Activist Methodologies

Bodies as media
"Thriller por la Educación" - Chile

 

"...[T]his tactic of pacific occupation belongs to the early twenty-first-century moment of hybridization or, more specific- ally, intermediality—modalities of experience that are constituted by two media working together to provide mutually constitutive elements (Bay-Cheng, et al.)— between bodily practice and digital media" (Fuentes, p. 34)

"Students disguised as zombies used dance, synchronicity, and digital media tactics of spreadability to make a statement about the effects of neoliberal financial capitalism on their lives...Born from the 'complex colonial history of the Americas,' in contemporary protests, zombies have come to represent 'the slave, a silent worker whose humanity has been consumed and whose existence is living death'...Moreover, the figure of the zombie as the undead can also be connected in the Chilean case with the country’s recent history of authoritarianism that targeted political dissidents’ bodies to eliminate opposition" (Fuentes, p. 36-37)

• Use of place and space
• Disruption of public norms
• Dress, makeup, appearance

Cut-Up ("Found" Text) Performance
Robert Gutierrez-Perez, "A Letter from my Students"

• Use and transformation of found materials
• Use of body as a medium
• Use of other media to create an embodied audience experience (throwing the paper at the camera)

Intermedia
Miranda Olzman, "Worshipping Ursula"
Lip synching, choreography, sitting on audience member's laps - click on the picture to play the .mp3 of the soundtrack.

• Also a cut-up/mashup
• Embodied performance
• Use of makeup/costume

Queering/Flipping the Script
Mod Carousel, "Blurred Lines - Sexy Boys Parody"

• Rewriting lyrics
• Frame by frame reenactment
• Makeup/Costuming

Verbatim Theatre/Witness Mimesis
E. Patrick Johnson, "Sweet Tea"

• Verbatim/edited performances of interviews
• Changes in body posture, facial expression, inflection, vocal tone
• Script on the stand off to the side (semi-memorized)
• Use of pauses, fluctuations in volume, pace, tone, timbre

Hip Hop/Spoken Word/Slam Poetry

• Tension between humor and seriousness
• Use of hand gestures, voices, bodily postures
• Pauses, changes in pace, rhythm, volume, inflection
• Use of "false rhymes"

Conceptual Speed Dating

• Inner circle/outer circle 
•  Each Pair gets 4 minutes 
•  Each person must take turns explaining their final performance idea, and alternatively contributing suggestions to their partner about the following: 
•  How to refine the topic 
•  Specific activist performative techniques 
• Gong will ring at 2 minutes - conclude your discussion and begin talking about the other participant’s project 
•  20 seconds to switch partners - inner circle will move clockwise one chair 
•  Repeat - you will end up doing this process with 4 different people

Final Performance Assignment (feel free to post topics here)

Final Activist Performance (200) - The final performance project will focus on an activist approach to storytelling. Please choose a social/cultural/political issue about which you feel passionate. It doesn’t necessarily need to be serious in nature, but you must care about this topic. Your assignment is to inform and persuade your audience through a performance. Although the concept for your performance is relatively open-ended, please keep the following parameters in mind:

• You must create an original aesthetic text for the performance (the method of delivery, however, is up to you). Cut N Mix is considered a method for original text if the final product is crafted by you.
• You must utilize at least one activist performance methodology that was presented in class (wrap up on all of these will occur on 3/3 in class).
• Any videos used that include narration or spoken word must be under 30 seconds in length (unless the person speaking in the video is you). You may use videos beyond 30 seconds in length if they include background noise/ambient sounds or imagery. Basically, you cannot have your media perform instead of you.
• You must arrange for the use of laptops yourselves; my laptop will be used for recording the performances only.
• The performance MUST clock in at under 10 minutes. The timer will go off at 9 minutes, and you will be cut off after 10 minutes.

For rubric please see the assignment tab on Canvas.

Idea for Final Activist Project 

There are many issues to be passionate about in America today. As the 2016 presidential election approaches, we are surrounded by politicians speaking about justice, sustainability, economic prosperity, and equality. These candidates use elaborate strategies and rhetoric in order to persuade citizens to give them their vote. However, in order for change to actually occur and for leaders to begin to work towards improvement, citizens must get out and vote. Voter turnout has declined in recent years, especially in representation of millennials and young citizens. Eighty-one millennials will be eligible to vote in the election of 2016. However, only forty-six million are estimated to actually show up to vote.  There are many causes of this problem including voter frustration, a lack of political education, and a feeling that one vote doesn’t make a difference. However, these perceptions are harmful and inaccurate.

People would be shocked to realize how much our government, at both the national and state level, influences the progress and shaping of America. From income inequality to environmental sustainability, the government has a hand in how issues of today’s world are dealt with in America and all across the world. The leader of our democracy has a direct hand in many of the decisions behind the progress or lack thereof that contributes to solving these problems. It is important then, that the president who will be elected on November 8, 2016 is representative of every voice, especially those of young people.

