOpeaceNOpussy campaign. As Baz Kershaw writes of theatrical spectacle, engaging the audience’s senses turns performance into a ‘fabulously flexible force for change’ (593). In effect, Lee’s adaptation reaches beyond the screen—‘in excess’ of his medium, as film scholar Todd McGowan has noted—by using the techniques of immersive theatre to revive Aristophanes’ plot as well as his call to citizenly action. Audiences learn, move, chant, yearn, and envision a better world alongside the characters in the film. As a result, the goals of Chi-Raq are achieved in ways that are both more urgently compelling and more radical than any other contemporary US Lysistrata adaptation I know. IMMERSION AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT: ADAPTING THEATRE AND POLITICS TO FILM By using immersive performance techniques borrowed from the worlds of theatre and street protest, Lee calls viewers into affective proximity with the film’s embodied acts of resistance. Following the Aristophanic model of harnessing audience engagement for persuasive effect, Chi-Raq gives depth and dimension to Lysistrata’s flattened comic approach to political resistance by defining its protest in much more complex terms.2 Unlike the original play, which focuses on one targeted collective (in)action, imagined as a solution to a local problem, the film invites audiences into the before, during, and after of protest. Rather than beginning with the climactic neighbourhood sex strike that originates in a living room alliance between rival Spartan and Trojan women who want to stop local gang violence, the film’s protest actually starts with Lysistrata’s activist awakening, as the audience watches and learns right over her shoulder. Later, once her local protest is underway, it quickly grows ever more inclusive and expansive as it addresses intersectional real-world issues like the national gun lobby, police brutality, and institutionalized racial and economic inequity and is taken up by other international groups. In these ways, the film models the processes of so many movements for social change, in which goals, messages, and membership evolve as systemic issues are reconceived and addressed in new ways. It is significant that Spike Lee and his co-writer, University of Kansas Film and Media Studies Professor Kevin Wilmott use film to accomplish a remarkably rare feat of ‘spiritual fidelity’ to their original theatrical text (McFarlane 22). The film taps into something so directly about the Aristotelian function of drama that Chi-Raq makes a stronger argument for the affective power of political theatre and performance than most stage productions of Lysistrata. By using the chimerically immersive coordination of the three aforementioned elements of the visual-spatial, the corporeal, and the aural—in other words, site-specific markers of civic locality, haptic and choreographic formation, and music and rhyming verse—this film becomes instructive (or affirmingly representational, for those already in-the-know) on two levels: it teaches audiences about community organizing and protest work, and it teaches them about the power of theatre. After all, protest and theatre are not so different. They both depend on embodied public gatherings, sights, and sounds to make meaning. To learn to do one well is to learn to do the other. Or, as Baz Kershaw puts it, both political and theatrical gatherings ‘allud[e] to an ideal of direct democracy, in which co-present bodies collectively decide on the future’ (608).3 As a film-goer, myself, on opening day at Oakland, California’s historic Grand Lake Theatre, my first reaction to the screening was entirely consistent with that of Classicist Casey Dué, who marvels that Chi-Raq’s ‘creative and systematic incorporation of music and dance, its humor, its politics, and even its didactic tone’ are all ‘brilliantly reminiscent’ of Classical models.4 But not all audiences responded to Chi-Raq with the same enthusiasm. While the New Yorker’s Richard Brody called the film Lee’s ‘latter-day masterwork—perhaps his best film to date’ and Entertainment Weekly’s Joe McGovern dared the Academy of Motion Pictures to award the film the Oscar it deserved, the film was also criticized for lampooning gang-related violence on Chicago’s Southside and for undermining women’s political efficacy by suggesting that sex is their only asset (Donnella). Chicagoans disparaged the film’s uses of an offensive local nickname and non-local actors in lead roles (Bosman). Yet, as Lee was quick to point out, these concerns not only ignore Chi-Raq’s adaptational function, but they also underestimate a mass audience’s ability and willingness to engage in critical reception.5 In many interviews, Lee has returned to the sharp distinction between comedy and satire, insisting that Chi-Raq falls urgently into the latter category because of the way it uses Aristophanes’ plot to structure its biting social commentary. As he insisted in a promotional video released before the film’s opening, ‘Now some people are going to twist it and say that Chi-Raq is a comedy. Chi-Raq is not a comedy. Chi-Raq is a satire. In no way shape or form are we making light of the lives that have been murdered with this senseless violence...Don’t get it twisted. This film is about serious business’ (The Making of Chi-Raq). Thus, viewers and critics that ignore (or simply don’t know) the film’s textual ancestry may miss the ways that ‘Chi-Raq is in dialogue with ancient Greek drama but is also an utterly original composition for a new community of citizens’ (Dué 24). This feeling of exchange, of ‘being in dialogue’ across ancient drama and contemporary film, old and new concerns, historic and contemporary citizens, speaks to the innovative ways the film disrupts aesthetic and disciplinary boundaries. Critic Matt Zoller Seitz claims ‘Every Lee film has an affinity for the theatrical. […] There is a sense in which Lee has always been a theatrical director, as well as a rhetorician or commentator and a stand-up comic, even as he proved himself a master of images who directs in a way that’s equally intuitive and intellectual’. Hence the usefulness of the critical approach proposed by performance theorist, Josephine Machon, who resists disciplinary boundaries by identifying features of immersivity that appear