Geneva Heron Assignments

Assignment: Aesthetic Evangelists - Due 1/30  

Three key ideas in the text that resonate with me:

• The first is the idea of the "new public art," or what we would call "community engaged art." The article discusses the transition from art displayed in public sites to community based projects that have the goal of collaboration and focus more on the process than the end result/outcome. This intrigues me because before this class I was honestly very unaware of this form of art-making and its growing prevalence.
• Another idea that resonates with me is when the author talked about community based public art of today drawing on the urban reform rhetoric of the past both consciously and subconsciously. This stood out because it's an old adage that history repeats itself and I think it's interesting that the times we live in now call for a callback to this type of work and a more curious examination of what this can do for people and their communities.
• The author's comparison of the community artist and the reformer/social worker was also an interesting one. An artist and social worker being somewhat synonymous is not something you hear often, but the author argued that they both,"share a belief in the universality of the discourses that they deploy in their work with the community." This is a big concept, and on this level I would agree with the author's comparison.

Three questions:

• One question I have is since more and more organizations (such as Lannan Foundation in LA to the MacArthur Foundation) are reassigning its funding from "media art" to social-issue based art, has this created a negative shift within art-making communities? Are people now creating community and socially based art simply in order to secure funding and because "community' art is the latest hot topic, for lack of better words? I think the pros of making this kind of work are obvious, but what are the cons?

Assignment: Research Review and Mind Mapping - due 2/27 

Assignment: Team-designed assignment - due 3/6 at 6pm

Students will work on their individual assignment based on the goals defined with their team. Post your individual work on the blog.  Students who were not in class last week please complete your blog post based on your research on gun control and gun violence. 

The research I found : On March 13, 1996 in Dublane, Scotland, there was a school shooting that prompted the British government to have stricter background checks for gun ownership and also banned certain military rifles and handguns. Seventeen years later, 200,000 guns were taken of the British streets. In 2016, England and Wales' gun homicide rate was approximately 1 in every 1 million, which is about 50-60 killings annually. That same year the US had roughly 160 times that amount of gun killings, even though this country has only 6 times the population of the U.K. Also as of 2016, the U.K. had 6.5 guns per every hundred people, whereas the US had 101 guns per every 100 people. There has not been a single school shooting in the U.K. since the 1996 shooting. 

​Assignment: Theater of the Oppressed

After reading this, I understand why Boal's methodology has resonated with so many people and has been a platform for others to build their work off of. One thing major in this is the activeness of the audience. This is what really makes his approach to theater making community-engaged, engaged being the most operative word. 

The Rituals and Masks technique of the people’s theater resonated with me. It was stated that this technique, “consists precisely in revealing the superstructures, the rituals which reify all human relationships, and the masks of behavior that those rituals impose on each person according to the roles he plays in society and the rituals he must perform.” The concept of putting human masks of behavior at the forefront is work that excites me.

“The spectators in the people’s theater (i.e., the people themselves) cannot go on being the passive victims of those images.” The images he refers to here are the biased images of those typically considered actors in typical theatrical productions that tell the spectator to simply watch and accept the vision of these people without any participation. I admire Boal’s desire to “liberate” the spectator because that form of theater is truly encouraging dialogue, discourse, and the generating of a multitude of perspectives and ideas. As a result, I think it must be challenging to create SUCH an open dialogue with the spectator, because that inevitably invites certain arguments which could create a chaotic environment.

Assignment: Theater of the Oppressed- Mady Schutzman's  "What a Riot!"

Create a blog post that reflects on Schutzman's a) methodology/approach b) your reflection on her approach, and c) your wonderings/concerns about the approach. 

Schutzman decided to model her collaborative play after Boal's Joker System plays and follow its methodology. There is the character of the Joker, who is the driving force of the play and has the ability to go in and out of other characters. There is a Chorus that openly remarks on how they feel the play is going and suggests things. Actors change characters. Each scene is staged differently from the next and multiple points of view are encouraged. It was extremely collaborative with the students. Her intention was to have the students not only learn about these historical figures but also be able to make their own connections to this work through their personal lives as Latinx youth in California today and to be visible and to ask questions.

I think her approach is very effective and is an excellent model for what lengths community based theatre making can reach. It reminds me a lot of the devised work that Corner Stone Theater Company was doing.  It asks a lot of questions and is very focused on the process as opposed to end result. It also, from my understanding, tries its best to meet the needs of the community at hand. I would personally apply this practice in my own theatre-making in the future.

I wonder if this approach in relation to this specific project helped to perpetuate any negative views on African-Americans within the Latinx community. I don't mean to imply that the students involved didn't have the capability of separating fiction from reality and that they didn't understand ironic moments in the play. But, the moment in particular that made me question this was on page 16 when Schutzman described a moment of "critical empathy" for the officer that brutally beat Rodney King. I think empathy is important when playing a character, I prefer this to Brecht's alienation effect. However, I think if not facilitated the right way, it could easily get tricky and be problematic.