BEING “HERE”/BEING “THERE” (An Ode to TAMI SPRY,Mostly in Her Own Words)

Abstract

The authors detail the profound impact that Tami Spry has had on their lives and their work, but through her words and embodiments. The essay/performance uses Spry’s own words in part to elevate their documentation of her influence.

Introduction

In May of 2023, still rubbing the COVID sleep out of our collective eyes, those of us who are pilgrims to the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry made the long or short or medium trip to Urbana-Champaign to gather for the first time since pandemic lockdowns. It was a heartful reunion.

Some had changed, some had not; some were tired, some were not; some were wary, some were maskless face-free into the wind of communality and proximity and skin-touch of which we had been for so long deprived. One of the first skin-to-skins for Dan was in the stairwell of the student and conference hub, the Illini Union, enfolded in the warmth of the incomparable hugs of Tami Spry and Ronald Pelias.

For Dan, ICQI was the first place they had found in academia that felt like home. The scholars who laid that ground were mostly performance (auto)ethnographers like Bryant Keith Alexander, DC Hill & Durrell Callier (collectively known as Hill Waters), Tami Spry, and Stacy Holman Jones. These scholars did so by showing Dan another way of contributing something original to “knowledge”—that academic term for something with value, all the while sidestepping the question of “for whom.”

Stacy first encountered Tami when she visited the University of Texas at Austin, a guest of Paul Gray, Lynn C Miller, and Omi Oshun (Joni L.) Jones. Stacy was a brand-new PhD student and was drawn to performance studies, so much so that Stacy shifted her focus from organizational communication to performance studies during her first week. Sitting in the auditorium watching Tami perform Tattoo Stories, she found her place, her self. She found

“The artist

who happened to be there

when it happened

[Tami] said that she could

feel it writing itself..” . . [I could feel it too]

“. . .as if it were surfacing from a space

in my body” (Spry, 2000, p. 89).

And from then and there, that moment, she was in. And she wanted to be wherever Tami and the others in this noisy, happy tribe found themselves.

We have loved seeing Tami perform, hearing her perform, watching the crowd when she performs. But there’s something else going on too, when performance autoethnographers like Tami, Bryant, and Hill L. Waters perform: they demand we reconsider definitions of what matters as research, what matters as a contribution to knowledge, what matters to building a field, a discourse, a concept. And the answer to that query always comes back to relationship. Tami Spry’s brand of performance challenges the accepted dualisms of heart/head, intuitive/logical, audience/performer. She has modeled a fierce and deeply empathic, vulnerable, and—yes, entertaining—version of scholarship that moves both hearts and minds. This is scholarship that re-couples the head and the rest of the body. All the jokes about academics’ bodies only being useful to carry their heads around are put pale by these folks. The work of Tami Spry, and her fellow travelers, goes beyond the radical mandate of autoethnography, and moves us toward something else—something more?—by creating an aesthetic that is effective, not just speaking its voice, but shouting it, in ways that we feel landing in our bodies. Reading Tami Spry is one thing, but being in the room when she performs for/with us is something else altogether. This then is our humble homage that is just an eyehole into the kaleidoscope that is Tami Spry, offered with love.

STACY:

“Being here, being there.” (Geertz, in Spry, 2001, p. 723)

DAN:

22 years ago, she wrote those words.

STACY:

22 years!

DAN:

Tami, riffing on Clifford-the-Ethno-Geertz-pher (1988), brought me right up close to him. How could it be twenty-two years ago already? Twenty-two years is a long time.

STACY:

Blink of an eye.

DAN:

Where’d it go?

STACY:

What did we do? What filled up all those days and nights out at jazz clubs, and

DAN:

mornings and classes and students and performances

STACY:

and writings and weepings and growings?

DAN:

It’s here. In our bodies. In our bellies. In our hearts.

Threshold 1:

“A Story is not just a story” (Spry, 2001, p. 709).

DAN:

I wanted to experiment with ChatGPT because I guess that’s what we’re supposed to do now, right? It’s a frenzy.

STACY:

It creeps me out. I can’t bring myself to download it.

DAN:

I wanted to ask it “what is the most potent particular of Tami’s lasting legacy?” And see what it said.

STACY:

Oh yeah?

DAN:

Mm hmm. But then I decided, NAH. I didn’t want to give it the honour. I wanted to keep that for us. These fleshbodies. These empathy bodies. This hugging-fat-flesh-muscle-lungs-nothing-artificially intelligent-about-it bod.

