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

Day Two: Aesthetic Texts

• Group Exercise - Please discuss and prepare to present to the class responses to the following questions (each group is assigned one number):

1. Why do we study performance theory? What does this add to the study of communication? In your personal academic interests, how might performance theory enhance your studies?
2. What do Pelias and Shaffer mean when they say that all human communication is performative? What are some qualities that typify a communicative act as performative?Give three examples of communicative acts you engaged in within the past month and describe how they are performative.
3. What defines an aesthetic text? Find an example online of an aesthetic text and a non-aesthetic text.
4. What do Pelias and Shaffer mean when they define performance as a transactional process? Who/what are the different agents that participate in this transaction?
5. What are the three modes of aesthetic communication? Give an example of each (either from your own life or popular culture -- you may search online and even show a clip)
6. How do genres of performances condition the interaction between performer and audience? Give three examples -- excluding the ones named in the book at the top of p. 114 -- of genres and their expected listener responses. 
7. What claims are put forth about a text when one categorizes it as "literary"? Why has the tendency in recent years "been to blur the lines between literary and nonliterary texts" (Pelias & Shaffer, p. 114)? Why do you think that scholars have recently recognized the classification of texts into established literary forms as not only unnecessary but harmful to certain marginalized groups?

• Prompt responses will guide us through a large-group discussion of the following:

1. Performance as a political act: All statements are statements of value; human curation of words to be uttered determines what is important and what is not, it assigns significance. "What [a speaker] decides to say is an indication, implicitly or explicitly, of what [s]he thinks is worth saying. In this sense, all of [a speaker's] statements are statements of value" (Pelias & Shaffer, p. 6).

• Ex. - asking someone about their weekend
• What about "factual" statements? Do they contain their own value biases?
• Performance ethnographer Dwight Conquergood talks about the "antitheatrical bias" in academia. Why do you think that is? What are some synonyms associated with the word "performance"? What do these associations imply about the relationship between performance and truth?

               2.   Performance as interpretive, temporal and emergent:

• Interpretive: requiring aesthetic judgement, subjective feeling and situated within personal, social and cultural contexts.
• Temporal: time-based. Performance is not an object or a product, it is a process.
• Emergent: the outcome of a performance cannot be formulated -- because of the many factors that affect a performance, including audience responses, the "liveness" of a performance is never the same twice.

               3.   Subjectivity: The interpretation of texts requires a subjective response, meaning that the performer and the listener call                        upon their personal conscious experiences such as perspectives, feelings, beliefs and desires. This framework questions the                      notion of objectivity or a capital-T Truth.

• Can there ever be two competing truths to reality?
• We will examine this topic further next week, when we debate the various perspectives presented in the RadioLab episode "Yellow Rain" -- a story from the Cold War, about a mysterious substance that fell from the sky in Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam war.
• Pick a side from which to prepare an argument: Hmong villagers in Laos or US scientists.
• Listen to the podcast over the weekend, noting arguments that would validate an advance the narrative your side is arguing.

               4.   Performance as dialogic: 

The term “dialogic” refers to two or more contributing agents, given various examples:

• • 1.) The performer and the author of interpretive text
  • Embodiment - a transformative act: time-based image functions to “both to deal with logical understanding and to penetrate to unconscious levels, to reach for the emotional denominator of all men, the nonverbal basis of human life,” (Youngblood, 387).
  • The difference between knowing something and emotionally connecting 
  • 2.) The performer and, if text is self-composed, the past self of the performer, or another performative identity 
  • Radiolab - Help! The act of self-bargaining addresses the most extreme examples of how we can play different roles as time progresses
  • 3.) The performer and the audience
  • Does a performer need to  have a certain audience response as an objective?
  • The importance of the role of the audience: the potentiality of audience responses is what makes performance temporal, emergent, dynamic and transformative.
  • The more the role of the audience is allowed to influence the development of the performance, the more these factors are present.
  • 4.) The performer and the media
  • Example, generative media
  • Are these examples performative?
  • 5.) The audience and the media
  • Examples of immersive media/art
  • Precognition -- The suits were only immersive to the dancers, but the LED wall responds to the overall movement of the room, making the audience a controller for the media

                 5.   Modes of Performance

• Lyric - Personal utterance, expression of individual speaker's private realization or discovery (think monologue)
• Dramatic - Shared conversation between two or more speakers (think dialogue)
• Epic - storyteller speaks directly to an audience while other speakers interact with each other or the scene (think narration)
• Where can you spot these modes within this example from the hit new musical Hamilton? How does Hamilton blur the boundaries of these neat categories of modes?

