Thursday, August 30, 2012

Using Labels to Aid Organization?

Would it be possible to adopt a policy of applying labels when adding posts in order to facilitate navigation? For instance, adding a "class notes" label or "prompts" label when posting those specific types of blogs, so that a person might then click that "class notes" tag to find them all in one place? I was playing around with it, and it looks like the original author of each post must do their own, but that it's quite easy to add after the fact.

Class Notes - 08.30.12 (Jess)


Jess Drew
THTR 566
August 30, 2012

Class Notes

·      Jennifer – opened the conversation about Sara’s post about a group of children (ages 6 – 12) who performed Hanke’s Offending the Audience in Los Angeles.
·      Sara – took place at the Panorama Theatre; restaging it in a place with an aura of illusion, with children who can’t help but be children (à la States); the goal of the production was to empathetically understand Hanke’s piece, but it’s also really funny to see kids using this language; similar to the Annie piece;
·      Justin – thinking about the typical actors who get this script, they’re given blank roles and rules (no specific characters), it’s about un-training the actor - - - get out of your head, so you can make the audience do the same thing. Perhaps the children automatically become the listeners or watchers.
·      Ming – I loved the bouncing off the article, re: Cody, the dog becoming the dog; morality of the dog
·      Cody – ethical issues? He doesn’t agree with States’ earlier discussion of semiotics and linguistics, glad that Sara commented on what he was saying and let him know that he got it.
·      Ming – the dog being a dog has brought the moral sensibility to the stage
·      Cody – talks about the States’ argument about Macbeth, taking away his humanity by making him an image of a hypothetical man out in the world?
·      Sara – what States’ was emphasizing, in theatre, the image of the man is more than just an image, he’s an actuality; animals and kids don’t yet have the skills to obscure that truth, their being-ness comes through; States says that there is that danger and that is vital; without that awareness the Hanke piece is not possible.
·      Ellen – expand on your ethical concerns?
·      Cody – issue of consumption, issue of the theatrical team who are ultimately going to get notoriety because of this child onstage; namelessness – name of the hypothetical person, doesn’t matter who they are in reality, in the theatre, they’re just an image; Hanke refutes that – the stage is and is not the world; he’s very confused about the whole thing
·      Whitney – I responded to Dorothy’s post that the director’s lying to the girl about sticking with it no matter what; thinking of Whitmore’s article, perhaps an ideal in early modern times that made kids underdeveloped creatures; if we’re treating them differently, training them differently in terms of theatre training, do we see them as cognitively underdeveloped or neutered?
·      Dorothy – I wasn’t talking about training kids versus adults; I meant that kids don’t know as much as adults do through the passage of time; the difference is adults know we’re not supposed to sit down on the floor and cry, but kids do just sit down on the floor;
·      Whitney – I went to the place that the director is feeding the line to the child, different direction to a child versus an adult
·      Jenna – do we consider kids to be emotionally incomplete or less formed? what is the difference between the Annie clip kid and the Offending the Audience kids? In States, when you place kids in a particular context, it makes us ascribe what they’re feeling – must be humiliated, must just want to try to get through it; different contexts created different reactions in me
·      Ming – interested in the idea of how we receive children and how that’s change; I think of them as cognitively underdeveloped; what are the forces for shaping this? What’s the reason why we want to slap them if they’re annoying?
·      Amy – someone brought up Toddlers and Tiaras; is there something about the society when children are being staged? Whitmore is arguing that there is a certain kind of work they’re unwittingly being asked to do; does that change? Could you do a present-day Whitmore-ian analysis about where we are?
·      Jenna – Yes? The Annie clip is going to help me - - the annotations on the YouTube clip say “You’re going to enjoy this! Just you wait!”; this is not just another precious moment of a precocious child - - - stay watching, don’t get bored!
·      Justin – It overlooks the thought that the performance would just want to be watched by an audience, and enjoyed
·      Jenna – When you’re depressed, you look at cute animals online, it’s one of the ways that children are useful!
·      Amy – I will tell them that, certainly!
