Course Blog 21: Wrong Review, Jones "Black Watch" (Jennifer)

Chris Jones’ review of Black Watch for the Chicago Tribune falls short due to his miscalculation of his audience. Consider his statement that, “on this second viewing of ‘Black Watch,’ I was struck not only by how organically Hoggett makes soldiers dance, without us realizing he is doing so, but by how well the show captures existential themes.” Jones' comparison is irrelevant for most of his readers. Plus, his terms are unclear and elitist. 

Jones' comparisons are for an audience who is considering seeing the production again, as Jones did, not for those considering seeing it for the first time. This is clear as he begins the review with an extensive consideration of the previous production in Chicago and notes the altered U.S. position in Iraq/Afghanistan since then. He also compares the current and previous casts to an unnecessary degree. This is particularly ineffective because, while Black Watch is nationally touring, it isn’t a theatrical icon/blockbuster like a Shakespearean tragedy or Lion King. There are numerous people who have never seen it.  So, by comparing it to a previous performance, Jones does not provide the type of information valuable to a reader of the Tribune, which has a general audience. His review is more appropriate for a blog or periodical geared towards aficionados of theatre.

Jones should concentrate on revealing this play to new viewers. He should consider using precise and evocative language, rather than jargon, to identify why a casual theatre-goer should make this a must-see. For example, when he mentions the “organic” nature of the dance, he could describe what he means by “organic” and perhaps create a verbal image of a particular dance or movement that achieves it.

Sidenote:  Jones should also avoid relying on cultural clichés and turns of phrase to reference the “Scottishness” of it all (“have its Scotch pie and eat it too”; “I headed out towards the St.Andrew’s pub”). 

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.

Course Blog 20: AdWorld (Jennifer)

I documented my day on my personal blog, so you can view the non-event of being an absentee voter there. What I will most remember about Election 2012 is the inundation of images, stories, ads, and editorials that were in yards, in my mailbox, on my television, in phone conversations, etc. Since I wasn't voting in person, I only saw this detritus without seeing the civic event itself. This means that for the past six months, while I've felt immersed in the drama, the actual day seemed rather anticlimactic. Therefore, rather than focusing on the day of the election, I'd like to shift attention back to where most of the action happened: the race.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, as part of her list of descriptors for today's museum, says that it can be an "artifact to be displayed in its own right, along with its history, operations, understandings, and practices." Therefore, I want to preserve an important artifact: the targeted advertising. Since advertising is becoming increasingly important and diverse, I anticipate Disney will create an AdLand park in the near future, one element of which will dedicated entirely to political advertising, with a special exhibit for Election 2012.

Image of Disneyland's theme park (as edited by me to add AdLand) originally from a teacher's blog. 

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett also mentions the trend, as we saw in the Center for History's living photos on Prohibition and the polio vaccine, of "experiential" exhibits. As an instructor, I've found that the more active and invested students are in their education, the more they learn and enjoy the process. Therefore, I am happy to jump on the experiential bandwagon. One of the trends I've noticed in museums lately have been what I'm going to call "self-identifying" exhibits. For example, Kohl's Children's Museum has an exhibit called "All About Me," where you can "find out more about your likes and dislikes, your abilities and qualities, and find out what makes each visitor special and unique." Children can record their own voices, see themselves from various angles, and build bodies onto a skeleton. I remember that one of Chicago's large museums also ran a similar exhibit, but with more of a tech angle. The IUPUI's Advanced Visualization Lab showcased a four panel 3D screen, which would be a perfect way to integrate these various pieces into an exhibit about the targeted advertising campaign of the 2012 election.

Course Blog 19.2 (Jennifer)

Is walking dance?

Courtney on “Esplanade”: These informal movements urge the question “Is walking dance?” and hint at what Reason and Reynolds call the “clichéd response to modern art, ‘I could do that myself’” (“Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures,” 59).

Sara: There is no beauty much less propriety in the tumble on the mattress without first witnessing the beauty in the walk for the bus. As a retrospective, I was happy to begin with Taylor and ponder the journey from formalism to expression, youth to age, public to private.

My note: I hadn't considered the importance of the walking prior to reading these two responses, but Courtney and Sara's idea rang completely true. They gave me an "Of course! It was about walking! Why didn't I get that?" moment. 