                6.   Genres - Burke's frame and genre analysis applied to performative acts

• The conditioning of audience expectations often happens subconsciously

                7.   Politics of literary canons -- Pelias and Shaffer say that "traditional literary forms include poetry, prose fiction (short stories and novels), drama, letters, diaries, autobiographies, speeches and essays. 

• How does the age of digital media necessitate a change in this system of categorization?
• Traditionally, who has decided what is a valid literary form? What kind of group gets this power? What does this mean for the study of, say, Black American slave songs?

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Expressive Language and the Cut-Up Assignment

• Expressive/sensuous language - "Expressive language avoids the ordinary, the cliche, the everyday. Striking in effect, it surprises, delights, enriches, moves and compels listeners" (Pelias & Shaffer, p. 118)
• Language and the senses - expressive language is the language of performance. If performance is a more embodied mode of communication (meaning, we experience the stories, rather than have them described to us) then the language of performance evokes our senses: "Sensuous language appeals to the listeners' visual auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory senses" (Pelias & Shaffer, p. 118)
• How can language, which we can only see or hear, evoke other senses?
• Synesthesia - the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.
• Figurative speech - language devices that contain more than their literal sense. Give me a definition and an example of the following:
• Simile
• Metaphor
• Oxymoron
• Hyperbole
• Understatement
• Personification
• Apostrophe
• Allusion
• Poetic Rhythm - Presentation on rhythmic musical features

The Cut-Up Assignment - The purpose of this assignment is to play with language structures. The cut-up software forces the author to construct new forms of language by cutting up their writing with another text. This assignment will force you as a writer to break with your conventional modes of writing. Due Thursday January 14. 

Group Presentations

Please comment on your preferred 2-3 group presentation readings by Tuesday January 12th at 4pm. I will assign the readings based on the order in which you post your preferences. All readings are linked to in full - feel free to peruse them before you comment.

