Fireside Chat

Belief is sometimes hard to put into words. It is also hard to choose one belief to talk about, given the opportunity to do so. So it was great to have one night where we could hear so many different beliefs shared, in many different ways.

I prepared my piece before doing the readings. The mother's story was similar to slam poetry in that it didn't hold to a tight structure or timeline, it followed stream of consciousness and that allowed us to experience a fuller understanding of a girl and of the mother's experience raising her. That is what I have enjoyed since first learning of it. The lack of structure allows for really good expression, but it also allows for heightened language and rhythm that better expresses thoughts and emotions. I hoped that I could accomplish some of that with my piece.

Again, though, the strong structure of the story of being 1/2 black, 1/2 white worked well in that setting to describe a struggle or life. Many of my classmates chose that route and were very effective. I think that much of this assignment, as it is about belief, is very personal. And personal expression should come in as many varieties as there are personalities. And some statements work better with some mediums than others.

Things I'll take away from this class:
1) There are thousands of mediums. Find the one that works for you and your statement.
2) Use your beliefs to fuel your work.
3) Experiment always with the expectation that it will work out well.
4) Don't be afraid or ashamed of your own beliefs. And don't ask others do so.

Concerned Citizen

https://soundcloud.com/rissa6/cami-hansen-1-2

For our concerned citizen project we interviewed a young woman who co-founded an organization with her friend to help out people who suffer from mental illness. Cami, the woman we interviewed, is very aware of the inadequate structures or lack thereof needed to help those who are struggling. Her organization is created purely out of the goodness of her heart because she knows personally what it is like to be improperly treated as someone with a mental illness. She seeks through her work to encourage and support those who need it through advocacy. She wants society to be aware that people are still human beings, even when they are suffering internally with a mental issue. Her organization is about bringing about awareness to the truth of what mental illness is and in turn inspire those around her to be more patient, kind, and considerate towards those who are struggling. Cami is aware of the social and political injustices that occur in the lives of mentally suffering individuals. She states clearly that people have physical problems are allowed far more treatment and care than people with mental problems, when in fact the mental issues are more damaging and take longer to heal than the physical ones. That is why she wants to freely help those who cannot help themselves. Her work reminds me of summer camps that kids go to for medical reasons to learn that despite whatever disability or seeming disadvantage, they learn through activities, encouragement and help that they can be whole and do whatever they want to if the set their minds to it. If they believe in themselves and have others believe in them they can be truly successful and whole. As Arlene Goldbard said, “Rights are mere abstractions without the means to implement them.” This is something that Cami is very aware of and that is why she is so altruistic and helps those that she can. She has made herself the means by which people can rightly get treatment for their problems.

I can say that I am not as proud of this week's project as I have been of others....
I believe much of it is because I still lack tact and subtly.  When I want to raise awareness or discuss an issue, I usually find my best medium is actually talking about it, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk. I find the spoken word to be the best way to get to the heart of the subject I want to discuss-- I think that is what Adichie achieved. I have been trying to stretch myself but I can see I'm still not there yet. I'm sure that if I revamped things enough times I could get somewhere closer.

I chose to create a poster about the representation of women in media. In history, women have been portrayed as a tool to be used for a purpose, a commodity to be won, traded, or bet with, creatures that need to be protected and taught by men, etc. Even the kinder representations still make us look shallow, timid, and naive about the world. In recent decades, the representations have become more and more sexualized-- including the ones that are supposed to be supporting a "better" representation of women.

Women who are super heroes or tv stars are still dressed in the tightest/most revealing costumes and comments are still always made about their sexuality. Female characters who are not supposed to be sexual are often dressed in a more "masculine" way, unfitting suits etc. in order to give them a air of being more serious. The dialogue of all these women (sexual or not) also often follow a pattern more similar to male dialogue than female dialogue [defined by studies, not defined by stereotyped speech or subject matters]. This likely happens because we still as a society believe, consciously or subconsciously, that men are more powerful and can be taken more seriously and that a woman gains power through flirting and manipulation.

In my poster, I tried to show the wide variety of how women have been represented, so I chose a modern, sexualized and emasculated character-- Black Widow-- as well as a shot from an old John Wayne western. I chose a Western because it shows the history of the representation but is still applicable today-- just a few weeks ago a man in the program told me the reason women don't like Westerns is because they don't understand doing something for the greater good, they just want everything to end happily.

I chose to have a group of real women standing in the middle of the images but in front of an empty screen. There is potential for these women to be represented, but it isn't there yet. (Really, I couldn't think of any examples of a female character who wasn't a caricature or the object of competitive romance.)

I used words from a short essay I read that I thought well concluded why our shift in how women are represented still didn't bring the answer we were hoping for. In looking for strong female characters we created woman who can fight hard core, fix cars, etc. but are still hollow characters without enough substance underneath. We don't need strong women, characters. We need strong, well-rounded characters, that are female.

Webspinna

I had a good time making this webspinna. The hardest part was finding online sound making resources. The workshop we did in class really helped with that. I began the process of compiling my sounds by picking a connecting theme—I wanted my webspinna to feel complete in that way. I ended up stuck on the idea that I wanted the theme to be humor—kind of celebrating laughter. That choice dictated a lot of my sounds, I used laughter, comedians, and online clips that many people recognize and laugh at. I was also able to find some beats that tie it all together, that helped a lot. Altogether I like how it turned out. It was a fun activity to have outside of class and be able to meet people's friends and family--albeit, not many could stay the whole time.

