Surrendering Agency

• Bailey (Show Don’t Tell) ~ Submitting ourselves to part of his human farming scheme.
• Carina (Juxtapositons)
• Kimmy (5 Senses) ~ Literally signing away our rights
• Any performance where we voluntarily closed our eyes or deprived ourselves of our full senses ~ there were many!

Deletion ~ How do we erase or fail to acknowledge?

• John (5/50) ~ Backwards writing
• Paige (5/50) ~ Strikethrough vs. removal
• Phoebe (Show Don’t Tell) ~ Corruption of original memories
• Sarah (Show Don’t Tell) ~ Use of pseudonyms (like Publius)

Dragon Tales, Dragon Tales

• Molly (Show Don’t Tell) ~ Beyond borders, there be dragons
• Bailey (5/50) ~ “Brothers” contained a picture of a dragon
• Omar (5/50) ~ patron dragon of an Osaka ramen restaurant
• Sara (5/50) ~ King Arthur imagery tied to European myths of dragons
• Phoebe (Juxtapositions) ~ Pokemon cards ft. dragons
• John (5/50) ~ “I wish, I wish…” with all my heart…

Works I Found Striking

Gabrielle’s 5/50 Letter Scramble ~ a microcosm for the devising process as a whole, where different viewpoints make for radically different interpretations of basic components.

Bailey’s Show Don’t Tell feeding trough ~ A fascinating juxtaposition between a scenario that’s intellectually absurd and comical, but also instinctively terrifying.

Molly’s Show Don’t Tell map ~ One of the presentations that directly challenged us as audience members to convert our experience into “art.”

David’s ELI5 on Gregor MacGregor ~ I personally just found the saga of history’s biggest con-man to be hilarious.

Personal Works That Stand Out

Juxtaposition (Enraged Edibles) ~ What started out as a (culturally insensitive?) satire of slam poetry ended up evoking some very real latent anger.

Show Don’t Tell (Don’t Drop the Beet) ~ The brevity of the performance was entirely a consequence of my failure to choreograph the battery ~ whether that’s good or not, I cannot say.

 

Memory/Nostalgia

STORY 4: Short Term Memory – John

STORY 2: Easter, 1996 – Gabrielle

STORY 2: A Summer of Sisterhood – Kimmy

STORY ? : (Spy Kids)  – Bailey

JUXTAPOSITIONS: A Star Fell and Nobody Remembered – Kimmy

JUXTAPOSITIONS: Hotels Across The Country – John

SHOW DON’T TELL – Phoebe

SHOW DON’T TELL – Molly

Love

STORY 4: Once in the Highlands – Kimmy

STORY 1: A Kiss for the Heart to Grow – Kimmy

STORY 1: Three Dated and a Wedding – Gabrielle

STORY 4: Us – Paige

STORY 5: The Origin of Love – Molly

JUXTAPOSITIONS: Love Is – Gabrielle

Creation/Universe

STORY 3: Adam & Eve – Molly

STORY ? : Cosmogeny – Sophia

JUXTAPOSITIONS: The End of The World – Molly

SHOW DON’T TELL – Sarah

Magic AND/OR Stars

STORY 5 – Everything Sparkles – Gabrielle

STORY 5 – Like Magic – Phoebe

STORY 4: Short Term Memory – John

Failure

STORY ?: FAILURE: Carina

STORY 2: Adventures in the Osaka Red Light District – Omar

JUXTAPOSITIONS: The Job Hunt of David Carter

JUXTAPOSITIONS: David’s Quarter-Life Crisis/Panic Attack

SHOW DON’T TELL – Carina

2 – 3 Things I’ve Made:

SHOW DON’T TELL: The Black Panther Party

For me, this was the first of my pieces where I felt every element really informed each other, even though the could (technically) all stand on their own. I think that made the piece even more powerful.

STORY3: Don’t Forget Your Mission (Thanks, Yonce)

I like this story, because I feel like an instructional guide 21 year old Kimmy would give to 11 year old Kimmy. It’s also a story about maintaining confidence, which is definitely something I did not have as an 11 year old girl, so something like this would have been helpful.  (i.e. I would have been my own fairy godmother.)

3 – 5 Things Made By Others:

SHOW DON’T TELL – Carina

The struggle in this piece was incredibly fascinating. There was a lot of failure involved which produced a both physical and audible reactions from the class as a audience

• JUXTAPOSITIONS – Enraged Edibles – Omar

The great thing the these performances is that Omar was able to take 2 very basic food items (like a raisin or a corndog) and address real systemic problems in the U.S. At the same time, he made the outlet for which he did that (slam poetry), seem like a farce.

• SHOW DON’T TELL – Bailey 

This piece was the creepiest performance piece I have ever been apart of. The act of 14 disembodied heads looking at each other felt extremely unnatural. Moreover, we were all fed by this almost naked man and told to not hiccup. Everything felt so ritualistic. I LOVED IT! (And also is a  connection to his other 5 Senses piece)

Overarching Themes

Justice/Criminal Activity
Kimmy- like I’m 5, black panther party
Kimmy- 5 senses, waving rights
Phoebe- show don’t tell
David- like I’m 5, Gregor MacGregor
David- 5 senses, GW Plunkitt

Travel
John- juxtapositions, hotels
John- 5/50, Midnight NYC
Omar- 5/50, Osaka red light district
Carina- 5/50, Berlin
Molly- like I’m 5, cartography

The Shit of Everyday Life
Sophia- juxtapositions, job hunt of david carter
Carina- failure
Phoebe- 5/50, Stop motion ganesha
Omar- 5/50, whats in a name? puns probably
David- the grand old job hunt