• Tues Jan 19th - Performing Oral History: Storytelling and Pedagogy (Stucky)
• This essay addresses the potential of oral history performance to explore human communication across cultures. The study describes a class project in collecting and performing oral history interviews. By engaging students as field researchers to gather oral texts, and through the use of performance as a mode of historical, cultural, and interpersonal inquiry, students meet their interview subjects in a dialogic encounter designed to enhance their understanding of another's personal experience.
• Thurs Jan 21st - Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics (Conquergood)
• Conquergood's teaching and research interests are in performance ethnography, cultural studies, and field research methods. Conquergood is particularly interested in how refugees, immigrants, and other marginalized groups cope with forces of displacement and domination through identity-strengthening performance practices.
• Tues Jan 26th - Critical Poetic Response (Alexander)
• This article focuses on what Alexander calls the Critical Poetic Response (CPR), in which the critical response of the instructor is presented in a poetic and artistic frame. This method offers critique, while reflecting the specific skills and performative nature of a given assignment. What follows is an initial articulation of this emerging method that seeks to foreground performative acuity as the tender of pedagogical negotiation. In order to explicate this method, Alexander elaborates the notion of a poetic pedagogy, following it with his process for creating the CPR. Next, he addresses larger questions about this method. Finally, in an appendix, he presents two examples of CPRs from a performance studies class.
• Tues Feb 2nd - Troubling Genders, Subverting Identities: Interview with Judith Butler (Reddy & Butler)
• In this interview, Reddy engages Judith Butler, described by Reddy as "one of the most challenging, influential and refreshing thinkers of our time." One of the topics covered is how Butler's work on performativity theory applies to the African context. The authors invite the reader to consider Butler's thinking in relation to how men and women may continue to engage theory and analysis from an activist perspective.
• Thurs Feb 4th - From the African American Oral Tradition to Slam Poetry: Rhetoric and Stylistics (Stoudamire)
• Applies the concept of a "speech community" -- "any group which shares both linguistic resources and rules for interaction and interpretation" (Coulthard, 1977, p. 32) -- to the Black American community and traces the rhetorical patterns throughout various textual forms such as oral history, phonetics, folklore and slam poetry. Black America, Black English, Black Dialect, Black Idiom, Ebonics, or as Geneva Smitherman refers to it, “the language of soul” (Talkin and Testifyin 1) is defined as “a language mixture, adapted to the conditions of slavery and discrimination, a combination of language and style interwoven with and inextricable from Afro-American culture”.
• Tues Feb 9th - To Witness Mimesis (Wake)
• This paper examines an Australian “verbatim play” about asylum seekers, Through the Wire, in order to consider the relationship between realism and witnessing in the theatre. It argues that verbatim or testimonial theatre is better understood as a form of realism than as a form of documentary theatre, as is usually the case. Current scholarship in both theatre and trauma studies criticizes realist approaches principally on ethical grounds, without necessarily accounting for a play’s political effects. Through an analysis of Through the Wire’s production and reception, Wake suggests that, while testimonial theatre may be ethically problematic, it can also be politically efficacious, precisely because of its realist aesthetics.
• Thurs Feb 11th - Performativity, Parody, Politics (Lloyd)
• The aim of this article is to examine both the work of Judith Butler on gender performativity and examples of how Butler's writings have been appropriated by certain other writers. Lloyd explores three areas in particular: the relation between performance and performativity in the work of Butler and her `adherents'; the developmental changes in Butler's argument between Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter; and the question of the effectiveness of the politics of parody.
• Tues Feb 16th - Digital media and ‘girling’ at an elite girls' school (Charles)
• In this article, Charles draws on Judith Butler's notion of performativity to investigate the role of digital technologies in processes of gendered subjectification (or ‘girling’) in elite girls' education. Elite girls' schooling is a site where the potential of digital technologies in mediating student‐led constructions and explorations of ‘femininity’ sits alongside school‐produced digital media in the form of promotional texts, in which young femininity is regulated by discourses of ‘girl power’. While such schools are well equipped with digital resources that might be utilized towards students' interrogation of how ‘femininity’ is understood, thus politicizing the girling process, school‐produced digital media inscribe a more prescriptive picture of ‘who’ an elite schoolgirl can ‘be’.
• Thurs Feb 18th - So Close to Burning: Intermedia and Documentary Solo Performance in Juan and John (Nielsen)
• When the display of documentary images attenuates solo performance, photography and other documentary media do not simply supply historical evidence; they tell stories about, interpret, and delimit horizons of interpretation, rather than “prove” it. In a project that aims for “forgiveness, redemption, and healing,” Roger Guenveur Smith's first explicitly autobiographical work in documentary solo performance, Juan and John, revisits the televised 22 August 1965 baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, when Juan Marichal “clashed” with John Roseboro. The projection of photographs and other media recordings throughout the performance fix Smith's meditations about the game, and the 1960s more broadly, as both fact and fiction, in a coming-of-age “memoir” that is punctuated by the rhetorical repetitions of the image. While breaking in and out of remembrance's affective repertoires offers a technique for resistance to documentary and other reinscriptions of historical violences, the serial and sequential intermedia cuts bespeak latent images of historical pasts, at once the burned and burning instruments for and bearers of memory.
• Tues Mar 1 - Performance Constellations: Memory and Event in Digitally Enabled Protests in the Americas (Fuentes)
• This essay analyzes the development of the relationship between performance and digital media within protest movements in the Americas. Fuentes tracks digital media's role in constituting what she calls “performance constellations.” Performance constellations complicate previous definitions of performance as acts of transfer in order to account for hybrid, networked, and decentered protest performances. Focusing on 1990s hacktivism within the Zapatista rebellion and on social media practices during the 2011 Chilean student protests, Fuentes demonstrate that by dis-locating bodies and events, performance constellations constitute important reworkings of time and space outside of neoliberal management.

Date	Material	Presenters
1/21/16	Performing Oral History: Storytelling and Pedagogy (Stucky)	Natalie & Susannah
	--	--
1/26/16	Critical Poetic Response (Alexander)	Nikki & Grace
2/2/16	Troubling Genders, Subverting Identities: Interview with Judith Butler (Reddy & Butler)	Amanda & Paige
2/4/16	From the African American Oral Tradition to Slam Poetry: Rhetoric and Stylistics (Stoudamire)	Rachel and Shewit
2/9/16	To Witness Mimesis (Wake)	Rosie & Montana
2/11/16	Performativity, Parody, Politics (Lloyd)	Taylor and Lily
2/16/16	Digital media and ‘girling’ at an elite girls' school (Charles)	Meryl and Samantha
2/18/16	So Close to Burning: Intermedia and Documentary Solo Performance in Juan and John (Nielsen)	Blaise & Kaylie