Course Blog 17, Group 1: Foster

The purpose of Foster’s article is to show the underlying power structures between the observed and observing bodies. She premises this argument on eighteenth century French philosophers Condillac and Du Bos’s conceptions of the body. She then extrapolates those ideas into a Foucauldian argument regarding Feuillet’s dance notation. She says that the notation divided bodily movements into approved and controlled motions: “Within such a space, neutral bodily features and motions, such as those identified by Feuillet notation, operated to confirm the existence of an absolute set of laws to which all bodies should conform” (88). 

Foster argues that this conception of the body allowed colonizers to distance themselves from the sympathy generally evoked by another person. Instead of sharing in their pain as equal beings, the colonizer could be moved by the plight of the colonized subject and seek to “help” them improve (87). The sense of sympathy was compromised by the colonizer’s ability to view the space between them and the body of the Other as under his or her control/remediation.

She shows the modern repercussions of her argument by framing her article with a 1971 journal entry by Yvonne Ranier, a choreographer and filmmaker. According to Foster’s interpretation, the entry shows Ranier’s unconscious position of power over the Indian performer she was observing (81). While Foster states that she’s not trying to “catch” Ranier in any way, she claims that using Ranier as an example allows her to show an unacknowledged process, one that needs to be interrogated further in order to re-choreograph.  Her conceptualization of the observer as possessing power over the observed is the most useful part of her argument for our course. Thus far, we have primarily considered the effect of the performance on the audience, but this reorients that discussion. It also returns us to the accusatory sections of Artaud’s work, in which the actors accuse the audience: “You feel the discomfort of being watched and addressed, since you came prepared to watch and make yourselves comfortable in the shelter of the dark” (13). This is underlined by our reading of Davis, who explains that the determination of a performance’s theatricality is in the hands of the audience, that implies that the audience’s gaze is exerting a form of power on the performer.

This is not a new concept, as the power of the colonizing gaze was discussed by post-colonial writers including Franz Fanon and Homi Bhaba. I’m sorry that I don’t have the original citation for this, but my notes mention that Bhaba was particularly concerned with this in his essay “Of Mimicry and Man” in which he explored the role of the colonizer on the colonized’s behavior (Fanon claimed such mimicry was more superficial). For example, author Salman Rushdie is often faulted for writing his book Midnight’s Children, a testament of Indian semi-history, in the language of the empire that caused much of the strife that led to the novel’s centerpiece, the Partition. So, while Forster claims that Ranier’s behavior, her unconscious mimicry of the Indian performer’s bodily movements, is a remnant behavior from the 18^th century conception of the empowering gaze, it could as easily be an acknowledgement of the performer’s power to inspire Ranier’s sympathy and mimicry. This could be a flipping of the historical power relationship between the European and Asian. In any event, the way in which the observer/observed relationship can inspire a complex web of sympathetic relations certainly has applications to more formalized performances.

*** Addendum ***

As for the Reason & Reynolds article, I agree with Ming that the authors may be trying to use a data-driven approach to underline truisms (people who have decided beforehand that they don't like ballet, don't like ballet [57]; people respond to dance in a variety of ways; etc.) . They frontload their article with a description of their methods, but they constantly remind their readers that this is not a definitive research method. They question the honesty of the responses, they mention that their study can't be entirely comprehensive, and they note the limitations of their sample. However, within all that, I think their description of kinesthetic empathy is helpful.

Kinesthetic empathy via Reason & Reynolds may actually be a better explanation for Ranier's behavior in the Foster article than the one Foster proposes. While Foster seeks to understand subconscious, historically based cultural responses to performance (Ranier), Reason & Reynolds study the individual: "It was vital in considering what people said about watching dance that we knew the perspectives from which they spoke, including levels of experience in watching dance, of taking dance classes, and dance training, and that we differentiated between different styles of dance" (55). Reason & Reynolds aren't look for deep-seated cultural practices as much as personal life knowledge and training and what impact that has on reception. Their sharing of the audience's responses is helpful and implies a respect for all kinds of viewing, irrespective of that person's cultural capital - a term they borrow usefully from Bordieu.

Also, their sense of the power structure is more complex from Foster's. The viewer is moved by the performer's virtuosity and grace, which implies that the performer holds a sort of power over the viewer (60). However, the viewer's emotional responses to the dance could also be because the viewers are "projecting [their emotional responses] onto the movement" (67).  In any event, "experiences of embodied and imaginative connection between the self and the other...can be considered in terms of kinesthetic 'empathy'" (71). This acknowledges that the connection can exist in a positive way, but it need not exist whatsoever. Also, should the connection exist, it need not be a destructive one for either party.

