Class Notes - 12/04/12

Began with Group Discussions concerning Abstracts for the Work to Come

-readers are to provide feedback from the perspective of a professional evaluator

-attempt to learn what it takes to create a successful abstract and what it means to be a productive reviewer of such scholarly documents

After Group Discussions:

Amy: excited by the Abstracts for the Work to Come; let’s go around the table and briefly describe each of our projects and share some of the feedback that we received during the group discussion

Dorothy: abstract pertains to a film project that traces perceptions of blackness in America through comedy; Andrea’s feedback brought up the question of popular opinion and how it is affected through various objects of study

Andrea: abstract focuses on an 18^th Century poem cycle fraudulently claiming to be Medieval – reading this as a performative text, as the author set to reverse English perceptions of Scottish people by presenting the poem cycle as ‘old’; feedback pertained to finding an appropriate to integrate historicization into the scholarship

Derek: abstract centers on the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike using many of the theorists discussed this semester; also drawing on Stuart Hall – see how representations of protest can close off meaning making and what strategies are used to combat that; Sara encouraged looking at an article related to the Rodney King beating

Sara: abstract looks at an alternative street theater movement in post-Soviet Poland; marked an instance of radical street performance as combating perception; how could such performance fight Soviet hegemony?; lots of newsletters are available surrounding the street theater (so know what the movement wanted), but not much exists concerning what actually happened and what change was effected; Derek pointed out that current viewpoints in Poland may be indicative of the change (or non-change) that was effected

Courtney: abstract concerning 1^st person character novels where the author is the protagonist; how does this position affect reader’s experience – if reader identifies with the narrator, is guilt felt in relation to that identification?; Cody helped clarify ideas surrounding identification and asked what it might mean if a reader did not identify with the narrator (would that be a source of guilt?)

Cody: abstract asks about performance as it relates to speechfulness or speechlessness and how these relate to audience response; speechless responses (eye rolls, sighs, etc.) are just as relevant as speech responses; suggestions involved looking at methodology (esp. concerning reader response) and considerations concerning gauging speechful or speechless response

Kelly: abstract relates to current concerns surrounding communication and its various occurrences; consider scene in the movie Bent; consider theater as a storytelling device – what happens if narrators explain what happens

Ming: abstract allows an opportunity to theorize about a past project; projects relates to the goal of selling an idea, but the idea must be defined clearly before moving forward; work has led to a question: is a safe space performed or enacted?; from feedback I now have clarity concerning what needs to be clarified

Jess: abstract continues research into the fat female body on stage (interest in ‘othered’ female bodies); does the actor’s body inform the character? (does a fat suit equate the fat body?); does what the actor looks physically matter if it does not match what is scripted?

Jenna: abstract gives an opportunity to follow up on thoughts generated during a trip to London this past summer; fascinated by the Tower of London which tries to manipulate visitors’ emotions (was Richard III guilty?); have an interesting way of organizing the museum product; Iris pointed out a dichotomy of thought within the project – must start in the middle space of the dichotomy and work outwards (dichotomy concerns traditional vs. new ways of organizing museum space)

Iris: currently writing a play dealing with issues surrounding rape and abstract deals with inspiration for this play that came from our reading of The Exonerated, which provided great ideas but did not have a clear call to action; Jenna talked about humor and how laughter can create an ‘in-group’ (does that automatically create an ‘out-group’?); must consider what creates sympathy

Jennifer: Whitney pointed out that the abstract idea is impossible but reflects a necessary area of study; want to know more about how we interact with texts; intrigued by a reverse-engineering of texts; consider a recent interactive version of Dracula; interested in texts created for specific spaces – how does a creative writer move into new technology?

