Please post your response to the lecture for June 15th to this thread.
Thank you.
Some questions to think about:
In today's lecture, Professor Pellegrini referring to a quote by Prof. Schechner remarked, "Performance is never for the first time." How do you read this statement in relationship with psychoanalytic theory? How can we apply a psychoanalytic optics to the Vogel piece and to Prof. Pellegrini's analysis? Is trauma a form of performance? Think about Schechner's work in relationship with the piece we read by Schneider. How do you perceive performance studies has evolved as a field?
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ReplyDeleteThe Subjective Experience of Memory and Trauma
ReplyDeleteAnn Pellegrini’s essay, Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive, uses psychoanalytic and feminist theory to illuminate the psychological and theatrical elements evident in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. By interpreting this piece through psychoanalysis, Pellegrini moves past the notion that Li’l Bit is simply a victim of trauma and instead focuses on the subjective and existential nature of sexual injury and memory. As the narrator of the play, Li’l Bit acts as the sole proprietor and storyteller, which allows the audience to witness her own comprehension of her experiences.
When the play commences, Li’l Bit addresses the audience and begins her narration looking back on herself as a seventeen year-old in 1969. From there, the audience jumps to 1970, then back even further to 1968. By the end of Li’l Bit’s narration, the audience has travelled with her from 1962 to 1979 to the seemingly time-less space where she begins and ends the account of her experiences. Vogel’s non-linear structure emphasize the disjointed nature of Li’l Bit’s account which seems to be a relatable, if not realistic, depiction of Li’l Bit’s memory of her relationship with Uncle Peck . Pellegrini suggests that this structure that Li’l Bit’s experience “neither assigns her wounding to any one event nor makes injury something of the contingency of identity “ (Pellegrini 416) which allows Li’l Bit’s story to be told without labeling her as a victim.
Throughout the play, Li’l Bit’s narration is interrupted by interludes that could represent memories or musings that may or may not be grounded in reality. Uncle Peck’s fishing scene, for instance, could represent an actual event where Peck seduces Li’l Bit’s cousin, or it could be a reflection of Li’l Bit’s speculation of Peck’s past (Vogel 25). While this fluid movement from scene to scene occurs as quickly and as effortlessly as a change in thought, it is anything but arbitrary. In the same way that free word association provokes random, “thoughtless” responses from people, those responses can still reveal a great deal about the inner workings of one’s mind. Though the structure of the play may not seem purposeful at times, Li’l Bit’s narration is driven by the deliberate intent to “tell a secret” and “start a lesson” (Vogel 9). This element helps illustrate the dichotomy between Li’l Bit’s conscious and unconscious thoughts and action which represents the conflicted nature of Li’l Bit’s experiences with her family and with Uncle Peck.
Pellegrini’s work also suggests that while Li’l Bit is not primarily a victim in the play her experiences do leave a lasting mark on her. In her examination of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” Pellegrini differentiates between the natural psychological response to trauma (mourning) and the pathological response of melancholia (Pellegrini 423). Melancholia is described as trauma created not just by knowing that an object or person is lost but failing to understanding what specifically is lost. How I Learned to Drive could even be seen as Li’l Bit’s search to find what she lost after she ended her relationship with Uncle Peck. It is obvious in the retelling of her story that Li’l Bit is affected by the events surrounding her long relationship with Uncle Peck , but it is left to interpretation to determine if she is traumatized by Peck’s death or by his treatment of her or even traumatized at all.
Louis PART 1:
ReplyDeleteMapping the Traumatic Archive in "How I Learned to Drive"
Paula Vogel, in her 1997 play, "How I Learned to Drive," masterfully employs the technique of treating narrative as repressed memory. We follow the story of Li’l Bit, who’s confused memory of being sexually abused creates a disjointed narrative structure. Performance scholar Ann Pellegrini, in her essay on this play, “Staging Sexual Injury,” offers insight into the psychical meaning of trauma and access to memory. In considering Rebecca Schneider’s ideas on the theory of the archive as well, we find a different but informative approach to the idea of memory. How does Li’l Bit’ memory act like an archive? What does her access and in-access to memory infer about the politics of the practices of archiving. We can see, through this reading of Vogel, that archiving is both a powerful force-- it both creates and destroys memory.
Li’l Bit’s story moves backward and forward through time, it starts at the end, with the act of reflection, an older woman looking back on her experiences, and ends with a younger version of Li’l Bit. We see many different selves, many different “I’s” coming into conflict over which memories to recall. Like Ann Pellegrini notes, because we have an unreliable narrator, “It also suggests the unreliability of memory itself.” (Pellegrini, 413) The structure now reflects the process of uncovering a repressed memory, examining and re-examining, peeling back the layers like an onion. Pellegrini puts Li’l Bit in relation to an understanding of trauma as “a wound that is experienced too soon to be known or narrated.” (Pellegrini, 414) Li’l Bit cannot have a developed sense what happened to her, because she hasn't unpacked the events of abuse, LI’l Bit’s inability to narrate her experience in any cohesive way infers the way we should read Vogel’s un-structuring of her story. Memory isn’t latent, it is a careful reconstruction of events that takes time to cohere. On the other hand, trauma is a catastrophe that shatters the fabric of the real, that takes us out of time and place. This temporal disorder, Pellegrini argues, is key to understanding how trauma works, it violently disrupts our agency over memory.
Louis PART 2:
ReplyDeleteWith that understanding of memory and trauma, let us turn to Schneider’s reading of the archive. In "Performing Remains," Schneider’s traces the idea that the ontology of performance is to disappear, that performance is ephemeral and evades easy documentation. Schneider suggests, “Noting that history, requiring remains, has been composed of documents because the ‘document is what remains.” (Schneider, 97) For Schneider, the process of making history is a process of preserving documents: archiving. What is archived is what remains, and performance, which is challenging to document, doesn't remain. What is archived is what is preserved through memory. Now, the concept of an archive becomes a very political one. The power over archive is the power to create memory. To expand upon this theme, Schneider cites Diana Taylor’s book, "The Archive and the Repertoire," in which Taylor argues, “What is at risk politically in thinking about embodied knowledge and performance as ephemeral as that which disappears? Whose memories “disappear” if only archival knowledge is valorized and granted permanence?” (Taylor quoted in Schneider, 106) Control over the archive means control over the voices who are remembered, who are made by history. This potential silencing effect has massive political connotations -- from censorship to historiography.
In coupling the ideas of archive, trauma, we can see that Li’l Bit’s memory as a more directly political problem. For the person controling the archiving process, it is self-selecting. Some of the memory is kept and some doesn't. This mirrors our understanding of Li’l Bit’s narrative, as distinct segments with clear gaps between them. Do these gaps not come from some form of censure? Li’l Bit can simultaneously access and not access her memory, for her, memory is created, destroyed, and censured by the archiving process. If one of trauma’s symptoms is repressed memory, isn’t another symptom the censuring of the archive? A society that makes use of major archival undertakings may be suffering from a trauma that is too fresh to process.
A second idea point about the archive, which traces back to Plato, is the idea that as a society, the more we practice writing (archiving), the more we lose our ability to remember. For Plato, archiving was a dangerous practice, in that it created a technology we relied upon which undermines our actual memory of events. Can it be that through writing, through creating history that we have put an incredible amount of trust in the technology of archiving? Is there a massive practice of archival censuring that goes on without us knowing it? One thing is for sure, if archiving is making memory, then we had better be very careful about how much faith we have in a dangerous technology we know so little about.