The fact that all of these responses are presented as valid is probably the most useful point for our class. Whether viewers engage in the trance, are offended, or are inspired to a state of stuplimity, each response is appropriate (not like the rube rescuing Desdemona or the misuse of Bernstein's cut-out). Finally, this article does offer one way of studying the repertoire rather than the text - interview those who have experienced it and see what they think. 

Richard III Casebook: Jennifer, Pacing

In our meeting with the director last week, he emphasized the need to trim down Richard III in order to make it more manageable for the modern stage. If the lines didn’t advance the action, reveal character, or show relationships, or if it they were repetitive, they were cut from the play. As the second-longest play after Hamlet, Webb - and many other directors -- are compelled to streamline.  However, the pacing of Richard III is vitally important to the overall operation of the play, and when I go see Webb’s production, I will be particularly interested in how he “advances the action” without losing the characters’ personalities and perspectives.

A good number of reviews of recent productions have complimented the speed with which the play moves, in spite of its long running time. “Posner directs this epic of evil with a sure hand and snappy pacing that holds the attention despite its length,” says a review of a San Diego production. “Briskly paced and sensibly edited, this ‘Richard III’ is relentless in its march towards its anti-hero’s tragic, self-inflicted destiny,” says a review of the most recent Chicago Shakespeare Theatre production of the play in 2009. No wonder Ian McKellan’s version (and others) have relied on militaristic motifs; the “marching” has a logical context. 

However, if the play goes too quickly, the modern audience will lose the sense of character and a clear understanding of why these people want each other dead. Webb explained that modern audiences don’t grasp the vital meaning of the various character names, so that information needs to be provided in other ways (sets, programs, additional lines, etc.). This has consequences. The 10 minute BBC cartoon version of Richard III certainly leaves a lot to be desired. More significantly, in a performance that was taken on the road by the Public Theatre’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit this August, the play was brutally cut down to 90 minutes. Charles Isherwood, the NewYork Times reviewer, was generous in nearly all respects, but took issue with the consequences of such pacing:

The abbreviated running time is naturally designed to appeal to audiences that rarely encounter Shakespeare . . . Still . . . shearing it in half inevitably makes for some uncomfortable shortcuts. While all the big set pieces are here . . . many scenes have been severely abbreviated or modestly refashioned. . . As a result the ambitious Richard dispatches foes and friends alike with a speed that is almost disorienting and on at least one occasion, a little confusing. 

Clearly, this production erred too much on the side of audience comfort/expectations and ended up damaging the play’s logical structure.

In contrast, a Richard without the powerful drive can reveal underlying weaknesses in the characterization. Of a controversial production at the Globe this past summer, reviewer Michael Billington of The Guardian said that “This is not the usual Richard: a symbol of active, energetic evil in the tradition of Olivier and Spacey. Instead [Mark] Rylance comes before us as a withdrawn, slightly apologetic figure as halting in speech as he is in gait.” However, this clashes with the “vituperation of the other characters” to the point that “Rylance's butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth approach to the role makes Richard's bad publicity a bit hard to explain.”

Therefore, the play must allow Richard to march through deaths and destruction, without inspiring us to lose count of the characters as quickly as he does. To pull from Dorothy Sayers’ novel Have His Carcase, “Richard [is] two men in one . . . One of ‘em’s a wormy, plotting sort of fellow and the other’s a bold, bustling sort of chap who chops people’s heads off and flies into tempers” (242-243) A good production will strike a balance between the two.

Richard's Body

As Hodgdon points out, one of the keys to the play is Richard's body; however, McKellan "masks [his deformity] by a perfectly tailored fit." Hodgdon gives this a generous reading, but I think it detracts from one of the key elements of Richard's character: his unadulerated evil. As The Riverside Shakespeare says in its prefatory material to the play, "As a Machievel who takes evil for his good, and whose twisted body signifies his moral nihilism, Richard...is not a good man who, when tempted, falls, and who, when fallen, hopes to find redemption" (750). Rather, Richard is just a bad, bad man.

Group Blog Post (Kelly, Jess, Jennifer)

“How true it is, that it is too late to catch the living form and face of our dear friends, and well illustrates the necessity of procuring those more than life-like resemblances of our friends, ere it is too late— ere the hand of death has snatched away those we prize so dearly on earth.”

