First off, during this semester I kept asking myself why I never considered to major or minor in theater? It is MORE than I thought it was and would have loved to study it. Alas, with two weeks left till graduation I will have to release this new found love for theater for post-graduation.
Before this course, I viewed performance as most people do, the time and place when a person acts out a different character then themselves and someone witnesses it. Because of my WGS concentration, I also viewed gender as a performance. From the time we enter to this earth, we constantly have had a certain view of gender said of us and expected. Now, I know performance is so much deeper and broader than this. I still have a hard time in grasping the full definition though.
Although the majority of the theories, articles, authors, in this course were all new to me. The one that stands out to me is Marina Abramovic's boldness in performance art. Even over the Thanksgiving break I was showing my family her performance and explaining to them what performance art is. I had never been exposed to performance as rich as hers. It was a whole new experience of thinking of performance, art, and theater.
Recently, I visited the LASM for a planetarium showing and visited the art museums and discovered a wonderful piece by Heather Hansen. She uses her body, charcoal, and a canvas to create kinetic drawing pieces. How cool is that?! The end results are stunning and I was so bummed to find out I missed her performance that was earlier in Novemeber! Performance art so close! I would love to explore this area more and one day witness performance art in person.
Here are two articles of Heather Hansen's piece for LASM. Enjoy!
http://www.nola.com/arts/baton-rouge/2014/11/full-body_artist_heather_hanse.html#incart_related_stories
http://www.nola.com/arts/baton-rouge/2014/11/heather_hansen_creates_new_pie.html
I am thankful for this class through its challenging readings and difficult questions. Thank you Dr. Fletcher for a great semester and I am so glad I was able to take another course with you!
You along with just about everyone else, including myself, talked about "performance" and and performance art and what those things entail. But I still have the burning question and frustration, that I actually wrote about in my blog and will never have an answer to because one probably doesn't exist, are "performance" and "theatre" synonymous. My impulse is no and my other impulse is that performance art isn't theatre either. These are all essentially contested concepts but it makes me so boggled. Part of me is like "heck yea everything is theatre-the world is theatre--WE ARE ALL THEATRE!" and then the other half of me is all like "Yea, performance can be everything-no duh. Walking is performance, sneezing is performance, but that doesn't make it theatre." But reading your post about how the class intrigued you to want to know more about theatre may have answered my question. For someone who doesn't study theatre as their major, but can still appreciate and love it, and has no qualms with from what i can tell using performance art and theatre synonymously than maybe my frustration is just stupid and irrelevant, and nobody but me even cares as long as they are entertained. So thank you!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Yvette's comment and think that's a great way to look at it! But I also agree with you because I am not a theatre major, only a theatre minor. This class opened my eyes to theatre even more than in previous theatre classes for my minor. I had never analyzed the definitions of theatre or performance before this class. The idea of them being an essentially contested concept really opened my eyes! I like what you write about in this final blog post. And I really enjoyed getting to meet you this semester! Good luck with everything and hope to see you around!
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