Smith, Anna Deavere (1950–)

Performance artist, teacher, professionally trained actor, Anna Deavere Smith has used her training to work with communities stricken with racial and ethnic conflict. Smith has developed a method of “documentary theater” where she interviews members of the communities in conflict, then carefully reperforms the speakers with their own characteristic speaking style, physical mannerisms, and idiosyncratic viewpoints. Her performances move beyond mere impersonation to a critical empathy, whereby the time spent speaking and moving as the other enables Smith to speak not like another, but as the other. Part of her questioning attempts to bring an element of the unexpected to the interview situation, so that the interviewee is more likely to say something spontaneously individual. She employs this method in two significant works Fires in the Mirror, and Twilight Los Angeles, both centered on conflicts that cut along racial, ethnic, and religious lines in the United States. Fires in the Mirror was her first work about the communities impacted by riots and protests in the summer of 1991 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The events that precipitated the riots, the accidental killing of an African American boy and a retaliatory murder of a rabbinical student, roiled the Crown Heights community in a conflict that garnered national media attention. Smith reperformed some of the media personalities identified with the conflict, but the majority of the voices came from residents of the neighborhoods affected by the conflict. The distinct voices offer a window on the diverse and interconnected community that make up the streets and residences of Brooklyn. What emerges in the performance is a community that is far less polarized than is represented by the mainstream press. The performance creates a public space that more fully represents the range of complex issues, perspectives, and individuals impacted by the events.

In Twilight Los Angeles, Smith reperforms interviews with members of the Los Angeles community impacted by the riots in 1992, after the televised beating of Rodney King by police officers. The play presents a cultural mosaic of voices from the African American, Latino, Anglo, and Asian communities. As with Fires, the play complicates the notion that the conflict was a manifestation of purely racial tensions. Instead, the voices personalize the disempowerment felt by large sections of the urban disenfranchised. Although not overly graphic, the performance is painful to view in the raw, unscripted responses of her subjects. Even now, the show illustrates the tensions that lay just below the surface of American consciousness, tensions that are largely ignored in press or popular cultural representations. Smith's more [Page 1294]recent House Arrest explores the intersections of public and private life of American presidents from Bill Clinton to Thomas Jefferson. As a professor of performance and a writer, Smith teaches new actors the process of becoming other-minded in their approach to performing. Recipient of a 1996 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Smith has performed in several major motion pictures, as well as taking a recurring role on the popular TV show The West Wing.