Ellen/Amy: Is there a distinction between emotional and theoretical
response? Can they be intermingled and work together seamlessly, unnoticeably? Can both be accomplished while honoring the real life that was lost?
Ellen: blog points seem to suggest that no consensus on this issue is possible; think
of key terms from class, especially thinking about the notion of value concerning absorption/enchantment (i.e. Andrea’s note from
last class); What did you think of Jill Dolan’s overidentification with the moment?; is it just an instance of oversaturation in
the empathetic view?; theater is productive as a social tool, but can be difficult
in relation to events like 9/11; what did you find Dolan's principle transgression to be in her
contribution to the Forum?
Cody: calls to mind the discursive act of calling something a tragedy; wonders how Dolan could identify with the woman falling from the window?; not proposing that we take an inconsiderate view,
remembering that actions are never totally innocuous
Dorothy: wonders what made 9/11 so big of a deal for Jill
Dolan, as opposed to anyone else living at the time?; if this made such an impact, how could she not always be in a state of constant trauma?
Ellen: wonders if you can do theater well without being a sharer? Especially in view of Dolan's Forum contribution (p
107); What happens as you move away from the immediacy of the event?; How do we move away from Taylor
Amy: What is disembodied empathy?; There are a lot of
categories we create, and 9/11 makes these irrelevant; as people interact with their environment, they are always sharing a
simultaneous intellectual and emotional response to outside stimuli
Ellen: intrigues by Ming's blog post - translation theory is about keeping faith (being
faithful to the original); by trying to understand it linguistically, we
automatically distance ourselves from the event; Davis
Ming: note that people at hyper-emotional events don't necessarily feel a release - often note feeling a numbness;
really, sympathy is the response coming from those who were not there
Whitney: common response to 9/11 was that a person felt more than
he/she actually did
Ellen: a sense of guilt about not being involved was quite prevalent
Dorothy: everything got a lot scarier, as certain signifiers
suddenly became more apparent
Ming: not uncommon for a 'reader' to experience a moment where he/she suddenly don’t identify
Ellen: our definition of 'audience' is unclear – Sue-Ellen Case's Forum contribution
stops short of pursuing a definition; our understanding of audience appears to be that it is a composite of many views, which in turn creates a hierarchy of
witnesses; also struck by the application of genre by many of the Forum contributors – many in forum grappled with a definition for tragedy
Andrea: noted that Carlson’s experience of 9/11 matches her own experience, such as casting players to
melodramatic roles
Amy: experience seems to require recourse to theatrical
language; these are tools to understand the indefinable in everyday life; allows us to find
a way through it (understanding that melodrama solves a problem and carries moral imperatives)
Ellen: Carlson notes that Americans don’t have tragedy - they have
melodrama; in fact, we have 100 years of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is sentimental but we can have deep
qualms about it; consider that melodrama infects you with feeling, which is the opposite of tragedy, which
intends to purge you of feelings
Amy: 9/11 does not
give us a spectatorial position unlike melodrama
Ellen: I agree; and with Carlson, it can be melodrama; yet it has a
more Brechtian feel
Ming: melodrama does not hinge on a tragic flaw whereby the hero must assign blame to him/herself; assiging melodramatic status to 9/11 frees us from assigning any blame to ourselves
Dorothy: the discourse prevalent after 9/11 seemed to have the unspoken implication that American lives are somehow more valuable than those of others (what might be termed an unsaid notion to certain people by certain other people)
Amy: the Forum (as it appears in a theater journal) has no way of reaching a huge majority of the American population; How can
performance scholarship look at a contentious event and then not just speak to those within the performance scholarship circle? How do our voices make it into the greater populace?
Justin: consider Brecht who suggested its not necessarily the content/message that has to be addressed in relaying information, but the overall structure of how that content is relayed
Whitney: Who are the witnesses? Is there a way to bring it
out to a more public forum? How do you not come away thinking you’ve offended
someone?
Derek: Can’t give up status of victimhood which makes it
difficult to look at
Jess: here we must be careful; parse out the event into separate spaces – political side
(objective) and emotional side; be critical without diminishing what happened; perhaps it is okay to not look at something with a critical
eye
Derek: isn’t part of the reason 9/11 is so felt due to
the repetition of imagery and of state ideology?
Jess: the machine pumps it out, but people have an awareness of
the machine
Ellen: the rawness is a cultural product; consider Debord and concept that all spectacle is based in capital – it is possible to
keep people chained through mediazation; to be ethical and fair, people feel
emotions as they can, but allows for surreptitious translation
Amy: let's inject Davis U.S.'s Davis
Ellen: not about scale of the event; somehow the power of the empathetic spectator becomes
obfuscated
Ming: an catastrophic event is a time to keep in mind how trauma affects the
body, remembering that the body's response is dictated by chemicals; in trying to relay the event later, those chemicals reignite, causing person to repeat original reaction (generally a shut
down of systems)
Whitney: when does our instinct to write history get in the way?;
Archival instinct occurs in the moment; perhaps we want to capture moments that mirror those of previous generations, so even
in the experience we stop to ask how we can remember it
Dorothy: rationality is not lost in the moment – which in a
strange way can elicit shame; thus, we can’t criticize in-the-moment responses
Sara: in our conversation, we have not acknowledged the attack as a kind or type of performance; the 'playwright' is not present and we have no way of asking intent - we have
to fill in the details ourselves
Derek: after 9/11, the media didn’t generally didn't present the expected narrative back to us
Amy: note how certian narratives were immediately okay to share
Dorothy: underlying the narrative was the sense that “things like that don’t happen
here”
Sara: gives us the knowledge that we are not the only audience
to the event (consider Carlson’s Star
Wars analogy)
Andrea: common analogy was to Pearl
Harbor, but understanding of that analogy depended on a previous prescribed notion of what Pearl
Harbor was
Amy: we were asked to shop and see theater; a safe place was presented to enable a return
to normal spectatorship
Ellen: but it failed!; there were many Broadway closings; performers
didn’t know what they were doing there, made theater just a consumable; made
state of rawness even more real
Jennifer: is this a disruption of Roach’s idea of
surrogation?
Ellen: interesting thought; consider a statue erected in Rockefeller Center
Jess: brings to mind ritual and performance and the need to
keep the profane separated from the sacred
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