My head was spinning after this lecture, but certainly in a good way. I thought How I Learned to Drive was a stunning and thoughtful play and along with Pellegrini's article/lecture, it was a wonderful learning experience. The idea that L'il Bit's trauma may not be as bad as it seems externally was a very interesting argument for me. The idea that rape is not the worst possible thing that could happen to another human really made me think about injury and its meanings. Also this paradox of the trauma going away and remaining, the continuation of experiencing this trauma, and the idea that memory is always a reconstruction, are very important themes in the work.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the play, I wondered if L'il Bit truly realized what she was doing and fully comprehended the acts in which she was engaging. I wondered if she knew what the word "incest" meant and if she had learned it in college, which was the reason she had decided never to see Uncle Peck again. This actually brought me back to Austin, which I thought was curious. If she had at some point realized the meaning of "incest" and what this utterance meant, would she have tried to stop her relationship earlier? Obviously she knew what adultery was, as she was constantly bringing up her feelings about hurting her Aunt. However, it seemed to me that in her reality, her relationship with her uncle might have been, at least for a time, a perfectly normal and healthy exchange between a niece and a loving uncle. I also began to wonder if she had possibly never learned this term, if she would have continued her relationship with Uncle Peck. The entire "incest" word situation is hypothetical, so I suppose it does not matter, but it really brought me back to this idea of meaning of words and whether they can alter reality.
The idea of cultural relevance and how different audiences would be affected by the performance of this play was also of interest. I would have liked to survey the audience members to see how they were affected, but also, where they were from. As I am from Georgia and my father is from Alabama, I have heard many jokes about incest in the south. It would have been interesting to see how people from different cultures would read the play. Would someone from the southern United States have been less offended? Or perhaps even more offended? Also, marriage between cousins in many countries is actually legal. Would people from these cultures have been offended or felt discomfort? Would they have felt that L'il Bit's trauma was hardly a trauma at all? These ideas of ethics and kinship are of great importance for this play and how it is received.
I wanted to hear more about Uncle Peck in the article by Pellegrini. She stated in her lecture that he was a sympathetic and an appealing character and I agreed with that. The relationship, until the end of the play, is seemingly consensual. Of course there is a question of L'il Bit being taken advantage of in her young age, but Uncle Peck seemed to be a gentleman in many respects. His wife even boasted about how wonderful of a husband he was. But I wondered what he felt after L'il Bit broke off their relationship. We know that he drunk himself to death seven years later, but did he feel only sadness? Did he ever become ashamed? There is very little commentary about Uncle Peck and whether he felt what he was doing was actually morally wrong or not. There is also this idea of the audience identifying with the abuser. There is a possibility that there may be audience members that did not find his acts so outrageous or offensive and I am curious to know what those audience members would have felt about the play.
Pellegrini states on page 413 that "Trauma has a particularly vexed relation to time and knowledge" which references the adequacy of L'il Bit's memory throughout the play. Li'l Bit narrates the play and the audience may begin to wonder what facts she actually remembers correctly. We wonder if she has exaggerated or even censored some of the interactions between her and Uncle Peck. However, Pellegrini gave clarification in her lecture on this topic. She stated that memory is always a reconstruction. One may be wrong about facts or right about facts, but what is important is what actions are done with these memories. This idea is paramount. She went on to discuss something that I found unprecedented, but very important: the idea of war and trauma. Perhaps someone has been faced with war and death in their life, and they decided to cause more war and death on others, even though it is not these "others'" fault. I feel that in many cases, at least in the American culture, there always has to be someone to blame for trauma. When something bad happens, it is often a question of who is at fault. And often, people are wrong about the facts. We may think of school shootings and all the violent video games that were blamed because of those traumas. Often it seems that these reconstructions that are made because of traumas can be extremely subjective to ones own pre-existing suppositions and even created to support one's already existing beliefs.