across a range of aesthetic and performative contexts. She describes a broadened notion of immersive performance in the following terms: In brief, the event should always establish an ‘in-its-own-world’-ness where space, scenography, sound and duration are palpable forces that comprise this world. To allow full immersion in these worlds, some kind of ‘contract for participation’ is shared early on between the spectator and the artist […] On entering these immersive domains, spectators are submerged in a medium that is different to the ‘known’ environment and can become deeply involved in the activity within that medium, all their senses engaged and manipulated. Bodies are prioritised in these worlds, possibly performing and always perceiving bodies – the latter belonging to spectators, whose direct insertion in and interaction with the world shapes and transforms potential outcomes of the event. (“Watching, Attending, Sense-making” 35–36) Chi-Raq’s opening scenes do just this. They take us into a synaesthetic sensory world where music is visual, embodied choreography is persuasive and rhetorical, and time can be stopped and started again. SIGHT-SPECIFIC IMMERSION: ENGAGING IMAGES AND SCENIC LOCALITY A few initial examples from the film’s opening scenes help to illustrate its immersive uses of sight, sound, and touch. At the film’s start we hear Nick Cannon’s ‘Pray 4 My City’, a song that becomes a recurring aural motif through the film and, like Jennifer Hudson’s ‘I Run’, holds some extra-diegetic interest because the performance merges Cannon’s real life musical career with his title role in the film. As the song begins, its brightly coloured lyrics flash on screen against a black background. Visually hooking audiences first with a map of the US figured as a red, white, and blue mosaic of tiny guns, and then with a more localized plunge into gun violence statistics in Chicago specifically, the transcribed song lyrics refuse to be ignored. They enact a narrowing readerly focus that moves from the national gun violence epidemic to the local murder rate in Chicago’s inner city, which helped it earn the Middle Eastern warzone moniker of Chi-Raq. Manhola Dargis suggests that the ‘blood-red lyrics blown up on the screen’ enact a synaesthetic inversion; we hear the written text, ‘each word reverberating like a shout’: ‘Please pray for my city/Too much hate in my city/Too many heartaches in my city/But I got faith in my city/This Chi-Raq and I love that/You can’t take it away from my city/Some can’t relate to my city/They die everyday in my city’. Following the visual presentation of more data on how Chicago’s casualties exceed the number of US military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, our map’s zoom lens plunges further still until we see the names of Chicago’s Southside neighbourhoods configured into a map of the city. Again, this statistical movement from international to local repeats the previous visual analogy. Intimate familiarity with Chicago’s spatial ‘warzones’ gets mapped onto a parallel fatality statistic from actual war zones: 4,424 American deaths in the Iraq war from 2003 to 2011, and 7, 356 homicides in Chicago from 2001 to 2015. Chi-Raq’s title portmanteau is justified before our eyes as this opening sequence telegraphs the film’s central conceit—that it is at once about Chicago and also about war-torn ‘Chicagos’ everywhere. Finally, as if we’ve been dropped from Google’s street view into the cinematic-theatrical action of the film, we quickly move from an aerial view of a subway station, down a dark street and into a packed club where Samuel L. Jackson’s theatrical chorus-leader figure, Dolomedes welcomes us from the stage by magically pausing the crowd and addressing us directly: In the year 411 BC — that’s before baby Jesus y’all — the great Aristophanes penned a play satirizing his day and in the style of his time ‘Stophanes made that shit rhyme. That’s why today we retain his verse To show our love for the universe. But warning — you gonna see some pain, but that’s only natural cause it involves the gangs So before I unfreeze these G’s, like the stats you heard before, People, people, people, we can’t take too much more. Though metafictional moments like these have traditionally been regarded by some literary critics as inherently anti-immersive in their production of temporary breaks from the narrative plot structure, Machon’s framework suggests that this type of fourth-wall breaking address actually serves two key functions in immersive modes of performance. First, she sees the insertion of audience members into ‘the world of the event’ as ‘a pivotal criterion’ because it signals a ‘breakdown of division between audience and creative crew’ (Immersive Theatres 98). Second, Dolomedes’ speech treats the viewer as ‘an active invitee who will be taken care of and treated as a willing guest within the event’; Machon sees ‘spoken guidelines’ like these as a kind of ‘contract for participation’ within immersive worlds (99). Dolomedes provides context and warnings to frame the audience’s affective experience. Thus, right at its outset, the film’s opening minutes begin to establish the immersive qualities that structure Chi-Raq’s deeply theatrical and sensory world. This rhyming direct address also allows a kind of simulated eye contact to occur through the screen between viewer and character. At the same time, its rhythmic sound woos the ear. As Sara Ruhl says, rhyme has ‘populist primordial power […] an alchemical thing where the meaning [is] the sound—wherein the sound of the word can actually imitate experience’ (45–46). Notably, Dolomedes’ introductory dialogue is instructive and synaesthetic from the outset. He explains the film’s satirical, adaptive framework and explicitly introduces sound, sight, and touch as overlapped sensory experiences that will structure the re-telling of this story: rhyme is retained out of respect for the lineage of the universal tale; and our eyes will see pain, as unbearable as the visualized statistics we already heard. Lee also uses immersive sight in another crucial way. In keeping with Machon’s claim that immersive practice ‘owes its sensual aesthetic primarily to a mix of ingredients involving landscape, architecture, scenography, sound and direct, human contact’, he