Taking Portraits After Death. N. G. Burgess

From The Photographic and Fine-Art Journal Vol. 8, No. 3

March 1855 Page 80

The description of this item is brief. It is an ambrotype from the Woodward manuscript collection. The item is listed as an “interesting example of post-mortem portrait of baby along with a woven piece of hair.” Other images are listed as part of the collection, but these two objects, as they are listed in one sentence, are presented as a unit. Therefore, our group treated them as one item in two parts. In this way, the description scripted out treatment of the items (Bernstein’s idea of scriptivity; Phelan’s point that writing changes the performance) – we wouldn’t have considered them together otherwise.

Class notes 10.9.12 Berland and Phelan

Notes on Class 10-9-2012

Chicago Trip Discussion (Amy)

Rides: Ellen and Amy are driving and can take 3-4 people. Ellen is leaving Saturday night, even if it’s super-late. Amy is leaving Sunday midday. Both are leaving for Chicago on Friday. Please e-mail the person whom you would like to go with and let him/her know. Ellen and Amy will post schedule on Oncourse.

Hotel/Jennifer’s House: Amy will be doing hotels, or you can stay at Jennifer’s (704 Fox Street, LaPorte, IN 46350. Closest South Shore trains stop is Michigan City Carroll Ave.).  Amy volunteered to do a Priceline/room list in order to get a better rate. E-mail Amy details on what you’d like to do. Use Oncourse to see if anyone is interested in sharing a room.

Black Watch – be there at 7:30 p.m. – no intermission, no late seating. Amy will provide directions, but give yourself plenty of time.

Equivocation – Saturday at 4:00 p.m. (Prudencia at 8 p.m.) – will try to get tickets for those who said they wanted to go to Prudencia

Upcoming Class Logistics (Ellen and Amy)

We are meeting on Thursday in the Lilly to work with the objects and groups; be sure to file your item so we will have it available. Please let Ellen know if you have any questions.

Next Tuesday: meet at the Wells-Metz theatre to look at the Richard III set and chat with the director.

Next Thursday at 5:30 in the Studio Theatre Amy and Linda Charnes will be giving a talk about Richard III.

Phelan and Berlant

Whitney: Starting with Derek’s blog question: How does this object of analysis (opera|drama|scriptive thing|performance) function as culture, reproducing and re-creating itself by surrogation (i.e. by offering “a substitute for something else that preexists it”)?

Inspired by Roach’s discussion of memory, performance, and substitution, in which he argues that “performance…stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace” (3).

Whitney referenced Kelly’s image from “Angels in America’s” televised production – what happens when a performance still offers an impossibility for a stage performance? Upon questioning, she clarified that she meant it as practically impossible (perspective, effects, etc.), as well as – to some degree impossible from Phelan’s philosophy.

Dorothy: The cinematic connection is important – cultural memory of performance – translation from cinema to live – people come to think of what they see in film as a paragon – anything that doesn’t meet these qualifications fails. (Ellen: the Platonic idea of performance becomes cinema?) It can be for films that turn into plays.

Justin: This is always a production challenge – fitting your production into iconic images – this is where theatricality comes in. You can come at it from another way.

Jenna: You shouldn’t produce the play without having a way to do that iconic moment.

Ellen: Phelan says you can get the theatricality and the sublime – theatre has the potential of materiality, which is something film can’t offer.

Amy: Connections to Phelan – peroformance is subject forming in its disappearance. Did that point make sense to everyone? We’re starting at the end of her text. [Reads from article – performance becomes itself through disappearance.]

Iris: This reminds me of Sara’s earlier comment about live opera vs. recorded. I turned away from Phelan here – I almost don’t care about the fact that it’s recorded.

Kelly (and Iris): Recalled “Passing Strange” – and discussed whether those seeing it live saw anything different from those seeing it staged.

Ellen: Phelan is making a point that performance isn’t performance if it doesn’t disappear. If we try to make it more permanent we make it something other than performance. “The twain can never meet.” That’s an ontological claim, not about the pragmatics of doing research (Phelan’s doing recovery work). There are other strains to her claim. Why is it important to her that performance has this ontological distinction? What are her theoretical commitments to why performance needs to be separate?

Dorothy: Being unable to reproduce a discrete moment – liveness – is important to her. Could be as simple as the way we talk about viewing – saying “I saw ‘Passing Strange’” is different from “I watched ‘Passing Strange.’” Plus, you have control over the filmic versions that you don’t have when you’re in theatre.

Sara: Any attempt to document the performance in any way changes it – her great point. If you view a filmic version, it won’t change if you watch it.

Ming: Performance is also affecting the writing about it, according to her (p. 153, other/whys).

