29 February 2012
Lecture:
In groups we had to look at the reading by Dee Heddon and look for three claims and three counter-claims.
3 Claims:
1) Solo performance is, of course a field rife with self-indulgence and incipient monumental egotism. (159)
I disagree with this statement slightly because yes even though some performers use their own personal life stories within their performance they still include other people that were with them within that memory of time that the story was taken. There are also solo performers that use the stories of other people so it is wrong to say that solo performance is self-indulgent and egotist because the performances are not always about the performer alone.
2) This impoverished site is vulnerable to the imputation that a 'politics' whose only sure referent is the self is hardly a politics at all. (159)
3) As Gammel notes, when personal experiences are expressed via the female voice, they are perceived as being informal and lacking in authority, belonging to the realm of parole rather than the more abstract langue, and as such are dismissed as being of less concern. (160)
3 Counter-Claims:
1) Autobiographical performances are rarely about the (singular) self. (161)
This backs up my point above above performances including the lives and stories of others and are not just based on the life of the performer.
2) The goal of autobiographical work should not be to tell stories about yourself but, instead to use the details of your own life to illuminate or explore something more universal. (170)
This point also can be used within the first claim as it speaks about how not only is one person's story their own but it can also be something that other people have gone through or experienced. An example would be the work of Bobby Baker in which she speaks about mental illness and this is something that is common in the world with many people.
3) They actually relate to it as people, they've had that experience, or similar experience. (183)
Other Claims and Counter-Claims:
1) You need to tailor your performances for certain audiences. (170)
In a way yes you have to tailor a performance to suit certain audiences but if your performance has cultural, historical or a political context it is most likely going to be understood by any audience.
Autobiographical performers looks at the self, past, present and future.
When devising your own solo performance you should look at: WHAT THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE SELF TO THE HISTORICAL, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL?
When you in dialogue with yourself and your dialogue with the audience it becomes more than just a 'me' performance but includes the universal.
2) Even the meaning we ascribe to the 'self,' indeed, the very notion of the 'self,' is culturally located. (165)
How do you construct your solo piece that brings in the political, cultural and historical?
How is your piece dialoguic (past, future, present) (universal elements of your work)
3) My desire to attend autobiographical performance is partly prompted by the need to 'reach for something better, for new ideas about how to be and how to be with each other.' (166)
A story is a performance.
Think within your own pieces what you want to do or what you want the audience to go away with from your performance.
Look at how you going to stage the piece.
Should a performance change the audience, make them become shocked or aware of things?
4) Becky Bekker makes the point that examining differences might in fact result in 'misunderstanding' although, after Peggy Phelan, she recognizes that misunderstanding could themselves be considered 'generative and hopeful,' providing 'oppotunities for conversation.' (177)
C.C Highlighting misunderstandings are not always a negative thing because it is a way of getting the audience to respond and creates a debate.
How do you show multiple positions within your piece?
Bobby Baker:
How does she work with the historical, cultural and political?
Mental illness is such a broad subject and therefore she shows awareness by using the historical within her piece.
She uses a lot of humor and obsedity in her piece.
Themes: Heirachy of suffering.
How her process and methodology informed her performances (by using personal things like her painting) (colors of food)
Real-Time Composition:
We did an exercise in which we had to believe the room was a blank white canvas and one person had to go up and do something or place something in the space. The next person that goes and alters the space with an object we need to vote whether we agree with what they did or not and what ever the majority vote will determine whether we are on the same thought wave length or not and how to proceed from there.
We had to try and keep a line of thought going within this exercise. So by placing an object but not using any text and then trying to see if the audience see's what we see.
A thread of thought, showing and having the audience follow and understand your piece.
The method of Real Time Composition has been developed and systematized by João Fiadeiro since 1995. At a first stage, its main framework was the need to create a system of composition that could be shared by his collaborators along the creative process. In a second stage, it asserted as a tool to explore modalities of dramaturgic writing within the dance field, and was studied, developed and used by several artists and researchers. Since 2005 it has been asserting in the territory of research at large thus widening its range of interest and use beyond the boundaries of dance and even art.http://atelierealtextoctrgb.blogspot.com/2010/05/indroducao.html
The goal of the “Real Time Composition” method is to put the maker in the position of “mediator” and “facilitator” of the events, blocking his temptation to impose himself by means of the will or the ability to manipulate them. His only “creative act”, should there be any, amounts to the mastery with which he handles the tension, the balance and potential of the material he is dealing with, letting things happen – if they really have to – by themselves.
