Prompt from Victoria!

On Friday, we discussed how traditional clothes is a part of cultural performance. Dresses, t-shirts, hats and other items represent heritage and history of the nation, race and community. But what if these items of clothes are worn by someone outside of traditional circle and are utilized in a new, more modern, way? Kimono is a traditional Japanese garment, and the national dress of Japan. However, nowadays we can buy it through such stores as H&M, Zara, Mango even Ralph Lauren. Due to this fact, emerged a debate among protestors, who are trying to protect traditions of the culture of Japan, and supporters (fashion designers and just regular people), who see this as an act of appreciation. 

Conversely, the same pattern occurred to Ukraininan shirt Vyshyvanka (which means a dress with embroidery). Being traditional clothes in Ukraine, first it turned into daily clothes of modern citizens and then was implemented into high fashion. Not only the people of Ukraine are very proud of this transition they also encourage tourist in buying these shirts and dresses as part of embracing their culture. 

            With all this said, I would like you to think about whether you know any other cases when traditional clothes found new application. And to what extend or where/when it is respectful to adjust or utilize these clothes pieces?

Prompt from Alan!

Choose one of the following questions to write about.

Question One:

In Alan Bowne’s 1985 play Beirut the lower east side of Manhattan has been isolated as a quarantine zone. There is an unnamed plague among the population which fits all the 1980’s worst fears of a super communicative AIDS. As a result, the U.S. has become something of a police state dividing people in to “Positives” those with the plague and “Negatives” those who are unaffected.  Two weeks ago, the governor Edwards of Louisiana was describing plans for reopening businesses in the state. He said testing for Covid 19 was essential so that employers would know which employees had had Covid 19 and were immune and which employees were not. That way the employees who were immune could be put in the jobs in at the front desk and have contact with customers and others while the employees who had not had the virus could be put in jobs “in the back.”  

Imagine what this plan could mean for different people? What kind of segregated spaces might be created for “Exposed” and “Unexposed” persons? Does this allow a discrimination against people who due to age, or preexisting condition can not endure Covid 19 and acquire that immunity?  Does it count as a disability if one cannot risk Covid exposure?

 

Feel Free to read the play,

https://oneactingthingaday.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/beirut.pdf

 

 Or watch the film Daybreak that was based on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acBpWp13Rsg

 

 

 

Question 2:

 

          We talked some in class about the potential for social differences among cyborgs “What happens if I can afford to get the cybernetic arm with sensory connections that’s sleek metal and glass, but you get the prosthetic hook?” Let’s take this idea further and consider what happens as prosthetics/cybernetics move even further out of health care into the consumer market. We already see this as the case in how for example health insurance will cover glasses and contacts but not corrective eye surgery unless it is life threatening. But for this question let’s consider cybernetic limbs and implants of inorganic nature. Most consumer products are designed planned obsolescence. Think about how long a pair of shoes, or an automobile last. Don’t even get me started on the short life of a computer or a smart phone. These revolutionary technologies that change the world yet in only perform for a couple of years before it’s time to upgrade. What happens when cybernetics and prosthetics need t be upgraded every couple of years?  Will there be easily detachable cybernetics, or will people repeatedly need to go under the knife?  Last night my smart TV froze because it needed a firmware update that took a half an hour. It was frustrating because I wanted to play a fifteen-minute exercise video, a minor irritation. But what if your smart arm stops responding while it connects to the cloud. . . while you’re on the freeway?  Also consider how so much technology has moved to the subscription model? These days we own less and less. We subscribe to movies, to music, essential applications. What would it be like if we have to license a part of our own body? What if we can no longer afford that low monthly subscription of $9.99 for our eye, our leg, our liver?

Prompt from Manny!

Much like colorblind casting, we are seeing a rise in gender-blind casting as well. However, it still has its problems. 