·      Ellen – there’s a sort of Marxist suspicion creeping into the conversation; Annie seems to be very overdetermined, familiar, expectation of virtuosity in child/dog; also the schadenfreude side where we expect the package coming apart, where by the leakyness of the package will be part of the pleasure; is that ethical? How conscious is the pleasure we take on these errors? During a tech rehearsal of the The Beggar’s Opera – the couple singing a romantic duet were parted by a Clydesdale who let a super-long fart rip (seven minutes!); there’s a possibility of free laughter in that environment, which isn’t possible in front of a child or a dog; let’s nuance the cognition difference between these creatures, beyond experience or training; big difference between a dog and a gerbil, or snake; different animals process audiences differently; exploitation and use; consent is on a spectrum and meta-theatre/consciouness, but States perhaps didn’t have the vocab to talk about it yet; not part of the academic conversation at that point.
·      Amy – one could also dump into the conversation the kind of categorization on the early modern stage of teenage boys as women, because they weren’t considered men; biology and cognitive development were not in the same place as they are now; consent, semiotic excess, precosity, all these things are not expected are in creatures like the gassy Clydesdale - - - we imagine the perspective of the horse, and that makes it funny – creating a theory of the mind of the horse makes it interesting; some of the freak show stuff in the 18th – 19th century – bringing back of zebras, pygmies, as unconsenting creatures without the same cognitive development as the English elite as they discovered them in their “habitat”
·      Dorothy – raises the question of how much we care about their ability to consent? I was reading about human zoos and how these two people in 1895 found some random black people in San Francisco after they found out that the boat with the African people was late; there’s a generosity in assuming that children can’t consent, different races, or does their consent have the same power as mine? Or someone else?
·      Whitney – anybody read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel García Márquez? A smelly dude falls out of the sky, people are initially afraid of him, but store him in a chicken coop, but he’s then seen as an angel; goes in a corner and talks about nothing, refusing to buy into being an angel; people stop coming because they have no way to understand him, no dialogue between them; who are we as an audience if we’re only interested in images we can be involved in? Hanke says “No, you don’t get to play, we get to offend you”; so what is the role of the audience? how can we make them think differently?
·      Ming – deviating from the script, the magic is broken when the script is deviated from; when stuff goes badly, it becomes really awkward; deviating is not comfortable
·      Dorothy – the Cage clip makes me wish people would deviate from “the script”, because if they don’t, they are making the script incomplete; if you sit silently, you’re stopping the creation of music; no one ever stands up and screams, but would make this piece maybe more legitimate and interesting; it’s more pleasant when people don’t know what’s going on; in Music 101, the prof. performed the piece, and the students are thoroughly confused; at the end, there’s a moment of “What did you hear?” at the end, and there’s a conversation; being an audience is not just direct theatre/audience, but the cultural context of how to act in a theatre, as an audience;
·      Whitney – stand-up comedy treats audiences differently; I’m so intrigued about how uncomfortable people are when they go up onstage, even if they’re doing of their own will; the expectation, when we go to stand-up, is different than what we see in theatre, but we treat it as if it’s not; maybe the room is set up a particular way, or an expectation that we are supposed to receive enjoyment and if we don’t we get uncomfortable with that;
·      Natalie – expectation alone is not all; how is desire working for the audience; a friend of mine who is an experimental musician and he gave the audience instruction, and the chance to be a performer and the chance to feel rebellious and yell, but people ended up making a lot more sound and he played it to them afterwards; that piece and 344 is structurally the same, no authority of script, but something about people not just having the expectation of participating a certain way; we have to remember to talk about desire and the audience;
·      Ellen – it’s always a challenge to think of an audience as desiring to participate; maybe they came in with a preconcieved notion of the performance?
·      Dorothy – I don’t desire for participation, but I desire meaning; when people in 344 are quiet, I think of a desire to know what’s going on; the first critique of my senior show was “Was that supposed to mean something?”;
·      Natalie – what kinds of desire are operating in audiences? Desire to participate? Friend’s doing this piece, I should help him out, etc.
·      Ellen – the Cage clip is interesting – played it on the radio for a trivia contest and the DJ had to assure listeners that the radio was still working, because people think the radio is broken, dead air; there’s an interesting idea of consuming practices of symphonic music; to purchase a copy of that piece (apparently people do – a fully realized score), to listen to it on the radio versus seeing it are different; they’re not listening to non-music, they’re feeling like the onus is on them, to pretend my attention is on the thing that is not happening; there’s a theatricality to the three section, the audience is performing their own respect for this piece of avant-garde music; the distinction b/w mediums is very helpful to think how the practices of the concert hall work; they’ve been more visible to the broad audience population than the notions of consent;
