LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 35

1 i The Revolution 111 Be Multimedia? Of words, history and other weapons BY KIISTAl Ef ENT ZOOK signed to open the universitys doors to otherwise unqualified youth," were heavily screened by the FBI in order to single out and keep tabs on those with leadership experience within their communities." I can also see where cultural nationalists might be inspired to reinvestigate Ron Karengas role as founder and Figurehead of US. Or where those involved in gang truces might better understand themselves as legitimate heirs to the legacy of men like Bunchy Carter, the former head of the Slauson Gang and an ex-Soledad inmate turned revolutionary poet. Carter, a student of Lemn. Mao and Che, founded the Panthers Southern California chapter. EVOLUTION is not an etnt, admon JL I ishes Sister Soinayah Nloore-Kambui, I 1 a.k.a.

Peaches." She was one of 1 1 lxs LU Angeles Black Panther Party (BPP) members who, in December 1969, waged a four-hour war of wills against an army of police officers who had surrounded and tear-gassed their headquarters. Waving a makeshift flag torn from the fringes of her slip. Peaches was the first of the 1 1 units, so commonplace in American police departments today, were actually formed in direct responose to the Panther movement in Los Angeles. These paramilitary forces, equipped with shotguns, rifles, automatic weapons, climbing gear and other specialized paraphernalia, were officially designed as urban-guerrilla counterinsurgency teams." Using this history, McCauley basically structured The Other Weapon on three central events that took place in Lxs the UCLA murders of Alprentice Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins by members of Ron Karengas US organization in January 1969 (a white professor's witnessing of the calculated neglect by paramedics is especially powerful as Carter struggled for his last breath. They went in with two empty stretchers and came out with two empty die BPP HQsiege described above, which occurred four days after the murders of Chicago Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark; and the December 1970 arrest of Geronimo Pratt, whose ongoing imprisonment continues to be a source of international outcry.

U. UJ 0 For all the questions The Other Weapon raises, audiences will be pleasantly surprised to find the floor opened to discussion following the performance; such conversations should be read as highly successful continuations of the project itself. When I attended, a 60-ish man spoke excitedly about the problem of immigrants who take" jobs from black folks and about his own former involvement with the Orange County Panther office. As he did this, one of the Chicana performers listened patiendy before standing and moving quiedy across the stage, toward his side of the room. At the first break in what was quickly disintegrating into a most incoherent tirade, she pointedly asked, What are you doing today?" He gave no reply.

In keeping with the spirit of The Other Weapon, I resurrected my neglected copy of Cuban folk political singer Sihio Rodriguezs greatest hits and allowed the music to take me back to a long-ago, thwarted revolutionary self. In the midst of the keyboards hypnotic tap-tap-tap, Rodriguezs voice jars one to attention with the urgency of Bertolt Brechts words, which ironically befit the moment: There are men who struggle for a day and they are good. There are others who struggle for a year and they are better. There are those who struggle many years and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives: These are the indispensable ones.

EJ Empowerment to the people: Robbie McCauley (seated, center). Peaches (with auto harp) and ensemble ATTERNEI) AS A MESH OF OVER lapping narratives, memories and re-enactments compiled at McCauleys request, the somewhat disjoined voices of 12 black, Chi-cana, Asian and white performance artists recall the struggle, against a visual backdrop of enlarged newspaper clippings, official documentation and videotaped testimonials. Vignettes go beyond the three events outlined by-McCauley, however, expanding into the complexities of present-day Los Angeles: Rodney King, Latasha Har-lins, the myth of the model Asian minority, issues of language and cultural authenticity among Latinos, etc. The problem with such expansiveness is that the production suffers at times from a lack of dramatic and factual precision. Many references are obscure, incomplete or misfire altogether.

For example, a particularly frustrating sequence juxtaposes the voice-over of an officer whispering racist policy' while a black woman appears on video describing the FBIs COINTELPRO activities her image framed by bureau memoranda calling for the destruction of the BBP. Their voices incongruously interrupt one another with a barrage of words, ending maddeningly with the womans incomplete proclamation, COINTELPRO goes on today under a variety of different names like In another vignette, we learn that one of the Stiner brothers was recently found in Suriname and extradited. (The Stiners had been convicted for the shooting of Carter and Huggins but mysteriously escaped from San Quentin prison. Interestingly, at least 75 Panthers were arrested after the shooting, while US members positively identified by eyewitnesses remained free.) The play offers no explanation for such odd twists but merely presents them as fact, documented by a newspaper clipping. I can see where young people, in particular, might be moved to learn more about these histories if the histories connection to present-dav lives were made more explicit.

Students would surely be interested in such little-known gems as the Black Demolition Team, an underground movement in which straight-A bookworms least suspected of subversive activity were active in the most radical of exercises possibly neglecting, The Other Weapon suggests, their chemistry hoine-woik for designing bombs. Or that applications to the UCIA-originated High Potential Program, de to emerge and face a crowd of thousands that included police, press and neighborhood spectators defiantly leading even die most macho of her male comrades. Tonight at the Vision Complex, in Robbie McCauleys multimedia ensemble performance, The Other Weapon, Peaches portray herself in part of a larger story. A liberation songstress, she is the life force of this touring show, functioning as a witness" living proof that what we are about to experience is direct from the scarred memories of real-life historical actors. Of course, memory and narrative are tricky tools for reconstructing a past, fraught as they are with dreams, desires and imaginings that are often un-real-ized, but real nevertheless.

Peaches, for example, insists that Angela Davis, in her book If They Come in the Morning, incorrectly claims Peaches was shot during the BPP HQ siege although I found no such mention there. Also, Peaches characterizes the accompanying shootout as a victory (Oh my God, they shoot back! exclaimed one shocked I APD officer at the scene) yet Elaine Brown notes in her Panther memoir, A Taste of Power, that while BPP member Tommye Williams received the only gunshot wound in the siege, all were later beaten mercilessly. (Kidneys had been collapsed by gun butts. Teeth had been kicked out by combat boots. Eyes had been stomped How one goes about cataloging and celebrating such victories" is crucial for planning future strategies.

While The Other Weapon does not make die point explicitly, lxs Angeles was, in many ways, the site of the most brutal police response to Panther activity in the nation. In fact, the infamous SWAT T- 5 ut- I nvt jmcrnr- Ktt i HlfTiriR M- fifin' uhtf onm tv, Stfif- mtu trrvr rrt it fit tApCt zi a tfez nu-J v4T(Xi trf. a mM HOT 'Min MARCH 18-MARCH 24, 1994 LA WEEKLY 35.