 

If we take a look at the recent Broadway revival of Once on this Island, the characters of Asaka and Papa Ge were nontraditionally cast. However, when the Tony award season came around Alex Newell lost the chance for a nomination. Alex, as a gender nonconforming person, did not want to be nominated as best actor or actress in a musical. I love that Alex decided this, however, the chance for much-deserved recognition and praise was lost. Is there a way to fix this, or is it better to leave well enough alone (people still say this right?)? At what point does the conservation of tradition prohibit progression? Should more theatre be created with a softer lens on gender?

For some fun: I would like for you pick a play, musical, or movie and recast it gender neutrally. Or tell me some roles you have always wanted to play, but traditionally would not get the opportunity. I personally would love to play Sara in Ragtime, Cassie in A Chorus Line, and Cathy in The Last Five Years.

Added questions:

How were you taught to perform gender? How do you use the performance of gender to your advantage?

###

Prompt from Kaitlin!

Here 'tis:

 

I want to dive in more depth in regards to cross-racial casting and white washing as was discussed in Herrera's piece, "But Do We Have Actors for That?" I want to dig into this issue without reservation because this is an incredibly sensitive topic that  we don't often get the space to process the myriad issues that come along with it. This conversation needs to continue, but is so frequently divisive that it gets shut down before understanding occurs, leaving frustration and anger within theatre communities nationwide.

My personal experience is that of someone who has benefited from looking just ethnically ambiguous enough to be able to play non-white characters, most frequently Latinx. I believe I've shared some of this last semester, but can't recall which was in class and which was at a bar, so forgive any repetition in the story. I've come back to this a lot over the last few years, wrestling about the best way forward. 

My involvement in white washing casting issues was a few years ago when I was cast and accepted a role as Conchita in Anna in the Tropics. For those unfamiliar, it follows a Cuban family in cigar factory in Tampa and how they are impacted when a new lector arrives and brings Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to read to the workers. It is a fantastic show and to this day it is one of my favorite roles that I'm so glad I played, but looking back would not accept again. The show sparked a lot of anger in the Pittsburgh theatre community. Please bear with me as I discuss this in a little more depth, I think there are several issues within this story that illustrate more discussion is needed. 

An actress from New York who was in town on a contract called out the theatre company that put up the show publicly on her facebook, which had a fairly large following. The show ended up with an entirely white cast, frustrating many in the community. The company responded poorly by then making guest comments unavailable on their page, and then the conversation became more about what was perceived as her being silenced than the casting issue alone.

It went downhill from there, rather quickly. By the time the AD of the company could be persuaded to defend their decisions publicly in depth, most people who had been upset already solidly viewed them as careless and harmful. It was too little, too late and was bad PR all around for the company.

Here's the part where I think the conversation needs more specificity to each market and company rather than across the board statements on what is allowable and respectful.

This happened at a long-running community theatre in Washington County, Pennsylvania. The newly appointed AD had pushed the board to include more diverse works in their season and Anna was a large part of that. In rural, red Pennsylvania an hour out of the city, where the Latinx population at the time of the last census was .6%, the theatre's patrons were, no surprise, almost exclusively elderly white people and/or supporters of the cast. All positions were volunteer. 

They did not have remotely high turnout with their season's open call in terms of Latinx actors. So, they held three separate call backs/open calls for Anna in an effort to find actors with ethnic identities close to those of the characters. The local paper, frustratingly, removed the phrase "Cuban descent" from the casting call they put in for the callbacks, fearing it was racist. Yeah. 

Their callbacks having not been much more diverse, they then personally reached out to, I believe, 35 Latinx actors in the Pittsburgh theatre community and offered them roles in the show. Two actors accepted. Both unfortunately dropped out by the time of the first read-through, having been offered paying gigs. So it goes in community theatre.

So, that's how they ended up with an all white cast portraying a family of Cuban immigrants. A lot of what I said paints them in a fairly positive light, and I do want to acknowledge the efforts they took to try to cast the show authentically. For the record, they also messed up a lot.Tthey were flippant about people asking if they "had the actors for that." Though clearly enough of a concern to those involved to hold multiple open calls for one show, someone within the theatre also joked that if they couldn't find the actors, they would "just cast Italians" [like them.] There was, more than once, jokes to the cast to tan before opening night. So they were also very, very dumb.

