Class Notes October 23rd

Class Notes
October 23^rd

Ellen.  How does one write about performance without failing to keep faith with what is most intellectually productive. One of the rules of thumb is to know yourself, know what you bring to the performance, exercise them form the standards, which you hold. This was an opportunity to throw out on the table where your loyalties lie.  Dislocated versions of Shakespeare do this because they have never been seen before. Clearly a difficult assignment with lots of different responses.

Amy. Let’s have Justin talk about the helmet.

Justin. I was trying to come up with a specific way where something points to the text that is confusing. This is an example where a dramaturg would look at a show, and come back and provide an enrichment opportunity. You can ground this show, if you’re doing motorcycles, do these helmets and you can do both the classic text, and the modern dress. Here’s the world we’re in. And it highlights the story, it tells you Richard is preparing for the upcoming battle. Is the dream real? Are the real ghosts? Or is it an unconscious choice on his part? Where he realizes man, I’m a really bad guy.

Amy. Let’s talk about the production and talk about what Ellen wants to talk about. How do you engage in the performance as a critic? How do we read performance and respond to it, separate from our expectations? Write down some things that you would like to engage in specifically about this production. Write down a couple of moments that you feel need critical engagement.

Ellen. Look at the production as you recall it and write down when the dramaturgy happened.  Where can we have critical engagement?

Amy. You can include into this conversation our Chicago plays. We’re looking for pieces of the performance that we can read as text.

[Class took a few moments to write down thoughts.]

Iris. The prologue as well as the two snippets. The end scene with Queen Elizabeth. The fact checker. The heads on the spikes,

Derek. Schizophrenic just woken up speech Richard has. The wedding scene, the way Anne was portrayed.

Sara. The double casting of Edward the fourth and Richmond. How does that relate with the lineage. And also Elizabeth’s speech in the end and how does that relate to the divine right of kings.

Andrea. When Elizabeth appears in her full Tudor gear. And before the play started how they were running the political ads. And also this isolate moment in the play, in the Richard and Lady Anne coffin scene. She spits on him. And how he took the spit and licked his fingers.

Jess. The prescription drugs. The skull helmet. Richard was the only one with a full helmet. It was confusing.

Justin. Flat screen TV and the anonymity of the fact checker. We understand that history is being rewritten, but by who? Casting of the two young women as the two princess.

Sara. Margaret as a ghost and a disembodied voice. Haunting the theatre as well as the play. The disembodied voices.

Kelly. Plot vs. Poetry.

Jenna. Cuts and ghosting connections of Margaret and ghosts. Duchess has a line about how Margaret is a living ghost. That connects dramaturgically of having the ghosts in act V. The way Margaret acts and the way that she curses, there is the need for Richard to be taken out by the ghosts. I heard Gavin kept Margaret and cut ghosts. She functions now as some choric Greek person. It doesn’t work as well because nothing in this world changes in the way that she is able to work in the sense of the supernatural elements.

Ming. The video’s beforehand. And Elizabeth stuck out. How different she looks.

Derek. The image of her appearing is very striking.

Jennifer. I was concerned when I heard about her in full Tudor gear. I thought of the scene from Black watch with the sign language.

Cody. Casting of Richard and Clarence. Clarence is older, yes? The body of the actor was much younger than the actor who played Richard.

Courtney. In black watch- Interested in how they cast the same actor as the interviewer in the post war scene and the sergeant in the way scenes. I was also interested in the dancing the actor’s did to represent fighting.

Derek. Regeneration (Book). A section in here that reminded me of black watch. The soldiers didn’t like the way they were sitting ducks and how it wasn’t really a proper war.  Reading this book helped me understand what was happening there and the masculine and feminine aspects of war. In this book they are talking about WWI and sitting in the trenches and being killed and how it was emasculating for them. And how that was a huge problem for them.

Amy. So, with everything on the table. Are there things that feel more or less fruitful in terms of inquiring our engagement? What needs our attention.?

Kelly. The cutting of the text.

Ellen. Shakespeare is someone we feel very concerned about the cutting of the text. A good spectatorship calls out the cutting of the text. Is that necessary/productive? There are productions of Japanese Shakespeare that still come off?

Dorothy. I was thinking about that in terms of things worth interrogating further? As a critic it’s important to see the difference between your personal judgments and the overall production.

Ellen. The text is a blueprint for the performance. Understandably a playwright should be concerned with the cutting of this. It is a tricky question to discuss what counts as a good cut or a bad cut. We never start from ground zero. We never start from a neutral point of view. One good example was Whitney’s post. Cross-contaminated with equivocation. Speaks to our theatrical experience. We must be cognitive about the experience.