Everyone has an issue that they are passionate about. The great thing about democracy is that you do not have to be a millionaire or an elected official to have a say in what goes on in our country. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has a vote. We cannot make serious progress or positive change in any issue or area before we address the issue of voter turnout. We simply need more millennials to vote and we need to spread the notion that their votes matter. That is the first step in making progress toward any other issue. 

Rachel Ledon 

Final Performance Topic-Death Penalty

My final performance concerns opposition to the death penalty.  After taking a class referred to as Capital Punishment over this past winter interterm, I will address the key issues pertaining to deterrence, retribution, arbitrariness, and incapacitation.  I will mention how the death penalty isn’t much more of a deterrent than life without parole and how the death penalty is arguably more appealing to the defendant (thus less effective in terms of justice) because one does not have to suffer in prison and regret past choices.  Capital punishment proves to be delayed as the average time from death sentence to execution is 12 years.  In addition, arbitrariness through race again proves the unsettling qualities of the death penalty.  For incapacitation, it is argued that execution saves lives because the dead men cannot kill again, but the people who would kill again are not necessarily the same who have been executed.  Execution is also not necessary as it is safer for the inmates to be in prison because it is harder for them to access weapons and they are more closely monitored.  The murder rate in prison is 4 per 100,000, proving that it is safer in prison that it is out.  I will supply this data in a rhyming fashion to make the presentation more engaging.  I will also mention the three men currently on Colorado’s death row to bring the issue to a more local level.  Retribution will be integrated through the inappropriateness of equating the death penalty to the principle of “an eye for an eye.”  After today’s group presentation, I would like to integrate the John hits Juan concept by showing a picture of a man on Colorado’s death row and saying what he is accused of and convicted of without giving his background.  Afterwards, I will provide the backstory and indicate he is less deserving of the death penalty than one may assume.  I will spotlight Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray in particular.  Owens was sentenced to death in 2008 for the murder of two people, one of whom had been set to testify against a friend of Owens, Robert Ray.  Ray was sentenced to death in 2009 for the planned murder of the witness Owens had killed.  By highlighting these two men, I hope to make it more personal and easier to understand for the audience.  I will try to include other people’s stories as well.  I will also explain how, in the state of Colorado, a defendant must have committed first-degree homicidal murder with at least one or more aggravating factor and go into depth regarding the aggravating factors.  I will also mention the financial burden the death penalty poses on the nation as a whole.  Although I may not have the time to go in depth into each of these topics, I do hope to touch on them briefly all the while conveying to the audience that the death penalty should be eliminated.

Adobe Creative Cloud Free Trial Link

http://www.adobe.com/downloads.html

TWO Extra Credit Opportunities

ASAP: Survey Participation by THIS FRIDAY AT NOON

For Veronica Droser's Quantitative Methodologies class:

"We are looking for people ages 18-35 to fill out a brief survey that includes questions about their experiences with relational maintenance, love languages, and romantic and/or friends with benefits relationships. Participation is completely voluntary, and responses are anonymous and confidential.

Survey link: https://udenver.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_cx2ps0IqbYqn4sR"

**The survey will begin (or end) by asking your name and what class you are expecting extra credit for, which will then be relayed to me. This part of the survey is completely separate from your survey responses so there will be no way of connecting your survey responses to your identity!


Next Thursday, February 25th, 12pm

• 10 points: Attend the event (sign in sheet will be available)
• 20 points: Post a 500 word blurb on the blog relating the event to performance studies
• 30 points: Give a 5- to 10-minute presentation in class relating the event to performance studies

Day Eleven: Performing with Media & Technology

Chris Salter, Entangled Preface, and Sarah Kember & Joanna Zylinska, Culture Machine Letter from the Editors

"[T]echnology is comprehended as an originary condition of our being in the world....It is in this sense that we have always been media(ted)" (Kember & Zylinska, p. 4-5).

"[T]echnological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of subjectivity” through memory and intelligence, sensibilities and affects (Salter, p, xxxiii)

• Is technology a part of what it means to be human?

"...technology’s transcendent embodiment of the gods..." (Salter)

Media is anything that alters the human body's relationship with time and space - Marshall McLuhan

• In a sense, the "superhuman" capacities that human's use of tools of technology delivers is what makes us human.
• Humans as worshippers of the divine

"Mediation, we suggest, is all-encompassing and indivisible. This is why ‘we’ have never been separate from ‘it'...our relationality and our entanglement with other human and non-human entities continues to intensify with the ever more corporeal, ever more intimate dispersal of media and technologies into our biological and social lives." (Kember & Zylinska, p. 2)

• In this way, what is the traditional approach to media studies and Kember and Zylinska are trying to challenge? (p. 1 second paragraph)

Board Exercise: How do the following objects expand our bodies' relationships to time and space?

If performance describes our experience being in and interacting with the world, and technology/media plays an integral role in this experience, then media must be an integral aspect of performativity.

