Course blog 21 (Andrea)

“There’s some small initial amusement in Cain’s willfully anachronistic language, hearing Shag and his actor pals speaking about their 17th-century current events in modern American Sorkinese…What’s missing is a real emotional core beneath the cleverness.”

(http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/theater/15740471/equivocation-at-victory-gardens-theater-theater-review)

While I agree with this reviewer’s overall assessment of the play, his conclusion that Equivocation fell flat because it had no emotional core misreads one of its worst flaws. True, I found the play ultimately unsuccessful, but not because it was a lengthy theater in-joke that relied too heavily on cleverness. Rather, Equivocation tried to establish too many emotional focal points and never managed to settle on one in a way that could provide a satisfying conclusion.

If the play had truly been as the reviewer describes it, it might have had better success as a performance. He grudgingly admits that there is amusement in Equivocation’s brisk anachronism, and if the playwright had been less ambitious, he might have produced an entertaining comedy for an audience that knows Shakespeare and the theater well.

Instead, Equivocation tried to add weight to its fluffy cleverness by throwing Shagspeare into scenes of torture, political scapegoats, and domestic problems. Shag witnesses the torture of the prisoner played by Arturo Soria and feels so sympathetic to him that he agrees to deliver a letter to the prisoner’s wife and tries to bargain with Cecil on his behalf. But then that prisoner is forgotten and Shag forms a bond with Henry Garnett, the imprisoned priest. But even that emotional connection is muddied—Shag cares about Garnett because he needs his help to write a play, then because of his political involvement in the gunpowder plot, and then, most confusingly, because he thinks the priest can help him heal from death of his son. Finally, there is an attempt to ground the play in the relationship between Shag and his daughter Judith, which felt like an ill-fitting last-minute addition to the script.

None of these plotlines were integrated with each other or with the comedic aspects of Equivocation, and the play never found its center among the various possible emotional cores. The reviewer is correct that this play didn't work, but he misses what is possibly the most important reason why—the problem is not that it had no emotional core, but that it had too many and couldn't pick.

Course blog 20 (Andrea)

Like many of us, my election day experience was primarily based around social media. I am a compulsive Facebook checker to begin with, and people's election statuses and posts kept me coming back more often than usual. I also read news stories, headlines, and commentary from my Twitter feed. I even watched the coverage of the results that evening via Youtube's live streaming from several different broadcasters.

In the middle of this media binge, however, I was a passive participant, reading without posting or commenting. Part of the reason I kept silent was because of how politically polarized my Facebook feed is. Most of the posters from my hometown are Republicans, and most of the posters from undergrad and especially Bloomington are Democrats. Among the Republicans are most of my family members and some close friends, and while I often talk politics with some of them, I have learned that with others, confrontation isn't worth it. I'm not about to reveal the extent of my leftness to some of my new in-laws, for instance, especially right before I visit them for Thanksgiving.

Here are a few of the Republican Facebook posts on my feed to give you an ethnological sampling:

I'm now hiding all posts about the stupid election. I'm done with it. We are stuck in a nightmare for 4 more years and I do NOT want to be reminded of it every 5 seconds.

I am scared for our country. I am worried for my children's future. However, God is in control over EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY! So, I will place my trust in Him alone and ignore the fact that the democrats think sin is ok, that we have a national debt that rivals no other is ok, the fact that a majority of Americans can barely make ends meet and are soon to be met with higher taxes, higher groceries and I'm sure higher gas costs are ok. 

Here's my election night map. Romney wins. Romney 270 / Obama 268 electoral votes. #wsjmap http://t.co/PjkrShyc via @wsj

Calling it for Obama. Oh well...

Welllll... On the bright side, I baked some delicious Nutella cookies tonight...

Other people have already posted suggestions for how to curate this kind of social media experience in a museum, so I will focus on the polarization aspect of my election day. I would like a museum display to show a little about these two environments: the conservative rural small town and the liberal college town, places within easy driving distance of each other. Visitors to the museum would enter through a common space or passageway that would display some of the public representations of political belief: Facebook, Twitter, political TV ads, yard signs. These would be accompanied by short descriptions of why these public demonstrations are socially significant and politically influential  in the election cycle. From this public domain, they could move through two different doorways leading from the passageway--one to the right and one to the left. The room to the right would contain a reenactment of a scene from the conservative small town, and the room on the left would contain a reenactment from a more liberal environment. The goal would be to show a more nuanced view of both sides than their public personas can reveal, just as Iris hoped to do with her interlinked status updates and comments, and also to show a little of the different environments that form these polarized views. 

Blog Post 19.2 (Andrea)

On narrative: I am much more susceptible to pieces with a strong narrative structure (Iris). I tried not to impose a narrative on the piece, but the use of a prop (a flower-girl’s basket of petals) and symbolic costuming appealed too much to the latent lit scholar in me (Jennifer). “Rite of Summer” was the only piece that really prompted a deep and disturbing physical response. My ultimate conclusion is that I preferred this piece because of the (in)tense relationship between the narrative and the dance itself (Whitney). I wonder what my reaction to these dances would have been if these performances did not present themselves as being charged with narrative/narrativity?  When I read poetry or prose that seems to have no narrativity or narrative comprehensibility, for example, I usually surrender myself to a more visceral, experiential reading of the language (Cody).

