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Kevin Manning

998102404

ANT473

December 16, 2013

Grease: The Ethnography

There have been plenty of ethnographic works on conflict in power structures, but

not many on power structures running smoothly. Over the past two months I observed the

rehearsal process of Grease with the intention of examining struggles in the power

structure of the cast and crew- but there were no struggles, much to my surprise. I

believed that examining power structures in Grease would actually be quite an interesting

and multi-layered process, because the play itself is about power structures. Grease is

about two students (Danny and Sandy) in a 1950’s high school who fall in love despite

being from different social backgrounds: he is one of the cool kids, and she is not. They

and the supporting characters navigate the different levels of popularity in high school

across the course of the play, and this is the source of almost all of the conflict in the

story. In full disclosure, I had expected a similar “cliquey” structure among the cast and

crew, but this did not prove to be the case at all. In fact, it was less “cliquey” than most of

my own experiences at the university in my four years here. This surprised me, because

the power structure was built into the production: although everyone is a student, the

director is in charge, and some of the actors play more important characters than others.

My mistaken assumption led me to a conclusion I did not expect: people are happy, or at

least happier, to adhere to power structures in things that they choose to participate in for

enjoyment. Although there is a very formal structure in place at all times, it had only a

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positive effect. This essay will focus on my observations in the rehearsal and production

process, and the theories and approaches that I (unsuccessfully) tried to apply to these

observations. It will then consider several reasons that these widely accepted approaches

did not work with this particular group of people, and what that could mean for future

ethnographic works in similar fields.

My original intention was not actually to study Grease, but a production of

Twelfth Night at Hart House. Ultimately Grease was by far the better option (for reasons

that I will explain later), but at the beginning of the process I was set on Twelfth Night

because I believed it would have been a richer field site and because I believed it would

have a population drawn from the entire university instead of just one college. I began by

emailing a man named Doug Floyd, who is the theatre director at Hart House. Mr. Floyd

was very enthusiastic in his email, writing that it was “a really interesting idea”, and

when I met with him he continued to express his enthusiasm. However, he was unsure if

the director of Twelfth Night would be comfortable with it and suggested that the director

of Grease would be more open because he was also a student. This was the point where I

learned that Twelfth Night would not actually be a student production (the director was

not a student, and many of the actors were professionals). Mr. Floyd then put me in touch

with Sara Gonsalves, the producer, who then put me in touch with Jeff Kennes, the

director. In his first email, he wrote:

Sara brought to my attention your interest in observing the production

process of Grease, and her discussion with Doug. I think you can

understand that I have a number of reservations about the process.

Obviously, I would like to meet with you to discuss it before making a

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final decision one way or another and we can discuss your thesis, my

reservations and the logistics of your project and our production. I of

course want to support the continued research of all academic fields, so I

invite you to convince me to get on board. When are you available to sit

down for a coffee?

I was quite nervous after receiving this email, thinking that Mr. Kennes had already made

up his mind, but this was not the case at all. I met with Mr. Kennes at a café near the

university where I explained the project, and he was immediately open to the idea: I was

not required to do any convincing at all. I can only assume that something got lost in

translation between Mr. Floyd, Ms. Gonsalves and Mr. Kennes, because Mr. Kennes was

under the impression that I was a graduate student and would be publishing the project

without protecting any of the sources. I assured him that it would not be published if he

or anyone else was uncomfortable with it and that it was only an undergraduate paper,

and that if he was not comfortable I had no problem withdrawing. He then agreed to let

me observe and emailed me the rehearsal schedule, inviting me to drop in whenever I

wanted. In this paper I want to focus on three particular rehearsals: the very first one I

attended, which provided some context for the power structure of the production and

introduced me to the cast and the rest of the crew; one choreography rehearsal that the

director did not attend, which revealed the power structure among the cast; and a

rehearsal with the entire cast and the production leaders (the director, the choreographer

and the music director) that brought everything (and everyone) together before

performances began.

