Process Notes: I was going to write a pamphlet on how to know if you are a lesbian, but then I checked the Super Tuesday polls and subsequent discussions on Sanders and socialism and was reminded of the fervent declaration made by other candidates on their loyalty to capitalism. Gender equality and feminism, but more importantly feminist movements are often discussed as if they can only survive in a “liberal” environment, so I wanted to do something that offends that aesthetic. Originally the plan was to put Mao’s quote on one side and his face the other, but then I realized people are probably not going to be familiar with his saying and the language betrays its origin from outside the contemporary feminist movement.

Paradoxically, painting this was a really soothing process that quelled some of my anger. It’s making me think artists catharsis like theatre is political in their message but also in how they help its participants work though sentiments.

Process Notes:

I was originally going to make a poster or banner of some kind that had a kind of Giving Tree vibe about a mom and greedy children. However, the whole nature-is-a-mother-we-are-taking-advantage-of form of environmental awareness is so played out, especially in my writing. 

I thought the Bread and Puppet Theatre stuff we looked at was awesome, so I tried my best shot at making a how-to kind of like the one we read. Deciding what “how to’s” I wanted to add was the most difficult part of making this because I wanted issues/guides that felt relevant, but I could still write in a sort of sarcastic tone. I wanted to have a mix of drawings and words so that it still felt like a visual poem rather than something I could have just typed up. 

(Hopefully the file uploads properly. Fingers crossed.)

HowYouCanSaveThePlanet

The alienation effect – or at least the attempt to create it – is a very new way of thinking about looking at / depicting the world for me. Rather than trying to imitate life and the attitudes we have about it like pretty much every movie I have ever seen, this technique looks at situations from a viewpoint that most might overlook. In this way, an attempt to achieve the alienation effect is an attempt to defamiliarize. By defamiliarizing everyday life, we can bring about political discourse from a myriad of angles, from “the man” looming over head to the little things that tick us off on our way to work. When we take a second look at everything, even the the mundane, we can bring about discussions that have been swept under the rug or have never even seen the light of day. 

The way Brecht described the alienation effect, I understood a large aspect of it to be looking at the world with an unfamiliar eye. When talking about social change, I think this aspect is very important. This forces us out of complacency. It reminds us to look at our society from (for lack of a better term) an outsider’s point of view. This forces us to see the things we put up with regularly as they truly are, worms and all. 

I understood “the old art of poetry” to be a kind of call to action. The book invites people to start looking at the world through the eyes of people such as the Chinese actors, Brecht and Schumann. This is done by discussing the silence of puppetry in parallel with political complacency. The reader must look at their own views on the world and if they are the views they really want to have.

Monologue/ Spoken Poem:

I tell my friends that my essays have gotten better because I’m a math major.

I think about my arguments in the same way I think about a proof

You realize that there are things you can’t take for granted

You have to prove everything. 

Except math doesn’t work like that. There are axioms you do have to assume, like the axiom of choice, or the parallel postulate, or the native postulate.

Wait. I forget this one isn’t as well known as the others.

There’s a nice story behind this one. It starts in an email chain, after a draft on some very elementary, super easy, memorable years after writing it, number theoretical concepts was submitted to a supervisor: 

“Nice solid write up.   I’ll be curious to see how it compares with others (several on the same topic).”

“A little more care of English is needed.” 

“(which I assume is not your native language)”

Which I assume is not your native language.

Which I assume, is not your native language.

Which, pronoun, as in this idea I see no problems with saying

I, subject, as in someone whose Google search image results gives a picture of someone who has no idea what their privilege is

Assume, verb, as in to know with certainty

Is, verb, as in to be without doubt

Not, adverb, as in unlike me

Your, adjective, as in not mine

Native, adjective, as in not mine

Language, noun, as in English, not math.

Granted, the fact that I had to look up which part of speech the word “which” is confirms his truth.

My professors had concocted a conspiracy where, yes, I had good ideas. Yes, I was smart. But no one could tell me my English was so bad, so imperfect, so disgustingly written that it must be because I don’t know the language. 

All the other papers I had frantically submitted 2 minutes before the deadline, from an 8-page paper about 3 short minutes in Pacific Rim (yes, the giant robot movie) to an analysis of some of Arendt’s arguments in Eichmann in Jerusalem (god, she’s so dense)

They were all terrible.

Well, fuck. How the hell did I get here? I can’t construct a sentence for the love of myself.

Maybe it was my speech impediment how I didn’t start talking until I was 4 and if I wrote a paper like how I talked it was wrong because I never developed those language development skills.

