Hi! I'm Jared.

Hello all, my name is Jared White. I’m a second year graduate student here at the University of Louisville. I’m really excited about this class because I love creating new works from scratch. I’m excited about what we will accomplish in this class. About a year and a half ago I did a performance art piece for the first time. The piece involved me putting up several pictures of civil rights leaders. I had up pictures of Chief Joseph, Harvey Milk, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X and Caesar Chavez. Then I went along writing racist words on all their faces. With each picture I would remove an article of clothing. Once the clothing was revealed it showed the very same words written in permanent marker all over my skin. I would eventually by the end of the piece be completely naked and covered in racism. During this whole piece I had the star spangled banner (ironically sung by the Mormon tabernacle choir) playing while a slide show showed photos of white Americas checkered past with freedom. Then once I was completely naked I tried to wash off the words with a bucket of water while Elton Johns’ “The Last Song” played in the back ground. During this last song I also had pictures of hope continuing the slideshow.
I tell you this, not to brag but to highlight all that we might be able to accomplish with this class. We probably won’t be touching such heavy handed material but we can go far with the statements we can make.

Ready To Learn!

Hello All,

I am very excited to be working in this class as this will be my first community-based theatrical experience! Although, I'm sure some would argue that every theatrical experience is through community, whether it is defined as the acting ensemble and crew, the production staff, or even the audience. Anyway, I am currently an MFA student at U of L, trying to expand my knowledge of theatre as art and literature. And with the help of Amy and this class, I should hope to also be exploring theatre as anthropology (which I had never thought of before and I'm not sure why!) and community strengthening. I also have a special and exciting connection with this class because I am currently planning my own wedding for next August. So the ideas and connotations of marriage are fresh in my head, defining what marriage could possibly mean to my future husband and I. I also am getting the first hand-experience on how other brides and grooms view weddings and marriage. I am so excited to see what I can learn about myself and relationships while in this class!

Please Come to Our Reading!! Join the Process!

Hello, everyone. I've put together an announcement to publicize our first reading of the play on which we'll be working in this class. Please forward the information far and wide! We'd like to have as much community participation as possible. Please note that this won't be on campus, but at the Main Library, which I think is a more central location. I've included a map below, and information on how to get to the main library on the bus.

Saturday, October 2, 2010 at 12 noon
Centennial Room
in the basement of the Louisville Free Public Library,
Main Branch (on York between 3rd and 4th)
FREE and open to the public!



Community Reading
of Charles L. Mee’s
A Perfect Wedding
to be produced in the Theatre Arts Department
at the University of Louisville
in March 2011.

This reading is part of a course called “Acting, Performance and Community” at UofL. We are experimenting with a community-engaged rehearsal process to find ways of using our work on this play as a jumping-off point for community conversations about the issues it addresses, particularly marriage equality and cultural difference. The play is a comedy with some music and dancing, so the process should be fun**, but there are also darker moments and serious questions raised. Everyone is invited to participate after the reading in any way they wish: offer to be interviewed by one of the actors, attend one or more rehearsals and give feedback, follow and comment on our class blog, etc.

For more information, contact:
Dr. Amy Steiger, (502) 852-8446, amy.steiger@louisville.edu
or check out our blog:
communitybasedacting.blogspot.com




**Please note: the play contains some sensitive language and content. You can read it in its entirety at www.charlesmee.com/html/perfectwedding.html

The Main library is in downtown Louisville at 301 York St, between 3rd and 4th:

View Larger Map

If you're taking the bus, here's a link to the TARC website so you can plan a trip to the library on October 2.

WE HOPE TO SEE LOTS OF PEOPLE THERE! PLEASE COME!

Starting Again!: A Perfect Wedding

Hello, everyone.

It's been over a year since we began this blog back in the spring semester of 2009. I'm teaching the same class again, but with a few important revisions; and because the course goals and materials are, for the most part, the same, I've decided to continue with the blog we used before. This way, it becomes an ongoing compendium of thoughts and information on the evolution of this community-engaged acting process.

Last year, we worked with the plays of Naomi Wallace.
This semester we're beginning again, but this time developing characters for a production in UofL's mainstage season, A Perfect Wedding (that link will take you to the script in its entirety). Students in the class will be choosing characters from this play on which to work this semester, and engaging with members of the local community as they develop those characters for performance.

This is, in part, an extension of the work we did on Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed: A Theatrical Documentary on the Topic of Marriage, which we devised starting in 2009 and performed in April of this year. Our interest in that project was in using theatre to start an ongoing dialogue on the topic of marriage, especially with the purpose of joining the national debate over marriage equality. This debate has entered the news again recently, since Proposition 8 was overturned by a federal judge in California, but marriages of gay and lesbian couples were put on hold by the Court of Appeals. The case is expected to go all the way to the Supreme Court. It seems useful to find ways of using theatre to explore this issue with local communities.