These are videos of the work by João Fiadeiro on the 'real time composition'
Real Time Composition / Fortaleza / Small Square exercise
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MzpwCGcdVE&lr=1&feature=mhum
Real Time Composition / Fortaleza / Big Square Exercise
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V3qYkS147w&lr=1&feature=mhum
Real Time Composition / Forum Dança / Big Square example I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgWvoZqS4lE&lr=1&feature=mhum
When we first started doing the exercise I could understand what was going on but after a while I felt that it was just becoming too silly because you could actually see where this was going in the fact that people just started putting the same thing one after the other.
Pictures and Text:
Last week we were asked to bring in five personal pictures that we were familiar with and a piece of text from our free writing. We had to pair up and describe our picture in detail to the next person and see if we could say everything that was in the picture.
We had two volunteers go up and describe their picture as we all had a look at it to see if they were really familiar with it.
What I noticed the second time the picture went round I kinda was looking for certain things that was said about the picture that I didn't notice when it went round the first time.
Afternoon Workshop:
Creative Exercise: Where does the stress fall?
In the workshop we had to pair up once again but this time we had to describe our partners picture as much as we could. Then our partner had to tell us what we missed in the picture. From what we missed we had to then choose one and like the exercise we did in the morning 'real time composition' we had to do a movement and the other person had to follow our line of thought and see if they know what element of the picture we chose and try to continue that line of thought.
I found the movement part hard to do because even though at the beginning I knew what she had chosen it was afterwards that it was hard to think of a movement that will continue from there and I felt that in the end we just ended up doing movements that had nothing to do with the picture and ended up getting confused.
Next we had to take our piece of text and look to see if the movement we did would fit with any of the words and try to do a small solo piece from that.
In this exercise none of the movements we did fitted in with any of the words I had written down so that was very hard to do anything with.
After that we had to sit in pairs and talk about what we had written in our text and the concept that we had in mind for our solo piece so that we could get feedback and help on our ideas.
In a way this was a bit helpful because as I am looking more at alter-ego's I was lucky to get some ideas on how to stage the piece. Some of the ideas were those that I had originally thought of so that was good.
Reading One:
Schechner, R. (2000) 'Global and Intercultural Performance' Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge
This reading looks at globalization and the different performance practices that incorporate many different cultures and ways of making a performance. It looks at how the media and the internet enables people from all over the world to view the same performance and also talk about how there is commonality in whatever work that is made and wherever it is made. Different theorists and practitioner also speaks about the different kinds of performances that use the cultural, the political and the historical. A lot of performances are made by fusing together different aspects of culture, history and politics.
Globalization allows, even encourages, "cultural differences" at the level of daily behaviors, spoken languages, foods, clothes, lifestyles, artistic works, and so on,l its underlying system is unified and transcultural. (226)
Intercultural performance needs to be studies along with globalization because it arises as responses to and in some cases as protests against an increasingly integrated world. (226)
In terms of aesthetic performances there are four kinds of intercultural performance research: 1) Research into artistic processes,
2) Tourist,
3) Hybrid and Fusions,
4) Community-based performances. (226)
[Daryl Chin says,] interculturalism is one which is, in a sense, duplicitous. [It]...hinges on the question of anatomy and empowerment. To deploy elements of the symbol system to another culture is very delicate enterprise. (227)
The detractors of globalization see it as a plot to increase Western, and especially American, hegemony militarily, economically, politically, and culturally. (227)
[Henry Jenkins says,] one of the real potentials of cyberspace it that it is altering the power between media producers and media consumers, enabling grassroot cultural production to reach a border readership and enabling amateurs to construct websites that often look like professional and are more than detailed than commercially produced sites. (228)
[Guillermo Gomez-Pena talks about] the 'information superhighway,' the internet, e-commerce, cable tv, and 'smart' tourism have ideologically narrowed the world and the word. (229)
The USA, many of its cultural exports are already intercultual, e.g. American pop is thoroughly Africanized, its theater heavily influenced by Asia. (230)
By far the most pervasive cultural aspect of globalization is the media - movies, television, radio, recordings, and the internet. Local media adopt local styles so that wherever produced the products are similar. In the future, the internet may prove to be the most powerful medium because it is so difficult to control. (232)
There is virtual and media tourism - part of the explanation for the great popularity of film and television is that it gives people the chance to experience 'the other' without leaving home. Surfing the web yields similar opportunities to experience the far away. (235)
Tourism...allows the tourist to purchase the other, the past, the exotic, the sexy, the exciting...whatever is up for grabs. (236)
Transculturalism: working or theorizing across cultures with the assumption that there are cultural 'universals'-behaviors, concepts, or beliefs that are true to everyone, everywhere, at all times. (244)
[Jerzy Growtowski says,] one access to the creative way consists of discovering in yourself an ancient corporality to which you are bound by a strong ancestral relation. (245)
Reading Two:
Dawn Akemi Saito (2000) ‘Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, ed. Jo Bonney, New York: Theatre Communications Group. pp. 389 - 397
Within in her piece 'Ha' she talks about how she was born not being able to communicate and the ways that her parents tried to help her. She always reflects on memories of grandfather from the way he looked when she first saw him (with half a face) Her piece begins with how her parents met in a zoo and she performs aspects of things that she may use as a signification of the scene. Such as the zoo in which her parents met she acts out the monkey in the cage with an announcement that you would hear in a zoo describing or giving the history of the particular animal. Also within the piece she blames her grandfather for her lack of communication because she speaks about the experiments he used to do and through those experiments he lost half his face.