So. How DO we move forward? How do we get diverse works in front of audiences and respect authenticity in casting, particularly in markets that don't have the actors for that. Do we always have to pre-cast the show? What are the ethics of that? Do we cancel planned productions when royalties have already been paid? Herrera's piece focused on school settings, but does any allowance extend beyond that for rural settings? Remote? Unpaid roles and not-for profit theatres? Or if we do allow/excuse others, are we causing a larger problem? Will the AEA companies take that as allowance to do the same?

Please wrestle with this with me! I've been doing it for years. Like I mentioned on our last zoom, I think making choices that entirely remove an avenue to expose audiences to plays to audiences who would not otherwise see them is a mistake. Beyond that? Still wrestling.

Post from Henry!

A Brief History of The Plague

Or what we write when the contemporary world gets F-ed

             Hey hey! We’re back! Kind of! I’m so happy to engage with you all again! You can tell this by my exclamation points! There are so many! Yay!!!!

             So, here we are. Metaphorical shit has metaphorically gotten weird.  None of us are allowed to congregate in public spaces, the theatres are dark, the federal government is a rudderless ship of ineptitude, our neighbors are dying of disease like its 1605 and King Lear is being written (or pirated, depending on who you ask), and my asthmatic bahookie is afraid to go outside. The state of the planet is, in a word, terrifying. At least, it is for us Democrats, ‘cause apparently believing in the horrifying destructive power of respiratory illness is uniquely a liberal prerogative (see Liberty University attempting to reopen last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/us/politics/coronavirus-liberty-university-falwell.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage).

Ahem.  #WorldWarC

             Fear. That is broadly what I would like us to meditate on this week when it comes to the corona crisis. But hopefully not in a terribly anxiety generating way. Hopefully just a cathartic way. Fear is one of the most fundamental of human’s instinctual responses, and it drives us to all forms of self-preservation. Without diving too deeply into definitions (yalls know what fear is), I would loosely classify fear into two categories. I would say there are big F fears that generate an immediate fight or flight response and little f fears that wheedle away at you, generating anxieties and stress over the long term. I would also argue that we are in a period where both are highly acute right now. Just two weeks ago I had a big-time fight or flight response to the way Louisiana was handling Covid-19 and drove 18 straight hours back to MN. Now every night I fight the little f fears of catching this disease, wondering what it will do to my asthma, wondering how much of a pain in the ass it’ll be to study acting over Zoom, wondering when we will be able to get to campus, wondering if my parents will get it, etc. I assume you are familiar with these fears and face your own versions of them as well.

Just as there are many types of fear, there are many responses to fear. My own personal favorite is sardonic humor. I’ve generated some of my best one-liners before going under the knife, after getting violently beaten and left in the street, being on the receiving end of three car crashes, etc. But there are many other responses to fear as well that we have seen in the last couple weeks in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Like all the assholes hording toilet paper and chicken. An increase in the purchasing of guns. That one NBA player, Rudy Gobert, coughing deliberately over reporters microphones https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/rudy-gobert-touched-every-microphone-at-jazz-media-availability-monday-now-reportedly-has-coronavirus/.

I think it is safe to say that fear brings out the absolute damned worst in some people. I think it’s safe to say that fear brings out the best in others. These are not new thoughts. I am just bringing them up because right here, right now, in this time, there is a metric forkload of fear going around and it is generating some really interesting responses in people.

And so, without further ado, your subject matter for this week’s critical-theory blogosphere:

Performing Quarantine.

Look around you, whatever that means to you, and find ways that quarantine is being “performed” right now.  If you were a theatre historian, fervently taking notes on the zeitgeist, the mood of the times, the pulse of the people, in what ways do you see performance coming to light right now? What are the boundaries of performance spaces in this quarantine? Is the internet, for example, a vast and metaphorically infinite space where one can be ceaselessly entertained? Or is it a trap where people brag about quarantine productivity? Over what mediums do you see performance? Performed actions? Performed citizenry? Society Performed? What is the relationship between the personal and the collective? How does fear play into how we perform the Self? You can grapple with some of these questions, you can grapple with none of these questions.

