Last Wednesday marked the final presentation in the Sustainability in the Arts lecture series, which began with an introduction by David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies. Professor Kim set the stage for the event by explaining that arts “open up space” to questions that we would not otherwise be able to explore. “Being Alive: A Talk in Three Acts,” the afternoon’s lecture, explored sustainability in the context of musical theater and provided a supporting example of Kim’s argument for the role of the arts in society.
Professor Kim quickly relinquished the podium to Ann Pellegrini, Director of New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies and author of several books, including Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race. Her impressive resume, she explained, is the product of following her interests, especially musicals. “You should Gleeify the campus,” she said with a laugh.
Like a play, her lecture was broken up into what she referred to as acts, the first entitled “Being Alive.” Through analysis of Freud and other major thinkers, she developed the lecture’s guiding question of “How do we inhabit the now?” or, in other words, how do we sustain ourselves and our society?
Her unique response to this question began with a song, an element of the presentation that was popular with the audience. A few bars of the song “Being Alive” from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company drifted from the speakers. Once described as the “bitterest, most unhappy song ever written,” the lyrics “Someone to need you too much / Someone to know you too well / Someone to pull you up short, / And put you through hell” were accompanied by a longing melody.
After breaking into a few lines of the song herself, Pelligrini went on to explain that her love of musicals derives from their “violation of reality.” “In fantasies,” she explained, “our desires can range widely and wildly.” However, she could never get enough of this Sondheim musical, for it demonstrates that the “tragicomedy of desire” is that “the object [of desire] is always lost.”
The lecture detailed the conflict between the difficulty and pleasure of desire, and presented this conflict as an inescapable component of being alive. As the song “Being Alive” expressed, “alone is alone, not alive,” and thus social sustainability is of the utmost importance.
The second act, titled “Feelings,” began by asking “why does the value of freedom come crashing to the fore when it comes to sex?” Here Pelligrini asked how we address sex in our society. On the one hand, there is the “fantasy for change and risk;” there are individual and societal ideas about what constitutes “good sex.” And yet, though sex is rampant in society and popular culture, there is “hesitancy in the pleasure of sex,” which makes queer sex, for example, to become a “scapegoat,” according to Pelligrini. This hesitancy may arise because sex is a crossing of boundaries, a “site for bodily vulnerability,” and many are thus uncomfortable discussing “what’s messy in sex.”
“How do we start talking about sexual error?” Pelligrini wondered aloud. How can we talk about “sexual mistakes and not punish self or other?” The answer came in the third act: “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.” Company became the subject of the lecture once again in this act, while Pelligrini considered the answers to the numerous questions she had posed. Robert, the play’s protagonist, gave insight into “how to live and not fall ill,” as Pelligrini described a scene in which Robert did not answer his door, despite his friends’ numerous knocks. Instead, Robert “luxuriated in being alone”; Robert was praised for appreciating his selfhood, for knowing that “he’s alone and he’s alive.”
“Both religion and art emerge as places of enchantment,” she argued, meaning that the arts ultimately allow us to have these difficult conversations that typically cannot take place in different mediums.
Finally, the lecture returned to the original question about how to “inhabit the now.” For a moment, Pelligrini paused as she projected the lyrics “To help us survive / Being alive, being alive, / Being alive!” onto a white pull-down screen. So, how does one inhabit the now? Pelligrini triumphantly concluded the lecture with the pronouncement: “Fuck reality, fantasy helps us survive being alive!” •