Maybe it was my parents, who left everything behind 30 years ago in a land still reeling from the effects of British colonialism and who never could pass down good grammatical skills.

Maybe I was wrong. Because now my English wasn’t good it had left me and the only thing on my mind was how much I wanted to shrink, into a ball, so small that no one would hear me speak.

“I do believe your comment about my native language was inappropriate and unnecessary”

Were words I never could speak but somehow could type. 

And all these feelings go away, when he says, quote, “Sorry.” with a justification of his words.

I tell my friends that my essays have gotten better because I’m a math major.

Process Notes:

I found myself fine tuning the use of my voice for this piece. It was liberating to be able to express parts of the piece with inflection and not having to write everything down, at the cost of having to make sure it is read the same way every time I went through it. I tried to make it sarcastic and a bit humorous so it would be more palatable, and I’d like to know what people think about that (along with breaking the fourth wall). We’ll see how it goes tomorrow!

The pieces for this week demonstrated a wide variety of mechanisms for constructing social change. The Old Art of Puppetry in the New World Order and the 40 How Tos both had multiple levels of interpretation. They both had the appearance of having a simple meaning that could be grasped simply by looking at the illustrations, but they also obviously had meaning beyond their images. I liked the dual messaging because it forces the reader to engage with the pieces on multiple levels; it is hard not to look at the images before reading the text.

The Truth Pageant, which was artistically impressive and elaborate, made broad claims of society, but only attracts a not so large group of left-leaning, Vermont-friendly liberals. Even though the Truth Pageant would probably like their message to be consumed by a wide variety of audiences, it won’t be because it only appeals to some. I particularly enjoyed the sketch about the Supreme Court because of the humor it added to an otherwise often dry but important topic. Brecht and Bentley’s piece on alienation in Chinese acting, reminded me that even in the Truth Pageant, despite its attempts to frame itself in the global context, was presented with geographical and cultural biases.

Bertolt Brecht’s piece On Chinese Acting brought me back to a theme of thought I’ve had throughout the quarter: the role of abstraction. Or, as Brecht calls it, the role of alienation. I have often thought the effect of art is to evoke feeling and sentiment, yet when it comes to art for social change (which, is all art for social change?) one must consider exactly what sentiments are being evoked. By depriving the audience of full fledged empathy, perhaps they are forced to process the emotional content more concretely. Through the alienation effect, the artists forces the audience to more actively project their selves into the character/scene/art. But I wonder if the role of Chinese acting is to really effect an active projection, or is it to really just portray a story for the audience to watch?

Peter Schumann then raises the point of the addictive quality of intimacy in acting, the false intimacy created by actors and movie makers to close the gap between the real world and the made-up world. This intimacy, where we are drawn in by strong feelings of either love and allure or fear of pain and death, plagues the art of the made-up world and detracts from its sincerity. While it is satisfying to the audience, what else does it really accomplish other than scratch an itch for that sensation?

Perhaps there’s something to be said for the art of mimicry, or comedy. Both authors above mention these arts. Currently, comedy seems to be one of the most politically pervasive forms of art and entertainment. Either comedy, such as stand up or talk shows, or satirical/bizarre alternate realities crated by horror movies such as Get Out or Sorry to Bother You. The abstraction made by comedy and satire presents traps for the audience to fall into, where they catch themselves laughing at things that shouldn’t be laughed at, and thus are forced to more sincerely process the emotion meant to be conveyed, which is actually conveyed through the alienation or abstraction.

Reading Brecht’s “On Chinese Acting” created a stark contrast between Western and Chinese theater and made me question the Western theatrical practices that I have always seen as normal. Brecht begins the essay by discussing “alienation” (Brecht, 130) in Chinese theater. That is, acting that does not elicit an empathic response from the audience, therefore creating an emotional distance from the audience and the actors. This idea seems quite foreign to me, as I believe the goal of nearly every Western play is to incorporate pathos in some way in order to create an emotional connection to the work in the audience, therefore resulting in the audience liking the performance and feeling moved by it. This alienation, as Brecht titles it, is not always present and necessary in Chinese theater. 

Additionally, I was rather struck by Brecht’s description of the Chinese actors’ performance, as “he makes it clear that he knows he is being looked at” (Brecht, 130). This was fascinating to me, as I have witnessed in Westernized plays that the actors and others producing the play that they aim to distract the audience from the very fact that they are witnessing a performance (i.e. costumes, changes in scenery, lack of interaction with the audience), as well as the expectation of the Western actor to become their character completely, eliminating any trace of the actor and replacing them with the character. I believe this is also done to appeal to the emotional attachment of the audience, as they are led to believe the illusion that they are witnessing real life instead of a performance. 