STACY:

“December 4, 1997: I am spinning and vibrating inside. I am shimmering as if light is trying to break through. . .shifting into something that is not me, and is not-not me (Schechner). Shaking at the checkpoint” (Spry, 2001, p. 728).

DAN:

We’ve shared some lovers, Tami and me: Trinh, Munoz, Behar, Gingrich-Philbrook, Haraway, Madison, Pollock. . .Holman Jones.

STACY:

“I am now one of those feminists” (Spry, 2011, p 164).

DAN:

What kind is that?

STACY:

“The kind that remember what I’ve done and the experiences I’ve had. The kind that believe in the choice but believe in the knowledge to make that choice” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 164)

DAN:

This is a confession?

STACY:

“There is danger here in this world, the academy. . . .[see] I am not there, but I am not here either” (Spry, 2001, p. 707).

DAN:

Being here, being there again.We’ve both shacked up with dreads. We bothlike a good red. We have some things in common.We believe in bodies.

STACY:

So many performances. So manypunctures in the conference constitution,the academic doldrums,the protocols of mediocrity. You’d hear her voicebefore you reach the room: Tami roars. Hollers.Thunders. And she is not afraid to roar in a fancy hotel conference room. You gotta love a woman who can thunder!

DAN:

“I have learned that heresy is greatly maligned. . .and can begin a robust dance of agency” (Spry, 2001, p 708). Out of the mouths of babes.

STACY:

Then in 2011, a decade later, you wrote Body, Paper, Stage. Threshold 2.

DAN:

“Autoethnography is place and space and time.

STACY:

It is personal, political, and palpable.

DAN:

It is art and craft.

STACY:

It is jazz and blues.

DAN:

It is messy, bloody. . ..” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 15).

STACY:

“In moving out of the self and into a performative troubled communion with others, we have the opportunity to look beneath the skin of our own privilege,

DAN:

oppression,

STACY:

pain, and hubris

DAN:

and into the possibility of a ‘utopian performative’” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 67).

STACY:

“It is the practice of being vulnerable to the process of becoming” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 169).

DAN:

“In other words, representation has risks” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 61).

STACY:

“We peeked around at each other . . . some said ‘courage,’ ‘insecurity ‘power.’ I was given the last one, ‘self-reflection’” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 50).

DAN:

You are a natural teacher, Tami, a guide. You cajole, cry, praise, touch. Exclaim! Inhale sharply. Moan audibly. Shake your head in solidarity as others perform. You are the perfect audience member. You remind us about beauty. Ethics. Gender. Violence. And Swing.

STACY:

“Now. Start writing. Now. We can talk and read and think all day about writing. But now it’s time to walk through the threshold. The best way to start writing. . . is to start writing” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 151).

DAN:

Threshold 3: An ending that is “not an ending that is not-not and ending” (Spry, 2001, p. 714).

STACY:

“And even then, before any critical analysis of the experience, even then I knew I was in trouble, ethical trouble, because I could feel myself hoisting her up on a pedestal and replacing her personhood with mythos. . .immersing myself in Conquergood’s enthusiast’s infatuation” (Spry, 2017, p. 46).

DAN:

“Grandma’s having one of her spells again. We need to get to Aunt Judy’s” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 85).

STACY:

“[the kick causes her to fall off balance; she catches herself before falling to the floor] No, I rather like this ambiguity because I am never quite sure if I am dancing, or kicking, or falling” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 81).

DAN:

“I used my body as a billboard” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 96).

STACY:

“For some time now, my work has focused upon an ethnography of loss and healing” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 20).

DAN:

“She made this experience HER story, her analysis. Her pain. Her hope. Her strength. Her meaning. Hers.

BOTH:

And now, ours.” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 50).

STACY:

“And now, when I move in clarity or chaos, we women come together. And on a very good day, I can hear them singing and see them dancing” (Spry, 2011/2016, p. 92).

DAN:

“Perhaps autoethnography is not about the self at all; perhaps it is instead about a willful embodiment of ‘we’” (Spry, 2017, p. 48).

STACY:

“Embodying utopian performatives through

BOTH:

the willful embodiment of we’” (Spry, 2017, p. 50).

DAN:

Maybe being here IS being there. Time. Place. Action.

STACY:

It’s here, it’s right now. As you’ve taught us Tami—there’s only this moment. Only this body. Not time, but not-not-time. Only the now.

DAN:

“And we find in the light of our afterglow

STACY:

that utopia is still here in our breath,

DAN:

in our bodies,

BOTH:

all of us // a band of Others” (Spry, 2017, p. 52).