C’OPERA, Or Where Cops Remember their OlympicsbySarah Lehrer-Graiwer
The Los Angeles Police Academy was born out of a wave of construction and activity surrounding the World Games. It all began with a picturesque Spanish-style complex, imposed on a hillside in Elysian Park. In 1925, a private club for policemen opened a pistol range there. Seven years later, the range hosted the Olympic pistol and rifle competition. The new Olympic Village dormitory building for athletes relocated there from Baldwin Hills after the conclusion of the Los Angeles games of 1932. The Olympic Games are perhaps the only persistent, albeit meager (even drearily kitsch), present-day materialization of some residual utopian impulse not yet squandered by ever-mounting disillusionment. The Olympic Movement, as it calls itself, was resurrected, after a more than fifteen hundred year hiatus, at the Games of the I Olympiad held in Athens in 1896, at the culmination of a century opened by Charles Fourier’s Theorie des quatre mouvements of 1808, and only a few years after the appearance in 1890 of William Morris’ utopian accounts of News from Nowhere. The Games are rife with the utopian rhetoric of global peace, respect for universal moral principles, and the purported Olympic spirit. Despite the extent to which commercialism, corporate sponsorship, corruption, and any other unfortunate real-world conditions have cheapened these high ideals, there is still a flicker of hope emanating from the Games’ historical inception. For the last seventy-odd years in Los Angeles, every cop around has been trained in a house haunted by an Olympic ghost. New recruits enter the firing range where Olympians once aimed. New inductees receive graduating honors where champion marksmen were awarded gold medals of excellence. I guess you wouldn’t sense that lineage by looking at the LAPD today. The Olympian flame was briefly rekindled for me on the night before the opening ceremony of the XXth Olympic Winter games in Turin, at the Police Academy’s former site of Olympic competition. The occasion was Heidi Duckler’s Collage Dance Theater’s site-specific performance, C’Opera. In it, company dancers, together with a full-bodied female soprano and a real-life cop performed a choreographed (and operatic) interpretation of the drama that characterizes the experience of training for, and ultimately becoming, an LAPD cop. The four acts of C’Opera were each located in an interesting spot on the Police Academy’s edenic campus: the gymnasium (with the curiously cockeyed motto ‘To Protect and To Serve’), the coffee shop/ luncheonette (open to the public for lunch), the baroquely landscaped grotto (with waterfalls and pools surrounded by rocks and ferns), and the elegantly Judd-esque rows of the firing range. The audience moved from interior to exterior in tandem with the dancers. Though the performance as a whole was ambiguously effective and affective, it was full of inspired moments and transcendent ideas. The unexpected beauty and strangeness of the Police Academy’s enclave ensured that any dancing there would, at the very least, have surprise on its side and hook the viewer with the lure of defamiliarization. Staged in the darkness of night and a backdrop of (urban) woods, C’Opera was dream-like, riddled with intrigue and the bizarre interventions of aesthetics within this penal colony. While it suffered from some hokey passages of shallow theatrics, the performance also delivered simple, intimate gestures of curious potential, one that resonated with the site’s Olympic, utopian origins involving uniformed police officers dancing exuberantly with each other in leaps and twirls. A male trainee posed in drag, wearing a camouflage unitard with nylon fringe and red high-heels. Cops dancing? Cops in drag? Can they get the job done? Soft cops? The law gone limp pink? Surely this is an image from some bizarre future Utopia? In Utopia, the State will not use force to impose and secure the law. The law will dance its own way into being through voluntary imperatives of grace. Like a highly refined moral compass, our own sense of a harmony between our rational and moral faculties will compel adherence. The strength of a police force will wither from neglect, condemned to disuse and irrelevance. And cops will have to busy themselves in new ways. If there are cops in Utopia, they would have to lay down their arms and be charged with a new duty: flitting gracefully, dancing fluidly, and staging Brechtian dramas for our entertainment. The cop as prima ballerina. See www.olympic.org |
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