Intermedia Assignment (200) - The objective of this assignment is to begin to utilize the synthesis of multiple senses to create a more immersive experience for your audience. Remember that "media" is anything that "expands the body's relationship to time and space" (McLuhan) - so when we talk about media, we're not just talking about videos, music, technology, etc. We might be talking about setting or physical artifacts that the audience can perhaps feel if they are passed around or interacted with, or hear as it encounters other objects within the environment.

For this project, please choose an event from your life or an event that was told to you that you feel is significant in shaping your personal/cultural/spiritual/political/etc. perspective. This can also be a story that was told to you by someone you know, if it had an impact on how you saw the world. Create an aesthetic text about this experience (it can be poetry or prose, narrative or persuasive, you can use cut n mix, but please have the end product be original). Gather at least two materials that add another "sense" to your text. For example:

• Tactile - you can find a physical artifact (object) to pass around to your audience
• Acoustic - you can use an audio clip or allow the sounds of a physical artifact to add to your performance
• Kinesthetic - you can integrate movement or you can invite your audience to move
• Olfactory - please no burning objects! But anything else that adds a scent to your performance :)
• Taste - you can bring treats that might be relevant to the issue you are talking about (for example, if you are talking about a specific culture, the audience can further connect by tasting some food from that culture)
• Visual - Pictures, physical artifacts and/or video

Timeline

• This weekend - I highly recommend writing your aesthetic text this weekend, as well as planning the conceptual framework for your performance
• Monday, Feb 22 - Please fill out this Media Techniques Request survey
• Tuesday, Feb 23 - Meet in the Digital Media Center in the Anderson Academic Commons (i.e., the library) for a media techniques workshop
• Thursday, Feb 25 - Intermedia Performances

Day Ten: Queering the Script

On Queering the Twelfth Night

"Queer theatre reflects the sorrow, anger, and fear of a community responding to patriarchal heterosexism, homophobia, AIDS, and threats of violence; yet at the same time, queer theatre can provide joy, pleasure, and fulfillment by questioning the concept of normal and celebrating difference" (Thomas, 2010, p. 101).

• In this way, queer performances are both affirmative and critical
• How have conceptions of queerness changed over time?
• How is something like Queer Shakespeare inherently political?

Queering the Media/Flipping the Script as an Activist Strategy

• "Queering" has become a term to describe any parody technique that reverses the power dynamics of the identities portrayed in cultural artifacts (i.e. the media, plays, art, music, folklore, fairy tales, etc.).
• The disruption of the normative order often results in humorous outcomes, prompting the audience to look at normalized social constructions as "queer" in and of themselves (in the sense that these constructions do not come from nature but are instead enforced by cultural institutions).
• No longer limited to the switching of gender or sexual identities, queering can happen when conventional roles are changed to reflect queer (or non-dominant) conceptions of race, age, class, nationality, ability, etc.

In-Class Assignment: Flipped Script
This performance will be your chance to not only interpret a literary work that has already been written, but to re-write a literary work. Therefore with your assigned partner you will be interpreting through writing and performing. You will choose a well-known narrative text (i.e. a fairy tale, folk tale, movie, TV show, comic, play, book, etc.) and re-write in such a way that makes visible a particular aspect of culture or identity. This is your chance to be creative and serious. Some ideas for how you might re-write the story include: silencing one character and giving voice to another, telling the story from a marginalized perspective, changing the ending, or rewriting the story so it highlights some issue of oppression or social (in)justice. You may also make visible (expose) previously invisible stereotypes or dominant ideologies. The performance selection does not need to be memorized, but you can’t hide your performance behind your script. After the performance, please turn in your script to me.
Rubric on Canvas

Day Nine: Power, Performance and Communication

Vocal Analysis Assignment (in class)

• This exercise will require both quantitative and qualitative analysis
• The numbers from the Voice Analysis program are there to give you a general idea of what is happening in your recordings
• The average human voice will be somewhere around 60-63 in the analyzer. Bear in mind that even a difference of a point is significant here (it's not like one voice will be 40 and another 70, even when varying between male and female).
• However, once you notice your vocal trends, you will need to do some deep listening to qualitatively interpret how it sounds, and apply those qualitative attributes to a critical explanation of how your two conversations contrast and differ.
• In Summary: you can use the numbers, but you must also use your ears and senses to make sense of what is happening!
• In-Class Write Up
• 500 Words
• 1.) Explain the contexts of both conversations - what is the contextual source of contrast here?
• 2.) What is the average pitch and loudness of your voice in each conversation? How do they differ from one conversation to the next?
• 3.) What is the average pitch and loudness of the other person's voice in each conversation? Again, compare both dialogue partners
• 4.) Take a moment to just listen to the conversations. What are the subjective qualities that you notice (without taking into account the numbers)?
• 5.) Did you tend to mimic the pitch and loudness (tone) of the other person's voice? Or did your voice take on an opposing role (either dominant or submissive) in relation to the other person?
• 6.) Please write a few sentences to critically analyze your conversations, combining both qualitative and quantitative data, and applying the data to the theory of what we have studied about how voice works as a tool in performance within a space/context, communication with another and in relation to an audience.