Whitney: abstract explores the digital humanities; idea builds off the course and personal blogs maintained in class this semester; looking into how such blogs simultaneously construct the identity of their writers as well as an image of the digital humanities; Jennifer said to consider how blogs both use and replace traditional ways of doing scholarship and consider the options provided for editing in blog space that does not exist in traditional print media

Amy: like the idea of the possible vs. the impossible project; the impossible is useful to write down, as it can be equally valuable and lead to a thread that leads to the important project

Ellen: along with Amy, we are uploading comments to the abstracts directly to the course blog; encourage everyone to continue making comments on the blog; don’t forget, our next class will meet at Nick’s where we will talk about holes in the field.

Class Notes - 2012.11.27 (Derek)

2012.11.27  Class Notes

(As taken by Derek DiMatteo)

Ellen – today, discuss best practices, best methods of reviews.

Amy – we’ll break into two groups by way of breaking up the hegemony at this one table. Make small groups to engage with the review and the methodological “don’ts”.

Ellen – here are both Jones reviews.

[Class broke into two groups, one at each end of the table]

Group 2

[Talking about Black Watch review by Jones]

Jones thinks it is a culinary play and fails to address its politics. He codes his opinions in the language of the theater. Jones is operating under pressure from the newspaper, the theater community/culture/economics, and his own feelings about both the play and Scotland.

[came together]

Jennifer – reviewers seem confused about their audience and purpose (arbiter of taste, archivist). The reviewer might need to state who the audience is. These reviews tend to be full of nearly incomprehensible, elitist allusions.

Amy – when is it an ad-hominum attack benefitting only the reviewer?

Sara – this is a commercial product being done many years after its initial production. It has some problems, but it’s super cool and super fun. And it’s very coded. Shephard’s Pie is a wink and nod at Brecht—it’s made to be consumed, and is not close to Mother Courage. These things are past, though—should have been talked about in 2004. Should give it a little license now.

Andrea – hesitancy to ciritcize the play directly because it is about the military—so there is some cultural pressure.

Amy – Justin’s comment about the marketing. Related to the point of the reviews. There is a really horrible dysfunctional relationship btw NYTimes and the Theater District, considering the number of shows that paper has made or broken.

Justin – who your institution is makes the review differently important (e.g. grant writing).

Sara – anti-intellectual?

Dorothy – not anti-intellectual, but more Jones posturing above that kind of humor.

Ellen – it’s a totally inane understanding of what academic knowledge of this field amounts to.

Whitney – exclusive snarkiness. It’s isolating.

Dorothy – this is a good play for people who like bad things.

Amy – right—you have really poor taste…

Dorothy -- …I wonder what the Times thinks about Applebees.

Amy – it’s one thing to provide a vicious takedown of Spiderman on Broadway—saving people some cash. Same as with the restaurant review. The review gave me a really excellent sense of what eating in that restaurant would be like. Unlike the Jones review of Equivocation, which was just him being an asshole.

Ellen – The Weiss review had a lot in common with the Jones review in that both trying to be overly witty, just like the show. What they did/didn’t like about the show comes out stylistically. Genuine information is being conveyed in the level of style—can see better by reading several reviews by the same critic.

Dorothy – very zingy… snarky things can be made well if they have different layers of why you’re being snarky.

Ellen – the quality of that restaurant is the quality of hyperbole—that’s what he sells on TV and in his restaurants. And that comes through in the review by skewering that very hyperbole.

Sara – the reviewer takes offense that Guy is disrespecting his customers by serving them Applebees and calling it genuine. I had high expectations of you, and you gave us crap.

Ellen – the review is all about the cruel bait and switch.

Dorothy – it’s for customers that don’t want to go to Silvia’s.

Amy – [refs Whitney’s post] part of the role of the reviewer is the establishment of what gets your social standing. They see themselves as gatekeepers of high cuisine or high art.

Jennifer – Grand Forks Herald, woman reviews Olive Garden.

Amy – important distinction between derivative theatrical schlock and what is theatre. Role of reviewer is as reporter to acknowledge something happened and this is the quality and caliber of the experience I had.

Ellen – reviewers rehashed the story. What happens when the reviewer assigns praise? We are all in the business of assigning praise. Must learn to do it subtly. It is an art. The review is setting up a false paradigm for what is praise. It needs to be descriptive, mention what happened. Despite Conquergood’s first article (textocentrism) 40 years ago, still a problem. The notes they can rehash that are most stable is about the script. Demand for contextualization mentioned in Cody’s post. I’m interested to hear from those who witnessed the misogyny, etc. of that play.

Amy – how do we review without being in an ideological camp? Conservative in a certain way, but most plays are not. Where’s the line between articulating an ideological positioning of the play and making an ideological argument?

Dorothy – impossible for intelligent reviewers to avoid their ideological position in the reviews.

Ellen – his comparison to the mining business, not defending freedom. Not entirely in accordance with what BW was trying to engage in its initial performance; if that’s what it has been filtered down to, that’s alarming. Speaks to what happens when a play is several production-generations old. Jones is trying to not say something that is ideologically dangerous.

Class Notes 11.15.12 (Jennifer)

Class Notes

November 15, 2012

Readings: Andrea Witcomb, “The Materiality of Virtual Technologies” and Peter Walsh, “Rise and Fall of the Post-Photographic Museum”

Ellen: This is one of any number of exhibits we could look at as a way of discussing the articles we read and Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s article. This exhibit represents the painting of KG’s father, who learned to paint when he was 70 so that he could depict his Polish childhood before the Holocaust  - he had a recognition that his history would die with him if he didn’t preserve it. It became a visual history, something similar to the AV book we saw in Indianapolis. It’s a virtual tour of a site that is now entirely virtual. Brings up some of the questions we discussed last time – this turn in museology toward experience + preservation and how that deviates from the historical process of collecting and preserving facts and objects (such as walking through Jordan and looking the exhibits in jars).

Upcoming Blog

Amy: During the week after Thanksgiving break, we have a blog “The Review that gets it Wrong.” We’re going to post several reviews of Black Watch and Equivocation and what we’re hoping is that you will use them as a way to talk about what it means to get it wrong – to have been there versus those who read a report. If you didn’t experience either of those two, you should find several reviews on a performance you have seen and perform the assignment.

Ellen: This is a way of turning the assignment inside out. We hope your criteria for getting it wrong will be rich, more than “that’s not what I saw.” Rather, what were some of the underlying messages/ideas that could have led someone astray? How generous should you be to understanding this alternate viewpoint?

Amy: Also, to restate – the point of getting it wrong isn’t to contradict preferences but to me more thoughtful about what it means to get it right/wrong, what are the perspectives this person is bringing, what is his/her critical lens? I invite you to do a rich critique of the review you feel does it wrong on a theoretical, perspectival basis.

Ellen: Consider the issue of expertise as well.

Amy: Or to think about it historically. Taking a historical, theoretical remove rather than preferences.

Class Notes 11.1.2012

Ellen: Depart between 8 – 8:30 and stay until 1 p.m. (Will be going to Advanced Visualization Lab)

            Crowd-sourced review: The dance performance is on Sunday, so we all have to be there – I want each of you to offer 300 word reviews (short – a capsule review) – I want you to try to be cognizant of what is true, meaningful, and subjective in what you’re talking about. (These are all overlapping categories). The reviews should go up by midnight on Monday. Before we meet (on Thursday) I want you to sweep through the flight of reviews by your cohort and pull out what you find most true and meaningful, and from that I’m hoping we will pull together a crowd-sourced review. I will also write something to this effect up on the blog. We will talk with these reviews in light of Kirschenblatt-Gimblett.

            We don’t convene until the 8^th – we have two assignments: the previously mentioned dance performance. And then on Tuesday – document the lived performance of Election Day. Do a sort of ethnographic approach with an emphasis on whatever you run into in your day. You’ll probably need a camera (this could be phone) since it will be important to document -- pictorially and in other registers --what you experienced.  We haven’t indicated how that’s going to look blog-wise, but Amy and I will have an account on the blog by Thursday. This isn’t due till November 13. The assignment doesn’t assume that we will go to the polls – it’s just asking you to approach the day as a heightened moment. There are many ways to filter such evidence.