·      Dorothy – Cage was an alum of my school; the evolution of listening to 344  - - - not always so polite, yelling, protesting, leaving the auditorium; I’ve witnessed people really deeply listening to it; I wonder if interrupting 344 is possible? or are you adding counter-point to the extant sound? His credo is 13 pages of poem, in caps;
·      Courtney – State’s point is that newness is really upsetting (ie: chair on stage); this is a tragic piece, how dare they put chairs on the stage; audience members learn what’s okay and what’s not;
·      Jennifer – what’s the end goal? What do they want the audiences to be? There’s one scene where they’re going to perform King Lear – the audience dresses up as the character they want to be, they get cast, if the audiences don’t like your performance, they can tell you to leave and replace you; is this their goal?
·      Ellen – do you agree with that reading of Hanke? He’s a tougher nut to crack than that. That idea of a total lack of separation b/w actor and audience is part of the 1970’s; tons of performance groups that embraced precisely that conceit; a happening, all empowered, no hierarchy, no divide, etc.; that’s now a very predictable avant-garde, and that tells us how far we’ve gone along the lines of thought that States’ is proposing (though he’s not as goal-oriented towards the theatre as Hanke); Sara’s video link was very helpful; performing a manifesto – rhetorical form that’s always already form, it undoes itself once printed; this whole idea of trying to convey a revolution in an act of scripted performance is complex in all kinds of rich reasons; I’m interested in this sense of the complexity; the clip is just awesome for bringing out this very fraught, vexed, question; what is Hanke’s agenda? these readings are pointers for your own definitions of performance and of what you’re looking for in performance, what lights your fire in relation to performance; Hanke is making a cri de cœur about what performance should be
·      Cody – he’s charting what he doesn’t want to see; for me, it was the goal to put the audience on trial, and that was the real performance; to me, that’d lead into an abyss, maybe that’s what he wants; he’s trying to break down this wall between stage and audience;
·      Ming – the instructions for the actors I viewed as a key, legend; there’s nothing you can do to prepare for performance
·      Ellen – so anything that’s prepared for is performance?
·      Ming – or maybe that we’re always preparing for the performance we’re performing?
·      Amy – the verbs used here in these rules are insightful because it’s not “enunciate”, “don’t interrupt other actors”, “don’t skip a line”, “don’t trip on the chair” - - - what are his rules? What is he asking them to do?
·      Cody – experience, listen, rather than do; watch, see
·      Whitney – every day stuff, stuff that would potentially be considered sounds and sights of the every day
·      Courtney – it’s very pop-culture of the 60’s, 70’s
·      Amy – so presumably we could imagine what he thinks the actors are going to get from that, but why doesn’t he just say what he wants them to have gotten from all of this?
·      Jennifer – doesn’t States make a point about us analyzing our imagining of plays versus just seeing one? Maybe that’s more effective to imagine it?
·      Amy – there’s a real kind of staged manifesto that he’s hoping that the actors stage by and with themselves, prior to then doing this; in a way, it’s saying “I can write what I want theatre to be, so I want you to have an experience.”; acting with a chair on the stage is radically different (both watching and doing) than not; there’s something profoundly central about having an embodied experience that exceed what he’s capable of articulating in some diatribe about what it can and should be
·      Jenna – it related to a section where the performers talk to the audience about it’d be better if you were standing, watching this performance; you mentally process your space, how you inhabit that;
·      Derek – pg. 18 – 19 in Hanke “People enjoy...”, “Standing you would be more individual...you would give in to fewer illusions”; that section struck me and made me think about how, in early June, I saw “Henry V” at the Globe in London, and I was standing for that performance; not an epiphany, but it was hugely different from reading “Henry V” or seeing a film of “Henry V”; it was uncomfortable - - I was standing for a really long time, shifting my weight, I noticed the people around me, had to move to see around people; it was a different experience from any other theatrical experience I had prior; I could imagine how in the early 17th century you could have people in the pit yelling back at the actors; the actor playing Henry directed his lines to us a lot; when it started to rain, he actually worked it in to the performance, he worked in the rain that was falling on us; it was a crazy moment for me, to have that experience;  opposing the theatre more resolutely, being of two minds - - this reminds me of Brecht, where you’re not trapped in an illusionary world onstage, but you’re able to look at it from a critical distance;