also uses images of Chicago as a site-specific backdrop to bring geographic and economic immediacy to his adaptation (Immersive Theatres xv). Contextualizing cues introduce the ‘crucial element of space/place […] through which spectators become wholly engaged in an event’ (89). The Chicago Transit Authority’s graffitied, rattling ‘L’ subway trains serve as the film’s visual leitmotif, connecting its scenes and city spaces. Our first daylight encounter with Lysistrata is intercut with one such subway shot in which a moving train on a split screen seems to pull night into day. The attractive female lead is introduced in a salacious voiceover by Dolomedes as she fiercely struts down her Englewood block. Working the sidewalk like a runway, Lysistrata waves to neighbours on a stoop and high-fives a man passing by in a wheelchair. But Lee quickly leverages the opportunity to redirect the audience’s traditional male gaze away from Lysistrata’s sexy establishing frame by zooming out to a long shot in which signs of the community’s social and economic ravaging come to dominate the visual field. People loitering in the streets, curbside clothing donation boxes, and dilapidated buildings contrast with bright new billboard signs transparently wielding African American Vernacular English slang to hawk their targeted consumer imperatives: ‘You Need Da Bomb Malt Liquor’ (a parody product from the world of Spike Lee that also appears in earlier films like Bamboozled) and ‘Weave on Fleek: 100% Human Hair! Super Light! Tangle Free’! The last sign, ‘For the strong, black manhood, Tusk Prophylactics’ offers a wryly Aristophanic final symbolic shift as a massively oversized, upcurving elephant tusk projects from the groin of a black male model, posed seductively with his hand on his waistband (Figure 1). Figure 1 View largeDownload slide . Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) and billboard ads on the streets of ‘Chi-Raq’. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. Figure 1 View largeDownload slide . Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) and billboard ads on the streets of ‘Chi-Raq’. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. It is a potent moment of visual encapsulation. In one long tracking shot, the object of the gaze has gone from Lysistrata’s body, to her neighbourly relationships, to her community’s economic disenfranchisement, to symbols of capitalism and the domineering phallus itself. In Stephen Di Benedetto’s terms, Lee uses moments like these to revision Lysistrata in ways that recuperate ‘the body’ from its late twentieth-century mass proliferation as a consumer object; the film’s immersive and somatic performative techniques ‘harness the body as object to resist current cultural trends and try to reactivate our sensorial awareness through strategies, asking spectators to challenge their perceptive habits’ (128). This is a decisive moment of initial character establishment as Lysistrata’s bodily autonomy is brought into perspective against the backdrop of the oppressive status quo. Our perceptive habits are checked again when Dolomedes greets Lysistrata from his observer’s post beneath a freeway overpass. ‘Waaaaake up’! he shouts. As mentioned earlier, this is another one of Lee’s classic nods to his activist oeuvre. Jackson revives the twenty-five-year-old catch phrase of Señor Love Daddy, the narrating radio DJ he played in Do the Right Thing. Moments like this one help to underscore the citationality and adaptational play that encode Chi-Raq’s activist meta-language. The film can sometimes feel encyclopaedic in its visual and verbal Easter eggs placed not only for the benefit of Lee’s fans but also for fans of Aristophanes and students of Civil Rights and Black history, as I discuss later. ‘Hey, Dolomedes’, Lysistrata calls back without breaking her stride. Returning to his ongoing dialogue with the audience, Dolomedes exclaims, ‘Welcome to Chi-Raq, land of pain, misery and strife. Folks, our windy city been filleted with a king size butcher knife’. Here, he sets the scene in direct address once again. Meanwhile, Lysistrata and the trains are the only things moving through the clogged arteries of the ‘filleted’ city (Figure 2). Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Dolomedes (Samuel L. Jackson) uses rhyming verse in his direct address to the audience. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Dolomedes (Samuel L. Jackson) uses rhyming verse in his direct address to the audience. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. Shot onsite in Chicago, Chi-Raq also contrasts this visual-spatial narrative of Englewood with other local scenes of life beyond the inner city. In a mid-film scenic montage, we move from the graffitied words ‘spray paint not bullets’ to boarded up streetscapes, to the ‘L’ train. The subway then moves us to the Chicago stock exchange, a shot of downtown by Lake Michigan, and the Sears tower. These consecutive images involve the viewer in the work of noticing; they constitute a scenic tour of Chicago’s economic and racial inequality, the cultural backdrop to the film’s central action. They seem to signify the proximate possibilities of other ways of life, which despite their physical closeness to ‘Chi-Raq’, feel impossibly far away. EMBODIED IMMERSION: CORPOREAL COORDINATION AND ‘EYES THAT TOUCH’ Lee’s film also offers a view of ‘Chi-Raq’ as not a place, but a people—a city made up of citizens. The body politic is literalized through highly organized movement sequences that are arranged to feel spontaneous and organic. These spectacles of collective embodiment are not only designed to be irresistible to viewers within and beyond the film, but they also serve as metaphors for the potential power of collective human action. As Kershaw attests, ‘spectacle seems always aimed to produce excessive reactions—the WOW! factor—and at its most effective it touches highly sensitive spots in the changing nature of the human psyche by dealing directly with extremities of power’ (592). To return to the film’s opening scene at the nightclub—a contested city space in its own right—one such instance occurs when Dolomedes ends his introductory speech by unpausing the frozen, mostly female nightclub crowd. The group then launches into a choreographed