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The first rehearsal I attended was about two weeks later, and it was probably the

best possible introduction I could have had. It was a small group of actors rehearsing a

dialogue scene, which then moved into a song with some relatively simple choreography.

Because there were so few actors I was able to talk with them (which became more

difficult at rehearsals with the entire cast), and I was able to see a little bit of both the

music rehearsals and dialogue rehearsals. However, the rehearsal ran incredibly

smoothly: I was expecting at least some conflict between some of the cast members or

between the cast and crew, but this did not happen at all. (At this point I began to worry

that my presence was affecting the rehearsal process, and that everyone was behaving in

a calmer way than they usually would: however, this eventually proved not to be the case,

as we will see later.)

The dialogue rehearsal essentially involved learning the entire scene in one night,

although it would change over time: I never saw them rehearse this scene again, but

between the end of the rehearsal that night and the time the scene appeared on stage

several lines and some of the blocking had changed. It began with the cast and the

director sitting casually around the room, reading the lines to get a feel for how each

actor would speak in that particular scene. Then the actors got up and the Mr. Kennes

began to arrange how they would stand at specific points and when they would move.

This particular scene was somewhat complicated in that regard: various actors were

entering and leaving at different points during the scene, and any time this happened the

actors would have to adjust their positions to allow for various things. For example, one

actor (Actor A) had to be standing near another (Actor B) so that they could interact, but

then had to later interact with another actor (Actor C) on the opposite side of the stage,

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and then interact with Actor B again. It was too distracting for Actor A to walk back and

forth across the stage and looked unnatural to have the three actors communicating across

the room, but Actor B could not move (they had to be in a specific part of the set) and

Actor C had to be close to the exit. Therefore the entire cast would have to find ways to

work around this- either they would all move as a group or some would move to allow a

clearer path between the two who needed to interact. However, in order to make this

make sense certain lines needed to be added, removed or changed, which would then

sometimes change the dynamic of the entire scene. It was a complicated process, but the

cast and the director worked together quite well to figure it out: the cast would sometimes

make suggestions which the director would incorporate (or not), or the director would

make a suggestion that the cast would try to see if it worked. If these suggestions worked,

they would stay; if not, someone else would suggest something and they would try that.

By the time the scene made it to the stage it was completely seamless.

Once the dialogue was mastered, they moved into the music and dance

choreography. Most of the actors left to work on a different number (the music, not the

choreography, which had not yet been developed), while Actor B stayed and delivered a

monologue that set up the song (the monologue was approved much more quickly than

the rest of the dialogue, mostly because there was only Actor B but also because this

actor did not have to move while speaking). Then the ensemble arrived for the number.

The dynamic changed a little bit: there was less joking around and the actors were more

focused, but this may have been because it was getting later into the night and everyone

was ready to finish up. The actors had already learned the choreography for this number,

but Mr. Kennes was seeing it for the first time. They performed it for him to give him an

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idea of how it would be, and then he began to offer suggestions. Actor B did not sing or

dance in this number, but needed to be in the centre of it, and Mr. Kennes would tell the

actors where to stand while the dancers moved around them. This was rehearsed for

about an hour without many changes added by the director or actors, and it made it to the

final production in almost exactly the same form (unlike some of the other musical

numbers, where the choreography was changed heavily between rehearsal and

performance).

The next rehearsal I want to focus on was a pure choreography rehearsal. Mr.

Kennes was not there, but by sheer coincidence many of the same actors from the first

dialogue rehearsal were. Actor B (who I had spoken to more than the others) was not, and

there were two or three additional members of the ensemble, but otherwise it was the

same group of actors. The musical number that they were learning this day was one of the

more elaborate ones in the production: although it did not feature the entire cast, like

many of the bigger numbers did, it had more complicated choreography. I was interested