Amy: How does she get to writing? How does she incorporate the idea of the other? (148 quote “Performance in an ontological sense is nonreproductive).

Kelly: Every time you do a play, it’s different.

Whitney: She’s using “reproductive” in order to ease into argument of gender.

Cody: She’s referencing the Mother as “other” and the hidden genitalia. (Body-based analysis – women are commensurate with negation – none of the permanence.)

Ellen: Exactly – which is why she uses these particular examples in her figures. What is the evidentiary value here? She’s talking about performance art, and she’s talking about an artistic photograph, which isn’t performance, but it’s on the spectrum. Offer her a dense area of representation in which she can find her claims about gender. How are these images particularly meaningful for her? Is this an extending of Cody’s geneology .

Amy: She sets up her description of these performances by talking about the writing and the disappearance. Description of Festa piece on 156.

Dorothy: She’s talking about how we see.

Ming: She’s treating the objects as scriptive and what they have the viewer do.

Ellen: These are people who are not seeing. The body itself is irreducible to the forms of signification; it remains a blind/blank. Other forms of performance might not operate identically (gender/Marxist claims may not carry over). What is her context? Does that make a difference for her ontological claims?

Amy: Her description is amazingly detailed – she’s arguing across disciplines and doing it well. She’s simultaneously saying it’s disappearing and the writing is also a performance. She performs her spectatorship in her writing very clearly. How she’s making her argument is clearly important to what she’s arguing.

Ming: Is she writing toward disappearance?

Ellen: She has a theory that writing is constative. Does her analysis of these performances render them documented?

Dorothy: It reminds me of a performance art score – a paragraph.

Ellen: What is our distance from the faraway look in the eyes in the photograph? How extrapolate-able is Phelan’s response to the show and her generalizing from it?

Courtney: Could it be that since we only have her perspective that this references the subjectivity that comes from a performance? Not that that solves the problem of our access to it.

Ellen: This reminds me of the story she opens with – the French artist recording the missing images. She’s mining her own memory of a lost event and recording her perspective of it, which pushes toward the ontological questions she finds embedded in performance.

Whitney: Could we connect this to Berlant? It suggests this affective relationship.

Amy: Berlant starts by making strong claims. What does she mean by the affective event and how it works/what it is?

Whitney: What Phelan is doing is what Berlant is saying is a problem. Berlant would say that our current view of the communication of meaning/emotion is problematic. Phelan’s reading of the photograph is affective communication as mimetic- that transmission is performative. Berlant is calling for the idea that we can’t normalize something like this.

Ellen: What is Berlant ultimately looking for in terms of more nuanced theories of affective response, esp. traumatic/hard to watch phenomena?  (Especially in light of Wexler’s argument.) We need to read the affective cue as identical to affective uptake. 

Amy: Just because you see a moment of pathos on stage, that doesn’t mean the reaction needs to be mimetic. There is a desire for the reaction to be in line, but those of us with some slightly more performance competency might recognize that emotional reaction is slipperier than we often think. We need to pay closer attention to transmission.

Dorothy: This kind of argument against presumptive affect relates well to Phelan’s example. We are supposed to take her response as the valid response, but that’s inadequate. Anything that talks about the emotional response at any level – we should pay attention to the work it took to produce it.

Ellen: Just because you don’t take the required response – people who view traumatic events and the rolerize (take on the role) aren’t naïve/ignorant spectators. It’s not that something misfired – it’s that their mode of response is different from what we think is affective decorum. Such as Dolan’s piece and her trying to prove her decorous reaction to the event. There is a cultural impulse to homogenize, but we need to be aware that there is a broad range of responses.

Whitney: Bernstein argues that the image/scriptive thing takes into account that range of responses.

Amy: I think the difference is in the systems they are both responding to. Bernstein is talking about the dances possible with this thing. Berlant is talking about trying to distend/extend the space between the expected and actual reaction.

Courtney: Berlant allows for the possibility of no response, which Bernstein doesn’t.

Dorothy: This highlights the difference between a formalized and unexpected performance – you’ve gone to see something versus passing something that you didn’t aim to attend to.

Ellen: This has to do with the archive that Bernstein is working with: photographs.

Sara: Doesn’t meet her requirements for thing-ness either.

Cody: Why is section 2 required? Hemphill and Bush? How is it connected to the larger argument?

Natalie: It’s not just that there are different responses, but it’s not a cause and effect between seeing the thing and having a response; it’s a constant negotiation that has a lot of variables. The emotional response unfolds in time in a way that we’re not accounting for correctly.