ReplyDeleteChloë Rae Edmonson
ReplyDeletePERF-GT 1000.002 – Sujay Pandit
Reading/Lecture response for 15 June 2011
Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive
Ann Pellegrini’s “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive”
Richard Schechner’s “Points of Contact…”
Rebecca Schneider’s “In the meantime…”
Lecturer: Ann Pellegrini and Jose Munoz
As our first interaction with a dramatic text, we read Paula Vogel’s play How I Learned to Drive. To summate: the play centers around L’il Bit, a smart, pretty and sassy Maryland teenager who is sexually traumatized by her uncle, Peck. Adrift in a dysfunctional family, however, L’il Bit finds stability in her uncle, and continues her relationship (however inappropriate or traumatic) with him throughout her adolescence. Eventually, we learn that L’il Bit perpetuates the cycle of trauma that robbed her of her own youth, when she grows up. When summarized in this linear fashion, How I Learned to Drive smacks of the stereotypical, cautionary after-school special; furthermore, if the play’s events were situated and recounted as such, it might just be so. Vogel tells L’il Bit’s story, however, by manipulating time, memory and the actor-audience relationship, setting up an immediate connection between audience and L’il Bit. In the opening scene, L’il Bit addresses us directly – and does so often throughout the play – creating an intimate relationship with the audience. In some ways, after hearing Ann Pellegrini lecture on psychoanalysis as performance theory, I believe our relationship with L’il Bit and her story is like a psychoanalytical clinician-patient relationship.
Though this assertion could be an essay in itself, I will make just a few claims in which I think that we relate to How I Learned to Drive psychoanalytically, using strands of Pellegrini’s lecture and the readings as support. First, there is the free-associative nature of psychoanalysis, which is at once meaningful and meaningless. Since free-association disregards conventional time and language structure, so are we encouraged to experience instead of interpret (Pellegrini Lecture). In the same way, the dramatic structure of How I Learned to Drive is free-associative and, as Pellegrini says “antichronologic: launched in an indeterminate present” (Pelllegrini 416). Moments of aural chaos, such as the final scene when L’il Bit turns up the radio, unleashing the voices of the chorus whose dialogue overlaps with hers, create an explosion of memory and overlap different times, characters, and places. In effect, this aural chaos is a performance of flashbacks, projected out of Li’l Bit’s psyche for the audience to experience and, then, analyze. Inside this aural chaos, we experience wisps of L’il Bit’s past with which we can interpret her present and future selves.
Edmonson PART 2
ReplyDeleteOur second portion of class, conducted by Muñoz, was devoted to Schechner’s “Points of Contact between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought.” Though this book is mostly concerned with locating, comparing, and mediating the disciplines of theatre and anthropology, Schechner too uses psychoanalysis as a lens. He defines “performative consciousness,” as that which “activates alternatives: “this” and “that” are both operative simultaneously….performance consciousness is subjunctive, full of alternatives and potentiality”(Schechner 6). Applying this to my argument for the clinician-subject nature of the audience to Li’l Bit in How I learned to Drive, performative consciousness makes fluid who is working on who. When we receive a new insight or flashback, we get another piece to L’il Bit’s psychoanalytical puzzle. At the same time, however, L’il Bit literally drives us through the narrative action, and has all of the power to decide which piece of her puzzle to give us and when. Aware of this, we may feel at times like L’il Bit is the clinician, working on us, driving us through her personal trauma but collecting our response as a reflection of our own selves.
To touch briefly on Rebecca Schneider’s chapter, “In the meantime: performance remains,” I draw upon her example of the visor and the specter, borrowed from Derrida’s account of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, “whose eyes can never be met” (Schneider 109). Likewise, as scenes from L’il Bit’s past play out, the actress playing her performs the disappeared versions of L’il Bit – her specters, who according to Schneider “can see but not be seen” thanks to our embodied knowledge of how to attend to appearances” (Schneider 110). These are moments of conventional theatre-going and audience-actor separation. Only when L’il Bit is addressing the audience can we conceivably meet her eyes, and arguably not even then, depending on that particular production’s level of audience involvement, theatre setup, lighting, etc. Even if we were to make contact with L’il Bit, would we then be beholding the character or the actress? As Schneider asks, “Does is matter that the actor playing the specter may be alive? Perhaps it does not. Or perhaps the question is undecidable” (Schneider 110). Once again, in performance studies, we come upon an undecidable; once again, we find ourselves in the borderland, forced to increase the magnification again and again through which we view the problem.