On visceral reactions to 'grotesqueness': The moments I loved were the moments, like in the first dance, when the dancers came on crawling on all fours in a grotesque way, an evil way . . . Perhaps there is this joy I find in bodies that celebrate how ugly/disturbing they can become rather than pleasing to the eye (Kelly). The patterns of movement imitation between the shadow brides and the young virgin felt eerie and dystopic . . . At one point, the dancers crawled along the ground on their elbows en masse – dragging both their temporarily paralyzed bodies and their white dresses over the black floor, a moment that actually prompted a grimace (Whitney).

And to 'joy': The dancers engaged in domino tag, touch-falling and rising, leaping into the air, and I could not help smiling in pleasure at the joy they exhibited (Derek). In the non-narrative dances, I noticed myself responding more physically to the performance. Through most of Esplanade and Nascimento, my enjoyment came from the physicality of the dancers as they moved and the joy that they seemed to have in their own movement (Andrea). When I see dance, there is a part of me that yearns to do what they do, because to me, dance is almost more important to the performer than the observer. It's such a joyous, ecstatic thing, to be moving the body in these increasingly difficult, yet emotionally explosive patterns, and absolute passion showed in every one of the performers' bodies (Jess). We have been discussing kinesthetic empathy and the connection between critical and emotional intellects as they relate to spectators. How can a viewer’s thoughts and feelings be attended to simultaneously? The answer may lie in the dancers’ ability to simultaneously perform their own physical movements yet have an external focus that allows for a faultless connection to another or group (Justin).

On beauty in everyday movement: By eschewing narrative and formal abstraction for embodied exuberance and the aesthetic of the everyday, it was Taylor’s work that created a space for the subsequent pieces we witnessed. There is no beauty much less propriety in the tumble on the mattress without first witnessing the beauty in the walk for the bus (Sara). What is dance? If running is dance, than is it dance to walk, is it dance to sit up and look chagrined (as in Straight Duet)? To paraphrase John Blacking, I think dance in these modern contexts can be defined as “humanly organized movement,” and feel most engaged by the movements that are not necessarily traditional in the canon of pre-modern Western dance (Dorothy). Decentering the significance of the dancers’ skills and physical virtuosity, Taylor choreographs a dance that is about movement itself and the beauty of “everyday” movements . . . In this piece dance is about the many different ways a body can move and interact with other bodies more than it is about a each particular dancer’s virtuosity (Courtney).

Dance review (Andrea)

There were two types of dance performances at the Gala last Sunday—those that were based in a narrative and those that were not (or were less so). Throughout our discussions about dance, I've been thinking about the role that narrative plays in my understanding and appreciation of art, and whether meaning can exist without it. I’d like to use those questions to frame my review of the Gala, in which Rite of Summer and Straight Duet relied on some kind of direct narrative and Esplanade and Nascimento Novo did not.

The program notes for Rite of Summer tell us that the dance is playing with references to the ballets Rite of Spring and Giselle. Even without these notes, though, I read the dance as a narrative because of the props, costumes, and interactions between dancers. The twitching movements of the dancers and their facial expressions indicated a struggle between opposing forces. Much of the pleasure or enjoyment of watching was about puzzling out the story and the characters. The narrative in Straight Duet was much more obvious, and the pleasure in the dance came more from seeing impressive athletic feats and simultaneously seeing the parts of the story that they conveyed.

In the non-narrative dances, I noticed myself responding more physically to the performance. Through most of Esplanade and Nascimento, my enjoyment came from the physicality of the dancers as they moved and the joy that they seemed to have in their own movement. They were often smiling as they ran or jumped or spun onstage, and I felt my face become more lifted as well, raising my eyebrows and lips slightly. I kept finding that my leg muscles, especially my calves, were slightly flexed as I watched, and when the music had a strong beat, I tapped my toes in my shoes. At their best moments, these dances conveyed a kind of exuberance in movement that I somehow experienced with them. I’m not sure that I can completely remove narrative from my understanding and appreciation of dance, but the chief enjoyment I took from Esplanade and Nascimento came from a different, more obscure, source.

Class notes from 11-1

Ellen: From 12-1pm on Friday the 9th, we will visit the Advanced Visualization Lab. We will leave between 8-8:30am. We will be looking at exhibits and archive and speaking to curators/directors of outreach beforehand. We’re going to need 2-2.5 hours there and an hour at the Lab.

                                                             

The crowd-sourced reviews- Ellen was unsure how to draft prompt. After the dance performance on Sunday, each of us should offer 300-word reviews. Try to be cognizant of what is true, what is meaningful, and what is subjective in what we are talking about. They are due midnight on Monday. Before we meet for class Thursday, November 8, read everyone’s reviews and pull out what is most true and meaningful. From that, we will put together a crowd-sourced review.