But also, Mee's play addresses a lot of important and engaging issues: cultural difference, love and relationships, death and funerals, beauty. And it does so in a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking way. It's a comedy and plays on the conventions of that form, but is also poignant and even dark at times. It seems like it would be a fun way to introduce the public to this method that is intended to make the actor's process more democratic, engaged and responsible to community.

And also again, this is a class in which students will learn about the theory and practice of a number of different artists whose work they may not have other opportunities to study in a direct and practical way. We'll talk about how this work can provide them with tools for building their own processes outside of school.

So it's a lot of work we have ahead of us this semester, but I think it will be fun and productive work! Students are required to post on here over the course of the semester, so it will be updated on a regular basis. Please please help us as we take on this project: we would love to hear any thoughts on what we're doing ... just click on the envelope at the bottom of the post to leave a comment.

We're starting by learning about Viewpoints training, and how to use it to stage performance compositions. You can learn more about this technique by clicking on some of the links to the right.

More to come, very soon ...

Viewpoints: I think I've done this before...but not really.

So my first reaction to viewpoints was "Oh, yeah I've done this." Or at least something like it. I've done most of the execises we explored in the past but no body ever told me it was called viewpoints. I think that Tompkins had us doing something like this as the beginning of his warmup routine last semester, at least the moving through space part. And i don't think I've ever done all those exercises at the same time.
It is one thing to read about the concept on paper. It's quite something else to do it. I've always learned that way anyway. I didn't understand the concepts in application until I'd actually done them. To me the viewpoints chapter we've covered so far only explain the concept in dividing out Space and Time and how to apply them through various things such as Tempo and Shape. It was Amy's instruction that brought it to life.
What also I noticed was how quickly it develops ensemble. I seems to break down barriers quickly and I'm not sure how. I often wonder how these things are thought up and wish i was part of the creation process. I would have loved to have been in the room when someone said "Okay I think we should all move through space."
I can't wait to read the rest of the chapters...

Afterthoughts ...

I just wanted to post once more at the end of the semester to reflect on the work we did. First, I will say again that I was very impressed and grateful for the small group of students in the class. We had a group of eight at the beginning and a few had to leave because their schedules demanded it, but throughout everyone was very receptive to new ideas and gave their full attention and energy to thinking and talking about these plays and this process. Excellent work all around!

I was also very impressed with what the students put together for their final performances. Naomi Wallace's plays are already extremely relevant and moving, but I feel like the students were able to make direct connections with their own lives, current situations, and local people in ways that doesn't always happen, especially publicly, in acting classes. As I was watching, it occurred to me that if I were an audience member who wasn't familiar with how actors work, I would be intrigued just by seeing the process of research. And in addition to that, I learned a lot from the performances. I really think that if actors always went through such a process of research, interviewing and performing their work on characters, theatre would become relevant in a different way for contemporary audiences. That's an ambitious thought, but it does seem possible.

I will definitely do some things differently if the opportunity presents itself to do this again in the future. (Students can weigh in on this if they have the chance.) First, this is the assignment I gave for the final performance:

You might think of this performance as being akin to a live documentary related to your character, a collage, a quilt woven from a number of different kinds of fabric to represent your character, or a sort of “Frankenstein’s monster” of your character. The idea is to develop your character’s identity using different pieces of information—interviews, written texts, pictures, film clips, songs, costume pieces, etc.— and perform this montage for the class. You will then put that character to work in the scene you are performing. You can create the montage any way you care to do so, but it must include the following elements:

1. At least two “Everyday Life Performance” moments
2. At least two costume pieces
3. A piece of music that you associate with your character
4. All of the Viewpoints
5. At least two pieces of non-fictional research associated with your character (from news media, for example, or scholarly texts)
6. At least two artistic representations—not music--you associate with your character (film clips, sculpture, paintings, etc.)
7. At least two of your character’s lines from the play
8. At least two elements of your character’s history that come from your imagination
9. At least one reference to your own identity and how it is similar to your character’s

("Everyday Life Performance Moments," by the way, refers to an exercise that I took from Omi Osun Olomo's course in Performance Ethnography. It is a short excerpt from an interview performed verbatim, in the way it is spoken by the interviewee.)

I modeled this assignment after the composition work I learned when studying with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company years ago, and think it works well in a situation when there is limited time to compose a performance. I also have used it in the past, for undergraduate students who have very little performance experience. But this time, it seemed a bit limiting.