Memory, Ephemerality, and Syncopated Time
ReplyDeleteAnn Pellegrini, Richard Schechner, and Rebecca Schneider are all concerned with time: liveness, syncopated time, antichronology. Coming from different disciplines and writing across several decades, how do their concepts of time compare? Schneider shares that the question of ephemerality—performance’s disappearance—has been the subject of study since Schechner’s declamation of theatre’s unoriginality in 1965 and that ephemerality has continued to incite debate in the microcosm of NYU since the Performance Studies Department’s inception in 1980 (Schneider 8). Writers such as Schechner and Marcia Siegel located performance’s uniqueness in its “immediacy”: that is to say, performance is notable because it is temporary and irreproducible (Schneider 8). However, Schneider herself, with Diana Taylor, writes of the ‘remains’ of performance, while Ann Pellegrini, interested in trauma and the performance of it, locates in theatre as in memory the “re-construction” of events (Schneider 1; Pellegrini, Lecture). If these three writers disagree on the duration of performance, they do still recognize time as an essential ingredient in it, and their ‘points of contact’ on the subject warrant discussion.
Schneider points to the multiplicity of time as a means of understanding temporality in the theatre, citing Gertrude Stein’s understanding of “syncopated time,” or the disconnect between the agreed-upon time-frame of the play and her observed, felt, and aural experience of it (Schneider 2). Schneider uses Stein’s disorientation to point to the disjointedness of time within performance in general: “If liveness must imply an immediacy or a ‘real time’ devoid of other times, as many might have it, then the delay, lag, doubling, duration, return, the betweenness of Hamlet’s meantime could suggest that theatre can never be ‘live.’ Or, never only live” (Schneider 6). That is, thrown together, performers and audience simultaneously exist in the ‘now’ and in some other time frame.
Likewise, Pellegrini recognizes that different modes of time may operate together when she recognizes in the “shared space-time that is live performance” the possibility for the “doubling” of the character Li’l Bit of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. In a key scene, Vogel allows Li’l Bit (and the audience, her confidants) to hear her own words spoken by another (“Uncle Peck—what are you doing”) while she is also reaching out to touch her uncle, as if revisiting an old memory (Pellegrini 426). The two moments in time can exist concurrently in the play. In fact, Li’l Bit herself can be represented both in memory and in Schneider’s “real time,” and we are taken with her: as Pellegrini explains, Vogel moves the audience and Li’l Bit from the present to 1969 to 1970 to 1968 to 1979 and so on, in an order that “refuses the tidy linearity—and pious teleology—of even a reverse chronology” (Pellegrini 416). Of course, these leaps in narrative time also contrast or perhaps complement the lived experience of the audience member, who follows Li’l Bit’s time travels over the course of ninety lived minutes.
(To be continued...)
(Continued.)
ReplyDeleteEven Schechner, champion of ‘immediacy’ in performance, celebrates the shifts in tempo (a function of time) in the Japanese concept of jo-ha-kyu (Schechner 12). A structure often invoked by Anne Bogart and SITI Company in response to their work with Tadashi Suzuki, jo-ha-kyu consists of three tempos or time: jo, or a slow opening that relies on ‘holding back’; ha, or a quick break or transition; and kyu, or the rapid culmination that returns us to a new obstacle (Schechner 12). This idea of kyu—returning to a new place—is essential to the structure of jo-ha-kyu, which should be used to shape not only the play, but also the scene, the line, the moment: in other words, to allow for syncopated time (Bogart).
