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)
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• "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)