So Close to Burning: Intermedia and Documentary Solo Performance in Juan and John (1965)

Abstract

When the display of documentary images attenuates solo performance, photography and other documentary media do not simply supply historical evidence; they tell stories about, interpret, and delimit horizons of interpretation, rather than “prove” it. The pageantry of archival recorded images in documentary performance supplies a silent if also resounding kind of intermedia genre that plays in relationship to the staged monologues of solo performance. In a project that aims for “forgiveness, redemption, and healing,” Roger Guenveur Smith's first explicitly autobiographical work in documentary solo performance, Juan and John, revisits the televised 22 August 1965 baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, when Juan Marichal “clashed” with John Roseboro. The projection of photographs and other media recordings throughout the performance fix Smith's meditations about the game, and the 1960s more broadly, as both fact and fiction, in a coming-of-age “memoir” that is punctuated by the rhetorical repetitions of the image. While breaking in and out of remembrance's affective repertoires offers a technique for resistance to documentary and other reinscriptions of historical violences, the serial and sequential intermedia cuts bespeak latent images of historical pasts, at once the burned and burning instruments for and bearers of memory.