            Today’s talkers were asked to come in with some methodological approaches based on our reading and the blog posts. What do you have?

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.

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.

Class Notes - 10/25/2012

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; it’s not quite Brechtian, but it acknowledges subjectivity

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

Class Discussion Notes 10/25

Amy: Suggest we have a discussion of the “sublime” before moving to the “stuplime.” What is the sublime? Where have you encountered it before in your various fields?

Jenna: Interjection that the way I tell the difference between the two terms is the serifs on the “b” and the “p” – sublime, the “b” goes up and stuplime, the “p” goes down.

Cody: Kant makes a distinction between beauty and sublime. Beauty exists in objects and sublime is a reaction to the indescribable object or observed. Ngai’s term suggests more of a psychological reaction.

Amy: What’s central to that observation of sublime?

Cody: The experience of subjectivity.

Sarah: The earlier sense of the Kantian sublime is that the sublime isn’t contained within the object but it has to do with the subjectivity of the experience.

Courtney: On page 269, Ngai talks about the two competing effects of the sublime – shock and serenity.

Amy: Why are those two reactions important for her definition of the sublime?

Courtney: It goes back to Kant and these two distinct reactions.

Amy: Right. Having to do with the distinct experience of the perceiver of the sublime. Central for Kant is that shock and serenity. Also, an important removal from the object that inspires the emotion. Central in his account is the observer’s position as spectator. How can we think about that in terms of ideas of performance that we’ve talked about in class?

Jess: Certainly not Artaud. He’s not at all about safety and distance.

Iris: Would we say it’s more Brechtian then?

Sarah: Less Brechtian, maybe closer to Davis’ concept of theatricality. But the part about acknowledging our own subjectivity does seem related to Brecht.

Amy: But the sublime does seem to be more about vastness and serenity – there’s an emotional, trance-like aspect that might be anti-Davis. Maybe more like Berlant? There’s a spectrum of possibilities here, definitely. It’s the recognition of that which lies beyond the comrehensible, which seems more important for Berlant. Let’s shift to talk about the “stuplime” now using the blogs as a jumping off point. We’ll start with the examples you posted and try to backend into a definition of “stuplime.” So where does this manifest itself?

10/23 Class Notes

Ellen- The dramaturgy assignment was an impossible one. The idea behind it was to probe how to write about performance without failing to keep faith with what is critically productive. It relied upon knowing yourself, what you bring to a performance, and the standard to which you hold a production. A dramaturg has the opportunity to declare their loyalties while still being self reflective in a critically productive way that does not hold others' productions to their standards.

Class Notes 2012.10.16 (Derek)

Class Notes 2012.10.16

Prepared by Derek DiMatteo

Part I: At the Wells-Metz Theatre for RIII Talk

Director Gavin Cameron Webb talked to the class about his upcoming production of William Shakespeare’s Richard III.

He likened the experience to hypothetically directing an episode of The Daily Show 500 years after its air date: audiences wouldn’t know most of the references or what they represent. For example, the person Jane Shaw has no meaning for us today, but would have made everyone in Shakespeare’s audience laugh.

He discussed his decisions in terms of style and substance.

Style

He chose to use a motorcycle gang as the context for the play for three reasons. First, motorcycle gangs are more familiar to the audience and the actors than are courtiers and dukedoms. Second, the factions involved in the War of the Roses behaved very similarly to thugs and gangs. Third, this allows for the use of emblems, badges, and tattoos as signifiers within the play; e.g. they can put names on the back of the jackets of major characters, which will help the audience tell which side they’re on. “It sorts itself out visually for the audience.”

He stressed that despite using motorcycle gangs for context, this is not a modernization or modern equivalent of the text. They will just use the motorcycle motif to convey what the play is about. Most of the rest of the play will be as Shakespeare wrote it, with few exceptions (e.g. brutish weapons instead of swords).

The set is made of corrugated fiberglass and iron. They moved the seating to enable the use of the theater’s pre-existing balconies and catwalk, but needed to add a spiral staircase.

