You’re Freer to Break Traditions If You Don’t Know Them: Edgar Arceneaux on Boney Manilli
Originally from Los Angeles, artist Edgar Arceneaux first blurred perceived boundaries with his visual arts works, becoming known for exploring connections between historical events and present-day truths. Arceneaux’s latest theater work, Boney Manilli, centers a self-loathing artist who struggles to finish his script about the infamous pop duo Milli Vanilli while coping with his failed pop-singer mother’s dementia and a brother adapting the controversial Disney film Song of the South into a play about Black liberation.
In advance of the presentation of Boney Manilli at the Walker, Arceneaux sat down with Philip Bither, the Walker's senior curator of performing arts, to discuss his career in visual arts, Milli Vanilli, and a family connection to the Song of the South that led to his reimagining the stage musical.
Philip Bither
How does your practice in making theater relate to your visual art practice, if it does, and what started you in exploring this form?
Edgar Arceneaux
With all my projects, there are usually three coordinates that come together to allow for something to come into existence. One of those is a history, something bigger than myself. Then there’s some personal connection that helps to show both the individual scale, the social scale, and the parallel between the two.
Finally, there is a material process. That could be my working with sugar crystals to make a sculpture, building a building that’s also a library, or, in this case, working in the space of performance in theater. Each of these domains has its own set of rules, and I typically try to put myself in a situation where I’m familiar with the rules, but I haven’t been trained in them. My belief is that you’re freer to break traditions if you don’t know them, that something interesting will come out as you stumble through. I’ve taken a deep liking for performing arts because I really love the cooperative and collaborative spirit that’s intrinsic to that kind of storytelling.
Throughout the work, I try to figure out different ways of telling stories so that I’m always learning something new each time. If you have a set of principles that you’ve learned in one domain, say in drawing, can you take those principles, put them into another medium, and see how they hold up?
PB
Are there specific things you’d point at in Boney Manilli that a trained theater maker or creator of musicals would never have done?
EA
I find myself trying to make stuff that I typically have a certain disdain for. I used to hate musicals; I never liked them. When my kid was growing up, she was in musical theater camp, which led me to develop a fondness for musical theater because of her.
But, since I am a spatial thinker, instead of a traditional script a lot of my storytelling involves lighting, music, prop, and video elements. Sometimes it’s confusing for the actors when we’re rehearsing because they’re just like, “Okay, what’s happening here?”
When I’m telling my stories, I’m oftentimes trying to decenter the thing the story is about. By having what is central to the story be peripheral, you can see challenging subjects more clearly or from a fresh perspective because you’re not being confronted by the biases we form by being familiar with certain kinds of subjects.
For instance, exploitation in music is something that everybody knows happens in that industry. There is no reason for me to center that as part of the story. But then having little things that pull your attention away from the center, such as puppets happening on the fringes of the story, you incentivize people to see layers of the story. They can discover new elements each time they watch the work and say, “Oh, I didn’t even see there was this whole other story that was happening on the stage.” Those are the kinds of stories I like.
PB
When it comes to working within the genre of the musical, is it hard to innovate because the structures are so locked in for the most part?
EA
Typically. I think that has to do with how expensive the musical is; certain innovations in the form are inhibited by its scale. The general audience expects a big show and loves the musical formula they are accustomed to. But the stories that I’m drawn to are centrally connected to a musical expression. The music is just an element of the story. In that way, I get to have my cake and eat it, too.
PB
If you were going to give one bit of advice to a visual artist who is interested in making a theater piece, what would it be?
EA
It starts with the script. You have to start writing and then find a collaborative partner, such as a creative producer, who can help you to think through the story and bring it into the world.
PB
Theater is hard and expensive, especially in today’s climate. What does it give back to you that makes it worth all that struggle?
EA
First of all, the people I work with are fantastic. Then there is something so enriching that happens when you’re telling the story you really want to tell, and everybody in the room believes in it. Every performance is a gift.
PB
There is a lot going on in Boney Manilli, from the musical theater elements to family drama and dementia, to racial appropriation, Blackface, and the history of the minstrel, as well as the story of Milli Vanilli. If you had to choose one single most important aspect or theme of the work, what would it be?
EA
It is a story about a guy who wants to prove to his mother that he did something with his life before she forgets who he is. This idea of being forgotten or not having contributed anything really plagues the main character, and it’s something he inherited from his grandfather. This idea of being inferior is the reason why the main character is drawn to the story of Milli Vanilli and just can’t let it go.
The Milli Vanilli story is about two guys who got exploited, but nobody knows the real story of what happened to them. He wants to elevate and transform an understanding of them so that, by extension, he can redeem himself.
PB
In the piece, the main character is working on a play about Milli Vanilli.