Childhood
Bailey- 5/50, spy kids
David- 5/50, toy story
Phoebe- juxtapositions
Kimmy- 5/50, don’t forget your mission
Madeline- 5/50, Seidman dead squirrel

The Idea of Playing your Part
Carina- Juxtapositions
Bailey- Show don’t tell, hiccups
Omar- show don’t tell, music puns
Sarah- show don’t tell, federalist papers

Memory
John- 5/50, Remember me Please?
Phoebe- like I’m 5, how memory works

Love
Paige- genesis of love
Paige- 5/50, Us
Gabrielle- 5/50, dates and a wedding
Gabrielle- Love is..
John- 5/50, You and me

Things Made My Others that Interest Me:
-Bailey’s Show not tell, in a box!
-Carina’s Juxtaposition
-Jackson’s Show not tell
-John’s “Remember me Please?” object

*I really like the first three because I think they make such interesting use of space and our sense of orientation within it. Each piece made me feel a bit uncomfortable but in a way that

Things Made by Me that Interest Me:
Show not Tell, How Memory Works
5 senses, Sight

*I think both play with expectation, and really mess with it in an cool way which is why I really like both of them*

First Object: the Space

Second Object: The Performance

Third Object: the Sound

Triptych

1. Audio

2. Performance

3. Visual Object

Emerging Themes/Ideas

Memories/Lost Memories

• Phoebe’s ELI5 and Show Don’t Tell (The struggle of remembering something truthfully, whatever that means)
• John’s 5/50 “Short Term Memory (I love the line: I forgot what the stars looked like”, and it seems to be its own sort of theme; it’s cropped up in several juxtapositions)
• My 5/50 “Peter” (“It’s so much easier to just…forget)

 

Myths/Legends

• Gabrielle’s 5/50 “Icarus”
• Molly’s 5/50 “The Origin of Love”
• My 5/50’s “Orpheus” and “Arthur”
• Molly’s 5/50 “Adam and Eve” and Paige’s Juxtaposition

 

Audience Participation (This appeared in many forms, both intentional and unintentional, in really interesting ways, and with varying degrees of audience agency)

• Carina’s Juxtaposition “Human Again”
• My Federalist Papers Show Don’t Tell
• Rearragning the letters in Gabrielle’s name from her 5/50
• Phoebe’s pokemon trading cars in her juxtaposition
• Bailey’s eating of bread and honey/oil in 5 Senses
• Paige’s counting game in Show Don’t Tell
• Creating a map with Molly’s Show Don’t Tell

 

Things I’m interested from what I’ve made

• Federalist Papers Show Don’t Tell: I was fascinated in how the reading of the papers escalated so violently, even though I’d given no instruction for that to happen.
• 5/50 “Peter- Glitter”: Flushing the glitter down the drain was both incredibly violent and a little sad to me, sort of a distortion of beauty that I found interesting

Things I found interesting from what others have made

• Carina’s Show Don’t Tell performance: there was something heart wrenching and terrifying about watching her run back and forth across the street in the cold and wind, but I also recognized my own hesitation to go out to help, which I think spotlighted an interesting problem of being an audience member.
• Kimmy’s Juxtaposition: I liked seeing how images that had brought humor before could be twisted and changed to make something so tragic.
• John’s Hotels Across the Country: There is something simple and beautiful about a homemade map that I really love, particularly one that feels like it belongs to people who are going somewhere, or have been somewhere together.

topic: Syria

Word/Text Art/Play

-John My Father is Secretly A Nudist (5/50)

-Omar Puns (As a form unto themselves)

-Gabrielle’s Letters in Easter, 1996 (5/50)

-Paige “Calling All Nymphets” Lolita (5/50)

-Bailey “Deer” Live Forever (5/50)

-Paige “My OCD Is Not/Is…” Obsessive. Compulsive (5/50)

-Sarah “Youth Man” Peter (5/50)

-Kimmy Five Senses “Sight” and “Sight and Touch”

-John Brail in Five Senses

-Kimmy Posters for Black Panther Party

Romanticized or Perverted Memory

-Bailey “Bailey and the Bruja” (5/50)

-Carina “Titanic” (5/50)

-Gabrielle “Juxtapositions: Love is…”

-Molly Show Don’t Tell “Show me what you found”

-Phoebe Show Don’t Tell Memory

Coping with Mortality

-Bailey “Brothers” (5/50)

-Phoebe “Ouija Board” (5/50)

-Sophia “Cosmogeny” (5/50)

-Carina Show Don’t Tell

-Molly Cremation (5/50)

Thing I Made:

“Wind” and “Blue”

There’s something interesting to me about creating something hypnotic or lulling that is either punctured by the middle finger in “Wind” or just unsettling like the pigment in “Blue.”

“Show Don’t Tell” (and sort-of the quick little piece from Will’s class)

I think they both ended up playing with a performer’s relationship and responsibility to the audience; I like the dance between making the viewers invisible and reaching out to touch them.

Things Other People Made:

David’s Juxtaposition: Quarter Life Crisis with Sophia’s The Story of David Carter.

The combination of the two was so unsettling and incredible, not to mention that I think that the transcript of David’s archive of his performance would make a great monologue.

Carina’s Juxtaposition

The use of the space, the unique way of putting the audience on stage in this exposed compromised way are all things I would really love to see this expanded into a larger piece.

Maddie’s “A combination of cacao powder and sea salt, served on a plastic spoon. Should taste like dirt, blood, and tears.”

That text was brilliant and hilarious and, with that put into my head, tiny taste on a finger tip (much like how you would taste blood, tears and dirt) it made strange even though I could very much identify the salt and the bitterness of the cacao.