It is with this understanding of syncopated time that we can begin to examine memory, itself a result of re-living the past (Pellegrini, Lecture). Schneider recognizes in this re-membering the potential for performance ‘remains,’ and Taylor will engage more deeply with this idea of embodied memory in The Archive and the Repertoire. Yet Schneider also warns that memory does not resurrect the dead but rather leaves a ghost, a ‘haunting’: “Performance does not disappear when approached from this perspective […] Rather, performance plays the ‘sedimented acts’ and spectral meanings that haunt material in constant collective interaction, in constellation, in transmutation” (Schneider 16).
If I have neglected Richard Schechner somewhat in this brief essay, it is only because his interest lays not so much in the multiplicities of time—though I could argue that his idea of the sequence of performance does play with syncopation (Schechner 16). What seems to interest Schechner more are the reverberations in space-time: that is, the echoes, parallels, and ‘points of contact’ across geographical areas and historical ages, the chance similarities between, for example, Zeami’s oral tradition within the Kanze family and the role of the coach in contemporary sports in the United States (Schechner 17, 23). Schechner is (usually) careful to recognize that these links go both ways and that artist-practitioners from various traditions and cultures have much to learn from each other (Schechner 23). To belabor the Gertrude Stein quote further, one might even see syncopation in these intercultural dialogues, and if one leans closely, one might even hear the haunting whisper of the translators who have facilitated them.
Works Cited
Bogart, Anne. A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre. London: Routledge, 2001.
Pellegrini, Ann. Lecture. New York University: June 15, 2011.
Pellegrini, Ann. “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive.” Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Schneider, Rebecca. “In the meantime: performance remains.” Performing Remains. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Schechner, Richard. “Points of Contact between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought.” Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
part 1
ReplyDeletePatricia Valladolid
Response to : Pellegrini, Vogel and Schechner
The Conscious and subconscious mind can be thought of as a continuum of our psyche. Our psyches complicate memory. In addition, this complexity is altered by the way memories are produced and then altered again by the way memories are held in terms of our conscious or unconscious minds. As I reflect on Paula Vogel’s play How I Learned To Drive along with Ann Pellegrini analysis of the play in “Staging Sexual Injury: How I learned to Drive,” I am constantly locating the creation of memories and further the retention of those memories. In terms of performance and its relation to memory I would like to consider memory as a performance of the subconscious applying this to Richard Schechner’s views on positionality such as the way he acknowledges that he is seeing with his own eyes, in this same way we can begin to articulate that memories are recreated in the eyes of each individual from the way they experienced it(13). Also I would like to note Schechner’s discussion of oral histories and begin to engage memories as a type of oral history because if memories can be read as oral histories then they become live embodiments of specific social systems and the communities/people that experienced them. This is the point at which Schechner states how Anthropology speaks to theater and how theater speaks to Anthropology. Both discourses are considered live embodiments of social systems, although one might be inclined to think of theater as a preformed practiced response to those systems instead of an organic reaction to daily life(25). I find my self in the middle, such that I see theater and performance as a place where lived experience can articulate social relations in a setting that allows multiple realities to suspend time and space.
How are memories suspended in time and place? In How I Learned to Drive author Paula Vogel’s use of time and temporal space allows the audience and readers to physically feel the trauma. Vogel is retelling trauma through the use of Lil’lBit’s memory. This technique becomes a live experience for the audience, as we move with Lil’l Bit we too find it challenge to locate the specific acts of trauma.
Sung Yeon Park
ReplyDeleteProfessor Jose Munoz, T.A. S. Pandit
PERF-GT 1000 001 Introduction to Performance Studies
June 15, 2011
Performance is Never for the First Time
Today in the lecture, Professor Pellegrini referred a quote by Prof. Schechner, “Performance is never for the first time” several times. I heard and read this statement that indeed, our real life is performance and performance is also our real life. Means that there is no fake story, but there is our life story. Based on people’s life, every performance are made and performed. However, the themes are supposed to be interesting and intriguing so that many people started to take an interest in others’ personal story which is rare or special. The story could be someone’s embarrassing part or trauma. However, it is not the fake, it rather a likely story in the ordinary life. Like I says, I think that “Performance is never for the first time” implies how our lives are diverse and surprising. Moreover, since facts lend probability to the story, trauma is not only referred one, but many, and it is closely related with psychoanalytic theory. For this reason, I agree that trauma is a form of performance. Trauma is our real life story which people do not really want to share with others.