On Tuesday, document your performance of election day as lived experience. Use an ethnographic approach to election day based on your daily life. We should be thinking about how we document lived experience. Use a camera. Put that post on the blog by 11-13.

--Handout of methodological questions from previous blog post.—

So, best practices for analyzing and reviewing dance?

Justin: Account for your own bodily experience of the performance and go into the performance prepared to do that. If you’re not conscious of it going in, you won’t notice.

Jennifer: Be conscious of your cultural baggage and be aware of the culture of origin for the performance you are watching. If you can’t know about the culture beforehand, look it up afterward.

Justin: Make the familiar unfamiliar. Recognize that you don’t already know it. Open out from your performance object to the total mise-en-scene. Be aware of the spectators and the location of bodies both onstage and in the audience. Avoid textocentrism—how do you get away from words when you are using words? One example: RCA animate videos on youtube, drawing out pictures of theory and its practical applications uses coupling of text and pictures. Best example: From Tragedy to Farce.

Sarah: I always wish I had some empathy gnomes to take care of that stuff while I do some Davis stuff. I’m constantly trying to push that down. What are strategies to do both of those at the same time? My assumption here is that thinking and feeling are different things.

Dorothy: In fieldwork class as ethnomusicologist, they used different notation to record both emotional and technical observations. Ex: Use capital letters for feelings and lowercase for intellectual thoughts, or brackets. When you combine those later you have an account of both the technical and your response to it.

Whitney: Like Courtney’s post, ethnological approach can help in realizing new ways of acquiring knowledge. Sometimes another field can give you new research methods. Like Ngai and the stuplime, they give us new ways to analyze and react.

Jennifer: When I was reading the Kealiinohomoku article, she was challenging phrases that I hadn’t challenged before. In the end it was like trying to put emotion and technicality together using the right words. This happened for me when she took apart the term ethnic dance and undermined the term ethnic. I don’t know about dance, so I wouldn’t have questioned it.

Ellen: Does ‘ethnic’ need to be used carefully, or does it need to be used at all? It seems too broad to be useful. From a political standpoint, if you take the ethnic off the table, or any other term that signals a subjugated group, are you doing any favors to that group? It sometimes just absorbs it into the whole. Ethnic studies programs often seek to give attention to ignored subjects. To allow the continuance of categories of difference to exist is also to bring them into the foreground for study and practice. This does seem like a sloppy label, but race as a category of experience and difference in humanity is undeniable. There was a lot of pushback between people who were taking apart these terms and those people who wanted to hold onto the terms to make them visible and bring their cultural value into the conversation.

Dorothy: The problem with ethnic dance or world music or things like that is that ethnic dance is not a thing. There is not an ethnic people. There can be more specific categories, but that is the problem with the use of ethnic in general.

Jess- It groups everything into a muddled category. We have precise names for it, but we don’t want to put the effort into it.

Sarah: There is folk dance, but the danger is in viewing it as a method of performance and thinking that it is a fixed form or not constructed intentionally. We need a word with an asterisk in some ways.

Dorothy: That’s why a lot of people have switched to lengthy titles with the word ‘vernacular’ in them.

Whitney: At bottom of p. 41 she addresses this directly. We can’t let these terms become connotative. She is calling for something like that more specific terminology.

Dorothy: The problem with that is that people are still not going to think of ballet as ethnic dance. It still doesn’t answer the problem of ethnic dance in general. That doesn’t change the discourse that makes folk music problematic.

Sarah: I was wondering if the project is completely sincere. She might be saying that it’s okay to use this term because we can use it to describe ballet. I thought the essay might even be a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Jennifer: I wondered that as I read. She’s not trying to get people to call ballet ethnic, she just wants to trouble this term.

Ellen: This is a polemic, from 1970, a very early incursion against imperialism in anthropology. This is a first shot over the bow in an effort to reassess the Western relationship to other cultures. All these terms turn out to be synonymous in their usage. This is in some sense a gambit, but still, is there any content added to her analysis of ballet as an ethnic form?

Justin: In her list of ethnic traits of ballet, I was surprised by what she pointed out that was excluded rather than included. Exclusions also define for us what is ethnic.

Ellen: That list of significant Western symbols is quite valuable.

Jess: She kept using the term primitive, which made me uncomfortable. It seemed insulting and I didn’t know if that had been targeted.

Ellen: Article is partly a critique of how Western criticism understands itself that allows it to understand contemporary society as more primitive than itself.

Dorothy: In ‘post’-modern dance, there has been a lot of debate over the use of primitive. I’ve heard it privileged, described as being closer to your primal, natural self. Movements that are free and not stiff (like ballet). Need to recognize that the word has history.

Ellen: Modernity makes flattering use of the primitive, like Picasso’s paintings. Still, it always maintains these connotations. I had a thought—this seemed to me very tricky on this question of expertise. Who can watch dance properly? In second paragraph, anthropologists are dealing with forms that they really don’t understand. But then at the end of the article, she notes that she is critical of other anthropologists only where they have stepped outside their fields of expertise. The sequestering of dance into categories is problematic, if only because I come at this from the point of view of performance research. 

–handout from seminar—investigating questions of difference or universalism.

I reject the notion that you must have expertise to watch opera and dance and other performances. Conquergood is trying to solve this problem. He is from Northwestern at a dominant performance studies program, and he is an anthropologist. Does he posit any kind of solution? It’s not just from the seminar, the other impasse is the textual problem. How do we annotate our experience of performance without falling prey to the imperialist Western bias of text?

Jennifer: At one point, he mentions using some element of performance to run alongside text rather than replace text. I wasn’t entirely sure what that looked like.

Dorothy: Videos of performance while you have readings relevant to them. How you write the text with formatting choices to connote the tone of it. Video and audio are not saviors, but they are helpful. You need to see or hear some things to understand them.

Jennifer: irony of this argument—gives examples of non-textocentric performance but argues them through text.

Justin: irony of the Frederick Douglas example.

Jennifer: It goes back to our previous argument about writing about ephemerality.

Ellen: Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities has hosted annotated video system developed by anthropologists to upload field work, often performance. It’s slightly clunky, but one can see that we are moving toward a format that would allow them to run alongside each other.

Dorothy: It makes it challenging to use Phelan’s ideas because the performance is a discrete event, not generalized. I went to Orthodox services as an ethnographer, but you have to say, ‘This is what services are like in this church, not all churches.’

Whitney: Douglas example- importance of embodiment, being physically present, cannot be represented by a video.

Jennifer: Making it text-plus is making it less accessible to an audience. Almost no one can use some of these things.

Ellen: This is a constant battle—we don’t know what the communicative forms will look like in the future. Once EVIA documents are complete, they can be uploaded to youtube, but that is still contingent on knowledge and technology to find it. It’s an interesting moment to read this paper because the digital innovations answer some of these questions.  What about his ways of knowing, taxonomy of serious and non-serious?

Dorothy: I hate Geertz and his thick description.

Sarah: But still, when you read that you can experience what it’s like to be there. It’s a good example of Conquergood’s point that even the best description of being there isn’t being there. [something about cock fights]

Dorothy: Is it misrepresenting things to always make them transcendental? Sometimes things are just banal.

Iris: Where was this Balanese cock-fighting? Was it in the article? [It was not.]

Justin: What is beautiful about that description was the men having to run away from that event, not the cock-fighting itself.

Whitney: I wonder where appreciation for another culture comes in. As soon as we do that, we get the sense that it’s more normal and not transcendental, but does that strip away the appreciation of another culture’s everyday? There is something important about the Westerner’s gaze, it can be an appreciation of something we can’t understand in the same way, so we can appreciate it in a different way.

Ellen: That introduces question of embodiment and what kind of experiences make that embodiment approved and acceptable.

Dorothy: That’s a big controversy, especially back then: can you do ethnographic research from a culture that you are a part of? That doesn’t mean that you will have a more detached, accurate description of a foreign culture.

Ellen: But is there a value in misunderstanding? In the case of performance, there might be some opportunity for misunderstanding to be productive, to be non-immersed spectators and offer a thoughtful account of what we see. In the 1991 article, the last quotation is pretty somber: power produces knowledge, there is no power relation without a field of knowledge. Knowledge constitutes power relations. The person who comes in with an “impartial eye” is bringing strong power relations to bear, but this says that there is never a knowledge gathering that is not about power relations. One of the ways I’ve been trying to work through this question is to look at performance writers who talk about performance in terms of a different language. There is a desire to say, ‘something that happens in postures of body in space that is full of content and we recognize it, but it is not fully translatable.’ As soon as we try to translate that, we bring in power relations and it becomes problematic. –handouts on Artaud and hand gestures—they have in common this desire to decode and reduce gestures to text. Part of hand gesture interpretations come from Roman gestures.

Courtney reads section from Artaud article

Ellen: Artaud is recognizing that bodies on the stage connote more than what they say or what their official movements signify. There is an impression made on audiences by this extra-linguistic expression. It is necessarily a personal and individual experience, but that is always what we seek in performance. The contemporary desire to attend to that which resides outside of the analytical, that seems an opportunity to allow a non-expert audience to have some say. It opens up the possibility of a broader spectrum of bodes interacting with performance and finding meaning there. Reason and Reynolds’ article shows that we have been told clearly not to read things that we don’t have expertise about. There are rewards in bringing these pre-articulate responses into analysis. With the ethnographic lens, you can never be a good enough spectator through knowledge. It’s good to have as much info as possible, but we shouldn’t cut out any pleasure in the form when we don’t have enough knowledge.

Dorothy: Who is saying we can’t compare disparate cultural forms of performance?

Ellen: Immediately there is a set of bells that goes off when you are imposing one system on another and not seeing the differences between them. I don’t know if other people share the same sentiment, but in my experience in the English department is that you get tremendous claims of concern and unease in comparison of different sources, for the understandable reason that it leads to lopsided interpretation. Cognitive science, feeling historical, and the stuplime are not a solution, but they are moving there.

Dorothy: I understand that in an undergraduate term paper setting, but why we would need such levels of analysis and science to compare spectator to spectator? It might not work in a paper, but in a seminar it could easily happen.

Ellen: That’s exactly what I’m hoping we can find a way through. Conquergood sees performance as a panacea for the questions that we’re raising, and the dissemination of performance as a way to undo the bad hierarchies of text and science and empiricism that came before us. There are success stories, but it has not become as accessible as he hoped. We need to offer up our bodies in a more nuanced way alongside text. When Amy asked you guys to think about performances that made you feel, thinking about those kind of physical reactions are useful. We have been trained not to be attentive to them. That seems like a way to work through Sarah’s question from the beginning of class. Think about where your body is in addition to where your mind is. Does anybody have the same hesitation around scientific measurements? Like in the map story at the beginning of the article.

Jennifer: When I was reading the map section, I had a difficulty with the division. My feelings partly came from a short story in which there is a map of the world. Two siblings can’t leave Scotland because they are taking care of their mother. Their cousin brings a map and the sisters live through their imaginings of the map in a greater way than their cousin who has actually been there. Text can evoke physical responses in the way that Conquergood wants non-text to do.

Sarah: A map and an experience of visiting that place work together, but the experience is always richer than the text.

Dorothy: I feel averse to the kind of science that asks people to describe something in terms that are not their own. On a visceral level, I’m more attracted to what you knew you experienced, even if that knowledge is flawed.

Sarah: Part of what this presupposes that is difficult is that what we feel and think are different things. Science can help us poke at that presupposition even if we can never overcome it. Cognitive science can help us get outside these systems of knowledge that we have and interrogate why we think so. There’s absolutely a trap if this becomes another structure from which we can’t escape.

Ellen: It will never be a cure-all, but it does open up new sites of receptivity. We will venture forth into the realm of modern dance. My only tip is to try to put into your response as much of that extra analytical understanding as possible.

Course blog 16 (Andrea)

I've heard that when you are thinking of buying a certain car, you start noticing that car everywhere you go. Maybe that's why the aspect of Ngai's article that I noticed was its conception of transport or absorption, which brought me all the way back to Artaud.

Ngai notes that the lack of temporal or causal links in the message slows down your interpretation and "paradoxically strengthens an affective link between text and reader, transferring the text's 'stupor' to him or her." This establishes that the mixture of boredom and awe can be a gripping emotional experience, maybe one that a reader or viewer could lose themselves in. It is also a new way to experience empathy without needing to establish "sameness as a criterion of worth" (Davis 154). For Ngai, this is done through the creation of 'open feeling': "a condition of utter receptivity in which difference is perceived (and perhaps even 'felt') prior to its qualification or conceptualization."

Artaud was also interested in creating a trance or transport for audience members, and although his description seems to aim more for the sublime, it could easily be perceived by an audience member as stuplime instead. The kind of displays he describes for the stage are thick, difficult images that would require slow interpretation by the audience as they allow their visceral reaction to translate itself into meaning. Artaud says that theater's unique language lies between gesture and thought, expanding beyond words to space, sounds, and light, which is similar to Ngai's erosion of formal difference in favor of modal difference.

I have been thinking about transport mainly in terms of the sublime, but this article gives me an alternate view and a new way to look at Artaud's theater of cruelty.

Course Blog #13: The Lilly Archive [Andrea, Iris, Jenna, Sara]

e chose for our object a lavishly illuminated Book of Hours from the fifteenth century. Our first interesting experience with this object was the librarian’s reaction when she brought us lists of theatre-related books and we asked her for collections of medieval manuscripts. Sara had to defensively come to our aid and insist to the librarian that we did, in fact, want to look at the Book of Hours for a performance class. Integral in forming our impressions of the object was the foam on the table that supported the manuscript as we read it. The fact that elaborate preparations were necessary in order to view this book—registering at the library, ordering the manuscripts, setting up the foam, gently turning the pages—encouraged us to regard the book as sacred. 

Ricketts 118. A book of hours (detail, right) from the collection of Coella Lindsay Ricketts (1859-1941) archived in the Lilly Library Manuscript Collections. The more than 12,000-piece collection contains medieval and historical documents assembled by Ricketts, ranging from the 13th C. through 1848. — Photo by Sara Taylor.

We all felt timid about turning the pages, and not all of us even wanted to do so, although everyone wanted to at least touch a corner. Additionally, we delegated the job of turning pages to Andrea, as she was perceived as a medieval “expert” and therefore was granted  legitimacy to handle the object in a fashion that we “novices” felt was improper. The hand-printed text awed us a little at the thought that producing this book was probably someone’s life’s work, and we especially admired the pictures. 

Iris daintily handles the book of hours after much encouragement. — Photo by Sara Taylor.