*Note: So I just found out that the developers of the software I used to program this made things a little easier. If you would like to download the program on your own computer:

• Download Max 7 at http://cycling74.com/downloads/runtime/ (PCs, 32-bit is good))
• To download the program, please go to https://www.dropbox.com/s/q6fm2dy6aiepobl/VoiceAnalysisFINAL.mxf and download the attachment VoiceAnalysisFINAL.mxf 

Linda Alcoff - The Problem of Speaking for Others

Debrief:

• Any questions?
• Reactions? Things you objected to? Things that resonated with you?

Individual Writing Reflections:

• What is the ethical dilemma of speaking for others, according to Alcoff?
• What are the typical responses to the dilemma that Alcoff thinks are inadequate and why?
• What does Alcoff mean by this quote: “there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one’s words do not ... affect … the experience of others... Even a complete retreat from speech is of course not neutral since it allows the continued dominance of current discourses and acts by omission to reinforce their dominance” (20)
• What are her four considerations, and how would you use them in a performance? Give specific examples

Small Group Exercise/Discussion

• Groups of 4
• First, discuss your responses to the four writing prompts
• Second come up with a polished definition that uses the context of the reading for two of the following key terms (I will assign):
• Crisis of representation: The ethical dilemma regarding the validity of speaking for others and truly representing others that we might not be able to understand 100%
• Rituals of speaking: The truth relative to the context and social location of the speaker, listener, and text - how someone says what they say and how they are positioned socially affects that they're saying - organization of their context.
• Discursive context: Speaking from only a specific context perceives a meaning as a one dimensional location, which isn’t true as it relates to the context on a larger scale.
• Retreat response: A retreat from speaking for anyone else allows for an individual to solely speak from their own narrow individual experience, therefore not learning from others and in essence allowing continued domination or unaddressed topics by way of not speaking at all.
• Hierarchy of civilizations: Suggesting that a group of people i.e tribe or country, is greater than another tribe or country. One civilization is greater than another civilization.
• Genealogy: Genealogy is the study of families and tracking or re-tracing a person’s lineage throughout history. In other words it is making a map of who and where you came from.
• Charge of reductionism response: The audience assumes that the narrator's performance is completely consumed by their location. Identity has different definitions and each identity interprets surroundings differently.
• Speaking to: Different from speaking for, not taking on identity, just presenting it. No assumptions, only performing.
• During this process, individual group members can come up and use my computer to make some quantitative observations about their vocal analysis recordings.
• You will turn in both your individual reflections and your group definitions

Weekend Assignments: Mid-Term Eval & Voice Analysis Assignment Prep

Mid-Term Course Evaluations:
Over the weekend, please take the time to fill out this anonymous (and untraceable) survey: https://udenver.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4Vo1RCpmEY0Fw2N 

• As a reminder, here is the code of conduct that our class created as a guideline for how to critique someone in a constructive and respectful way.
• Please note that qualitative, written descriptions are the most helpful in guiding me to create meaningful changes to class structure that best serve your needs as students, and to ensure that I sustain teaching practices that you enjoy/find helpful.

Voice Analysis Assignment Prep
Vocal Analysis Assignment (to be completed in-class) (50 points) - This exercise is designed to analyze the tonality, speech patterns and inflection of the voice as it shifts in response to one's perceived audience, environment and social norms. Please use a personal recording device (the voice memo app on your smart phone is an acceptable option - or, if you don't have one, the library rents them out, see http://library.du.edu/services/computers-tech-availability.html) to record yourself participating in at least two different types of conversations. These different types can include:

• You talking to friends and/or peers
• You talking to someone you consider a superior/someone who has more authority
• You talking to someone you consider a subordinate (or a conversation where you feel like you have more authority than the other speaker)
• You talking to family (if the family member is considered also a peer AND a friend, please do not use this option in conjunction with the first one)
• You talking to someone you consider an adversary

IMPORTANT: The vocal analysis tool I programmed uses .wav files. Your recording devices will probably output a .mp3 or a .m4a file. Please convert your file before class on Tuesday using this website: http://media.io/ 

• Use only the content on the left-hand side bar
• Upload your file
• Select .wav as the output
• Select "convert" > it will appear for 30 seconds or so as if nothing is happening but then you will get an automatic download with your new .wav file, be sure to save it to somewhere you can find it
• Please email me your .wav files by NOON on Tuesday, Feb. 9th --> kate.d.hoyt@gmail.com

Day Eight: Butler's Theory of Performativity

The Judith Butler Reader (Salih)
*Short debrief -- reactions to the reading/reminder about critiquing structures versus critiquing individuals.