(and somewhat surprised) to see that the dynamic was very different between these first

two rehearsals, despite featuring most of the same actors. The difference was the absence

of a director. There was still a person in charge: the choreographer. However, things were

much more informal than they were when the director was present. (Things were already

fairly informal when he was present, so the choreography rehearsal was extremely

casual.) This is where a leadership hierarchy began to show itself for the first time, and it

came through in very subtle ways, and I doubt I would have noticed if I had not been

specifically looking for it. Actor D was playing one of the larger roles in the production,

certainly the largest out of the cast members who were present at this rehearsal, but had

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less to do in this particular number because it was Actor E’s solo. However, whenever the

ensemble began to lose focus, Actor D would put them back on track, albeit in a light

way (usually with a joke). The choreographer was unquestionably on a higher authority

level than the cast, but it often took the combined efforts of Actor D and the

choreographer to make things run as smoothly as they had at the first rehearsal.

The third and final rehearsal I want to focus on took place about a week before the

first performance of Grease. It was the first time I had seen the entire cast together, and I

expected to see some interesting things about the power structure because they were all

together and because they were so close to the final production. Actor B had joked much

earlier that by this point they would “be at each other’s throats”, but ultimately this did

not really happen. Instead, things ran more smoothly than ever. They ran through most of

the major musical numbers once or twice (depending on how complicated each one was),

but no dialogue. For this reason there were few changes happening in each number: it

was only for the sake of polishing everything. The director would name a song, the

required actors would perform it (complete with the choreography) while the music

director accompanied them on the piano. Then the director would name another song and

the process would repeat. The only new information (for me, at least) that came from this

rehearsal was the official order of character status. The cast practiced the order that they

would take the stage at the end to bow, which had been decided by the director, for the

first time. The order began with the ensemble and moved up until it finally reached the

main two actors. Nobody seemed particularly surprised by this order, which suggests to

me that it was at least unofficially known beforehand. This is what really surprised me,

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but I believe that it shows something about power structures that we do not usually see,

for reasons I will explore later.

I had been hoping to attend one or two more rehearsals before the productions

began (on the weekend between this rehearsal and the start of performances the final

rehearsals were supposed to move onto the stage), but the times were changed at the last

minute and I was unable to. The next experience I had with Grease was the performance.

Watching the performance was clearly very different from watching the behind-the-

scenes process, as I was not exposed to any of the interactions between the cast and the

crew, but it was nevertheless enjoyable. I did notice that some things had changed

between the rehearsals and the performances. Some of this was for practical reasons: now

that they were on the set, certain movements had to be changed. However, some of it was

more surprising: the choreography for the number I described in the second rehearsal was

in some ways different from what I had seen them learn, with certain moves put in

different places or even completely eliminated.

For this paper, I interviewed five of the actors (Actors D, F, G, H and I) as well as

the director. Most of these interviews will not really come into play themselves in this

paper, as I am drawing primarily from my own observations. To protect the identities of

the actors, I will not be quoting them (a condition of the interviews) and instead of

referring to them specifically I will be using their information to add to my analysis.

However, these interviews provided some context for the events that I missed or was not

able to see for whatever reason.

Personally, I have never had any interest whatsoever in participating in musical

theatre. Even just imagining performing in front of five hundred people at a time makes

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me feel nervous, so I was very interested in why students would choose to add this

additional stress to their lives. However, watching the cast and crew throughout the

process it started to become clear that this was not stressful for them at all. There were

moments where they worried and they were certainly nervous before going out on stage,

but when I look at the experience as a whole I can understand the appeal of adding

countless hours of rehearsal and performance time to a busy school schedule. It is a way

for the students to relax, and although it seems strange on paper to relax by adding extra

responsibilities and things to worry about to your schedule, performing provides a sort of

“high” for the students who participate in it. This was an observation I made that was

supported by the actors. Richard Bauman explores this idea in his work, Verbal Art as

Performance:

It is part of the essence of performance that it offers to the participants a

special enhancement of experience, bringing with it a heightened intensity

of communicative interaction which binds the audience to the performer in

a way that is specific to performance as a mode of communication.