dance that is initially subtle enough in its display to seem a product of spontaneous coordination. The crowd’s bodies ripple under purple light, the trademark colour of the Spartan gang, which is amplified by the dancers’ matching purple club fashions and glowsticks. Fulfilling several more of Machon’s immersive criteria, ‘The world operates both within and outside of the time-frame, rules and relationships of the “everyday” world. These are places that have their own rhythm and choreography […] Costume design becomes an extension of the scenographic aesthetic’ (Immersive Theatres 93–94). The dancers’ surreal performance in unison visually evidences a kind of embodied communitas, or ‘group synchrony’, an extension of Émile Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence (Baer). Distinct from any popular line dance, the crowd’s movement doesn’t operate through repeated steps. Instead, it seems more like a trance. In this introductory scene, ‘people sharing an experience have their very physiology fall into a collective rhythm’; not only do the club audience members become rhythmically linked to one another, as well as the performers in the scene, but film viewers are also hypnotically drawn into the sea of choreographically matched bodies (Baer) (Figure 3). Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) and the Spartan women dance in formation at the night club. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) and the Spartan women dance in formation at the night club. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. As Cannon arrives onstage and starts to rap the opening bars of ‘My City’, the crowd of allied Spartan citizens—the polis, if you will—seems to move together as one body. Chanting along to the song in a call and response of the words ‘my city’, they are an organically connected crowd of spectators, ready for the show to start, and as film viewers, so are we. Their synchronized bodies anticipate the kickoff of the main event, and like waves in the pull of the film’s tide, viewers’ bodies sway along. The two audiences become one. Thus, prior even to the introduction of its erotic sex strike plot, Chi-Raq is a film of immersive seduction. Not only is the women’s sexual withholding an irresistible tool of political success, the film strives to produce an irresistible form of spectatorly immersion despite its medium. So while immersive performance has typically been understood as a kind of live, experiential, and often site-specific theatre, Chi-Raq supports the claims of film theorists like Laura Marks, who, according to Machon, have begun to ‘advocate for the haptic nature of watching’ (“Watching, Attending, Sense-making” 42). In her study of immersive films, Marks argues that watching ‘feels like going on a journey into states of erotic being’ and calls for the recognition of film’s potential ‘flow between the haptic and the optical that our culture is currently lacking’ (Touch 1, xiii). In concert with Chi-Raq’s seductive elements of synaesthesia is Marks’ claim that within immersive film ‘eyes themselves function like organs of touch’ (Skin 162). This ethos culminates in the scene after the dance club when the camera’s gaze meets Chi-Raq and Lysistrata back at home where we witness their lovemaking in vivid close-up, all in the first ten minutes of the film. SOUNDS OF REFUSAL AND LONGING: OATHS, CHANTS, ‘SLOW JAMS’ AND ‘ROCK N’ ROLL TRAPS’ After the erotically symbiotic scenes of collective dance in the nightclub and lovemaking at Lysistrata’s home, her walk through the neighbourhood the next morning is abruptly punctuated by a brief blackout and the reverberating blasts of automatic gunfire. The noise jolts us out of the film’s swaggering rhythms and into the world of a grieving mother (played by Jennifer Hudson) who has just learned that those stray gunshots killed her young daughter, Patti. Surrounded by yellow police tape and a gawking crowd, the child’s lifeless body lies on the ground beneath a sheet. The cries of the inconsolable mother are piercing. For Lysistrata, this is an untenable reality and an inciting moment of change. Her shrewd, bibliophilic neighbour, Miss Helen (played by Angela Bassett) chastises her complicity in gang rivalries and instructs her to Google Leymah Gbowee. Though Lysistrata appears tentative at first, the words of Malcolm X that Miss Helen uttered as a warning seem to ring in her ears: ‘The best way to hide something from Negroes is to put it in a book’. We then participate in the process of discovery along with Lysistrata as we watch her watch YouTube videos and listen with her to the words of Gbowee, the real life Liberian sex strike organizer who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work to help bring an end to her country’s second civil war. This research constitutes the beginning of an educational journey for Lysistrata (and, perhaps her audience), inspired by the matriarchal mentorship of Miss Helen. Nearly every ensuing image of Angela Bassett’s character places her within a literal mise-en-scène of Civil Rights history and Classical thinkers. Whether she is surrounded by books, protesting before murals of Ida B. Wells and Gwendolyn Brooks, or holding consciousness raising sessions in her ‘House of Common Sense and Home of Proper Propaganda’ decorated with quotes from Frederick Douglass, Aristophanes, and Cicero, Miss Helen’s repertoire of intellectual and political memory becomes the foundation on which Lysistrata’s community organizing work is built. Through a series of scenes that closely mirror Aristophanes’ text, Lysistrata quickly rallies the neighbourhood women. They gather for a meeting that cuts across gang lines, despite their reluctance to work together. ‘We all black women, that’s the matter at hand, sister’ she reminds them. ‘Peace and hair grease, we all sisters here’. A rocky conversation ensues as Lysistrata attempts to lay out her boycott proposal. In the midst of flaring rivalries and hot tempers, Lysistrata finally manages to get the leader of the Trojan women on board by discussing their shared mourning for family members killed by gang violence. She knows she has found an ally when Indigo’s vernacular switches to rhyming verse: ‘We want our men alive, we want our babies to thrive, we gon’ have to organize’. Without hesitation, Lysistrata begins to administer her oath, and the women around the table swear their allegiance to the cause (Figure 4): Figure 4. View largeDownload slide A foundational moment of shared grief and bipartisan agreement at the women’s first meeting, ‘All to the bang bang’. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide A foundational moment of shared grief and bipartisan agreement at the women’s first meeting, ‘All to the bang bang’. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. Repeat after me: I will deny all rights of access or entrance from every husband, lover, or male acquaintance who comes to my direction in erection. If he should force me to lay on that conjugal couch, I will refuse his stroke and not give up that nappy pouch. No peace, no pussy! This oath gets imbricated as a foundational element of Lysistrata’s growing movement as we see it repeated later in the film. When Lysistrata arrives at the local armoury with a newly assembled battalion of sex strikers, she leads the chant again. In that second iteration, the oath lengthens and evolves to incorporate the original language along with accompanying movements and claps—a unifying dithyrambic chant has grown from the promise that started at a dining room table (Figure 5). Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Swearing the oath again at the armoury as the movement grows. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Swearing the oath again at the armoury as the movement grows. Chi-Raq (2015). Amazon Studios/Spike Lee. Another moment of aural-haptic immersion crystallizes soon after the women have occupied and secured the local armoury as part of their collective resistance. As the sexless city falls into a frustrated state of emergency, the Mayor deploys his ‘Operation Hot and Bothered’, a parody of the 1989 US operation to defeat Manuel Noriega, in an attempt to break the women’s strike. Here, the immersive power of music is also employed as an additional sensory tool of strategic overthrow. Speaking directly to the camera with a pointer in hand, the Mayor stands before a chalkboard outside the occupied armoury and offers a remedial lesson on the childish strategy written behind him. ‘Lonesome women + Slow jams = Horny women + Strike break Equals= SEX Y’all’! As hundreds of armed soldiers in full combat gear set up among walls of speakers and camouflaged tanks, Dolomedes explains, ‘Now they hookin’ up the Noriega speakers/Remember Panama, y’all?/That was the one before the other one, before the other one as I recall./Well, them atomic woofers and tweeters made General Manuel’s machete snap./Too many DBs for them pock marks to bear, plus he’s ugly as crap./Our boys caught that dictator in a rock n’ roll trap’. As his description unfolds, we witness a scene modelled on the US military’s stranger-than-fiction Operation Nifty Package brought to life. Just as Noriega was notoriously driven out of his hiding place by the auditory torture of relentless heavy metal music, this scene imagines that music also might have the erotic power to drive the women mad with longing and force them to break their strike. As the sound of the Chi-Lite’s 1972 ballad, ‘Oh Girl’ begins, the scene changes from its clipped staccato of military drills, and the cinematographic frame shifts as we soar into an overhead interior shot of the women’s sleeping quarters in the armoury gymnasium. With rows of chastity belt clad women swaying on sad green cots, the scene’s perfect symmetry is immediately alluring. Women of colour in all shapes and sizes are dressed in a simple shared uniform of beige hotpants and white tank tops that read ‘#NOpeaceNOpussy’. Their dance, choreographed by theatre veteran, Majia Garcia, is a sensually melancholy swoon. The women snap in rhythm as their choral voices just barely drown out the original song with their words, ‘Oh, boy I’d be in trouble if you left me now…’. The vocal overlay is aching and raw. We hear both the original and its activist revision—a tiny metonymic nod to the film’s encompassing adaptation. The women sing to the camera and reach for it with outstretched arms. This is a highly coordinated serenade of yearning pitched directly at the film’s audience. At the start of the next verse, the camera cuts to an exterior shot of the military men in matched formation, corresponding to the women’s choreography. But their attire and dance is immediately comic, as their drill choreography is performed in standard military-issued caps, boots, boxer shorts, and t-shirts. As they also serenade us directly in their skivvies, their nighttime sing along is harshly illuminated by floodlights. At the song’s bridge Lee moves to a split screen shot allowing us to watch the separate men and women dance both for us and for each other. Their parallel dances are evocatively gendered, raced, and historicized—the men gallantly slide and spin like Motown singers; the women provocatively crawl and arch like pop songstresses. And when the camera pans to the crowd of protesters outside the armoury gates, including the two Aristophanic choruses of old men and old women, the crowds, as well as the police in riot gear surrounding them, are all swaying and singing in unison with the song. No one can resist. Communitas has taken over. Here, film viewers witness—and perhaps sway into participation with—the immersive performance in progress; as Machon writes, ‘the focus on the moving performers’ bodies fused with the audience-participants’ moving bodies […] cultivates a “sentient consciousness where feeling and thought join”, where the senses combine with the politics of the work’ (Immersive Theatres 91–92). In these crowds, again, we the audience, see ourselves, outside looking in, but totally engaged and now part of the coordinated deployment of romance. We are all together at the mercy of the plot’s political impasse. ‘OK LADIES, NOW LET’S GET IN FORMATION’: IMMERSIVE COORDINATION FOR INTIMATE JUSTICE Most of the film’s key instances of sensory immersion are grounded in women’s group coordination.6 We see this operate in the film’s opening dance scene at the club, in the twice repeated ritual swearing of Aristophanes’ sex strike oath and in the Chi-Lites armoury number. Through the characters’ strategic and immersive seductions, Spike Lee doubles