Key Terms
Sex versus Gender: Sex is a biologically-determined category (male/female) referring to chromosomes, hormonal makeup and sex organs; Gender is a culturally-manifested performance of characteristics that appear to be natural to sex categories but are actually socially conditioned.

Phenomenology: "the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Phenomenology emerged as a philosophical alternative to psychoanalysis, the body of work created by Freud, which pathologized, or treated as diseased, many experienced phenomena of consciousness.

• Why does the author pose it as unexpected that Butler would move from the study of phenomenology to the performativity of subject and identity?

Binaries: A pair of opposites that are mutually exclusive. A system of binaries gives no room for a spectrum of options in between the two poles.

Essentialism: The view that for every identity there is a set of attributes (or an essence) that is natural (i.e. biologically-determined) and essential for its existence as such. The opposite of performativity.

Telos: An endpoint, a final objective; Butler uses this word to describe how categories like "man" and "woman" are never "complete" -- we never reach "manhood" or "womanhood" but are constantly having to perform the characteristics that prove our masculinity/femininity. There is no telos of gender.

Discourse: Most of the time, discourse means written or spoken communication; when Butler uses it, she is talking about discourse as societal shaping forces that create norms, values and politics (with a small "p" - i.e. the politics of every day life, how power relations governs our behavior -- not political systems and government). Example: the discourse of drug use defines it as a criminal/law enforcement issue, rather than a public health issue.

Key Lessons from the Reading

• Gender is something you DO, not something you ARE. 
• "Gender Trouble describes how gender 'congeals' or solidifies into a form that makes it appear to have been there all along" (Salih, p. 46)
• "...gender is not something that one is, it is something that one does, and act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, a 'doing' rather than a 'being'" (Butler, p. 25, cited in Salih, p. 62)
• Performativity versus essentialism: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilisation [sic] as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 281, cited in Salih, p. 45). 
• What it means to be a woman, or a man, or any other identity category changes over time because it is culturally determined.
• "All gender is, by definition unnatural" (Salih, p. 46).
• All genders are performative. All identities are performative.
• Importance of masculinity studies alongside women's studies: all genders are performative. If we pretend that the category of "gender studies" only applies to women we are saying that masculinity is the default and femininity is an abnormality (or, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it, "the second sex"). This tendency also encourages men and male-identifying individuals to think that anything with "gender studies" in it is not their issue, when men are disciplined into performing masculinity just as much as women are disciplined to perform femininity [see Emma Watson's UN speech on HeForShe]. 

• This also applies to other identity categories: race/ethnic studies applies to white people as well as racial minorities; sexuality studies applies to heterosexuals, etc.
• The politics of "[White] American History" versus "Cultural/Ethnic Studies" -- how does this reflect the discourse around race and (lack of) inclusion in the Academy?

• Social construction of the subject.
• The subject-in-process: "Gender Trouble makes trouble by calling the category of 'the subject' into question by arguing it is a performative construct" (Salih, p. 44).
• The subject is not a pre-shaped entity that exists before it DOES something: the doing is what makes the subject.
• While one's identity is "chosen" it is not a free choice because one can only choose from a finite menu of options offered by one's culture.
• "...by 'choice' Butler does not mean that a 'free agent' or 'person' stands outside its gender and simply selects it...Instead, Butler asserts that '[t]o choose a gender is to interpret received gender norms in a way that organizes them anew" (Salih, p 46). 
• Even if you resist gender norms, you are shaping your subjectivity in relation to that act of resistance. Your identity always refers back to the dominant social script.
• Freud, Foucault and the History of Sexuality
• "'Genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourse, with multiple diffused points of origin" (Butler, p. viii-ix; cited in Salih, p. 48). 
• Identities are disciplined: in this sense, I am not talking about disciplining as outright punishing (although sometimes this is the case). Foucault describes disciplining as the process whereby dominant power structures shape or condition behavior through the dissemination of norms (hence why Butler says that gender performances are located within compulsory frames, bottom of p. 62). Here's an example of gender disciplining:
  
  
• History of race categories: prior to the European colonization of Africa, the Americas and South Asia, there was no such identity category as "race".  "Race" became the means used to justify the exploitation of foreign lands and peoples by deeming certain populations to be "inferior" to white Europeans. Race is a socially-constructed category created by the dominant Eurocentric order. Yet we still see examples of social disciplining when it comes to adhering to performances "loyal" to one's race.

Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else.

— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) October 8, 2015

to answer a question that's been blowing up my inbox: Cam Newton is not an NFL QB. At all. Great athlete. Heisman contender. That's all

— Matt Miller (@nfldraftscout) October 25, 2010

Group Exercise - Media Artifact Scavenger Hunt
Break into groups of three. In ten minutes, find as many media artifacts (photos, videos, graphics, commercials/advertisements, illustrations, songs, etc.) that illustrate the following:

• The performance of gender binaries (i.e. contrasting femininity and masculinity as mutually exclusive and oppositional)
• Socially disciplining children, babies, infants (fetuses??) to conform to gender normativity
• Framing gender as natural/essential/biologically-driven
• Questioning a person's identity authenticity
• "Types" of women; "types" of men
• Gender norms from other regions/time periods 
• Performing queerness
• Performing blackness
• Performing whiteness
• Performing straightness
• Performing [insert identity category here]

Day Seven: Embodied Communication

Kinesthetic/Kinetic Communication, Somatics, and Affect

• Kinetic versus Kinesthetic - what is the difference?
• Kinesthetic = a learning process based on embodied, tactile stimuli
• Kinetic = relating to motion
• Embodied communication is a process that combines the two, creating a systemic feedback loop where the tactile stimuli we receive shapes the way that we move through the world.

• Interviews with the dancers:
• Casey: "[It was] so interesting to communicate with another body in that way. I would see Danny's body moving because I would see the lights changing shape, but I wouldn't have any eye contact. To have that connection without being able to really see him was fascinating."
• Danny: "At times, I couldn't tell where I ended and where she began...I forgot that the other person was controlling my light, which made me react [in that area of my body], which was a really interesting perception."
• Casey: "It felt like someone else's body, which was very strange...I did not feel like myself."
• What do you notice about the "sense of self" that is different between cognitive communication versus embodied communication?
• Somatics
• Somatic Studies: the field of movement studies which emphasize internal physical perception.
• Soma: The "body felt from within"
• ** What do you think is the relationship between emotional states and body language/facial expressions?
• Inside-out versus outside-in

Body Language/Posture/Gesture Assignment (in-class)

Please watch the video of your Cut-Up performance on mute 2-3 times and write a 500 word reflection covering: 

1.) subjective reactions to viewing the video; 

2.) analysis of body language, posture and gesture as it reflects the emotional state of the performer

3.) the aesthetic interpretation of the performance;

4.) opportunities for growth (you may combine this part with some reflection from the peer critique exercise);

5.) any differences you observed between the subjective perception of being in your body and the "objective" observation of your body from the outside. Which of these two versions of you feels like your true self?

Code of Conduct

Guidelines for giving critiques

• Avoid critiquing the character of the performer
• Limit the critique to the content of the performance
• End critique with a tangible suggestion for improvement; focus on solutions
• Don't sugarcoat; be authentic about complimentary feedback
• Be factual/detailed in feedback --> specificity; take specific piece that you saw in the performance and address them
• Don't be vague
• Be instructional
• Be balanced/inclusive of both positive and critical
• Follow through with people
• Avoid generic language (i.e. "that was good")
• Monitor subjectivity -- investigate where the subjective response comes from
• Monitor tone - posture, eye contact, attentiveness, facial expression

Guidelines for receiving critiques/feedback

• Body language- open, receptive, eye contact, return the nonverbals
• Remember critiques are subjective
• Nonattachment 
• Process before responding (respond, don't react)
• Critically assess critiques; don't outright reject them
• Ask for clarification
• Ask for process check-ins
• Embrace failure

Day Six: The Art of Critiquing

Class Code of Conduct
Together, we will create a living document that will serve as a code for how to treat one another when we respond to our peers' performative and aesthetic work. As a guiding framework for both how to give and receive feedback, this document will be open to revision throughout the quarter. If there is anything you want to change, add or modify, you are free to speak up in class.

Exercise:

• Take out a piece of paper or open a new document on your computer
• Think of a time when you were given feedback that was either constructively helpful or damaging/hurtful/unhelpful. This can be for anything: schoolwork, artistic performance, sports, etc. 
• Take five minutes to reflect:
• What was the context?
• Who was giving the feedback (not the specific person -- no name sharing -- but what was their role?)
• What were your expectations in terms of receiving this feedback?
• What was said? How was it said?
• How did this feedback make you feel?
• What did you ultimately learn from this feedback?
• Why would you classify this feedback as either helpful or harmful?
• In groups of two, share your feedback stories, and as a group translate each story into a guiding principle for the code of conduct.
• We will be sharing these as a class to add to the code of conduct.

Putting the Code of Conduct into Practice: General Class Feedback and Self Critique

• After reading Pelias & Shaffer Ch. 10 & 12, what are some thoughts you have re: general feedback for the class's Cut-Up performances?
• How were you subjectively moved (or not) by the class's performances?
• What were some performative choices that were made?
• Did this assignment change your approach to writing at all?
• What are some things you'd like to see happen in the rest of the quarter's performances?
• Take a few moments to give yourself a short critique. What feedback would you give yourself in terms of:
• Emotional honesty/vulnerability?
• Experimental writing techniques?
• Performative choices?
• Connection to audience?
• Performing a perspective outside of your own?