One picture in particular caught our attention. It was the last large illustration in the book, and it used darker colors than the rest of the images. It was the image of a funeral, which was the only large picture in the book which was not specifically identified with a biblical scene, which is interesting in a book that is primarily for liturgical use. This is also the only day in the calendar that does not repeat, unlike the Saint’s Days that take up the rest of the book.

Edited to add: Upon doing some further research into books of hours last night, I discovered that this image most likely accompanies the Office of the Dead, a prayer that might have been said for a particular deceased person as a votive, but also commemorated All Souls Day which, despite not being a Saint's Day (but rather All Saints Day) it is still an annual Feast Day, and would have been celebrated by most of the faithful. In many European countries, this would have been a day to visit the dead, clean and decorate graves, and relieve the tension generated by the pagan festival Samhainn/Halloween.

Illumination illustrating prayers for the Feast of All Souls, also known as "All Saints Day" or "All Hallows Day." — Photo by Sara Taylor.

The background was striking in color and design, giving it an almost three-dimensional perspective. The movement implied in this perspective contrasted with the stillness of the death shown in the scene. The text on that page had faded much more than the text on any other pages in the book, which we interpreted as evidence of its greater use. The faces of the people in this picture were unsettling because they are highly detailed and the faces are vividly expressing pain and almost torment.

We considered the performance of this object from two perspectives, focusing on the methodological approaches of Bernstein, Harris, and Cavell. First, the book and the circumstances in which we encountered it invited us to treat it with reverence. Our perception of the book as a sacred object was based on Harris’ notions of untimely matter—the book was sacred because it was a survival of a long-lost time in our own time. Although it is not a palimpsest in the way Harris describes, but its interaction with time is not past or present, but both/and.

The foam and the rules of the reading room acted in a scriptive way, similar to the effect Cavell describes in the theatre; the setting encouraged us to interact carefully and reverently with the book. Not only did we feel that we were too inexperienced to handle the book properly, but we had some difficulty finding the kind of manuscript we were looking for. [Bernstein’s discussion of performance competency] We looked through two different catalogues and eventually chose our Book of Hours from a book the librarian provided that commemorated the Lilly Library's 50th Anniversary.  Without the historical information in this text, Gilding the Lilly, A Hundred Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts in the Lilly Library, we would have had little to no performance competence with the manuscript.

— Photo by Sara Taylor.

The second perspective we considered was that of the medieval reader of the Book of Hours. Hodgdon and Wexler were important to our methodology in interpreting this reader’s performance with the book. The image is teaching the reader the proper way to mourn, so the performance of mourning is scripted in a literal way by the prayer (which may be in the book) but the illustration showed the reader how to dress, stand, and feel. We connected this to Wexler’s discussion of sentimentality in photographs, which also teach us to normalize and script our reactions to everyday life. Hodgdon is also helpful in allowing us read photographs, which we extended to our reading of this image. These images are visually coded in a way that is no longer easy for us to read—for instance, the image of the Holy Spirit as a bird, or Mary kneeling to be crowned are not as accessible to us without study. The funeral image may signify a much more specific scene that we can casually read. We assumed that the book mainly performed an instructive function for the medieval reader.

Course Blog 12: 2nd Responder (Jennifer to Andrea)

Andrea: In what ways does the object incorporate untimely matter through supercession, explosion, and conjunction? (from Harris' analysis of the Archimedes Palimpsest)

Definition Notes: 

Supersession: New layering over old in a palimpsest of progress (21)

Explosion: Old is not lost – it can intervene and affect the present; “antagonistic”  (22)

Conjunction: current contains ancient in a way that “literally touches”  and engages in “untimely dialogue”

Analysis of Roach:  

Roach reads the practice of Mardi Gras krewe parades through a series of photographs and his memory of the last of the krewe parades. He claims that these krewes and other social clubs “promote a sense of timelessness based on their apparently seamless repetition of traditional roles” (Roach 18). Therefore, he is reading their performances as conjunctive. The costumes, schedule, route, and even reactions of the audience are scripted by the tradition: “Every year there is a new Rex and a new King Zulu, and every year they are supposed to look and act as they always have” (19). To this end, he chooses images from 1991 (19), 1971 (22), and 1940 (23). This implies that the date of the picture is irrelevant (one isn't even dated at all) – each of the images will be the same. However, they are conjunctive because they concurrently exist and interact with each other and the modern world in an “untimely dialogue” about issues of race relations in a contested space (Harris 22).

Blog 10: Comments on Jenna's blog (Andrea)

One of the most important framing questions of Jenna's blog is the "role that naming plays in personal identity and character creation." She considers the consequences of naming first from a personal perspective, examining why she was given her own name and the ways in which that name has shaped (or been shaped by) her interest in Arthurian myth and Shakespeare. But this discussion of personal naming introduces a larger issue of fictional names and how they affect the identity of the character: "Why is Hamlet named Hamlet? Does he feel any more or less indebted to the ghost because he was named after it? Is there a difference in being named Ophelia rather than Gertrude?" (Hello, my name is...) In another post, she ponders one of the great Shakespearean boating dilemmas of our time: Why would anyone get in a rowboat named Ophelia? This odd photo leads to a discussion of the ways these characters' names are used, and sometimes ignored.