But we are still in the early days of this crisis in the United States, and I want you to be the historiographer of these plague-times. When it comes to crafting the historical narrative or performance during Covid-19?

Some images, articles, and memes to get your brain in gear:

1)      John posted an interesting Foucault piece that talks about heterotopias of crisis. Could be one route to examine these questions. Check Moodle under “Space” week.

2)      https://secretnyc.co/empire-state-building-shine-red-covid/?fbclid=IwAR0FPjhQzxxd243xnwz1Z6ZBWAQFINXfAdK-_PI9D50tgxBB9IoeRobu5TU

3)    

4)    

5)      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0-2XxgHIXk&feature=emb_share&fbclid=IwAR3jwQp2k-SQrKKDI7SyIUcgqBlpk_j6Ar0vjP8CuKgP2jQm4VZBcjVHyQU

6)    

7)      https://www.timeout.com/london/news/the-national-theatre-is-going-to-stream-a-free-play-every-thursday-night-032620?fbclid=IwAR0c9k-m7hik7L02hrxB6oVWcy6sppal6RXe_5KLO9nmxXJIm4vrYdcSl0o

8)    

9)      https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-learning-home-should-more-self-directed-and-less-structured?fbclid=IwAR1TL3UdJNMZrjt7Jxhpm6gqjfQhIWY12EAO9TmATJnyGv5xfDgEUt11Zb4

10)  https://www.mamamia.com.au/coronavirus-scientist-heroes/

11)  And My Personal Favorite https://www.facebook.com/MarybethVitaEdwards/videos/10220574127777488

Post 7 from Tiffany--Behind the Scenes: Hidden vs Public Transcripts

Hey y'all.

What stuck with me this week was the idea of Public vs. Hidden Transcripts. 

"If subordinate discourse in the presence of the dominant is a public transcript, I shall use the term hidden transcript to characterize discourse that takes place "offstage," beyond direct observation by powerholders. The hidden transcript is thus derivative in the sense that it consists of those offstage speeches, gestures, and practices that confirm, contradict, or inflect what appears in the public transcript. We do not wish to prejudge, by definition, the relation between what is said in the face of power and what is said behind its back. Power relations are not, alas, so straightforward that we can call what is said in power-laden contexts false and what is said offstage true... What is certainly the case, however, is that the hidden transcript is produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power than the public transcript."¹ 

What happens when you think you're speaking hidden transcript, but in reality you're speaking public transcript, and what you say was intentioned for one audience, but was heard by the other? This is also playing lightly with the idea of incongruity. Incongruity means out of place — something that doesn't fit in its location or situation. In this context, it's an unexpected shift in audience and power.

In The Fox On the Fairway by Ken Ludwig, the playwright plays with this idea by causing a microphone to go on unexpectedly while one of the characters, Henry Bingham, confesses their love for another, Pamela Peabody. His impassioned, love-sick confession meant only for Mrs. Peabody, is broadcast for the entire country club where he is in charge, leading to an embarrassing aftermath and reputation amongst his fellow golfers. What Mr. Bingham intends to share privately with Mrs. Peabody is heard by the entire country club. If the microphone hadn't worked, as was always the case with this particular mic, the speech would have been private and the embarrassing aftermath would not have happened. Bingham and Peabody may have even begun a sexy affair and handled their relationship with more control and on their own terms.