Generating a Rubric for the Peer Critique assignment

As a class, I'd like us to come up with some criteria for the Peer Critique assignment based on the Code of Conduct and your reflections on critiquing. What elements should I look for? How should we all strive to critique each other? Assignment here. 

Peer Critique Assignment

Peer Critique Essay (100 points) - write an approximately 500-word essay delivering a fair, sensitive and honest critique to your partner regarding his or her Cut-Up performance (see Pelias & Shaffer p. 183 for more on fair, sensitive and honest). Your essay should have 5 sections:

1. Write an introductory paragraph explaining your subjective, interpretive and emotional responses to your partner's initial performance (this means you must write this section BEFORE reviewing the video of your partner's performance. This section is for first impressions only.
2. View the video of your partner's performance as many times as you need. Go to https://videomanager.du.edu and log in with your PioneerWeb credentials. You should be automatically included in a group called Comm Thru Lit 2016 - Winter. You will find everyone's videos in this folder. The following three sections should choose 3 of the 5 Evaluative Models that Pelias & Shaffer outline on pp. 184-186. Some questions to consider:
• Performance as a textual study: to what degree was the text itself performative? To what degree did the performer present a faithful rendering of the text through his/her performance? To what degree did the text reflect effort, artistic investment, evocative imagery/characters/setting? To what degree did your partner's performance bring new meaning to the text?
• Performance as an artistic event: To what degree did the performance render you emotionally invested as an audience member? Did the performance move you? To what degree did the text/performance leave you with a new understanding of the performer's lived experience?
• Performance as a communicative act: To what degree did the text/performance give you a clear understanding of the performer's positionality and subjectivity? To what extent do you feel the performance delivered a clear message that was intended by the performer? To what extent do you feel like your interpretation of the performance synced up with that of the performer?
• Performance as a cultural process: To what extent could this text tell researchers something about the culture in which we live/the performer lives? To what degree did the performance relay something significant about the rules, conventions and principles that guide and legitimize lived experience? To what extent did this performance cause you to reflect differently upon either shared or different cultural practices, values and beliefs?
• Performance as an ethical practice: To what extent did the text/performance do justice to the experiences of others outside of the author/performer? To what extent was the text/performance "fair" to the figures involved in the story and the experience described? How does the text reflect a certain political or moral point of view?
3. Conclude by offering at least three tangible suggestions for either improvement or for a new interpretive direction in which to take the performance. This can pertain to either the text itself or to the "staging" of the text (i.e. the performance).

Due Thursday, Jan 28 in class - rubric to be generated as a group in class on Tuesday Jan 26, and will appear here: https://canvas.du.edu/courses/24200/assignments/160608

Extra Credit Opportunity

Three Options:

• 10 points: Attend the event (sign in sheet will be available)
• 20 points: Post a 500 word blurb on the blog relating the event to performance studies
• 30 points: Give a 5- to 10-minute presentation in class relating the event to performance studies

Day Five: Embodied Learning

Embodiment and Marginalized "Others" - Who Gets to be a Rational, Objective Agent?

• What is pedagogy? How does the author describe or define embodied pedagogy? What are some examples she gives?
• What is a socially-constituted body? How do social norms, expectations, narratives and stereotypes shape the way that different bodies are treated?
• How do social norms shape our bodies vis-a-vis 1.) the way we feel in our bodies? 2.) the way we feel about our bodies? 3.) the way society reads our bodies?
• How are the differences between men’s relationship to their bodies versus women’s relationship to their bodies socially constituted? In other words, how do social norms shape the differences in the relationship between bodies and genders?
• What about other cultural identities? Class? Race? Sexuality? How do social norms inscribe ways in which "othered" bodies are "read"?
• The politics of excess
• How has the mind been placed above the body in a socially-constructed hierarchy?
• "The notion of an ideal democratic subject presumes an autonomous, rational agent...The question of what a citizen should be has been with us since ancient Greece" (Holc, 1996). 
• Aristotle's Politics
• Polis - the political/public sphere where men used rational deliberation
• Oikos - the private sphere of the household where women worked manual labor

• Examples:
  
• Erin Willer, research on "compassionate love" embodied by health care professionals in treating women struggling with infertility and miscarriage: "Although several participants acknowledged that interpersonal distance may be necessary with some patients, virtually all of them rejected professional detachment as part of their care repertoires and in fact indicated that “such an approach was foreign to their personalities or their self-image as health-care professionals” (p. 355). 
• The compassionate/professional binary: why is compassion framed as being mutually exclusive to professionalism?
• President Obama's speech on gun violence

• Objectivism, social/cultural decontextualization, and racist algorithms

Day Three: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity

Cut-Up Reading

• What was the reaction to the first cut-up story that Burroughs tells in the reading? Why do you think the audience reacted in this way?
• What are the virtues of doing a cut-up? 
• How is all writing a cut-up, as Burroughs asserts?