down on Aristophanes’ coordinated deployment of sexual difference by framing his adaptation as a worldwide citizens’ uprising led by Chicago’s women of colour, finally the masters of their own extraordinarily reclaimed and repurposed bodies. Performances in Chi-Raq elucidate Lysistrata’s dramatic possibilities as a ludic, corporeal extension of Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed. She sees ‘an emancipatory potential in women-of-colour formations and strategies precisely because, unlike in neoliberal conceptions of diversity, difference could be embraced in these formations and strategies not as an objective in itself, but rather as a point of departure and a method for transforming repressive and antidemocratic social circumstances’ (xi). Effectively, Lee shows us that Lysistrata has the potential to enact a more radical and inclusive call to action than the largely white second wave feminist adaptations that have garnered mainstream American recognition in recent decades.7 After all, Lysistrata’s strike doesn’t just solve the gun violence problem in Chi-Raq, once the strike is resolved she also wins the peace accord signatures of every Fortune 500 company ‘ensuring that every person in the hoods of America of employment age is guaranteed a job’ and ‘new hospitals and mental health facilities will be built by the United States government’. After the fictional President concludes, ‘Lysistrata, this is what justice looks like’, she replies, ‘Peace is not the absence of war, but a newfound love for one another’. This emancipatory potential is consequentially echoed by other contemporaneous popular performances of black women’s political resistance ranging from Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ video and the Dear White People film and episodic Netflix spinoff, to Black Lives Matter protests, which were initially organized by three women of colour. In these examples as well as Lee’s film, the ludic coordination of extraordinary female bodies is consistent with social psychology’s concept of intimate justice, ‘a theoretical framework that links experiences of inequity in the socio-political domain with how individuals imagine and evaluate the quality of their sexual and relational experiences. [The approach] questions how social conditions, such as racial and gender-based stereotypes and sexual stigma, impact what individuals feel they deserve in their intimate lives’ (McClelland 1010). To put it another way, in bell hooks’ terms, ‘It is only as black women and all women resist patriarchal romanticization of domination in relationships can a healthy self-love emerge that allows every black female, and all females, to refuse to be a victim’ (hooks). Chi-Raq evidences this commitment in its utopian instructional approach to public activism as an extension of (rather than a disruption or counter to) domestic life and private self-care, as well as its creative militarization of women’s—particularly black women’s—sexuality. Perhaps the most explicit element of the film’s intimate justice work is the way it echoes Judith Butler’s famous assertion that the body is ‘an historical situation’ as it participates in the radical resurgence of ‘pussy’, both the term, and the historical idea that has accrued still more political urgency since the January 2017 Women’s March (Butler 520). To put it bluntly, pussy is everywhere in this film, as a term of denigration and a re-appropriated term of empowerment and resistance, a haunting absent spectre for the male characters and an ever-present liability, life-force, and weapon for the chastity belted women. Yet, it is through strategic, military-style organization, that not just pussies, but whole bodies of disenfranchised citizens (in both senses of the term) are lovingly enlisted into a populist movement of self-assertion and intimate justice. While the militarization of sexually objectified bodies typically operates through sexual violence as a tool of war, coordinated sexual militarization in Chi-Raq is a reconfigured tool of praxical agency that makes protest magnetic. In other words, the women’s collective acts of embodied protest are irresistible to their male targets, but more importantly, they are irresistible to the female participants themselves, as well as to some film going audiences. The ‘contagious euphoria’ of protest—‘that glowy, giddy feeling where your sense of self slackens, yielding to a connection with your fellow, synchronized humans’ is what draws people to political movements (Baer). Of course, in her now canonical study of utopian performatives, Jill Dolan notes that this same feeling also draws us to the theatre. BEYOND SEDUCTION: CHANGING THE GAME AND CENTRING CITIZENSHIP Although many stage and screen Lysistrata adaptations have gestured toward the importance of the spectator as a kind of stand-in for the citizen to whom the play longs to speak, Lee’s film pulls the audience into Aristophanes’ plot in a particularly immersive and Classical way that defies traditional disciplinary assumptions about the different reception processes that distinguish theatre from film. Lee’s biographers have suggested that he uses excess in his films to intervene in politics, making it ‘impossible to watch a Spike Lee film in the way that one watches a typical Hollywood film’ (McGowan). By immersing audiences in the collective experiences of excess—the pain of racism, sexism, poverty, and gang violence—Chi-Raq refuses passive viewership. Instead, we unite with the characters of Lee’s films, not only during excruciating moments of pain, but also ineluctable moments of collective effervescence and activist communitas. These affective high points enact Dolan’s vision of ‘utopian performatives’: ‘small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense’ (5). These moments also help to centre the experience of the spectator, the object of Dolomedes’ address, and the only actual respondents available for his closing reprisal to ‘Wake up’! As Sandoval writes of the radical, emancipatory turn she imagines, Chi-Raq also ‘calls up new kinds of people, those with skills to rise out of citizenship to agency: countrypeople of a new territory. For these countrypeople-warriors […] the game is beginning again, new names, new players’. Similarly, Lee represents organized political actions as glimpses of the citizenly sublime. The rules of the game have changed, the film tells us; formal cinematic conventions don’t matter, dead theatre can be reincarnated, you can follow the story even if you don’t know the script, and forgotten citizens can lead movements. Flush with the potential to achieve a kind of sacred communitas, Chi-Raq renders audience members part of the film’s shared acts of democratic participation. By the closing scene, we have been invoked as not just necessary to the movement, but responsible for its continuation. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Versions of this article were presented as part of the 2017 Women and Theatre Program Pre-conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and shared with the ‘Arousing the Senses’ working group of the American Society for Theatre Research in 2018. I am grateful for the generous feedback of the participants in both those groups. Thanks also go to Professors Suzanne Schmidt and Manisha Anantharaman and the anonymous Adaptation reviewers whose thoughtful readings of earlier drafts helped to shape this project. Finally, my appreciation goes to Marc Klein for joining me at the theater on Chi-Raq’s opening day and for always being game to watch and discuss movies. REFERENCES Baer , Drake . “Protests, Parties, and Sports Games All Fill the Same Human Need.” New York Magazine 23 Jan. 2017 . 12 Oct. 2017 . https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/why-being-part-of-a-crowd-feels-so-good.html. Bonetti , Kay . “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara.” Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara . Ed. Thabiti Lewis . Jackson, MS : UP of Mississippi , 2012 : 35 – 47 . Bosman , Julie . “For Some in Chicago, Spike Lee’s ‘Chi-Raq’ Has a Title that Rankles.” New York Times 31 May 2015 . Brody , Richard . “The Best Movies of 2015.” New Yorker 11 Dec. 2015 . 10 Jul. 2017 . https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/best-movies-2015. Butler , Judith . “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 . 4 (Dec ., 1988 ): 519 – 31 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Chi-Raq . Dir. Spike Lee . USA , 2015 . Di Benedetto , Stephen . “Guiding Somatic Responses within Performative Structures: Contemporary Live Art and Sensorial Perception.” The Senses in Performance . Eds. Sally Banes and André Lepecki . London : Routledge , 2007 : 124 – 34 . Dolan , Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater . Ann Arbor, MI : U of Michigan P , 2005 . Donnella , Leah . “‘Chi-Raq’ and a Hard Place: What Critics Are Saying about Spike Lee’s New Movie.” NPR 9 Dec. 2015 . 11 Jul. 2017 . www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/12/09/458779031/chi-raq-and-a-hard-place-what-critics-are-saying-about-spike-lees-new-movie. Dué , Casey . “Get in Formation, This Is an Emergency: The Politics of Choral Song and Dance in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.” Arion 24 . 1 Spring/Summer ( 2016 ): 21 – 54 . Higgins , Charlotte . “Theatre: The Nation’s Debating Chamber.” The Guardian 6 Mar. 2015 . 17 Jul. 2017 . https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/mar/06/political-theatre-nations-debating-chamber. hooks , bell. Moving Beyond Pain . bell hooks Institute, Berea College , 9 May 2016 . 12 Jul. 2017 . www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog/2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain. Hutcheon , Linda. A Theory of Adaptation . 2nd edn . London : Routledge , 2013 . Kershaw , Baz . “Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism.” Theatre Journal 55 ( 2003 ): 591 – 611 . Lysistrata . Dir. Daniel Larlham . LeFevre Theatre , Saint Mary’s College , Moraga, CA , 15 Apr. 2016 . Lysistrata Jones . Dir. Dan Knechtges . Walter Kerr Theatre , New York , 7 Jan. 2012 . Machon , Josephine. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance . London : Palgrave Macmillan , 2013 . ———. “Watching, Attending, Sense-making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4 . 1 ( 2016 ): 34 – 48 . Marks , Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses . Durham, NC : Duke UP , 2000 . ———. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media . Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P , 2002 . McClelland , Sarah . “Intimate Justice.” Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology . Ed. T. Teo . London: Springer, 2014 : 1010 – 13 . McFarlane , Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation . Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1996 . McGovern , Joe . “‘Chi-Raq’: EW Review.” Entertainment Weekly 3 Dec. 2015 . 11 Jul. 2017 . http://ew.com/article/2015/12/03/chi-raq-ew-review/. McGowan , Todd. Spike Lee . Champaign, IL : U of Illinois P , 2014 . Robson , James . “Slipping One In: The Introduction of Obscene Lexical Items in Aristophanes.” Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson . Ed. S. Douglas Olson . Berlin, Germany : De Gruyter , 2014: 29–50 . Ruhl , Sara. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater . New York : Farrar, Strauss and Giroux , 2014 . Sandoval , Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed . Minneapolis, MN : U of Minnesota P , 2000 . Seitz , Matt Zoller. Chi-Raq . RogerEbert.com 2 Dec. 2015 . 11 Jul. 2017 . www.roger-ebert.com/reviews/chi-raq-2015. The Making of Chi-Raq . Chi-Raq DVD, Special Features , USA , 2015 . Footnotes 1 Key to Lee’s particular approach to immersivity that I am identifying here is the fact of its dualistic attention to both diegetic and non-diegetic audience engagement. Unlike the forms of textual immersion described by Marie-Laure Ryan and Linda Hutcheon as necessarily at odds with metafictional or self-reflexive modes, Chi-Raq’s brand of immersivity more closely aligns with Josephine Machon’s performance-oriented immersive framework in which self-reflexivity and immersion can work together by hailing audiences and establishing a contract for participation, as I discuss in the next section (Hutcheon 135–36). Though Ryan acknowledges that self-reflexivity and immersion can successfully ‘alternate […] through a game of in and out’, she treats this phenomenon as an incomplete form of ‘selective interactivity’ (284). For Machon, on the other hand, this type of hybridity ‘highlights a crossing of boundaries’ that is a hallmark of immersive theatre (Immersive Theatre 93). See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, Second Edition, London: Routledge, 2013, and Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 2 Lee’s immersive technique is consistent with Aristophanes’; many Classicists suggest that Lysistrata used established dramatic elements like the choral ode and dithyrambic chants to directly involve audiences in the comedy’s plot. As James Robson writes, ‘[Through] Aristophanes’ dramatic and artistic practices […] the audience is invited to engage with drama in performance. One key point is just how conscious Aristophanes is at times to manipulate spectator response, either warming the audience up and tantalizing them as he builds up to a climactic obscenity, or shocking them to signal abuse, attack, crudeness, freedom from inhibition, buffoonery or the like’ (49). 