The Fox on the Fairway, by Ken Ludwig | Theatre Baton Rouge | Photo by Megan Voiselle Collins

A good real life example is when news anchors think they're still off camera and say things they think only the studio can hear. Below is a short video of a news anchor who appears to fart off camera, believing the gesture of his fart is not heard or noticed by viewers, but in the video clearly appears to be heard. It could be a sound in the room of the people videotaping, but we'll suspend our imaginations for the sake of the subject discussion. I like this example because it's a gesture/action rather than spoken transcript.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE9yTJx1pdE

News anchor tried to fart off camera Me at work www.youtube.com

For this week's post, share a time you experienced or a time in history when someone speaking, gesturing, or practicing something that they meant to be hidden transcript, but ended up delivering it as a public transcript. A time you didn't know you were on speaker phone and said something private, a time someone flipped another person off thinking they couldn't see, but they could, or a time when you heard a microphone left on backstage during a show and heard more than you probably wanted to in the audience, and so on. What happened as a result? What would have happened if this transcript had remained hidden?

¹Scott, James. From Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale UP, 1990.

Post 6: Avant-Garde 180s (featuring GATZ)

Greetings, all--

This post covers not last week (Mardi Gras/Keyword) but the week before last (the avant-garde stuff). So much avant-garde performance sounds utterly stupid, almost a parody, when taken out of context. A woman just sits all day at a table staring at whoever sits down across from her? Get a job, loser! Or: A whole movement based on blurred images? Huh. Half the pics I take are Futurist, and I never even new it!

One of my favorite moments in undergrad classes are when I get to witness students doing a complete 180 in their opinion of a work. They hear about some experimental or avant-garde performance, mock it, and then hear (usually from me) a deep retelling/reframing/explanation of that performance. Then they're silent.

One of those moments happened yesterday in my capstone class. Students were writing about what kind of company they'd like to work for in 10 or so years. One student named Elevator Repair Service. He talked about their current big show, GATZ. GATZ, as you may have heard, consists of a live reading of The Great Gatsby. The whole thing. It is eight hours long.



The class groaned.
GATZ at The Public Theater TRAILER from ERS Theater on Vimeo.

Dr. Fletcher swoops in! Funnily enough, my friend in Scranton (the same friend who invited me up to talk last week) had just seen GATZ. He described it briefly. I groaned. Then he told what it was like to watch it. I'll rely on his retelling here:

The show starts with a guy in an office cubicle, trying to load something onto a PC. We see a projection of his screen. It crashes. He grumbles, sighs, tries again. Bluescreen of death. At this point, my friend said, it's like ten minutes into the show. You wonder if the whole eight hours will be like this. Frustrated, the man rummages around his office clutter and pulls out a book: The Great Gatsby. He starts reading.

As he goes on, office life continues behind him, people coming and going, making copies, chatting. Then, at certain points, characters in the office begin saying lines from the book as the reader comes to them. They seem accidental, natural coincidences at first. Then they become more frequent. Gradually, the life in the office seems to take on features of the novel--or vice versa. It's riveting, moving, dreamlike, exciting. Finally, forty-five pages from the end, the man puts down the novel, looks directly at the audience, and recites the entire final section from memory (apparently the actor used to do this as a party trick).

By the time I finish telling this to my capstone class, they're silent, absorbed. "So often," I tell them, "we go to a two-and-a-half-hour show that feels like it's four hours long. Imagine going to an eight-hour-show that feels like just an hour or two."

They seemed sold on that.

For this post, share a story of some kind of experimental or avant-garde performance you've seen or heard of that went (for you or for others) from That's so dumb to OMG what a great thing.

Post by Tuesday (March 3)-ish. Comment on this post about someone else's post by Friday (March 6).

Post 5: Not-Me, but . . . No, It's Really Just Not Me (Or, You Can't Prove You're Not a Bot!)

Part of the mind-bending fun of the simulation argument or Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulacra involves exposing ourselves to the fundamental leap of faith at the heart of our daily life: we don't know for sure that we're real, that our perceptions of the world are accurate--but we continue on as if they are from day to day. We're real enough.

Part of the chilling unpleasantness inspired by deepfakes and other modes of falsity online involves realizing that, sometimes, we really do want to ground ourselves in a reality against which we can check and discredit unreal images of ourselves. Thanks to the ambiguity of internet, it can be hard to establish a negative: I'm not that image. I didn't do that thing you see me doing. I didn't say/type/tweet/post that thing you read in my name. I didn't buy that stuff my credit record says I did.