Alternative apps/platforms/programs for cut-up assignment:  http://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/cutup/links

• Perhaps use more than one? Run a cut-up through one program and then run the output through a different program

Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity

• What is subjectivity? How do we differentiate it from its counterpart, objectivity?
• Relationship of subjectivity to capital-T Truth
• What does it mean to do academic research in an objective manner versus a subjective manner?
• "In its earliest form, the foundations for today’s social justice research involved the work of scholars who wrote traditional academic studies analyzing the communicative habits of groups who fought for justice. These were not works of advocacy but of analysis, meaning that they were neither arguing for a political position nor engaging in collaborations with the groups in question; rather, these works employed traditional notions of academic objectivity, personal remove, and political neutrality to diagnose the communicative habits of others." (Hartnet, 2010)
• "Thus any characteristics you share with the subjects and objects of research must be sterilized, because these biases contaminate the purity of the research process and undermine objectivity" (Guishard, 2008)
  ------------
• "One of the most significant differences is found in the subjectivity-objectivity dialectic....objectivity is paradoxically incorporated as a form of subjective experience of equal value to (not privileged above) all others. This is accomplished through the conscious acknowledgement of the functional, yet arbitrary, boundaries, which result in a variety of standpoints. In a sense, boundaries and bracketing of those boundaries (Becker, 1992), are a manifestation of the illusion of objectivity which is necessary to operate within constructed realities." (Gonzalez, 2000).
• "This approach to looking at members of `other' cultures has much to offer those who have been overly affected by the notions of scientific objectivity and the myth of possible separation of parts. Everything is related, and therefore what we do in our work with others will inevitably be done to us." (Gonzalez, 2000).
• What does this have to do with today's debate?
• One team in each debate must inevitably argue that their side's lived experience is more valid than an objective, scientific point of view that uses objective facts to verify claims. The burden of this team is to not only argue that your side's subjective experience counts as true, but you must also argue that an intersubjective process of coming to consensus is more just/true than scientific objectivity
• Intersubjectivity: In its weakest sense, intersubjectivity refers to agreement. There is intersubjectivity between people if they agree on a given set of meanings or a definition of the situation. Similarly, Thomas Scheff defines intersubjectivity as "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals."(Scheff, 2006)

Debate

• Topic #1 -- This house believes: the experiences described by the Hmong people in "Yellow Rain" are true
• Topic #2 -- This house believes: the hosts of RadioLab acted ethically in the "Yellow Rain" episode

Timeline:

• 20 min - Planning for first round argument, potential second-round rebuttals 
• 4 min - First round: Central spokesperson from each side lays out central argument 
• 2 min - Planning for second-round rebuttals 
• 2 min - Second round: Both sides counter the argument of their opponent. All members can participate. 
• 2 min - Third round: ALL OUT WAR. Anyone can comment
• There are no rules EXCEPT no interrupting someone mid-sentence.
• 5-10 min - Judges' deliberation (debaters of topic #1 will judge debate #2 and vice versa)
• *The winning teams of this debate will receive 10 extra credit points

Follow up/debrief: The shifting relationship between Truth and Fact

• Storytelling, myth and legend: not only shape communities but are shaped by communities 
• Is there a difference between Truth and Fact?
  
  
  
  From Kelly Oliver, "Witnessing Subjectivity" (2000)

Cut-Up Assignment

Cut-Up Assignment (100 points) - In studying the interpretation of aesthetic texts, this assignment is intended to elucidate the creator’s/performer’s power in structuring texts to fit his/her interpretation and conveying that to the audience. Using digital platforms to “cut up” originally-written aesthetic texts with reappropriated ones, students will re-interpret their writing from a different point of view and be forced to make sense of it, particularly in conjunction with performing the new text in class.

• Go to : http://www.cutnmix.com/macversion/ or http://www.robopoem.com/ for PC users
• Write a brief aesthetic text that describes an important experience or identity that you hold.
• Find one or more other texts to cut up with your text (this can be lyrics, a poem, a movie script, a set of directions - anything!)
• Cut N Mix: 
• 1.) Download the app for your respective computing machine 
• 2.) Open the app and go to "Input Tracks" tab; 
• 3.) Select "Track 1" tab and write in your composed piece (sorry, this does not do "cut' and "paste"!) 
• 4.) Select "Track 2/3/4" tab and insert your reappropriated piece(s) 
• 5.) Tab back to "Output" and determine your parameters (i.e. turning down one track, etc., size filtering out words) 
• 6.) Hit "Mix Tracks" 
• 7.) Cut N Mix cannot cut and paste so hit "Save Mix" and save it somewhere you will be able to locate. It will save as a TextEdit file. You can use that to print it out or cut and paste into Word/GoogleDocs/Open Office. 
• Refine the language to make as much (or little sense) as you would like. This is another layer of your aesthetic interpretation.
• You may find ways to include figurative language forms (i.e. personification, metaphor, etc.) in refining your cut-up writing.
• *At least 20 lines, please!
• Due Tuesday Jan 19