Week 15: Final Essay

Judith Butler writes, “gender is a stylized repetition of acts .. which are internally discontinuous … so that the appearance of substance is precisely that — a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and perform in the mode of belief.” What does this production […]

Week 13

Read a blog. Write to your fellow classmate and reflect what you found interesting and generative about that blog. You don’t have to read or write like an instructor. Instead, be a generous classmate and try to witness what the other has done throughout the course of the semester. Post the result on the student’s […]

Week 12

Think of a work you have seen or performed in and do the same as Wolf. Be a lesbian spectator, and make a different meaning from a work not intended for that purpose. Then write about it. I love finding different character interpretations in my favorite works, so I was very excited to read Wolf’s […]

Week 11

Where would you mount a production of Waiting for Godot right now? How would you stage it? Why? So much of what was talked about regarding Waiting for Godot in New Orleans was the universality of waiting–in New Orleans’ case, waiting to helped after Katrina, waiting for the government to uphold its end of the […]

Week 9

In “Enactments of Power,” N’gugi Wa Thiong’o writes: “The state has its arenas of performance; so has the artist. While the state performs power, the power of the artist is solely in performance. Both the state and the artist may have a may have a different conception of time, place, content, goals, either of their […]

Week 8

How do we write about dance? In Deborah Jowitt’s article in Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright’s book Moving Histories/Dancing Cultures, she asks how one can write “beyond description: writing beneath the surface.” You can’t reduce dance to a synopsis – nor can you write only about a narration of movement in order to get […]

Week 7

Perform a short scene on video taken from a realistic play. Be careful to choose a play where realism is not just the default genre of theatre — but actually contributes in some manner to the themes of the play. Write a short paragraph or two explaining (1) why you chose the play and (2) […]

Week 6

Take one scene from Sophocles’ Antigone or Anne Carson’s Antigonik, and rewrite it in a Brechtian epic form. You can re-write the drama – or you can describe what you would do to change what happens on stage as if you were a director.In this past week’s reading, “The Modern Theater is the Epic Theater” […]

Week 5

Pick one play we’ve read, or performance we’ve watched, and explain how catharsis functioned in the work. If the work did not strive to produce a catharsis, what did it do instead? Please offer an opinion as to why your choice of work did or didn’t utilize catharsis. You are welcome to refer to Aristotle’s […]

Week 4

Please identify and deconstruct a scene in the film Hell House that demonstrates Clifford Geertz’s notion of “deep play.” You can use (if you’d like) some of the discussion of the film and play in Ann Pellegrini’s article to assist you. In his article on the art of Balinese cockfighting, Geertz draws on Bentham’s definition […]