Amy. In figuring out how you develop a critical prompt in your own ear, in which says, ‘who cares’. It comes down to Who Cares? Kelly can say let’s talk about the cutting. And I say ‘Who Cares?’. It’s not enough to say that Shakespeare cares, or I like it. Similarly, it wouldn’t be a fair answer to say, ‘I like it this way’, or ‘I don’t like Shakespeare so I wanted to cut it.’ Kelly can come to it with the importance of poetry in the play and come with seemingly unimportant chunks of texts with some claim that it matters. How do we decide which of these chunks of performance text is useful to engage with critically. You have to mount an argument that says they matter.

Ming. But we can’t say that because we feel that way? It seems that feelings need to be integrated. What place does it have?

Dorothy. What kind of feeling?

Jess. Like feeling of the production?

Derek. The feeling of the sacredness of the text?

Dorothy. The feeling of…?

Ming. I’m just confused how it comes up.

Iris. I think it’s important to note that that’s when you have a visceral reaction?

Jess. An alarm goes off. I feel sucked into it. Theatre is about evoking emotion. IF you don’t care about what’s going on, then we as theatre artists have failed.

Ellen. On one hand, we want to put aside as carefully as we can, immediate kick back reactions. They’re not valuable unless they are part of a larger conversation. The second part is one of the reactions you can have to an aesthetic experience. You must remained attentive to how you feel about your self-loss in a play. There is a spectrum of engagement or disengagement. As a critic, you are conscious of yourself watching. But that can’t account for the whole of the experience. Theatre has this power to move us in this way that forces us to leave behind of theatrical self-recognition. How we keep faith with  strong distaste?

Amy. Ellen is pointing to, in her original question is how do we attend to our own emotional reaction to our roll of being critic. That’s partially due to being aware of our own affection of disliking something. That is a really powerful and yummy place to be. It’s very safe and very comfortable. That is an emotional reaction.  Our job as critics is to recognize the difference. That’s one of the dangers about thinking/ writing about performance. It’s one thing to talk about the text of Shakespeare and to rarify it, but that’s not what theatre does. It puts it on stage. It’s going to fail in different ways. How do you maintain this relationship? It’s not just you and this little relic that get’s to perform scholarship with you. How do you continue to do the real critical work that performance and scholarship call for? Despite and because of all the people in the room.

Ellen. Bordeaux mix intelligence with Passion. Where it lives in its most powerful dimension. You have to risk liking, risk the embarrassment. What is the full register of the experience? We are trying to dice it up into much smaller units to get there.

Jennifer. So are we to focus on one particular dramaturgical moment? And how it was used, why it was used, if it worked, how it served the audience.

Ellen. (I tried to listen really hard and so I missed what she said.) Everyone had arguments to make about class/gender, etc. These arguments are descriptive and good arguments to have.

Amy. What if we take a few minutes to discuss the political debates? What if you were to think about if you were to look at those debates as performances? What if you were asked to discuss the debates as performances? As a critical scholar what are some things you might look for to mount as your evidence. What kind of things about the performance that you might point to.

Dorothy. The debate is not spontaneous. Yet, it feels like it is. Like how it’s set off. They receive a lot of time before hand to think about how they are going to respond to this debate.

Jennifer. That sounds a lot like Auslander. Like how Obama is supposed to be president and so he is acting like president.

Amy.  There is something about structure that is meant to perform or communicate spontaneity. We are not supposed to see the script.

Dorothy. On the first debate I heard a lot of ‘Oh, well I heard that Romney won because Obama was nice and people didn’t want to see a black man be aggressive towards a white man.’

Courtney. Even the idea of someone winning the debates is really interesting. What does that mean? It’s not a discussion. It’s a battle of words. It’s not about one specific topic.

Derek. One of the things I would look at in the debates is where the candidates are looking. The kind of facial expressions they have when the other person is talking. Whether they actually answer.

Amy. Let me pull out this idea of eye contact, which I would put in the category of gesture. You could turn the sound off and analyze that as a performance scholar might.

Jess. One of the things that were a big deal was the flag pin business. The color of the ties. Not only what the candidates are wearing, but also how nice they look. How is the cut of their suit? As well as how their wives look.  You can do that along side of the setting.

Andrea. A small moment in the debate is the initial handshake in the beginning. Which candidate puts their arm on the other’s shoulder. Do they face each other?

Sara. I’ve thought what was interesting was the social media quantitative data and how fast.

Ellen. How do the audience count? How are they there?

Justin. Sometimes they do break through. They’ll laugh and we are suddenly aware that they are there.

Ming I think it’s also a question of… Jon Stewart says he needs the audience there.

Sara. Rachel Maddow talked about how there was one debate without an audience. And how deadly that is. They are talking to each other, but they are not really talking to one another.

Dorothy. I was also thinking about the twitter situation. Late last night, after the debate. The national democratic convention put up a website about Romney’s tax. And the joke is you can’t click the button. I’m interested in this new level of hyper engagement. It’s not necessary a level of deeper engagement.

Cody. When you see people sitting outside the debate halls watching the debate on the television. IT seems much more like a sporting event. They have no direct effect on what is going on in the inside. There is this constant need of feeling like you are engaged.

Jennifer. Whenever I see the photos afterwards, I realized I never saw the images that they choose. how much power does the photographer have in his ability to capture this.

Derek. That’s interesting. We were watching it being streamed and sometimes the stream got paused and sometimes the image would freeze in ridiculous expressions on their face. And we snapped a picture of that. But did that moment actually happen? When they were in mid blink.

Ellen. I wonder what this tells us about liveliness. Just to think back to Phalan’s claim. It does seem to me that we are in a moment where we are going to have to extrapolate this argument. With these digital creations in reaction to these live debates. We need to have a different understanding of liveliness and what counts as presence and what counts as being caught in the aura of this debate.  What about the image of Richard on a motorcycle? That doesn’t happen in the play? What are we consuming in the moment and what is being structured into the play in order to make the production what it is. Certainly in a Shakespeare performance there is a need for a program or outside materials. One of the things we need to be highly critical about this is that. What is the effect? What would Hodgkin say? To the iconic image of him on a motorcycle versus the production.

Jess. I don’t know if it captured the feel of the production as I remember it. The production still is orderly almost, and the production was not. Looking at the image of the bike and thinking of the production in my mind, there is a difference.

Sara. They made a conscious choice of putting a motorcycle in the picture. Was the motorcycle motif a metaphor of more of a conceptual blend?  How does Biker guyness blend with kingliness.

Amy. It’s hard to talk about without talking about the fact that I think it failed. I think it’s an attempt of a blend. That’s true for any costume choice. What can be usefully borrowed and used and what can’t? There are certain things Gavin doesn’t want around and there are certain things that he doesn’t want evoked.

Derek. The end of Friday night performance. Michelson came out and presented Gavin with gifts in the reception. And he said that Gavin had originally wanted to do it in full period costume and Michelson said no you can’t. That’s why this happened. He was forced to think of something different to do. So the motorcycles, one slang term for motorcycle is a hog. And you have a boar imagery that is associated with Richard. I don’t know what process he went through to arrive at motorcycle, but that’s there. As audience we are left to conjure up the image of the absent motorcycle itself. We have to the work of ghosting ourselves.

Courtney. I wonder to what extent our discussion with the director encourages our dislikeness. At some point he said the fact that it was staged here at IU had nothing to do with his production.

Iris. It’s silly that it is too anachronistic.

Dorothy. Sons of Anarchy. Based on hamlet.

Ellen. My sense of the biker stuff is that there was no commitment to biker gangs. You could’ve done it in boy scouts. I would push Cody’s response in that I thought it edged towards self-satire. Especially in its representation of gender. Not on it’s intent, but it’s effect. There is a way that biker gang is as histrionic.

Amy. If you’re dramturging this production where would you push this production?

Ellen. Bad facial hair. The visible un-persuaviness of the facial hair. Andrea’s post was very successful to me in the fact of how Brechtian it is.  Just giving the ever so small indication of satire. And self parody. Doing the battle straight in Shakespeare, is really hard. How you handle the fight sequence is already a difficult thing to approach. So we’re going to stylize the event and we’re going to go over the top. The one thing I thought of, in terms of this was the Batman movies in the nineties. The bad ones. As if you told aliens about urban gangs and they tried to relate it back to you. The biker gang was like that.  You can push that though and it can become interesting. And even if that is not the intent it’s available. That seems like a very limited way, in terms of where you get resources. If a play has a critical edge, in which a production deploys. How is that deployment happening? There are always ways of seeing the productions investment,

Amy. Going back to this idea of liveliness. The image that never was. And to the debates. I think you’re right to point to a reconsideration of liveliness where it’s disappearance who death is always part of it’s presents. The essential thing about the debate is that it’s live, but it’s not actually live to any of us. At any moment one of the could gaff. These are being staged because we are waiting for the other one to screw up. We know what we are going to do and they are waiting for them to embarrass themselves.