Ellen: What she’s calling an affect response -- “feeling historical” – is an unusual mood. Already she wants to extend the repertoire. What is the value of thinking about thinking historically?

Amy: What is she pointing to? What joins them?

Courtney: It seemed important that this (231) was a “crisis lived within ordinariness.”

Dorothy: She’s working with idea of constant memorialization, but I’m with Cody –don’t know how that fits in.

Whitney: I was thinking about the temporality of this type of affect (thought of Harris). In order for us to think about cause not equaling affect – we need to move beyond linearity.

Amy: When Hemphill says “now we think/fuck” – what’s he talking about?

Cody: It’s a particular moment in history – they were constantly thinking while they were fucking – esp. black males – because of the prevalence of AIDS in news. I don’t know how to relate this to Bush aside from this larger historical understanding.

Ellen: Entry into a new traumatic moment seems to be shared for both. Unfolding the state of suspension – the ordinariness of living in trauma time. Can’t be a sustained articulation of Dolan’s “I’m a feeler.” We can all be extremely suspicious of George Bush’s qutotation; nevertheless, there is some similarity in that they are both thinking that is not thinking and suspends you a different affective terrain.

Dorothy: Problem is that the AIDS epidemic wasn’t consciously started – that represents a different situation.

Cody: Is there a larger stake in the way Hemphill/Bush are being compared?

Ellen: Berlant has a history of writing about political figures with whom she doesn’t agree. Aiming to talk about a more complex way of thinking. The subjectivity of the individuals seems to be a bit of a red herring. Iraq War/AIDS – both are trauma times, but they represent a state of exception that is prompted by fatality and risk.

Amy: She is also foregrounding that both of their claims to thinking as an affective statement. Thinking punctures the present moment in both examples. She’s trying to notice moments where thinking becomes a code for a kind of affective historical recognition – the stakes of the long term enter into our affective present through this concept of thinking about them.

Sara: What about Taylor’s moment of taking photographs out of her window? I’m uncomfortable with this idea of thinking/feeling being separate.

Ellen: 232 – full pgh – Taylor is providing the perfect example for this. That sense of thinking historical is exactly what she’s doing. This act of documentation isn’t a thought-through process.

Amy: This would be much clearer if you didn’t separate them in the first place then try to bring them together.

Sara: Is Taylor more in line of what Phelan is proposing then? Keeping faith with the ontology of performance’s disappearance?

Ellen: Not sure how we categorize the event.

Dorothy: Reflects on her (Dorothy’s) teaching of black face performances and the variety of responses from her students. “Stopping to think” and “having feelings” – you can turn either off, and you don’t necessarily turn them off.

Ellen: Berlant is trying to focus on a particular kind of “stopping to think” – one we don’t necessarily notice – it’s very low-level. If we recognize it, we will find, symptomatically, a lived trauma. An unconscious stopping to think, a reflective action, that points us back to the recalibration to the normal.

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).

Course Blog 11: Sofer, a prop, and "When the Rain Stops Falling"

Joe Stollenwerk as Gabriel York in IU's production

I read Sofer’s argument while also keeping in mind today’s prompt, which meant that I ended up focusing on an object with biblical overtones: the fish from IU Theatre and Drama’s recent/current production of Andrew Bovell’s “When the Rain Stops Falling” (sorry to copy you here, Justin). The image depicts the character Gabriel York  holding a fish that fell from the sky, just in time for him to make lunch for his estranged son, Andrew, whom he abandoned 20 years previously. “The odd thing is that [Gabriel] is in the middle of a desert and, in this fictional 2039, fish are almost extinct. So a kind of miracle begins the play,” says Bovell (emphasis mine) of this moment in an interview with Australian Stage. (To learn more about the plot, check out this page about the Lincoln Center production. Significantly, they also include an image of Gabriel holding the fish.)

Course Blog 10: Jennifer to Iris

Iris is using her blog, “Imaginary Circumstances,” as a way to chart her search for information and insight. She catalogues concepts that she’s encountered, words she’s learned, and her reactions to new art forms (opera).

Early on, Iris posted a wonderful response to Debord in which she compared his ideas regarding society and isolation to a Japanese toy flower called a Hanappa. Here, she was indirectly considering the idea of scriptivity, even before we had read about it. She discussed the way in which the Hanappa asked its owner to talk to and interact with it in order for it to “flourish.” (She also has a developing fascination with chairs as things, which I’ll discuss in a moment.)