In her post, Election Day, Jenna recalls a visit to the Tower of London and describes the ways in which that space was used to evoke a specific response in the visitor. This involved the use of several different scriptive things, such as a voting booth that was lit so as to favor one of the choices, and an eerie soundtrack of ghostly children's voices that encourages the visitor to think of that specific room in the Tower as the site of a murder. Her response to these stimuli was also reminiscent of Bernstein's transgressive performer--feeling manipulated, she deliberately voted against the highlighted choice. The blog itself is also scripted partly by the plays of Shakespeare. Quotations appear in multiple posts, and many of Jenna's reflections are inspired by or supported by her knowledge of Shakespeare. The plays seem to function for her as scriptive things, both in their physical form as books and as remembered performances, inviting interaction and engagement and shaping her discussions.

As a viewer of the blog, the images in particular invite performance. They seem to be Jenna's own pictures rather than photos taken from elsewhere online, which significantly changes my reaction to the posts. Because the pictures are her own and they are accompanied by fairly detailed and personal descriptions of where and when they were taken, they invite me to see beyond their frame and place myself in the room where the voting booth stands, or the harbor in Stratford where the Ophelia boat floats. The layout and appearance of the blog were simple and appealing, and the blue color and simple design of the background encouraged me to see it as personal and accessible, which it was. I've enjoyed reading a little about Jenna's love of Shakespeare, and I hope to read the continued chronicle of her trip to Stratford, Ontario, which she promises. I especially hope to see and hear more about her interest in Arthurian legend, as it is one that we share.

[Lusk's view of] The Blog Of Andrea or, A Dictator’s Manifesto

[Dictator as in ‘Someone who dictates’, not the Castro persuasion.]

I’m giving this the optional title of the Dictator’s Manifesto because a) it’s funny and b) Andrea mentions The Dictator’s Book club in her very first post so I wanted to pay homage to that.

While reading Andrea’s blog I found myself nodding my head a lot. How wonderful! Someone who thinks like me. And then there were blogs that I sort of turned my head like a confused dog because she was talking about Medieval subject matter. But she did so in such an engaging way that I was able to easily follow along. I thoroughly enjoyed this different perspective on the subjects we’ve been discussing in class. Andrea has a wonderfully eloquent way of expressing herself with carefully selected grammar and well-crafted sentences. I do not have this gift. I often run out of patience when I spell check, let alone check for good vocab usage. But, she proved me wrong in the sense that… I find it damn near impossible to write scholarly and keep things fresh and engaging. And she has. I suggest she start offering lessons. I’ll be the first in line.

So, the blog. There are two elements that I want to focus on in Andrea’s blog and that is her Initial Emotional Responses and her Investigation of said responses.

When I first started reading the blog I found that our thinking seemed very similar, in that she responded with how she feels. Her most recent post that discuses Awkward Family Photos was fantastic. And what I love about that topic, and something I’m interested in, is that the franchise of the Awkward Family Photos is successful because of the Initial Emotional Response that it creates with it’s audience.  I think it’s wonderful that as soon as an image loads on our computer, no matter how long we wait for the Internet to load faster, we know that we are going to laugh when we connect all the pieces of that picture. I’m interested in this as a writer and how can we translate image to test and (as a playwright) back to image. Andrea takes this one step further. She doesn’t just stop and the reaction she has (which I assume was nothing short of hysterical laughter) like I do. But instead investigates it further. She asks questions. She ends her blog with the observation that it seems in Cosplay, men get more opportunities while women seem purely sexualized. She brings up the issue of race and why isn’t there a black family in medieval garb? (It’s not like they’re going for accuracy.) So I appreciate immensely this further investigation on reaction. It’s wonderful.

The moment that I fell in love with the blog though was September 27’s post. The first sentence declares: “I hated Don Giovanni.” This is the kind of writing that I love. I struggled throughout this semester with the readings because I felt like I had to sift through so much to get to what the writer was trying to tell me, what their opinion on the subject was. And here, Andrea nailed it down. She hated Don Giovani. Period. End of discussion. Yes, she goes into wonderful detail of all the factors that made her feel this emotion… but at the end of the day, guys. She hated it! But again, this was another moment that I could truly learn from Andrea’s style of blogging. She didn’t just go on a two-page rant on how Opera is justifying this elitism in art (like I did in my blog). She used her personal experience and justified why she felt this way in a very sensible manner. She took everything to task. The script. The characters. The actors. Even her seating may have had something to do with why she disliked this production so much.  It was a tremendous articulation on her initial response.

As the blog continues I felt like I was sitting down with Andrea. Her voice shined through that Blogspot with crystal clarity. Her attention on her reaction to events (the man who needed a stretcher at the lecture, 9/11, child actors, etc) was well versed and well focused.