·      Ellen – did other people find an overlap between Brecht and Hanke? Artaud and Hanke?
·      Justin – Brecht and Hanke; there’s something beyond the performance, after you leave, put what you saw into action; phenomenological ruptures that makes you think, afterwards I can be socially active, politically engaged; Hanke – break those audience rules to take this experience out in the world with you
·      Derek – Hanke frames this as a prologue – this will come before everything you do from here on out
·      Amy – are there ways in which he’s echoing/deploying Artaudian tactics?
·      Andrea – I saw the experiential element of this, see this, communicate in your performance – that comes more from Artaud for me; it’s not just like Brecht, where you’re conditioned to make a choice about an idea;
·      Amy – to be offended is not to dispassionately make a vote, there is a way that you’re agitating them to some kind of action; one point Derek made about ways in which theatrical spaces are built to create certain reactions in audiences; Shakespeare or Aeschylus didn’t write for those audiences, Hanke wrote for people who wanted to be comfy; the power of the performance space is insisting/requiring the audience’s performance; necessitates some reactions and forestalling others; when Henry is agitating the audience at the Globe, the audience is already standing, must have terrified the anti-theatricalists; very different in a proscenium space;
·      Ellen – Brecht, pg. 34 – “Values of all...” – this sense of the apparatus driving the content is very central to Hanke’s premise; in that way, he’s ferociously Brechtian. Any ways he breaks from Brecht?
·      Ming – taking offense is a norm-dependent thing; I saw the apparatus as a structure of norms; what that detracts/takes away; the entire business of judging/controlling habits is norm-dependent;
·      Cody – apparatus are dependent on structures; the idea of Hanke saying “You Nihlists, etc.”, it was very relevant to that idea - - - norms are relative to the dominant structures of the time, relevant to class, race, etc.
·      Dorothy – the dominant social constructs and how they get destructed in these communities where people would be aware of Brecht and his ilk; in experimental music school, you acquire a lack of offendedness because of the apparatus you’re a  part of; it becomes rebellious when someone sings a Mozart aria versus masturbating onstage; what about when people cease being offended? there’s an assumption that people can be offended, and I’m not sure that’s a valid one;
·      Natalie – the phenomenology is connected to these structures, these apparatuses; there are other bodily comportments that go with them that make them offensive;
·      Courtney – Hanke sets up before the curtains are opened, but it’s only going to work for audiences once, and most might know what they’re in for already
·      Ellen – brings up “culinary”; hard to bring up what Brecht is critiquing in Mahoghanny, an avant-garde opera – it’s avant-garde-ness is too tasty for a consuming public; that’s the risk of any manifesto - - by the time we appreciate it in our apparatus, it’s lost what’s really offended us, grabs at our skin; it’s become classic; it’s always hard to maintain or recuperate that; would Brecht say Hanke is instantly culinary, or is there some aspect of the work that he would have thought meets his standards? He doesn’t compliment anyone but Helene Weigel, I think.
·      Natalie – talks about Shaw as a playwright generally, not specific plays or performances.
·      Jenna – I had a lot of trouble staying attentive when it was repetitive, a change would happen, then it would become repetitive.
·      Kelly – fighting this whole trance thing - - - if I was watching, I would probably shut down; maybe that was the brilliance of having kids do it, you can’t shut down while they do it
·      Cody – was struck by similarity of Hanke piece to Beckett’s Not I
·      Sara – Hanke acknowledges the fact you’re checking out; use your boredom to educate you in your own passivity, à la Artaud;
·      Courtney – you figured it out! – Hanke
·      Dorothy – all this stuff, in reading it, makes me think of Robert Ashley, a musician; I have read scores that are like this, and there are a lot of them; Beckett gets used all the time for music pieces that are performance/theatre pieces; it’s interesting to me the idea of repetition of blanking out and not getting it, because you’re getting “not-getting it”; primacy of words over sounds?
·      Ellen – language as sound? States; Not I’s requirement of ejecting inappropriately dressed audience members before the show - - it’s so awesome! It brings out, like the Cage performance, the idea of performing as an audience; discomfort; if that is never an objective that can be achieved, not dividing actor and audience, it does something at least as potent; the normal expectations are being put under examination here; the point of avant-garde – questioning, re-evaluating the norms coming out of the theatrical apparatus; forcing audiences to re-evaluate their consent;
·      Justin – I hated it six years ago, but I appreciate it now;
·      Jenna – do audiences realize that people give up their time in seeing theatre?
·      Cody – the actor is also giving up their time, too, by being in theatre