EA
Exactly. It is a story that repeats itself over time, like how folk tales repeat themselves. These stories we tell ourselves, they repeat if the conditions that created them in the first place haven’t changed.
PB
Do you feel like the lip-syncing scandal of the Milli Vanilli story correlates with today’s culture, where people are so harshly critiqued on social media? How these two men went from the height of popularity to the gutter in the media?
EA
Yeah. America’s entire ecosystem of storytelling is based on rises, falls, and redemptions. Although I’m critical of that in this story, I do recognize that this work is also riding the crest of the wave around Milli Vanilli in many ways—how they have gone from a joke to a cautionary tale. We can recognize the trappings of the system while working within it. That complication is what makes storytelling more interesting.
PB
You were quoted recently talking about how art’s role is to create complexity and to have multiple meanings that people can find.
EA
The power of art comes from its unruliness, that it’s always changing and therefore cannot fully be instrumentalized. If it were, it would transform from art into propaganda or advertising.
PB
You also reference questions around appropriation of Black culture found in Joel Chandler Harris’s collection of Black folk tales and Disney’s infusion of those stories into the animated film Song of the South.
EA
Disney decided to make Song of the South because they had seen the success of Gone with the Wind. Walt Disney decided he wanted to do something as epic as that film, and the Joel Chandler Harris stories became that thing to create a sweeping tale. The use of live-action filmmaking with animation found in Song of the South was radical at the time. [Disney] even pushed to have the actor who played Uncle Remus to get an Honorary Academy Award for his performance.
However, even back then the NAACP and other groups were protesting during the creation and screening of the film. People protested the film for years, but Disney kept rereleasing it on video with anniversary editions and creating rides in its theme parks.
When my mother and grandmother saw the movie when it first came out, my grandmother said, “That man is your grandfather, and they stole this story from us.” It turned out that my grandfather had written his version of the briar rabbit tales, sent it to Disney, and never heard back. A few years later, Song of the South comes out. That happened in real life.
I grew up with this story of Disney, and that we’re going to sue them. Throughout my life the story shifted a bit because then my mom was like, “I can’t find the script anymore. We think somebody stole it.” There became this conspiracy around it, that somebody else had taken it to Disney and maybe got something off it. Maybe it was a cousin or uncle or something.
Later on, after we performed the show in L.A., after my mom had died, my dad said, “You know what? I’m going to search for the script again.” It was then that he finally found it.
PB
Did it have a relationship to Disney’s film?
EA
Absolutely, but it wasn’t the Song of the South. When you read it, it sounds like my grandfather’s voice. It sounds like an older man who was telling these stories. He had learned them from his father, who learned them from his mother and father, who learned them from his mother and father. The oral tradition is captured in this script, but I was relieved when I read it because then I knew that we hadn’t been exploited by Disney and that the story was better because it was genuine. It hadn’t gone through this lens of a white person in the South (i.e. Joel Chandler Harris) who had heard these stories and basically created this amalgam called Uncle Remus and started writing the stories through that voice.
PB
In the past you’ve discussed your resistance against Black artists being expected to address oppression or racism in their work—how this can limit the range of expression or the kind of stories that an artist may feel compelled to tell. Is there a parallel to the nuances of the stories in your own family and a sense of exploitation in relationship to this?
EA
That duality is firmly embraced in my story. The other main character, Bro, is writing a story that uses all the clichés and stereotypes of a “Black story.” It is similar to the main character in Percival Everett’s novel Erasure [editor’s note: Erasure was adapted into the 2023 film American Fiction]. Bro can’t fail, while the main character can’t raise any money. He watches his brother keep tripping into success, even getting the show taken to Broadway. It drives him to madness.
PB
You’ve often referenced Martin Luther King’s statement about how the moral arc of history is long but ultimately bends toward justice. In today’s America, do you still hold onto that statement? Do you still believe it?
EA
That is really being put to the test right now. We see what people with deep pockets can get away with. We see that the judicial system is not equal. We’ve always known that, but it’s never been on display in the way in which it is right now, at least globally.
However, the arts—I said this to my students recently—are even more relevant now because, over the last election cycle, we’ve seen how powerful storytelling can be. We have to keep using the arts so that people can feel not just optimistic, but also that we are building the world we want to live in.
I asked my dad, who is 89 and living in hospice, “What would you do if you could leave the country? Would you?” He said, “No, I wouldn’t leave. I would stay and fight. You got to fight like hell.” It made me reflect on my story—we’re talking about multiple generations of investment in this American project—and I knew that I didn’t want to abandon it yet.▪︎
Experience Boney Manilli for yourself at the Walker Art Center with performances on Jan 23–25, 2025. Learn more about the work and get tickets here.