Similarly, Iris has used this blog as a way to categorize her own responses to our readings. Each reading or performance scripts her reflection on her past experience as an actress, present experience as a student and playwright, and personal reaction as an empathetic human being. She follows this script by recording her reactions, considering them carefully, and noting any changes in her perspective. There is clearly an interaction between Iris’ conceptual development and the readings. For example, here is part of her entry on The Exonerated:

Worthen talked about using the theater to make meaning out of chaos, but I see no meaning here. I just see sadness. I feel that my job as a reader is not to make meaning out of this, but to experience the sadness, the sheer wrongness, of it all. In that way, I feel like "The Exonerated" doesn't really function as a play at all. It's another forum on tragedy.

Note that she first reflects on the ideas from the author (returning to an earlier concept), then uses her personal response to lead her into a consideration of other concepts we’ve discussed (audience responsibility), then to reevaluate her personal response, and she concludes with a considered statement integrating both.

At times, I think Iris knows that there are elements of the reading that are important to her, but she isn’t ready to fully integrate them into her worldview yet, so she copies out a quote, sometimes considers it, and sometimes lets it stand on its own merits. She probably returns to the quotations and considers them in light of the new ideas we uncover (see how she brings Worthen back in the earlier selection). Another example is how she is intrigued by Bernstein’s use of a chair to describe a person’s performance literacy and she also commented on States’ consideration of when chairs were first used on stage.   

I so enjoyed reading Iris’ blog all the way through – her thoughts on the readings, and her definitive reactions to the performances, were refreshing and enlightening. Thanks, Iris! 

Course Blog 8: Don Giovanni (Jennifer)

I'm sorry - I spaced on the fact that this was a full-class blog and just posted some quick thoughts on my private blog instead. I'll keep this short. I'm going to view the opera from the ideas of Auslander and Cavell, in an effort to explain what I thought was a "glamorously tragic" moment in the opera and why it worked.

 Auslander's consideration of the spectacle of glam rock is clearly relevant to the spectacle of Don Giovanni. As previous writers (Whitney, Kelly, et. al.) have mentioned,  "the set was obviously expensive, the costumes were lush, the special effects were insane" (Kelly). This recalls some of Auslander's descriptions of, for example, John's Children, who "dressed in dazzling white outfits, bounced hyperactively around the stage, became famous for destroying their instruments and equipment, but assaulted each other and ran through the audience" (47).  These performances are intended to amaze and, by amazing, engage the audience. Therefore, it is sensible that a scene's transporting power can be (although there are, of course, other methods) directly proportional to its spectacularity: the most characters, greatest plot tension, most beautiful scenery, most extravagant music, and liveliest action will lead to the greatest transport. (Simplistic, I know, but Auslander cares a great deal about excess.)

Let me give a precise example of the moment I believe meets these qualifications and underlines Auslander's point. During Scene 3 of the first act, the entire cast is on stage during the ballroom scene. There is a veritable orgy on stage among the peasants, the three maskers are dancing mechanically in a corner, and the tension between all of them is clear. Only Don Giovanni seems not to care about the violence nearly all his guests intend to inflict on him. As an audience member, I was waiting for someone to do something. This was engagement. Then Don Giovanni runs off with Zerlina, apparently to have (consensual? nonconsensual? See Iris' post about the difficulty to distinguish which.) sex with her. The Elmer Fudd Masetto was being kept in a corner by dancing girls. How do we save her? What to do? As Cavell points out, the fact that I was held back from running down four flights of stairs, up the aisle and into the wing to save her myself is relevant in itself and shows that I'm in a moment of catharsis: "what is revealed is my separateness from what is happening to them; that I am I, and here" (153-154). By being separate, I am joined with the rest of the audience, also separate. By feeling the desire to save her, I am involved.

P.S. To read the reverse, then, the scenes with the least spectacularity should be the least transporting. This is where my argument falls apart here, since some of the other strong scenes were far simpler (Donna Elvira's self-struggle on the balcony when she leaves with Leporello; the song between Zerlina and Masetto when she's asking for forgiveness). However, I only offer the Cavell+Auslander discussion as one effective way to create transport, not the only way. It seems to be particularly effective for opera, though, which is so "unsettled" that extravagance can somewhat mask its schizophrenic form.

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.

Addendum: Synecdoche not surrogate

I apologize in advance for what is far too long to be a blog post. 

In class today, I broached the idea that perhaps some of the diverse issues we have with taking a critical approach to 9/11 could be attributed to a rupture in Joseph Roach's theory of surrogation. I posit that we may have followed a course of synecdochial behavior instead, and this course is one that does not allow for distance and critical interpretation.

