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.

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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