3 Of course, this fundamental belief in theatre and politics as mutually constitutive is not a new one; it is classically Athenian. Classicist Charlotte Higgins asserts, ‘Theatre is politics, in its blood and bones. In Athens, its birthplace, theatre was deeply entrenched in the religious and civic calendar of the city-state. This was a talkative city – […] Rhetoric, the act of persuasive speech, was the great Athenian skill and the route to political power. Open-air, noisy, talk-filled gatherings were part of life, if you were born a free man; the streets and squares of the city were a kind of stage’. Recently, this fundamental link was even echoed by cultural critics who note the theatre backgrounds of the students leading the Never Again movement for US gun control. See Stephen Sachs, “Surprised that ‘Never Again’ Leaders Are Theatre Kids? I’m Not.” American Theatre 23 Feb. 2018. <https://www.americantheatre.org/2018/02/23/surprised-that-never-again-leaders-are-theatre-kids-im-not/> and Michael Schulman, “The Spring Awakening of the Stoneman Douglas Theatre Kids.” The New Yorker 23 Feb. 2018. <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-spring-awakening-of-the-stoneman-douglas-theatre-kids>. 4 Built in 1926, this theatre is registered as a local historic landmark and has served as an icon of Oakland’s Lake Merritt neighbourhood and its vibrant black community. In recent decades, the movie house has been recognized for its owner’s use of the antique marquee to display progressive political messages. Seeing Chi-Raq in a packed auditorium with this unique local standing was especially powerful. Coincidentally, in 2018, the neighbourhood launched its own form of performative grassroots protest dubbed ‘BBQing While Black’ in response to the #BBQBecky scandal that arose when a white woman called the police on black lakeside grillers participating in a longstanding community cookout tradition. See Laura M. Holson, “Hundreds Turn Out to BBQ While Black.” New York Times 21 May 2018. <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/us/oakland-bbq-while-black.html> and Emma Silvers, “When Is a Movie Theater More Than Just a Movie Theater?” KQED Arts 29 Aug. 2018. <https://www.kqed.org/arts/13839890/when-is-a-movie-theater-more-than-just-a-movie-theater>. 5 Given Lee’s penchant for making formally experimental and explicitly political satires about the African American experience, his 30-year career has rarely brought him blockbuster-level box office success, but he has been credited with changing the face of American independent filmmaking by widening and democratizing its audience base, drawing new viewership beyond the elite white, educated, middle class audiences of the 1980s. This shift is particularly significant as we consider the reception of an adaptation like Chi-Raq, since adaptation studies has long questioned how the reception of re-makes is influenced by familiarity with an original. While many critics have suggested that Chi-Raq’s viewership was complicated by a general lack of awareness about its Classical origins, I would argue that whether or not Lee’s mainstream audiences experience the adaptational frisson of Chi-Raq’s plot, his work to make a theatrical classic interpretively, financially, and geographically accessible ‘to the masses’ enacts an important democratic ideal and shatters the exclusionary myth of white Classical inheritance. Also compelling are the multifaceted elements of ‘palimpsestic’ citationality that Chi-Raq uses to hail different audiences in different ways (Hutcheon 21–22). These include his symbolic re-uses of characters, objects, and dialogue from his previous films as well as his casting of well-known Chicagoans like Jennifer Hudson, who plays a grieving mother in the wake of grieving the real life deaths of her three family members, and John Cusack whose role is based on Chicago’s real ‘Political Priest’, Father Michael Pfleger. 6 Here I borrow one of the driving lyrics from Beyoncé’s activist anthem ‘Formation’, a song featured on her groundbreaking 2016 visual album Lemonade. In the song’s video, a vivid critique of police brutality and the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans’ black community, black women perform synchronized choreography in single file while a young boy dances for his life before a line of police in riot gear. The rival lines in separate frames seem to enact a disjointed postmodern showdown. Interestingly, key elements of ‘Formation’s’ mise-en-scène, including its use of freeway underpasses and gymnasium dance lines, seem to mirror those of Chi-Raq. 7 For useful discussions of such productions, see relevant chapters in Philip Walsh, ed. Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristophanes. The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2016; Emily B. Klein, Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in performance 1930–2012. London: Routledge, 2014; and Martin M. Winkler, Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Seductive Movements in Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq: Activism, Adaptation, and Immersive Theatre in Film
JF - Adaptation
DO - 10.1093/adaptation/apz011
DA - 2020-05-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/seductive-movements-in-lysistrata-and-spike-lee-s-chi-raq-activism-f0Gwzfm5S3
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -