Amy: Let’s start with today’s text; I’m grateful for the
initial work done on the blog posts for today; I’m sure many of your have encountered
the sublime before, before moving to the stuplime, can we develop a clear
understanding of ‘sublime’
Jenna: This may be rather stupid, but I found it helpful to
think about the serif attached to each term, the upward b and the downward p
help to remember how sublime and stuplime contrast
Cody: consider Kant’s definitions of sublime and beauty; the
sublime is a reaction to the inexplicable, it is both psychological and
affective (whereas beauty is merely affective and exists within an object)
Amy: What is central to Kant’s notion?
Cody: it suggests a sort of subjectivity in the viewer
Sara: the sublime isn’t in the landscape (taking the
seascape picture on my blog post into consideration) but lies in the
recognition of the self in relation to the experience
Jennifer: implies a sensibility in the face of the sublime
(be sensible while feeling the sublime)
Courtney: gets to Ngai’s notions of shock and serenity
Amy: Why?
Courtney: she is attributing emotion to the sublime, a la
Kant, but it doesn’t go far enough to be put a subject in a panic
Amy: I’m curious about the experience of the perceiver of
the sublime and the removal of that spectator from such a position – consider,
the ocean is sublime while watching over it, but not while drowning in it; How
can we harness this in terms of performance?
Jess: this notion does not remind me of Artaud, who want to
create the panic within the viewer (put the viewer amidst the ocean, not just
viewing from afar)
Iris: would we say that Brecht would want that?
Sara: it’s akin to the theatricality as described by Davis
Amy: the collision of vastness and serenity creates an
emotional trance, like a state that is counter to Davis, perhaps more in a
Brechtian sense; recognition of that kind lies beyond the comprehensible – the
idea of comprehension and its absence is central to Ngai; Does this make sense
as a baseline?; let’s look at examples of the stuplime – either in Ngai’s text
or in the blog posts
Andrea: related to my experience at Black Watch where the sign language scene went on just too long,
evoking a sense of the stuplime; it marks a separation in temporal links from
what’s being shown – chronological links aren’t shown
Jennifer: the similar movements seem to parallel the
simultaneous layers that Ngai mentions; the layers also seem related to the
palimpsest, though different
Sara: the movements are also interdependent – in isolation
each movement wouldn’t hold the same meaning
Jennifer: which shows the contradiction between Ngai’s
layers and the palimpsest
Amy: watching the sign language goes on too long; what does
that do and how do we connect it to the stuplime?
Derek: the overlapping of the performances of all of the
actors, as they were added to the scene, made it difficult to focus on just
one; at a point, it became overwhelming and forced viewer to ask what
individual differences between each performance might mean; in that sense (too
much information) it brought to mind Ngai
Sara: from Derek’s post, I understood Ngai’s notion of being
open – a viewer reaches a point of appreciating beauty that does not have
specific meaning
Iris – page 262; instead of becoming frustrated and angry,
to the point where you give up on a performance, now you have more options for
thinking about the work
Amy: does watching it to that point present opportunity for
expressing what it does mean for you?
Jennifer: incorporates defamiliarization – able to what the
rest of the performance after being opened up by the ‘overwhelming’ scene
Iris: essentially stopped asking questions, and watched in a
different way
Sara: that moment epitomizes the idea that ‘words cannot
express’ feeling; reframes how you look at the stage; not causal or continuous,
so you have to watch differently
Courtney: if it was just reading, we wouldn’t have a lack of
access; such moments remind the audience of such a lack of access
Sara: Black Watch
created an interesting juxtaposition of visual text (that was not readable)
next to sign language (that was indecipherable); provided access to an idea of
communication and how it relates to new global forms of communication
Amy: What are possible applications of the stuplime to
performance? What is the methodology and how is it fruitful?
Andrea: understanding is different concerning of what is
necessary for transport to take place; having doubleness doesn’t need
similarity to identify with characters; this is a way to be receptive/open,
without having to identify or feel the same
Amy: what does it suggest if usual identification is
frustrated and there is this different option?
Whitney: opens up possibility for new reactions to
something; taking something like performance where the audience is keyed to
identify, something else might emerge; we need to figure out how something like
this might work, but Ngai doesn’t necessarily tell us how
Amy: think about the notion of the sublime in terms of
spectator/spectated; How would we restage the ‘man overlooking the ocean’ as
stuplime?
Jennifer: How would it change the space? How could we
overwhelm in a different space? Does it require a ‘non-tradition’ space?
Jenna: reminding of Black
Watch where audience focus was divided between by two poles spaced widely
apart, forcing the audience to look back and forth repeatedly
Jess: brings to mind Beckett’s Not I
Sara: interesting if we ask about space; makes me think of
Pina Bausch and Café Muller
Jennifer: the idea of repeated motion inducing open mental
space must have been psychologically studied
Amy: Yes – military drills and raves; repetition (especially
physical) moves people into a state where sense of group takes over the sense
of I or self
Jennifer: similar to Buddhist monks and walking meditation,
as well as children suffering trauma who use repetitive rocking movements as a
self-soothing mechanism
WATCH YouTube CLIP OF NOT
I
Jess: interesting to see it in video; a friend performed the
piece and put it on continuous loop in order to memorize it; it has lost
something by being on a screen, but highlights how mouth has become
disconnected from the person playing the role
Cody: the clip allows the spectator to become mesmerized by
the enormity of the lips displayed on the screen, whereas on stage they are so
small that spectator is mesmerized by the flood of words coming from the small
(hard-to-see) lips emoting through a curtain; the clip makes it appear that the
speaker is talking to herself, but on stage she is really talking to a spectral
bystander
Iris: in the clip, I found myself almost moving along with
the speaker; this is her physicality as she expresses it; it is a painful
process, but brings to mind the mechanism that works behind the idea
Cody: I know the narrative of Not I very well, but in watching it always find that the narrative
disappears
Jess: a viewer begins picking out his or her own connections
that the original text would not allow; it’s as if one is adrift in a sea of
water and the words act as life preservers that may carry one to a boat or to
solid ground
Iris: I appreciate that notion of drowning and grasping at
what stands out as a way of saving oneself
Amy: can you map that idea for us
Iris: the water represents a feeling of frustration and the
words (the life preservers) are the only way to pull through the frustration
Jennifer: the speaker could not cut off or hinder her
elocution because that would cut her listeners off from the only things they
have to hold on to in the performance
Cody: other performances of this text are not as fast, so it
is often easier to follow; also, the camera often follows the narrative,
helping to indicate past, present, and future; I agree with Iris, words act as
life preservers in this performance – we find ourselves encased in language
even as it is falling apart for us
Iris: in a way, this is why Jenna’s serifs are valuable
(shows the earthly thing versus that which is unearthly)
WATCH CLIP FROM BILL T. JONES DANCE
Amy: this was just a small chunk of the performance,
hopefully showing a connection between the stuplime and dance; does it offer us
anything?
Ming: brings to mind a certain carnality; movement is
responsive/necessitated to the sound; what happens when such carnality
dissolves?; refer to pages 254 and 266 in the article
Cody: it is held in the spectator’s mind
Amy: the mind struggles to make connections; does an example
where cause and effect can be easily linked to music and movement make this
less stuplime?
Ming: Yes – if movement and music connectivity is broken,
then stuplime is more accessible
Jess: the connection of narrative would be disrupted
Amy: is stuplime an absence of response?
Jess: stuplime is being overwhelmed paired with the absence
of comprehension; one must become bored and then let go of that response
Amy: I am reminded of the quote from page 271 that appears
in Sara’s blog post; if stuplime just describes theater we don’t like, then the
stuplime really only denotes a difference between an ‘initiated’ and an
‘uninitiated’ audience member – I want it to be more useful than that
Courtney: stuplime traits are valuable to performance
repetition; consider thick language – not just emotions in the viewer, but
traits that are necessary to the work of art
Andrea: the heaping up of things is another trait of the
stuplime; watching a part of a performance complicates our ability to see this;
in group dances, we can look at one dancer or the whole group of dancers; does
Ngai address problems that may arise by viewing parts or wholes?
Sara: she seems to make that a fundamental difference
between the sublime and the stuplime
Cody: returning to Kant, he suggests that we are all
reasoning beings and the sublime gives us room to do such reasoning, whereas
the stuplime does not
Sara: modern dance confers a certain appreciation of the
human body; I am reminded of the work of Richard Foreman where even when a
spectator checks out, the performance does something that forces the viewer to
come back to it; also brings to mind the million year art project – 10
leather-bound volumes of past million years – after the initial reaction, one
can recognize the care of creating such a work and also see what time is (‘a
drowning in infinity’); a performance was then created to go with the volumes –
one can hear a person reading the list of years (provides no catharsis from
time, impossible to escape its oppressiveness)
Jennifer: there is an intention to these works
Amy: I tend to be uncomfortable with the idea of intention,
but acknowledging intention is valuable to a point; there is a way to get to
the rock (per the drowning in water analogy); it is characteristic of the
stuplime that it refuses us this place (sanctuary)
Courtney: can stuplime exist in nature or does it have to be
created? Can it be a natural phenomenon? (question arises as it seems to
require a desire for meaning)
Amy: leads to a question of mine about Romanticism – seems
to be interested not in the actual ocean (nature), but in attempts to capture
the ocean (nature) within its works, yes?
Jennifer and Whitney: not exactly – Romanticism was very
much interested in actual nature and its wonders; requirement of the works
seems to be built on actual experience with the thing depicted, not just a
creation of a representation
Andrea: depicts what is always beyond you just a little
Amy: they create a different relationship between the
spectator and spectated; what is usable in this? How does it speak to our own
work?
Whitney: Jess noted how Shakespeare can be stuplime for her,
but since that is my area, it never comes across to me as such; it is odd that
the stuplime works very differently for different people
Sara: brings to mind things that are ritualistic – provides
a way to recognize affective response in a crowd without asking for people to
discuss it; explains efficaciousness in ritual performance – don’t just
recognize performance as a semiotic experience, if you can immerse yourself
into the experience of others
Amy: it’s a way into the hermeneutics; allows for a much
more complicated receptive event; especially in terms of type of subjectivities
that are possible (not just adoration of the individual)
Sara: comforting to know that no one feels transcendence from
Gertrude Stein; provides a way for understanding that boredom can be okay
Amy: it is helpful for talking to students who don’t like
something; allows us to ask why we’ve romanticized certain things into a
lifeboat
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