Through his performance, the performer elicits the participative attention

and energy of his audience, and to the extent that they value his

performance, they will allow themselves to be caught up in it. When this

happens, the performer gains a measure of prestige and control over the

audience-prestige because of the demonstrated competence he had

displayed, control because the determination of the flow of the interaction

is in his hands. (1975:305)

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This passage helped me to understand why the cast (and crew) decided to get involved

with Grease: for those who enjoy performing, the opportunity to retell a classic story is

one that cannot be passed up (something confirmed later by one of the actors).

My original hope was to look at Grease from a linguistic perspective, specifically

with the way that the director and the cast spoke to each other. I quickly realized that this

did not give me much to work with, because they spoke to each other in an incredibly

casual way, certainly more casually than I had expected. The majority of work on

linguistic anthropology is focused on power structures and the way language enforces or

undermines these structures, but the language used here did not do that at all. However, I

did find one good piece by Bauman in another work titled Genre, Intertextuality and

Social Power (which he wrote with Charles L. Briggs):

In establishing the place of genre in the conceptual repertoire of the

ethnography of speaking, one important task has been to articulate the

relationship between genre and other core concepts and units of analysis,

such as speech act, speech event, and speech style. (1992:140)

This seems obvious from one perspective: for example, Grease is set in the 1950’s, and

so the speech acts, events and styles in the play dialogue have to match those from that

period of history, or the audience will not believe it. However, in this context “genre”

does not necessarily have to mean the category that a work of fiction belongs to- the

authors even dispute the notion that its “association with literary and theory and critical

practice may similarly suggest that it is not likely to be illumintating with respect to

either ‘everyday conversation’ or ‘ordinary’ linguistic processes.” (1992:132) Instead,

genre is just a way of “classifying discourse” (1992:132). I had already classified the

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discourse of the rehearsal process in the way I expected to find it (very formal), and was

therefore surprised when it was in another genre entirely (very casual). This was the first

hint I had that the project would be more complicated than I had anticipated, and I credit

this work of theory with opening my mind to that idea.

I then started to look into ethnographic studies of small groups, but what I found

was for the most part not particularly applicable. I had tried to find ethnographic studies

of groups performing drama, but there was a very limited selection and Bauman’s was

the only one that provided anything helpful. However, the anthropology of small groups

was either too generic to fit Grease (whose dynamics were different from most small

groups) or too specifically focused on another type of group. There was an interesting

work titled A Self-Research Method for Small Groups by Tom Greaves and Brian D.

Conboy that I was able to make some use of. They developed a type of research that they

call “Analytic History”, where a small group analyzes themselves by developing

questions to ask each other. The final step of this method is as follows:

The responses were collected, transcribed, and collated. A brief summary

of responses was drafted and inserted next to each question, and the

resulting draft report, together with the entire corpus of raw responses,

presented anonymously, was sent back to all participants for review and

emendation. The draft report was adjusted in light of the responses from

the participants and a shortened version of the report was then drafted and

distributed to a group of participants who assembled in San Francisco in

November, 2004, for a roundtable discussion. (2006:33)

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Although I did not use this method of research, I tried to incorporate parts of it into my

interviews: I allowed the participants to shape the interviews by taking things the last

subject had said and adapting it into the next interview. I did not have the time to send

them drafts, but the answers from one person would shape the questions for the next. (For

the record, I think following the whole method would be very useful in a production that

did not proceed so quickly: for a rehearsal period that lasted several months, this type of

research could be very insightful.)