This blog, I’ve come to the conclusion, is a great example of how I wanted my blog to be. This is a class on performance studies. What Andrea successfully has done in her blog is look at her reaction as an audience member to certain performances and analyzed it. She studied the performance by studying herself as an audience member. I did not do that. I acted purely as an audience member and if I didn’t like something. I said it. And if I liked something. I gushed over it. Andrea was able to extrapolate on this duality that is within us all. She let herself have the reaction as an audience member, and then, as a performance studies ‘investigator’, dissected her reaction so she could further understand why she felt that way.

So Kudos, Andrea! For a fascinating and fun time. I was learning and didn’t even know it. It was like Zoom! on PBS. (Do you remember that show? Ah. That show was so cool. I wanted to be on it so bad.)

PS. There is so much that I didn't focus on that Andrea worked hard on in her blog. This connection between science fiction and Medieval garb fascinates me and I think the conversation they are in together is very exciting. 

Response to the Bloggers of Prompt 5

The blog posts were highly engaging, and I’m writing one post to react to them in general, because I saw several connections between them. Regarding sincerity, Jenna draws our attention to the title, suggesting that the audience knows ahead of time that the characters have been dealt an injustice, and the audience is already primed to believe in the characters’ innocence, and thereby judge their words sincere. Audience predisposition indeed seems an important factor. Just as important is the audience’s reaction to the performance itself. Ming, Justin, and Jennifer each pointed to the importance of the telling of the stories, rather than the over-emotionalized recreation or re-living of the events, as essential to the creation of a sense of sincerity within the performance of the play. I felt the same way—that it’s best to just tell the story rather than preach at the audience. Just as Blank and Jensen write “trust the stories” (xvi), I would add trust the audience.

Ming wrote of her reaction to the focus on the dialogue, which showed us that things weren’t fair, thus eliciting an emotional response in her. Justin also wrote about how the play focuses on dialogue, referring to the way Blank and Jensen pointedly do not follow Dawson’s Unity of Piscatorian Stage Devices, suggesting that to cover the stage with realia would have been cliché and resulted in a weakening of the authenticity of the play. I agree—the use of such realia would seem too self-conscious and detract from the story. It might even seem like the director was trying too hard to convince the audience that the stories were real, thus making the audience doubt the “truth” of the performance. The sparse set allows the audience to focus more on the words, the stories of the characters themselves. The audience can see the contradictions and the hypocrisy become apparent through the simplicity; the simplicity enhances the sense of sincerity. The dissonance between what we’re taught about how the system works and the way the system is shown to actually work is thus all the more powerful—especially when this gap is exploited by Rhodes to harm Sunny and Jesse (36). The audience also sees the dissonance they are feeling played out on stage in the characters who trust the system and are betrayed by it, such as Gary (30-31) and Sunny (43). It’s also felt when David’s prosecutor lies (44). The sense of sincerity felt by the audience does indeed contribute to the feeling that what they see is the truth. I’m not sure if Jennifer is equating the two when she writes “sincere/True” in her post, but I can see her point that the play’s simple telling of these six stories, because they are mediated and crafted, is not so different from Herzog manipulating facts to lead an audience to a realization of larger Truths. I’m not sure about the role of humor in creating this effect, but I do like Jennifer’s use of the phrase “dramatic testimony” to describe the play.

Would celebrity actors cause the “dramatic testimony” to feel less sincere? Would celebrity actors make it easier for spectators to “lose [their] sense of these characters as real people”, as Andrea asks? Would celebrity actors be distracting or would using them provide the distance necessary for theatricality? As Jennifer suggests in her post, I think it would draw the audience’s attention to the fact that it’s a set of stories being told to them second hand by actors. Rather than interpreting this as “an unproductive or unpurposeful phenomenological rupture,” as Justin posits in his post, I suggest the opposite: that the recognition of the celebrity would be beneficial because it would prevent the audience from slipping into the error of conflating the actor with the character—and it would thereby create the space necessary for the audience to engage in the process of theatricality. Here’s where the issue of trusting the audience comes up again. Create the conditions for theatricality and trust the audience to make meaning.

This brings us finally to the question of the role of theater, something that Ming deals with in her post. She questions whether people go to the theater “to take part in moral decisions,” asking “why is the best thing about theater a discussion about right and wrong?” She wonders whether this is because theaters are nominally secular cultural sites, in contrast to religious houses of worship such as churches, which therefore allow an audience more freedom to both have a moral reaction and to “consider the reasons why”—and I would add, for themselves. This seems reasonable. From a Marxist perspective, houses of worship seem like they can easily be places where ideological dogma is received uncritically by an already-receptive audience (this is not necessarily the case in reality), whereas a theater is potentially freer of such a dynamic (ideology is present in theater, too), thereby allowing more room for alternatives in terms of what is being presented (no dogma dictates what the priest preaches, or even whether there needs to be any preaching!), and also more room for interpretation, decision-making, and meaning-making by the critically-aware spectator observing the theatricality unfolding before them.