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.

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

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

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

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