Paula Vogel’s play How I Learned to Drive is really good example play along with this trauma and with psychoanalytic theory. The play opens as late 30s Li’l Bit was looking back on the past. Uncle Peck who has good reputation in the neighborhood and is nice husband teaches how to drive to Li’l Bit. Uncle Peck was attracted to Li’l Bit, as she is grown up. Since this play’s perspective is Li’l Bit’s perspective, this play shows her trauma more directly not like Lolita. Through her confession, the problem of paedophilia and wounded emotion from the family members appears. However, as Li’l Bit was thinking of the past, she has a chance to heal the wounds and grows up woman. From this piece, I was little bit uncomfortable at the first time, but I was also able to getting in to this play in mood of driving by myself.
part2
ReplyDeleteAnn Pellegrini’s analysis argues that these complexities stem from the way Li’lBit experienced the point of injury in the same time Uncle Peck gave her a gift. This exact point leads to multiple ways Lil’lBit’s memory oscillate between time and in and out of time. Time them becomes suspend in an imaginary that was created both to remember her trauma and escape it. Thus placing Lil’l Bit in a position of mobility. Unlike free movement, Li’lBit experiences mobility out of necessity in response to her social conditions. As a coping mechanism Lil’lBit separates the body from the self as she states, “ that day was the last day I lived in my body,” this detachment occurring after the point of injury becomes the lasting wound or remains and thus only allowing memory to provide it with a voice(58). The separation of the “I” in terms of Freud can be read in multiple ways. Since Lil’lBit is around an excess of trauma through her narration the use of detachment from the “I” allows her psyche to no longer experience trauma at the point of excess. Only then can Lil’lBit freely narrate
In How I Learned to Drive we are exposed to multiple voices. These voices through narration come out of memories. As Pellegrini suggest we have to consider the unreliability of memory, but also of narration(413). As we use memories to experience and understand the past we value their reliability. Although this is contradictory memory must be taken contextually or in addition to an “other”. In How I Learned to Drive the “other” is trauma and trauma as Ann Pellegrini notes “emerges at the juncture of destructive event and its survival,” leads me to understand trauma as a dependent variable giving it the ability to be read in relation to memory (414). Yet, Pellegrini also discusses that to narrate trauma we must come to know it, thus causing an excess of trauma that may result in altered sense of being like Lil’l Bit separation of body(415).
In Vogel’s use of memory as a medium to give voice to trauma I would like to consider the ways we remember. As women the act of remembering is held within the core of our bodies, if we understand Lil’Bit’s separation of her body we can then assume her memories are coming from her unconscious. In her unconscious time and space are disordered as a result of trauma(416). The play with time by Vogel allows memory to reproduce itself. With the constant disorder of time the order of events is never felt, but yet the effects of those effect linger throughout the play. This suspension of time acknowledges the multiple states of time we occupy at once and how memory is a space to locate all of those temporalities (425). In doing so Pellegrini discusses how even in a state of remembering Lil’l Bit, “objectifies her memory of herself,” to prevent the excess of trauma from her bearing witness to it through her own memory of it(426).
Witnessing and seeing and existing all come to be discussed by Vogel, Pelegrini and Schechner. With in Performance Studies the continual recognition of the afore mentioned states of being become complicated by positionality and social conditions. If we see Performance Studies as a discourse that can be extended to read social conditions, then the use of situated discourses such as Anthropology and Psychoanalysis become necessary to inform our readings of social realities.
