Blog 18 (Jenna)

Early in his essay, Conquergood asserts, “The hegemony of textualism needs to be exposed and undermined” (147). This short sentence encapsulates much of his early argument, that scriptocentricism, the dominant mode of Western scholarship, exists at the expense of richer modes which may help illuminate “culture-as-text” and prevent tendencies to “miss the omissions” (147). (Please indulge me in a horrible joke—that much of Conquergood’s early argument describes how the “visual/verbal bias of Western regimes of knowledge” conquers good. See, I told you it was a terrible joke…)

 While thinking of examples in which an ethnographic approach to performance may have been beneficial, I kept returning to the failures of Gavin’s production of Richard III. His was a production that I would associate with the scriptocentricism against which Conquergood argues. As we mentioned in our discussion of Richard III, this was a production that evoked the type of motorcycle culture that those unfamiliar with motorcycle culture would have produced. The concept of the motorcycle gang existed solely within the spectacle of the production; it never breached the center. To borrow from Ellen’s wonderful anecdote, this Richard III was the Batman and Robin of the motorcycle world. This Richard III was one in which royals and nobles wore motorcycle gear and used gang weapons rather than one in which gangs of bikers competed for control of territory. One of the reasons why there was such a disconnect between the motorcycle concept and its execution was Gavin’s scriptocentric staging.

The vast majority of scenes in this production were staged in the familiar “stand and deliver” pattern that I associate with rhetorical presentation. If alone on stage, actors were blocked in central locations and basically stood and delivered their lines. If in a scene with multiple people, the actors were staged along the fringes of the stage in shapes that have a large centrally negative space, like rectangles or circles, and their bodies rarely touched. This type of staging is relatively static and does little to allow the audience to deduce clues about culture. Rather, the audience must get the majority of their information from the text the actors speak. This was certainly true in Gavin’s production of Richard III, which featured the rhetorical skills of his actors. The actor playing Rivers epitomized the stand and deliver approach as he often stood in an erect stance and clasped his hands in front of his body while delivering lines, much like a politician in a debate.  The shape of his body, along with many of the other actors’ bodies, was divorced from the type of body shapes and movements that exist in motorcycle culture. Use of ethnography in the dramaturgical research conducted for this production may have aided in the direction of this play by giving the director the tools necessary to embody motorcycle culture in his staging.