Dawn Akemi Saito, actress/performance artist, writer, and Butoh dancer/choreographer has collaborated with major innovative performance groups in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America. She has also presented her own work, which has been seen in the United States and Europe. Her multidisciplinary works include Blood Cherries, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop; A Face of Our Own, a music/Butoh piece in collaboration with composer Myra Melford presented at the Orpheum Theatre in Graz, Austria; and many others. Saito has taught performance workshops at Columbia University, New York University, University of Massachusetts, Juilliard, Bard College, Lincoln Center Director's Lab, Institut International De La Marionnette in Charleville, France, International Workshops of Drama Schools in Sinaia, Romania, and Fordham Summer Program in Orvieto, Italy. She was a member of the Asian-American Playwrights Group at the Joseph Papp Theatre where she staged readings of her plays Hatchi and Bobbi and Karoke Above the Clouds. HA was published in Theater Communications Group's Extreme Exposure, an anthology of solo performance texts from the twentieth century. Besides her Selected Shorts appearances, Saito has acted in The Road Home at the Taganka Theater in Moscow, Hedda Gabler at The Old Globe Theater (San Diego), Suddenly Last Summer and The Poet at Hartford Stage Co., Kitchen God's Wife at The American Place Theater, any in many other roles at distinguished venues around the world. http://eomega.org/omega/faculty/viewProfile/a4f898339833c1f26ee73c37fff3153b/
Reading Three:
Brenda Wong Aoki (2000) ‘Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, ed. Jo Bonney, New York: Theatre Communications Group. pp. 265 - 275
A lot of her work is a form of story telling such as in the piece 'Mermaid Meat,' The piece 'Random Acts' is a kind of autobiographical piece and seems based on Aoki's personal life in which her nephew was killed in a shooting.
It is focused around his funeral and the emotions of the people present. It sounds to me like they are in a tribe as it speaks about how the chief stands up and delivers a speech.
What I like about this piece is how Aoki speaks about what emotions and thoughts she went through during the funeral and how she felt towards the killer of her nephew. I think this piece can be said to be universal because I am sure a lot of people would have gone through the same emotions as she did.
Within 'Mermaid Meat,' I felt that it was more fantasy but also in a way linking back to 'Random Acts' in the way that the piece focuses on the price and forgiveness. She had a CD out called 'The Queen's Garden, which is in a format of a story starting with a prologue and ending with a Epilogue.'
Brenda Wong Aoki writes and performs monodramas. Her intense lyrical song/dance/dramas are drawn from her grandfather’s memories of San Francisco during the Great Earthquake, Kabuki legends and her own personal life experience. Aoki’s multidisciplinary performances weave together Japanese Noh, Kyogen Theater, Commedia Dell’Arte, movement and voice. She has performed in such venues as the Kennedy Center, New Victory Theater on Broadway, Hong Kong Performing Arts Center, the Adelaide International Festival in Australia, the Esplanade in Singapore, the Graz Festival Austria and the International House in Tokyo. http://www.aokizu.com/about-brenda/
This is a TV interview with Brenda Wong Aoki
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQlaHtuczX4
This link looks at a solo piece written and performed by Dawn Akemi Saito called 'Blood Cherries.' It incorporates text, music and Butoh dance.
http://www.sabrinapeck.com/directing/bloodcherries/index.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Bonney, J (2000) Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. New York: Theater Communications Group.
Brenda Wong Aoki (2012) 'About Brenda Wong Aoki' http://www.aokizu.com/about-brenda/ (Accessed 4 March 2012)
Dawn Akemi Saito 'Awakening the best in the human spirit' http://eomega.org/omega/faculty/viewProfile/a4f898339833c1f26ee73c37fff3153b/ Accessed 4 March 2012)
Dawn Akemi Saito (2003) 'Blood Cherries' http://www.sabrinapeck.com/directing/bloodcherries/index.html Accessed 4 March 2012)
João Fiadeiro (1995) 'Real Time Composition' http://atelierealtextoctrgb.blogspot.com/2010/05/indroducao.html (Accessed 4 March 2012)
Schechner, R. (2000) 'Global and Intercultural Performance' Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge
Youtube (2012) 'Brenda Wong Aoki TV Interview' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQlaHtuczX4 (Accessed 4 March 2012)
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