Maybe we aren't real enough, at least for those who aren't physically around us 24/7.

That doesn't mean people don't try to establish a "real me" online.

For this post, find, share, and reflect on some means of performatively establishing a real identity. What performance techniques do people use to establish a trustworthy connection between real them and digital them? Alternately, how do they break or discredit links between real them and (deep)faked them?

Here's an example to get you started. There's a subreddit called "Roast Me" (r/RoastMe) in which people post pictures of themselves, sometimes with a brief description ("unemployed, live with parents, 32"), asking redditors to "roast them"--use wit or meanness to cut them down, insult them, etc.

 

It is not my cup of tea. But I do find it fascinating that those wishing to be roasted must post an image of themselves holding up a sign that explicitly says "Roast Me"--preferably with their Reddit handle there. The idea, it seems, is to prevent nonconsensual roasting. You can't just post a random picture of someone and invite the internet to mock them (well, of course you can, but just not on r/RoastMe).

Obviously, this isn't foolproof. Photoshop could easily manufacture a pic of anyone holding some sign like that. But it is an attempt, at least, to establish a link between real-space human and digital-space activity.

For what it's worth, there's another subreddit, r/ToastMe, which is the same thing, but it solicits only encouraging messages for people in need of support. Much more my speed.



(This poor guy's caption is "Girlfriend of 3 years just left me. I'm completely broken." Toast him if you'd like.)

What other means of reality-checking people can you think of? Are there artists playing with this kind of verification? Share!

John

Post 4: Presence, Attention, Performance . . . and Nigel

This week's readings all had the common theme of paying attention to people. For the most part, this attention aligned with notions of sight. We watch. We oversee (the episcop in episcopal). We observe ourselves and present (for others' eyes) selective bits of us depending on our situation.

Among our discussions this week, we wondered if and how we behave differently when we know we're being watched. Now, on one level (as discussed last week), we're always being watched thanks to surveillance capitalism. So ubiquitous and dispersed is that watching that we often cease to notice it. That pervasive attention becomes the background noise for our living in 2020.

Bogart, Goffman, Orenstein, and Kirby all in their own way suggest that something else happens when we submit ourselves to others' live attention, when we present or perform ourselves in front of other people. Suddenly all of our actions, reactions, and inactions unfold as if there were a picture frame floating around us, highlighting our bodies and faces and words and deeds with a special significance. We alter our behavior in relation to that frame (or that matrix, as Kirby would say, if we're on stage). We present a different self, suppressing some acts and accentuating others. Unless we're Manny. Manny is the same in public, on stage, at home--constant as gravity.

Something Kirby points out, though, is that this Frame of Added Significance (where we're taken as not just being but representing) doesn't necessarily happen just when we want or as we want. If I accidentally walk onto a stage during a performance, I might be taking as part of the mise-en-scene, whether or not I'm actually aware of the matrixed frame or not. Or consider a "hot mic" moment, where I'm not meaning to broadcast my words or sounds to an audience, but they get broadcast anyway. Most of us have also had one of those moments where we hit "reply all" rather than just "reply"--creating a larger performance than we had intended.

Conversely, I can think of times where I'm performing my heart out, presenting a particularly special version of me for an audience I'm sure is there--only to find that in fact no one was watching/listening. Think of the impassioned rant you just spewed out--only to find that the call had dropped three words in. Think of how many stunning YouTube masterpieces of self-expression languish with zero views.

Or think of Nigel, a gannet (a kind of bird) that fell in love with a concrete statue of a gannet. He devoted himself to this statue--wooing it, dancing for it, singing for it, forswearing all others.  And then he died, alone, having given all his heart all his life to a lover that could never respond or recognize his adoration.

 

What do we--what would Kirby, Orenstein, Bogart, or Goffman--say about Nigel? Can you think of other situations where the attentional feedback cycle between audience and performer and audience seems rich and amazing and full of mutual life but in fact turns out to be a completely one-sided affair, a fundamental misunderstanding. Does this matter? If so or if not, how?

John