Let me begin with a reiteration of my understanding of Roach (please do let me know if I'm misrepresenting here). He argues that when a society suffers a loss - through death or absence - "survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates. . . . The process requires many trials and at least as many errors" (2-3). When this process is unsatisfactory, "selective memory requires public enactments of forgetting, either to blur the obvious discontinuities . . . or to exaggerate them in order to mystify a previous Golden Age." This process is a continuum and therefore involves steps forward and backward toward forgetting/accepting, toward creating a narrative of the time before the surrogation was necessary. 

Now, let's examine the process of remembering 9/11. As we discussed in class today, there was very little forgetting. Rather, images of the event (Debord-style) were everywhere, leaving the event open, fresh, and unsentimentalized. The memorials were representative rather than replacements: the twin lights shining up, pictures of the actual people who were lost, sculptures of falling people. These weren't surrogates - they were synechdoches. This is even clearer when one considers the fact that actual pieces of the buildings, twisted metal and concrete, were used for memorials around the country. True, there were also images of the first responders, so perhaps my model isn't perfect, but I maintain (with little data at hand) that those images are generally site-specific and represent specific groups of firefighters, specific people. (One exception would be this statue, but as it was commissioned before the attacks and adopted by the city in their honor, I'm not sure it fits either.)

Following this line of reasoning, we are never allowed distance from the event. When we see its representations, we see the actual event, the actual people's images, not their replacements (setting aside the argument that an image is a kind of replacement). Does this constant returning to the day, as opposed to the effects of the day, explain why we have trouble with critical distance? Just consider the way we've named it. We define it with data - the date 9/11 - not with a name like "D-Day" or "Pearl Harbor." A date invokes universality - a "where were you?" conversation. This is opposed to the name of a place, which is only as evocative as how well you know it. 

Harry Elam, Jr., in his entry to the Forum on Tragedy, discusses the fact that many of those who were lost were never found; the site became an actual tomb rather than a memorial (like the Vietnam War memorial, for example). He says that the "visible invisibility of this communal entombment captured our collective sensibilities" (102). I would argue that there is no invisibility - this entombment is always present, always visible. When we visit Ground Zero, we are visiting the dead. To return to Amy's question, I don't know that there is a shared language for such an experience, but if we ascribe to Roach's viewpoint, perhaps we should start with a process of surrogation? Perhaps we should rethink our images of the day not as towers and falling people but as something (I realize this is too vague to be productive) more abstract, yet still respectful and meaningful? 

Blog Prompt 4: 9/11 Role of the Witness

Particularly in the first two-thirds of Taylor's article, she struggles with her role as witness. She discusses the sense of displacement, of distance she felt from the public discourse. She and the others who hadn't lost anyone but who lived in New York were suddenly outsiders. "If this was a tragedy, we were not recognized as participants," she reflects (243). In all our talk in class about the role of the spectator/witness, we have yet to read a piece from the audience's perspective. This is as close as we've come to an audience member demanding what Brecht demanded as well; he wanted the performance "to have a socially practical significance" (122). Taylor and her peers wanted to be socially practical.

The formula should have been perfect. As Andrew Dickson writes in his piece on Rupert Goold's play, Decade, the attack was al-Quaida's performance: "an attack meticulously planned for live TV, a supreme, shocking piece of political theatre." This should have worked. The performance was offensive, it assaulted the senses (Taylor remembers the smell, sounds, feel, and atmosphere), it was performed naturally, and the audience was ready to be reflective, changed, productive. But no. As Worthen says in the "Forum on Tragedy,"earning our place in that tragic spectacle... isn't easy." 

Taylor walks us through the role of spectator in the days after 9/11: trying to help, trying to donate blood, trying to find the lost, trying to give monetary support, trying to be a part of it. In the end, she felt powerless. She simply photographed, as did everyone else.

Those of us not even in New York, not even old enough to vote, what were we? "It's always possible that there's nothing to learn about ourselves here, no recognition," Worthen posits then abandons. Cody asks the question, "Why should we, as Americans, be entitled to feel or experience any catharsis for the events of 9/11?" 

Like John Stewart, I wonder if perhaps my memory of that day is as superficial as eating cottage cheese under my school desk while people suffered outside my school walls (his memory of the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot). I was not the audience here. I was not the spectator. I am reading the archive of a performance that, while it certainly affected my world, was not performed in a theatre where I was present.