Substance

The play is a lie, historically. Shakespeare took the Tudor propaganda (written by Thomas Moore) and wrote the play. Moore had been tasked with depicting RIII as monstrous because HVII needed his reign legitimized. Apparently, RIII was none of the things he is depicted as being in Shakespeare’s play (e.g. not deformed, not evil).

Because of where the USA is in its presidential election cycle (2012), they decided to include a video screen that will act as a fact-checker to illustrate the truth in contrast to the historical lies presented in the play. The goal is to show how effective propaganda is, since this play remained relatively unchallenged for over 450 years. “Tell a lie often enough, it becomes true.”

They also wrote a prologue to tell some of the background, specifically information that comes from the end of HVI, which will be included in this production through the character of Queen Margaret, ghosting around the catwalk overhead, and through her dialogue.

Question and Answer

Whiney asked about what changes he made to the play. He replied that he cut parts that don’t advance the action, don’t reveal character, or are repetitive. The play is now down to about 2 hours instead of a potential 3.5.

Ellen asked how the motorcycles will be included. Would they be ridden on stage? He replied that the motorcycles would be evoked using sound effects and by the way the actors move (e.g. walk as though they had just gotten off after a long ride). This is a matter of choreography of post-cycling.

Jenna (?) asked about costuming. He replied that the nobles would wear leather, including the women, but that the chorus/extras would be in business attire. “The costumes are not meant to evoke any period at all.”

He then mentioned that they would use sound effects for beheading and spiking. Also that the soundtrack is based on a custom-modified version of NIN’s Ghost Tracks, which were released to the public freely downloadable and modifiable (all source files provided).

Part II: In the Classroom

Dramaturgy Casebook

Next major project is a dramaturgy casebook. Each student is responsible for 1 page of the casebook. Focus on one thing/image/idea or particular approach that you think is important for staging a production today. Review Levin’s article for the parts where he discusses the role of the dramatug.

Class Discussion

Amy – Let’s focus on the readings. We’ll start with Crane. Can someone start us off with a brief articulation of part of her argument?

Jen – she focuses on the etymology of words used to describe performance, showing how they were different from the vocabulary we use today.

Amy – This is a critical terms approach familiar to us from Davis.

Andrea – She focuses on embodied performance

Jen – She keys in on New Historicism.

Amy – What does she offer instead of New Historicism?

Jess – p.170, Shcechner and Turner

Jen – She continues looking for the right approach on p. 171, discussing cognition.

Ellen – Yes, it’s a Davis-like move to recover the etymology. The key is the shift to The Alchemist.

Jen – shows the complexities of how they view performance.

Ellen – the play mocks or undermines the way theatre works.

Amy – what does she say about performance and exercise? See p. 172, bottom.

Cody – There’s a degree of materiality to performance.

The difference in the way talked about = difference in way thought about.

Interesting nexus of historicism and a cognitive scientific approach. She’s resuscitating a conceptual difference between how we/they think about what we now think of as performance. There was not a sense of representation being enacted in the theatre. This is different from how we are used to thinking of what was happening in this period.

Ellen – Look at the bottom of 183, top of 184. Imagined structure – we have the power to imagine these things differently. Build a theory of theatre from the ground up. Something imagined can have material effects. Crane notices material consequentiality and integrates it. Teleology doesn’t exist in social hierarchy—no self-fashioning into a higher status (e.g. into nobility), although the business-wealthy are sometimes indistinguishable when on the street. No single unitary understanding of how performance works.

Amy – A different understanding of cognition. Exercise of the brain…it’s an embodied experience.

Ellen – similar move as in Davis, with regard to the etymological investigation. … In Looking for Richard, Al Pacino absorbing onto himself everything is similar to RIII doing it.

Amy – The power of casting. The way the actors’ bodies are being “performed” (made), altered and altering, when they take on those roles. As if Pacino decided, well I’ll just “borrow Shakespeare’s authority to rocket myself up a few notches in respectability.”