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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Course Blog 4: 9/11 and Realism. [Lusk]

I was in seventh grade when September 11th happened.
I went home sick from school early in the morning with a bad stomach ache... due to a history test that I just wasn't prepared for.
The nurses thought that perhaps I was feeling sick because of what happened.
When I asked what happened they told me.
I didn't know what the twin towers were.
And since we take Government in 8th grade, the pentagon was a mystery to me.

I laid on the couch watching the news with my mom that morning.
My mom was quiet the entire time. She wasn't sad. She wasn't angry.
She was confused. I think we were all confused.

The thoughts of, how could this happen?
IS this REALLY happening?
These are things that you just hear about... they don't happen to us.
It was (as Elam quotes Kushner's Angels in America) "very Steven Spielberg".

But this power of empathy Jill Dolan brings up in her article fascinates me.
Because that is not the reaction I had to this event at all. I understood what happened, yes. I understood that this was terrible- that much was clear. But, being such an immature human (development wise) I found my lack of empathy startling. Everyone was having the reactions that Dolan did. They would sit in silence with their eyes fixed on something in the distance, putting themselves in the employee's position, or the flight passenger's shoes. My father became angry with the mere thought of an instant of an impulse that these people had. My mother was frightened for the anticipated retaliation.

And I was still trying to make sense of it all.
I couldn't empathize. I could understand. But not empathize.

Dolan wonders if her training in theatre has conditioned her to feel this way: "Has performance trained me for such painful empathy? Here, I found the world stage the place that drew my subjectivity, that unsettled my presumptive security by putting me in the souls of the dying, imagining their choices, their resolve, their final moments."

What a fascinating thought. Perhaps this conditioning of realism that we discussed in class before, is something that could be harnessed for outside the theatre. Perhaps the method isn't for actors to perform their empathy, but to have that empathy to then understand, and then to act. 

Is there a danger for an actor to act their empathy?
It's true for them, but will it ring true for the audience?
What if one of the survivors is watching this performance? 
How ungenuine would that performance then become, if at all?  

It took several years for me to wrap my head around what happened that day. It took maturing and development. It took the desire to want to know. And the desire to empathize. And I remember one moment, very clearly, that clued me in on that day. 

I was going through my Ani Difranco phase (still am) and listened to her poem, Self Evident. 

It was this performance of her poem that finally helped me understand now what I could not then. It's an angry, upset, sad, regretful, and mournful tail spin of her trying to make sense of what has happened. Her imagery of turning people into poems. To words. To pieces of paper that could fly through the air or get burnt... that was the clincher. 

But, as a performance and a performer, she wanted me to understand what was happening. She wrote her poem with such aggression that she, not only insisted for empathy from the audience, but she demanded it.

But, unlike an actor using the method, she took her empathy for that day, she processed it, made choices of what words to use where, what tone of voice, what cadences the end of sentences should have. And she performed it.

The actor of realism, doesn't take this time to process. Part of the method is FIGHTING that processing. They act. Instinctually. And, for a tragedy such as this on these proportions, I think perhaps that is irresponsible. 

So, not to retract from my previous post on how realism is just the worse, but perhaps there is something inside this method we have yet to extract... and Dolan has found it.
The method is all about empathy. That's what it is. Theatre goers and theatre practitioners though have complicated it. And wanted to make it this system. But it boils down to us wanting to understand each other. Wanting to know what we are all going through. And, I think, the events of September 11th, made us face just how necessary that all is.