However, it seemed unbelievable (to me at least) that things could really be

running as smoothly as they were, based on my own experiences with school clubs and

groups in the past, especially because the rehearsals of Grease were (I assumed) a much

more stressful environment than any club I had been a part of in the past. For this reason,

I began to look at theoretical work concerned with “behind-the-scenes” dialogues: I

believed there had to be something more going on than I was seeing. It was possible that

it was not happening when I was there, but I do not really believe this to be true- there

was nothing else that was kept from me, including the possibility of conflict happening in

the future. I began applying my own research to the theories of James C. Scott, presented

in his work Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. This passage

from the preface summarizes the concept of hidden transcripts quite nicely:

Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a “hidden transcript”

that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the

dominant. The powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript

representing the practies and claims of their rule that cannot be openly

avowed. A comparison of the hidden transcript of the weak with that of

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the powerful and of both hidden transcripts to the public transcript of

power relations offers a substantially new way of understanding resistance

to domination. (1990:xii)

I was not fond of the terms “subordinate group” or “the weak” and “the powerful” in the

context of Grease, because it was very clear to me that there was not such a strong

divide. However, the concepts Scott outlines here would (I believed) still apply to the

relationships between the director, the music director and the choreographer and the cast.

As I started to read the book in more detail, however, I came to realize that this idea did

not really fit with what I had observed. I decided that I could not use it once I reached

Chapter Six:

Like prudent opposition newspaper editors under strict censorship,

subordinate groups must find ways of getting their message across, while

staying somehow within the law. This requires an experimental spirit and

a capacity to test and exploit all the loopholes, ambiguities, silences, and

lapses available to them. (1990:138)

Hidden Transcripts would be a very helpful theoretical work for many projects, but not

for this one. It was at this point that I started to become frustrated: there were no

theoretical works to supplement Grease, because what I observed in Grease was

completely different from what I expected (or what anyone else had seemed to find in

their own ethnographies). I began to worry that I had not seen the “truth” at the rehearsal

process, and that they had restrained themselves from causing conflict while I was

present. However, this idea simply does not match everything else I have experienced

with the cast and crew. They have all been very open and welcoming, they have been

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honest in their interviews, and they have proven willing to discuss the possibility of

conflict (for example, Actor D mentioned that there were some differences but that they

were able to work them out before they got too out of hand, and Actor H mentioned that

there had been conflict between two of the actors outside of the rehearsals but that it did

not affect the rehearsal process). In fact, they all seemed to expect early on that there

would be conflict and they were not shy about expressing that belief. However, as time

went on I could see them growing closer: some of them spent time together outside of

rehearsals, for example, which would never have happened if there was serious conflict

among the entire group.

Therefore, I can only assume that for one reason or another there really was very

limited conflict. I cannot say for certain why this is. It is apparently not the norm in

musical theatre. (I asked a couple of the actors about this, and got mixed responses: some

said that they did not usually experience conflict in other productions, but some said that

they did and that this was unusual. One said that it tended to be “hit and miss”.) Maybe

they were just lucky, and the group of people who worked on this production were either

all very professional or genuinely all liked one another. However, I do not think it is this

simple. I do have a couple of theories that I would like to explore in the future, with

another production and another group of actors and crew members. One of these is that in

a situation such as Grease, where everyone is voluntarily working towards a goal that

they are personally invested in (for one reason or another), people are able to put aside

their differences and focus on their work. They all enjoy what they do, and they all chose

to do it. This is something that the actors mentioned in their interviews. The other is that

the power structure put formally in place allows them to avoid the usual power struggles

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that might happen, but because they are all students they are also able to relate to each

other as friends. I believe it may really be a combination of these two: their adherence to

and respect of the power structure, despite their friendship with those on a different level,

combined with their enjoyment of the project creates a productive and mostly peaceful

environment. I suppose the reason that I was unable to find any theory on groups that get

along is because it does not always make the most interesting subject in a paper like this,

but I think it is something that could be explored further- what makes people get along? If

the production period had been longer I might have been able to start answering this

question, but as it is it is simply an interesting question to think about in future

ethnographies.

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Works Cited

Bauman, Richard.

1975 Verbal Art as Performance. American Anthropologist, 77(2):290-311.

Briggs, Charles L. and Richard Bauman.

1992 Genre, Intertextuality and Social Power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology,

2(2):131-172.

Greaves, Tom and Brian D. Conboy.

2006 A Self-Research Method for Small Groups. Practicing Anthropology, 28(1):32-

34.

Scott, James C.

1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale

University Press.