This may also because I worked along with the student and composed my own performance as part of the class, so they might have a model to which they could look (and also so that I would have something to demonstrate this process in other contexts). But I think that students who are more experienced would benefit from something less structured than this. The problem is that students have so much anxiety about this process, they tend to look for a template or a set of rules to have something that ensures them they are doing this "right." And so when I say "just compose a solo performance using the techniques we studied in the first half of the semester," it seems too wide open and students sometimes feel paralyzed. But the truth is, I think the performances would be more varied, in terms of structure, if I didn't include this list, or didn't show them my own work as a model. I wonder if I shouldn't be less concerned about easing students' anxieties, since sometimes solving the problem of "how do I communicate this character to an audience?" produces such compelling ideas. Not that these performances weren't beautiful and fascinating, just that I don't want students to feel that they have to follow a particular set of rules to get everything "right."

Also, one thing that was really unfortunately missing in this process was more engagement with the interviewees and members of the community outside of class. I always encourage students to invite people to rehearsals, but it never does pan out. That's where I think it would help to have a community of people already interested before the class begins. I think the fruitful conversations that might happen as a result of this process, and the changing relationship of audience to actors this is intended to encourage, really relies on seeing the process as more of a dialogue and equal exchange instead of a process through which the actors interview people and use that information to lend authority to their representations. In fact, that's the way in which this really is fundamentally different than "method" acting or other processes actors undertake - that it is a process that happens publicly rather than behind closed doors. That's also the reason for using the blog and Myspace, so people can offer their feedback as we work and allow their thoughts to influence the choices actors make.

Part of the problem is, of course, that people's time is precious, and to request that they give some of it up to work with a group of acting students is a lot to ask. This part of it ... the "community based," dialogue-driven part ... is perhaps the most important, and the one piece that has never worked. But once again, I am convinced that this process has the potential to introduce a very important shift in the relationship between actors and audiences, so we can all benefit from the questions and ideas being circulated through these processes. What I mean to suggest is that, rather than theatre artists working toward a "production" that is a final point, the whole process is something dynamic and changing, a conversation that can happen before, during and after what we usually consider the "performances" are over. If anybody has any suggestions for how to make the dialogue part of this process more successful, I welcome your comments or thoughts.

Program for Our Final Performances

I thought I would post the program from our final performances for anyone who wasn't able to attend. Thanks to everyone who was there!


Final Performances for Community Based Acting
April 25 and 26, 2009

Characters and Performers:
Gin Chance from The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek … Amy Steiger
Dray Chance from The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek … Amelia Pantalos
Pace Creagan from The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek … Will Gantt
Dalton Chance from The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek … Melanie Henry
Boxler from In the Heart of America … Rocky Vanderford
Fairouz Saboura from In the Heart of America … Zac Gilbert
Craver Perry from In the Heart of America … Cassie Perkins

The scenes we will perform today are from plays by Naomi Wallace, a Kentucky-born playwright whose new play The Hard Weather Boating Party opened this spring at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays. In one of the plays the students chose, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, the character Pace Creagan says to her young friend, “Dalton Chance, when we're grown up, I want to stand here with you and not be afraid. I want to know it will be okay. Tonight. Tomorrow. That when it's time to work, I'll have work. That when I'm tired, I can rest. Just those things. Shouldn't they belong to us?" I find each part of Pace’s simple desire so moving - the "here" that means having a sense of place, the "with you" that means love and companionship, the lack of fear of persecution or loss, the need for satisfying work, and the need for rest - and this is so much what Ms. Wallace’s plays are about to me: the need to recognize which people in our world lack those simple human needs, to examine how we might contribute to their inability to have them, and to do our best to transform inequity and injustice in our own lives and communities.

And so these plays seemed ideal models for our efforts to find ways to examine and transform our relationship as theatre artists to our own community. All of us collected interviews with two or three people, and then we used pieces of those interviews in solo character study performances, using a technique borrowed from performance ethnography and the work of Anna Deavere Smith, who edits interviews into performances and speaks her interviewees’ words verbatim. We use her work because it gives equal attention to empathy and difference. Smith sees drama in the effort she makes to “cross the bridge” between herself and other people. In the introduction to her play Fires in the Mirror, she writes, "Character lives in the obvious gap between the real person and my attempt to seem like them. I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us. I am willing to display my own unlikeness" (xxxvii-xxxviii). So as we worked, we noticed where we succeeded and failed in our attempts to get inside another person’s skin—and the important thing is what we learned through the process, through learning how to listen so closely to someone else, through becoming aware of how complicated human identity is, and the beauty and difficulty of that complexity, through finding out how to truly respect both the comforting similarities and the significant and fascinating differences between ourselves and other people.

Thanks for giving us your time and attention! We hope you enjoy the performances. We would love to hear your thoughts on our work or these characters and the questions they raise.