Starting next Tuesday, Duke’s mascot will take a break from its traditional athletic duties in Wallace Wade and Cameron Indoor and shimmy into a more artistic space. If on that night, however, you’re passing by or heading to the Main Street music venue Casbah, don’t expect to see anyone in a blue-and-white character bodysuit. In this venue, it seems safe to say that a certain “Professor Diablo,” while mysteriously titled, may look much more like a typical culture-savvy Durhamite.
“Of course ‘Professor Diablo’ is a nod [to the Duke mascot],” said Duncan Murrell, professor of documentary writing at the Center for Documentary Studies. “But ‘Diablo’ is an entity whose identity will shift. It’s a shape-shifter.”
If you’re sufficiently befuddled and intrigued, perhaps that’s ideal (as Murrell further commented, “I think people are interested because it does seem unusual”). But fear not: “Professor Diablo” represents neither a seance nor sacrificial performance art—at least not yet.
The result of a partnership between the Center for Documentary Studies and the Triangle’s Hinge Literary Center, “Professor Diablo’s True Revue” is a new collaborative performance series that will engage writers, musicians and visual artists in an evening-length event showcasing multimedia artwork grounded in extensive documentary research and fieldwork. The series’ inaugural installment April 24 will bring together a visual and media installation artist, a local songwriter, a nonfiction writer and Murrell himself, who will serve as this performance’s curator and elusive “Professor Diablo.” Titled “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” the collaborative performance will explore, via each artist, the theme of plastics and plasticity.
“We were always looking for a type of evening where we could mix media and documentary work about particular kinds of stories,” said Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies. “[At CDS we were interested in] what it would be like to curate or produce a show where you’d get more reading and writing and also music to show the commonalities across the medium we call documentary storytelling.”
This type of performance structure is not new; in some ways, it parallels the first ‘Events’ and proto-happenings that began with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s, in which various artists would perform their art—be it dance or movement, painting, music and/or poetry—simultaneously in a specific space. But the “Professor Diablo” series differs in its aesthetic incorporation of nonfiction work—an obvious complement to the ubiquitous term “documentary” but, perhaps more importantly, a challenge to probe and expand it.
“I think that one of the things that gives documentary work its power is blending the skills of a fiction storyteller or artist with the contract with the audience that [the work is] based on something real,” Rankin said. “And sometimes that’s partially an illusion but in what goes on at the center it’s very much that idea of human actuality that’s taken and reshaped and reconstructed into compelling and engaging stories.”
Hinge member and local writer Eric Martin, whose novella Donald was recently adapted into the Manbites Dog play of the same title, emphasized the increasing popularity—as well as accessibility—of this type of creative work.
“It’s impossible not to see that non-fiction has been stealing fiction’s toys for a while now,” Martin wrote in an email. “Some of the most exciting writing, art, dance, film, you name it, is happening in the world of creative non-fiction. I love films like Waltz with Bashir, books like What is the What and artists like Ai Weiwei that are working in that space.”
Regarding the “Professor Diablo” series in particular, Rankin explained that the theme of plastics—which is the first among a set of ideas for the series that includes, according to the CDS website, “love, war and food”—meshes well with the philosophy and appeal of nonfiction documentary work.
“The whole idea of using a word like ‘plastic,’ which can be literally related or can spin out a little farther, is that documentarians are always trying to play with being true to the literal core and making it metaphoric,” Rankin said. “[With this series], we’re looking at what’s real that’s not being talked about [already] through art.”
This evening in particular will feature the work of Donovan Hohn, a creative nonfiction writer whose recent book reflects his personal odyssey exploring precisely what the title enumerates: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. Also featuring 2011 Guggenheim Fellow Marina Zurkow’s research-driven and often manga-inspired media works as well as Old Ceremony frontman Django Haskins’ history-inspired songwriting, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” engages plasticity as both a physical and intellectual or emotional notion. The theme’s multivalence seems to ensure an unpredictable evening that relies as much on the performers’ segmented presentation as the audience’s response.
“That’s what distinguishes this from a happening,” Murrell explained. “We’ll have time [for the audience] to meet the artists afterward, but…when I talk about the audience reflection, I think about…what happens to the audience in the interstitial spaces between performances.”
The combination of Casbah’s reputation as an established musical venue and an audience from what Murrell describes as an “art, literature and music-hungry town and university” will, the organizers hope, embrace the event as a viable artistic practice that will weather the quick cultural and economic shifts that define contemporary experience.
“I feel like it’s definitely sustainable and obviously there’s an endless amount of topics we can deal with,” Casbah owner Steve Gardner said.
Like many grassroots cultural efforts that have sprung from Durham and the Triangle more generally in recent years, “Professor Diablo’s True Revue” equates sustainability with a committed, do-it-yourself ethic nurtured by the area’s creative professionals and students.
“I’m a real believer in things starting organically and this is one of those projects,” Rankin said. “[There’s a] certain freedom and flexibility. We hope it will take on a life of its own. Fifteen years ago [the CDS] started Full Frame on a shoestring from our basement. Now it has its own identity, and with this [we hope to do the same].”
This type of project also serves as an alternative to the traditional, podium-reading-driven (and commercially modeled) author or artist tour, which, at this point, Murrell calls “kind of depressing.”
“I grew up in the punk rock and do-it-yourself world of the 80s,” Murrell said. “[With events like 'Professor Diablo'], we’re bringing the rock back. I think this is more exciting, to see how [a writer’s] words bounce off of music and fit with a visual.”
Adhering strictly to a “keep-it-local” philosophy, “Professor Diablo’s True Revue” is, for now, an open experiment; its direction is malleable as curators change for each iteration, introducing new themes and new artistic work, which may, as Rankin suggested, include that of Duke students.
“We want to promote the idea that this [series is based in] an ethic of turning attention outward that we should encourage across the arts, whether it’s dance, puppeteering [or some other art form],” Murrell said. “If you’re turning your attention to the world around you, then your work qualifies for ‘Professor Diablo.’”
The inaugural evening of “Professor Diablo’s True Revue” will take place at Casbah on Tuesday, Apr. 24 at 7 p.m. Patrons of Casbah must be members; a lifetime membership is $3.
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