Catching Up and Juggling

This is what we're doing this week: catching up and juggling. The ice and snow were disorienting, and it's been tough to regroup, but it seems like we're getting there.

Just to catch readers up if any of you aren't in the class:

We began by starting to learn the Viewpoints as a method of improvisation, both for ensemble building and for creating our own work. We started the process of having public readings of the plays we'll be working on later in the semester. Then we spent some time discussing solo performance as a particular form that can give people an opportunity to tell their own stories to audiences. Now each student is using the Viewpoints vocabulary to tell a story he or she wants to tell.

In The Viewpoints Book, one of the ways Anne Bogart and Tina Landau describe a "Composition" that uses Viewpoints as its foundation is

... an assignment given to an ensemble so that it can create short, specific theater pieces addressing a particular aspect of the work. We use Composition during rehearsal to engage the collaborators in the process of generating their own work around a source. The assignment will usually include an overall intention or structure as well as a substantial list of ingredients which must be included in the piece. ... These ingredients are to a Composition what single words are to a paragraph or essay. The creator makes meaning through their arrangement. (11)

Part of the point of this first autobiographical solo composition assignment is to allow the actors to explore their own identities ... who they imagine themselves to be, and what's important to them ... before they begin engaging with the fictional identities of characters and the histories of people in the community. It's also to give them an opportunity to practice building work in this way so that they can build on the experience later in the semester.

I'm posting the assignment here, just so readers will have a context for what we're talking about:

Solo Composition:
Performing Yourself as a Character

In this assignment, you will use the viewpoints (and the other “ingredients” on the list below) to compose a solo performance that focuses on your own identity. One of the challenges is to include everything on this list in the short amount of time provided. It is based on the idea that you perform yourself as a character every day, even if that character changes in different circumstances. And as an actor, you always bring at least a little bit of your own identity—your personal history, cultural background, likes and dislikes, deepest wishes, etc.—to the character on which you’re working. This project should give you an opportunity to explore what those things are before you start to work on a character who is in many ways very different from you.

In no more than five minutes (or less … just don’t go over five) you should tell the story of something important that happened to you (not necessarily deeply personal or emotional, unless you feel comfortable doing that. Just a story you feel you really want to tell). In those five minutes, you must use all of the following:

1. Your favorite song in some form.
2. A physical re-enactment of one thing you do everyday
3. A mention of your cultural background (whatever that means to you)
4. 10 consecutive seconds of total silence
5. All of the Viewpoints (Space: Shape, Spatial Relationship, Gesture, Architecture, Topography; Time: Repetition, Tempo, Duration, Kinesthetic Response)
6. A moment in which the audience participates actively
7. At least one costume piece
8. One object from home that is relevant to your story

You should turn in a sheet of paper with an outline of your script that explains how you’ve included each of these things. The performance should be memorized.

These performances are happening tomorrow and Monday, and we'll videotape some of them in case we want to revisit them later in the semester. I'm excited to see these.

After those are done, we delve into studying community based work.

Solo Performance

We're moving on this week to talking about solo performance as a form with its own history and cultural significance. It occurred to me as we were discussing this that I wanted to include it for a lot of reasons. In addition to giving students some practice using Viewpoints vocabulary to build a performance, I wanted to give them the opportunity to tell their own stories before they moved on to listening to, talking about and performing other people and characters.

I was thinking about the fact that it may seem strange to begin a semester about performance and community with such a self-oriented assignment as an autobiographical solo performance. But the history of the form clarifies why it seems appropriate. We read Jo Bonney's introduction to the anthology of solo performance she edited, which is entitled Extreme Exposure. Bonney points out a lot of important things about solo performance as it was practiced in New York in the 1990s that show how it relates to community based arts.

• it was often focused on the process of discovery and development rather than on creating a sellable product;
• as such, it was non-commercial, and in fact often served as a critique to more profit-oriented theatre, television, film, etc.;
• it was a form used by people who seem to have been left out of representation in mainstream culture for whatever reason, or it gave people the opportunity to represent themselves in the face of a long history of inaccurate or even offensive representations in American culture;
• it was frequently performed by the artists for an audience made up of people in their own communities, however they defined that;
• it often involved direct, active contact with audience members;
  
• it was used as a way of provoking questions rather than providing easy answers;
• it was used by people who had limited financial resources, and could be done in small spaces. In other words, it was developed in the spirit of independent "do-it-yourself" art that also inspired independent film and home recording of music.

I reminded students that this kind of work hasn't always been well received and is often subject to censorship. In the early 1990s, controversy over the NEA Four (Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller) was at the heart of the so-called "culture wars" that centered around questions of who should determine decency and morality when considering public funding for individual artists.

So, as we begin to choose the play we'll all focus on over the course of the semester, we're also starting to explore how we can begin to produce performance of our own that uses the stories and resources we have on hand. And we'll discuss some of the importance of being able to tell our own stories publicly.

Here are some Youtube videos we watched in class yesterday. These are examples of solo work that made its way to more mainstream venues and media:

John Leguizamo's Freak



Margaret Cho's I'm the One that I Want



and Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia