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The Beast Within

Fringe/Live Arts shows explore humanity's place in the animal kingdom.


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Published: Sep 1, 2010

Neal Santos

Marcel Williams Foster in The Jane Goodall: Experience

It's selfish, really: The only reason we study animals is to learn more about ourselves. Great apes tell us who we were 4 million years ago; "gay" animals inform how we perceive our sexuality; and Grizzly Man, with all due respect to Timothy Treadwell, was never about bears. But scientists and environmentalists aren't alone in doing so. At Philly Fringe, artists are also using critters as a conceit to explore humanity.

"Did you know chimpanzees and humans are the only animals that create imaginary borders and wage wars because of them?" asks Britney Hines, director of The Jane Goodall: Experience.

That's what science tells us, anyway. But perhaps primatologists who make that claim just have war on the brain: Hines' drag production, starring Pig Iron vet Marcel Williams Foster, questions how much the culture, race and inner life of researchers unwittingly shape their conclusions about animals.

Foster first conceived the show as a researcher for the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park. While studying in the same place Goodall worked with chimps in the 1960s, he found a community still at odds with the Institute.

"We've been there for 50 years," says Foster. "But the response from Tanzanians was still, 'What are you doing here?' That told me a lot about how the Institute had been operating all this time."

He also started questioning Goodall's research on dominance displays, in which chimps allegedly ascend the social totem pole by swaying violently, hurling rocks and essentially scaring the crap out of their more chill brethren. "That theory's got some imperial themes to it, and when Jane first got to Tanzania she was a British woman in a place that was being colonized by England," says Foster.

Upon returning home to Philly, he decided there was no better way to "both parody and admire" Goodall than to play her in drag. Though the show contrasts his experiences in Tanzania with the legendary scientist's, Foster insists he isn't keen on creating an outright dichotomy between the two. "I'm not saying that Jane was a colonizer and I'm this post-colonial figure," he says. "That would be troubling. It's more like I'm trying to figure out how I've perpetuated these problems, too."

Likewise, American Nigga Zoo points to the failings of animal science — or, really, animal pseudoscience. Branded as proof that non-whites were of "negligent character," 19th- and 20th-century zoos and freak shows displayed black people as if they were animals. Ota Benga, originally from the Belgian Congo, was exhibited alongside monkeys in the Bronx Zoo in 1906; Sarah Baartman appeared in European freak shows because of her apparently "strange" genitals, which were later preserved and shown at the French Musée de l'Homme until 1974.

Following in the footsteps of many black intellectuals before her, West Philly director Misty Sol draws on the concept of zoos to examine what it's like to be an African-American woman today. In American Nigga Zoo, the aforementioned Benga and Baartman (who never met in real life) have a conversation in a cage. The show whisks together poetry, theater, hip-hop and dance — and evokes a bit of necessary discomfort.

"Participants take part in the ritual of watching these people on display, as well as a few other interactive things I don't want to reveal," says Sol. "We've tried to create a nightmarish world where metaphor is reality."

On the other side of the performing arts spectrum is Beauvais Lyons, a sort of creationist Stephen Colbert. A Tennessean with a top hat, a salesman's swagger and a bowtie, he displays prints of bull-raccoons, giraffe-snakes, centaurs and other animal hybrids as if they're real in The Association for Creative Zoology. (He's got "taxidermy" and "fossils," too.) For the Fringe Festival, he'll show at the American Philosophical Society's garden.

Though Lyons has long been captivated by chimeras, he's made them his focus in the last decade, in response to right-wing politicians claiming they don't believe in evolution, the Creation Museum being three built three hours away from his hometown, and myriad other signs of the times.

Lyons' show comes off as more live method acting than visual arts or traditional theater. He's exhibited at re-enactments of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, the famous case in which a high school biology instructor was charged with teaching evolution, and written newspaper editorials pretending to be a man of the Lord: "The Bible is, after all, the word of God and rich with accounts of the animal kingdom," he wrote to Knoxville's alt-weekly Metro Pulse in April. "I take its eight references to unicorns (in Numbers 23:22, Numbers 24:8, Job 39:9, Job 39:10, Psalm 22:21, Psalm 29:6, Psalm 92:10, Isaiah 34:7) to be evidence of God's creation and biological truth."

Lyons so convincingly plays a Christian fundamentalist on an Animorphs bender that it forces you to viscerally fear living in a world where the pseudoscientists have won. In fact, it makes you wonder if they already have.

But Lyons isn't a total ideologue. He says his favorite part of The Association for Creative Zoology is its young fans, who dream up the most fantastical hybrids.

"Kids think of a lot of bird-mammal combinations," he says. "They want something to exist that's both terrestrial and able to fly."

The funniest part of Lyons' shtick by far? The creationists who aren't in the joke.

"I've found that creationists are generally less able to pick up on ironic signals than evolutionists. They tend to want to read into things literally," he says.

Sometimes that thing is the Bible. Other times, it's a half-dog, half-duck.

(holly.otterbein@citypaper.net)

The Jane Goodall: Experience runs Sept. 15-18, $15, 2nd Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St. American Nigga Zoo runs Sept. 8-10, 8 p.m., $20, Gallerie Isada, 3320 Collins St. The Association for Creative Zoology runs Sept. 10-12 and 17-18, 11 a.m., free (reservations required), American Philosophical Society, Jefferson Garden, 104 S. Fifth St.