Post #5

The first example that comes to my mind is a play that we performed in high school. The play was The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. The play was about a group of students putting on a play about the story of Christmas for their school. In the play, baby Jesus in the manger was actually a baby doll. I thought about this choice because obviously it was effective and makes the most sense to have a baby doll represented as Jesus rather than an actual baby. And the doll representing Jesus was essential to the play because since it is a play about a play they reference the actual baby doll. However, when the characters are performing their play it makes the most sense to not have this aspect in full, naturalistic form. This would be an example of dark matter because you just imagine that baby Jesus is actually in the manager, although it is known that he is not.

I think that abstraction in the theatre world is a very powerful tool. You can show sorrow, pain and devastation without knowing that the people you are watching are actually experiencing this. You also don't always see what left them in this state. I think that Theatre, definitely in relation to the Holocaust, does not need to show all the gruesome details to be effective. I think that it is just as powerful to use representation and abstraction to tell a powerful story that can never be forgotten. 

Disturbance

When I think of disturbance in the theatre world, I think of the performers in New Orleans that put on a show across from Jackson Square. In an amphitheater a group of performers dance, do tricks and perform comedy, which attracts a crowd. I view it as disturbance because it is set up in a public place, where people are walking by. Usually a crowd of people are sitting in the bleachers watching by the end of it. One time I was in New Orleans with my family and ended up sitting down to watch them perform. They asked for volunteers to go up and my mother was selected among a few other audience members. The performers joked around with them, had them in a conga line, and for the grand finale, had them all laying on the ground, while one one of the guys jumped over the line of people. I was a little frightened for my mother's life, but mostly laughing really hard and taking pictures. I find that disturbance in our society is usually something to take pictures of or tweet about. A lot of times when someone does something really crazy, in class, in a restaurant, on the street, I find that people around me are taking pictures or my friends are tweeting about it. It's interesting to see what kind of disturbances are tweet worthy and documented by the average iPhone user or the press. So to bring theatre into the 21st century, my idea is to integrate a form of media. Perform a play that stirs people up and has them live tweeting the performance or has a newspaper writing a review. I think that in our society today, the media is a huge part of any profession. I think that the theatre industry should jump on board. The theatre community can't control what people talk about on social media, but they can encourage and promote it using hashtags and a social media campaign. I think this would be the most effective way to bring about the social change that certain plays are aiming to accomplish. The more people hear about it, the more people the message reaches.

Blog Post #3

Two past productions that really stood out to me is the play Rising Water that I saw at LSU and the broadway play starring Idina Menzel If/Then. When I saw Rising Water, it really made me reflect on Hurricane Katrina and stories of people I know that lived in New Orleans during it. This play was a representation of what many people went through during the hurricane, when they were stuck in a flooded house with rising water, calling for help. The broadway play If/Then was not as realistic. The play showed two different destinies and the possibilities of things that would happen depending on what choice you made. This play was very entertaining, but showed some truth and made me think “what if” about things in my life. However, the play Rising Water really informed me of what it could be like to be in a house with water rising. I think that performances that are documentary style or naturalistic do end up providing truth. I think fictional and non-fictional stories still end up shedding light to some truth in life.  

Performativity

I think that Taylor Swift's new music video/song is an interesting performative statement. The song "Shake It Off" and music video to go along with it definitely show Taylor Swift "acting out" yet again.

Here's the link to the music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM&noredirect=1

In this video, Taylor Swift performs many different personalities in my opinion.

Here's a general summary:
She begins as a ballerina, then hip hop looking with a boom box, then swan lake costume (ballet again), then not really sure but wearing grey clothing and doing acrobats, then a gymnastics costume, then lady gaga looking costume (space-themed?), then all black with glasses, then twerking with short jean shorts and a cheetah top, then wearing black singing looking normal singing with a jazz band, then a cheerleader, then from here on out she switches between all these "personalities" with the ending being with normal regular people in normal clothes as opposed to costumes all dancing with her.

Her lyrics imply "shaking off" the rumors and stereotypes people say about her. The song seems to make a statement in the sense to shake it off and live your life and cause "the haters gonna hate (hate, hate, hate, hate)".

The reason I am bringing up this music video/song is because I feel like her main goal is to shake it off and forget what people say by bringing light to it. She addresses rumors and haters and doesn't "seem" to care by singing a happy-forget the haters anthem.

I think that before people even saw the video, they had their critiques lined up. In a way, Taylor Swift's song kind of addresses the negative feedback she might have gotten from this music video.

I think that the message in this music video is interesting because she portrays herself in different costumes, performing different actions. Does she identify with these characters? Is she simply performing them? Who is the real Taylor Swift? I think that her music video shows different people and different interests, but how at the end of the day we are all people. The end of her video which included "normal" looking people all dancing together just showed that we are all humans with different hobbies, looks, backgrounds, etc. and shouldn't worry about what anyone thinks.

No matter what the actual message of the song/music video for "Shake it Off" is, I think Taylor Swift wins because it's a catchy tune and is #1 on the iTunes Charts currently.

Marvin Carlson's "What is Performance?"

In trying to define my own version of performance, I knew that it was very difficult to decide what is and isn't performance. In my mind I feel like I have an idea of what would be considered performance, but putting it into the confines of a definition is harder than it may seem. In our class discussion, I would think I finally had it figured out until another student would bring up a different perspective that totally shifted my thinking. Therefore, I realized in class that there is no easy definition of performance. Learning the term an essentially contested concept in Carlson's intro was eye-opening for me. I was thrilled to learn that there is a term to describe the debate and confusion that was our class discussion when trying to define performance. 

Someone in our class brought up Mardi Gras Balls in our discussion. This really challenged my thinking about performance. Rituals can be considered performance, but their sole purpose is not usually to perform. Mardi Gras Balls once included real royalty and were rituals practiced by kings and queens. However, in today's times in southern Louisiana, Mardi Gras Balls that include kings and queens and rituals are more of a theatre performance because it does not include actual royalty. Would this be considered performance? I think it would because it mostly revolves around entertainment. But does all performance have to have the purpose of entertainment? I don't think it always does either. Through our discussions and this reading, I feel that I lean more towards the broader side for defining performance. I feel that more things in our world are performance, than not performance. As a Mass Communication major, I believe that a huge part of communicating is performing. Even on social media, I think people perform and portray the way they want to be viewed.

In Carlson's intro he says "Strine Long, and Hopkins argue that performance has become just such a concept developed in an atmosphere of "sophisticated disagreement" by participants who "do not expect to defeat or silence opposing positions, but rather through continuing dialogue to attain a sharper articulation of all positions and therefore a filler understanding of the conceptual richness of performance."" I really like this quote because I think that we should keep talking about what performance means to us to fully understand the richness of it. Performance is rich. It can include entertainment, theatre, music, human interaction, rituals, and much much more. My aspirations and career revolve around performance. Carlson's article comforts me in a sense because I can rest in knowing that performance is an essentially contested concept. It's not just me who can't decide exactly what it is, but even a scholar who studies this agrees that it is not easy to define. And that is the beauty of performance. For me, it evokes expression and creativity, even in trying to learn exactly "what it is".