Memorial Hunt

Tuesday's blog is an opportunity to test out the claims of Roach and/or Debord. Take your camera and search out some local act or space or sign of memory-keeping or commemoration. Upload a picture of your chosen object/subject, and in a short paragraph, tell us 1) what the site or phenomenon is marking,  2) how it communicates the demands of commemoration over to you and 3) what might Debord or Roach have to say about it?

Children Offending the Audience

I'm still parsing through how I feel about this all-child (ages six to twelve) production of Handke's Offending the Audience presented at the Velslavasay Panorama Theater in Los Angeles in March 2011. According to the video's description, the production is attempting to
"remove the audience from the artificiality of a critical discourse of artifice by introducing real play into a play that, for all of its avant-garde seminality is, to a contemporary ear, far too self-conscious to be listened to. The childrens’ lack of pretense allows the audience to experience the piece empathetically." They go on to call it a "conceptual gesture"[1]
but towards what end? There is certainly laughter, but very little critical distance. 11:30-12:30 is a great moment where there is an explosion of laughter resulting from "kids being kids."

Offending The Audience from Emily Mast on Vimeo.

It is particularly curious that the event takes place in a "panorama theatre," a 19th Century invention mean to transport the viewer via an illusion of continuous space--the LA venue is painted in a 360º format. According to the theatre's web site,
"The Panorama, Cyclorama, Diorama, Cosmorama and other multitudinous variations on the sensational venue were popular places to spend leisure time and embark upon imagined travels to unfamiliar and significant places in space and time."[2]
How curious to present a play that that is designed to disrupt illusion in a production engineered to evoke empathy and affection through its "attempts" at offense. Handke's play is necessarily considered in 360°, though any sense of transportation or transformation corrupts his essential message. I'm still thinking on it and will develop my thoughts on my personal blog, but wanted all to be able to see the video in light of its applications to today's discussion. You can check out the Panorama Theatre here.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Response to Group A: Handke/States/Witmore Prompt