Maybe it is just my Western bias, but I believe the European approach to theater is more effective in creating a more meaningful experience for the audience. However, I do believe that the Chinese form of acting does focus on the talents of the actors in how they construct their performance. I’d be interested in learning about this topic further.

This week, I was struck by the accuracy with which Brecht’s sentiments mapped onto Schumann’s. Like Helena and Ketaki, I was forced to think about the ways in which I label theatre as “good.” For Brecht and Schumann, theatre is performance, not mimicry. Expecting theatre to be mimicry is foolish on some level, it seems. According to Brecht, theatre’s alienation of the quotidian is “what makes protest possible,” which makes a lot of sense to me. Defamiliarizing and separating from the everyday can be valuable in that has the potential to be refreshing. It forces spectators to see things in a new way, just as many protests do. However, theatre defamiliarizes convention in different ways than, say, Keene or Boyer. Instead of breaking traditional form, theatre so often queers semantic content by applying new meaning to old action. Especially in puppetry, taking the familiar and making charicature of it can be rather valuable in terms of queering topics enough to make new and thoughtworthy comments on them. Although little of the Grasshopper Rebellion Circus performance felt “real,” it still did the work that it set out to do by destabilizing expectation just enough for messy but important topics such as rampant capitalism to shine through. It also queered the subject matter in a way that made it rather enjoyable to watch. It was definitely more entertaining than, say, watching CNN.

Like Ketaki, Brecht really upended my ideas of quality theater and challenged my notion that acting had to feel “real” to be good. The alienated form of Chinese acting seems to understand acting/performing as presenting rather than embodying. Brecht says this alienation “makes protest possible” for audience members. I found this really interesting—I’m not sure I’m totally convinced we can’t protest something we experience emotionally or empathize with, but empathy does certainly seem to muddy an effort to historicize and criticize society. I was really struck by Schumann saying that acting through mimicry (or an attempt to present something as “real”) is a dangerous “overly generous serving of intimacies.” He describes sincere intimacy as an “addictive spice” in the entertainment industry. This made me think about our discussion of the type of intimacy we are party to when we read a memoire. I’ve always found this intimacy and sincerity really powerful and moving, so it was strange to hear it described as something dangerous in its appeal to consumers (of which I am one). I personally thought Boyer did a good job of queering the expected narrative structure in The Undying, but it’s interesting to see how puppetry does this in a very different way. Schumann talks about how a puppet’s face “should not be degraded to serve the purposes of character and story.” This lack of character and story in the narrative gives the puppet the ability to “interfere as an agent in its own right” in stories that “don’t know anything about it.” I thought that was a really cool way to subvert narrative structure. It was really fun to see this happening in the video of the Grasshopper Rebellion Circus performance. The alienation and ridiculousness of the puppet performance definitely felt super unique, and the type of tone it created felt effective in subverting capitalism norms of art consumption, which allowed it to more effectively comment on these constructs. 

PDF of Poster:

W9 PDF – Chloe Madigan

Process Notes:

I found this week’s assignment to be quite challenging. I wanted to push myself to create a poster regarding the need for mental health education in college campuses given that it at first appeared to me as a difficult task but ultimately a valuable one for public circulation of a political message. I was inspired by the “40 how to’s” in creating my slogan, which took the greatest deal of time for me by far. I was constantly going back and forth between deciding if my word-choice was too “cheesy” and “catchy” and thus losing respect for its content or if it was too bland and serious and thus losing attention towards its content. Would it matter that my poster was viewed if it did not address the direct seriousness of its subject matter? Would it matter if my poster addressed the direct seriousness of its subject matter if it wasn’t viewed? I aimed to go for a bit of both in portraying the main slogan of “don’t just teach us what to accomplish, without teaching us how to accomplish” as the central attention-grabbing aspect of the poster, with the fine details of what is taught in schools appearing in the text of the “what” and what is neglected in education in the text of the “how,” which are visible upon closer examination. Lastly, I wanted to add the illustration at the bottom to provide statistical support for my claim for a potentially uninformed or skeptical viewer with statistics from the National Alliance on Mental Illnesses’ recent survey on USA college students. I also wanted to produce a sense of empathy in the viewers of this illustration; having engaged with past works in this course wherein the positioning of the text was not in uniform lines but in specific shapes greatly informed how it was perceived by me. I wanted to play with that idea by making the statistics into the shape of waves consuming high-achieving students who despite this threat, still hold their accomplishments outside of the water, hopefully illustrating that thinking to value accomplishments above your own life can be extremely detrimental.