I really liked the discussions we had in class about glitch art, but I didn’t understand how to incorporate it into my webspinna since we were told not to manipulate the sounds we found, just to use them the way we found them. I did try in some ways to create moments of smooth workings and moments of “glitch”: I had the psych theme playing with quotes from psych, but I also had a mash of stand up comedians with a beat behind them.

I think it is interesting that this assignment was given to help us think of the web as not just a place for information and communication but also full of things that can be made into art. It is interesting because more and more I think that our “norm” is to not see it as a place for information. I think that already the most common uses of the internet in younger generations is YouTube, blogging/tumblr, and online gaming. People use youtube to show their creations, they blog with pictures they’ve created or taken to express or represent themselves, and people use online gaming to create identities and sometimes to make videos. So these experimentations are turning into the norm.

Fox flute
Laughter
Psych song
Names
Loops
Regan
Seinfield
Carey
f sharp

Fox
Laughter
Psych song
Names
Loops
Regan :30
Seinfield
Carey 10:32
Fsharp
Laughs

Fin

Gone Missing/The Cleverest Thief review

This was a project I spent 6-7 months on. I was in a class where we workshopped with a member of The Civilians to learn how to create a play from interviews. Then we went out into the community to interview a lot of people. We had to learn their mannerisms, their speech patterns, etc. We talked a lot on how to structure these and how to piece them together to create some through lines.

Lindsay talked to us about how this ties into the gospel, that we are reaching out to people we would never otherwise have reasons to befriend. We get to know these people for a time and then try to represent them fully for other people, to respect their stories and give them importance. 

The other big part of this show was exploring with mixed media. Half the class worked a lot on creating video and media ideas. It was a lot of work for our stage manager to time all that media to the performances every night. It took a lot of people to get all that media created. It reminds me of the "play" we talked about in class. We are playing with what is theatre and what is film. We are also playing with what filming can do, we manipulated an image so it could project image all around but only project certain images on someone's skirt.

It was a good learning experience as an actor as well as a designer. I was the props designer for the show and I had to learn to work with a much more fluid schedule. It was a really great experience and I really was impressed with how much the community loved the Provo half of the show because they connected with it.

Medium Specificity

For this project I chose to do a set design. Like McCloud, I grew up with one idea of what set design was. I was taught that it just looks nice, shows where the story takes place, and has levels and five “areas” where the director can have the actors move to when the scene needs it. However, McCloud uses the buying ice cream comic story to show how many different ways the same story can be told and how artistic choices made by the author/artist can create new emphasis or meanings within the same plot. Likewise, I feel that set design can do much more than look nice behind an actor. 

Set design should be a physical rendering of the metaphysical concepts of the director, while also creating a comment on the action, and creating spaces for appropriate action all while being aesthetically pleasing.

My interest in the ability for theatre to explore the abstract to create incredible amounts of subtextual meaning began my freshman/sophomore year when I saw Theatre Mitu perform Death of a Salesman. The show used props and lights as metaphors for the many underlying thoughts and emotions the characters were feeling. The set design catered to that choice by creating levels and open spaces for the actors to navigate some of the larger props, and did what it could to not pull attention to itself so that the actors in costume would pull the most focus.

So with my set design I picked a script and asked my scenic design professor for a director’s concept to work with. The script is Wait Until Dark, a play about a blind woman who must save herself from an elaborate con and then outsmarts a murderer in her apartment by shutting off all the lights. The concept was that it would be pretty realistic, that the audience would feel a part of the action, and that the audience should feel like we are all blind.

To make it realistic, I had to do some script analysis and research. In order to invite the audience in, I wanted to eliminate the fourth wall. To do that I turned the set so the furthest back area is a corner. Now the audience can really only see two walls, making it unlikely that there would be a wall in-between them.

To create feelings that we are all blind, I thought about what feelings this blind lady in the show has: she feels confused, disoriented, and dependent. So I created a set that has a section set but the rest of the scene can rotate around. This is at first confusing, because the set is realistic, but it moved abstractly. It is disorienting because the audience is never quite clear on what the layout of the room is, and in many ways it is where the set is currently turned that dictates to the audience how they see the action and what angles they are able to see, much like if they were blind.

(This is called a white model, it is the preliminary model before the finalized color model. The actual set would not be all white.)

Textual Poaching

Jenkins discusses how the boy’s investment in his toy made the Velveteen Rabbit become real. It came through time. The boy integrated the rabbit into his life. That is where I struggled with this assignment. Although I am happy with what I have, I don’t think it is an accurate representation of something that has been integrated into my life. The ideas behind them play a very big part in my life and identity, but not the media I chose to represent them. The challenge of trying to find a way to use media to relay my thoughts to an audience reminded me of what Chris

Purdie said in class—that art is finding ways to convey metaphysical thoughts in physical ways. My thoughts and opinions have come to be through experiences I’ve had and essays I’ve read—so I don’t first think of media as a way to share these thoughts, but I think that if I am to make rich art and meaningful media in my lifetime, then I need to keep trying with this challenge.

 I changed from my initial idea in order to better fit within the given constraints of the assignment. I chose to focus on my “female-ness.”  There are several frustrations I have with how I have been treated as a woman. Although I thought our society had moved past thinking of women as second-class and less intelligent, I have experienced that this is not completely the case. So to start off with, I found some old media—the poster—and put some of my own experiences with it. Then I found an old movie poster, “The weak and the wicked.” I don’t know what it is about, but I chose to not find out, to just type “strong and smart” into google image search and use what came up. I was surprised to see such a matching find. From there I went to find mediated representations of some frustrations I have and I added my own thoughts. After setting up with the older media, I wanted to use media from modern times, foreign places, and local to show that I see this a current world-wide problem.