My response to Group A for the Handke/States/Witmore prompt has two parts because I noticed two really interesting threads running through the comments so far:

1. First, just a quick thought on Dorothy's point about the girl in the Annie, Jr. clip and what it suggests about the current training (and treatment) of child actors. She, I think rightly, states, “In a different context, an older actor might make a snide comment, something to provide a little wink to the audience that, yes, perhaps an untrained dog was a bad idea.” This observation seems to assume something about the different way child and adult actors are trained. That child actor's training is, perhaps, somehow less complete or that they are given less complicated instructions? If the director’s pre-curtain line to the child is simply “stick with it” (no matter what the dog does), and the line to the adult actor includes more complicated instructions about how to handle uncontrollable situations through improvisation, are we still treating our child actors (and, maybe to reach further, children in general) as “cognitively incomplete” (Witmore 102)? 

2. I'd also like to pull together some comments from Iris' and Cody's responses. Iris observed that the dog pulled her out of the illusion of the play: I'm no longer immersed in the story, I'm watching the middleman, the dog- who doesn't comment on the show like George or Nell, but just as constantly reminds me that I'm watching a play.” I had this same sense while watching the clip and it definitely suggests that moments of semiotic excess that cause actors to essentially lose control of the play have the dangerous potential to break down the entire illusion of the theatrical apparatus. Kelly’s responding question, then, becomes particularly pertinent: why do we keep doing it? Or, more specifically, why are there so few versions of Annie that use a fake dog?

To begin to answer this, I want to turn to Cody's use of States: “No longer is the dog merely an illusory image of another dog—that dog is a dog.” As States argues, “The illusion has suddenly become a field of play, of ‘what if’? The illusion has introduced something into itself to demonstrate its tolerance of thingsThe illusion has stolen something from the world in order to display its own power" (States 34). By saying, “I can choose to include a dog and deal with whatever comes from that choice” illusion invests itself with an incredible amount of versatility, essentially with the power to overcome the real. In accepting part of “the real” or “the natural” into its artifice, the illusion dares itself to overcome any indication that this thing (or animal) is “real.” The important thing, I think, for theater, is that we, as the audience, want it to do that. Why do we keep putting the dog on stage? Because we can’t wait to see that one performance of Annie where the dog “performs” perfectly. Where the theatrical illusion has become so powerful that it is able to control the uncontrollable. 

But does this potential desire turn us into the very antithesis of Brecht's "audience of the scientific age?" And is there something slightly shaming about wanting to be put into such a powerful trance (so powerful that even the dog becomes swept up into it) in a post-Brechtian age of theater?

Another clip: John Cage's 4' 33"


One of my favorite examples of performance testing the limits of the old "the emperor wears no clothes" accusation. What would States say of this, I wonder? Or Handke?


Response to Group A's Blogs


It seemed that most of the responses were focused on that adorable doggy that ruined the red heads song. And after reading these comments (Youtubes included), reading these articles, and even the old adage of children and animals… I’m confused why we keep doing it.

I can genuinely only assume that the director wanted that response from the audience. How else would you think things would go?

And also… someone had to have told the director it was a bad idea. Someone had to have said to him/her, ‘Hey, so the dog isn’t really staying put in all the rehearsals. I don’t think it’s going to stay put during the show…’

But I keep coming back to what States said: “With running water something indisputably real leaks out of the illusion.”

What illusion? The illusion of the real? Of the play being real?
This is something I’m fascinated with because it’s almost a riddle.

I’m wondering, where does the line get drawn?
So… we’ve all pretty much agreed… no animals.
And States doesn’t like water.
And children are kind of in the air right now. It depends.
We get a cute little girl who can play Annie. That’s great!
You want to cast a little girl in How I Learned to Drive? Get out.

This line seems to be very wide at times, and narrow at others. It seems full of zig zags that weave in and out of possibilities at will. And at some points it even seems to fade and disappear into nothing.