Melanie Van Allen
ReplyDeleteProf.: Jose Muñoz
TA: Sujay Pandit
Introduction to Performance Studies PERF-GT 1000.001 – Section 2
15 May 2011
Lecture 3: Professor Pellegrini/Professor Muñoz
Points of Contact Between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought
In Professor Richard Schechner’s book, Between Theater and Anthropology he argues that whether scholars and practitioners of Anthropology and Theater like it or not, there are points of contact between the two courses of study. He divides these points of contact into six elements including: Transformation of Being and/or Consciousness, Intensity of Performance, Audience-Performer Interactions, The Whole Performance Sequence, Transmission of Performance Knowledge and How Are Performances Generated and Evaluated?
Transformation of Being and/or Consciousness: There are two realms of performance: The world of contingent existence as ordinary objects and persons and the world of transcendent existence as magical implements, gods, demons, and characters. (Schechner 6) Elements of spectatorship and how it functions in these realms are an important part to the act that is being performed.
Intensity of Performance: In all kinds of performances a certain definite threshold is crossed. And if it isn’t, the performance fails. (Schechner 10) Many elements contribute to a performance; such as props, text, costumes, multimedia, dancers bodies and sound and according to Schechner, time and rhythm can be used in the same way. Interesting performances are always concerned with transitions, modulations of sound intervals and silence. The famous notes not played by trumpeter Miles Davis and American Composer John Cage are far more important than the ones they did play. Schechner states that the increasing and decreasing density of events temporally, spatially, emotionally and kinesthetically all contribute to a woven pattern. An example used to highlight the power of intensity is the post modern dance piece Accumulation, choreographed by Trisha Brown. The core of the piece is dedicated to working through pedestrian like gestures that accumulate in movement, time, rhythm, and space, all while contained in small space.
Audience-Performer Interactions are contingent upon both the performers and audience working in tandem to maintain the conjectural frame and if one side lacks, the illusion of the performance is broken.
Part 2
ReplyDeleteThe Whole Performance Sequence is concerned with the seven-part sequence of training, workshops, rehearsals, warm-ups, performance, cool-down, and aftermath, which scholars, have overlooked. When workshops and rehearsal are used together, they constitute a model of the ritual process. (Schechner 21) Opportunities to deconstruct ordinary experience can happen in the workshop setting, just as building, learning, creating and constructing happen in the rehearsal environment. Both live in the realm of modification.
Transmission of Performance Knowledge: As in some instances, the knowledge of performance is concerned with knowing the iconic texts, ballets, operas and symphonies, ranging from the ancient to the modern. However, performance knowledge is integrative. (Schechner 21). The knowledge of performance also belongs to the oral tradition as they have many different modes of functionality in different cultures and settings. Anthropologist and theater people can both benefit from the transmission of performance knowledge, as theater people know what is involved with training and anthropologist specialize in the art of observation. Both fields of study are capable to complement each other.
How Are Performances Generated and Evaluated? Schechner states that the evaluation of a performance is actually part of the performance itself. Statements can range from basic thumbs up, or thumbs down, to a detailed critical analysis of the work as a whole, or even deconstructed by theme, section, or time.
Aristotle identified action at the core of a performance: a very dense, dynamic system of shifting valences and twisting helixes. (Schechner 23) The convergence of theater anthropologizing itself, just as anthropology is being theatricalized is quiet interesting, and according to Schechner it is the historical occasion for all kinds of exchanges.
Alyssa Pereira
ReplyDeleteProfessor José Muñoz
Performance Studies Intro
15 Jun 2011 – Pellegrini & Vogel
Tracing Traumatized Memory through Performance
In performance, elements of reality are freely manipulated and altered to achieve a certain effect on the audience. The artist strives to create meaning in doing so. Victims of traumatic events relive and re-explore memories of their trauma in a similar fashion; they are likewise striving to create meaning of what has happened to them. Unfortunately, memory is subjective. Within a traumatized psyche, memories relating to the trauma may be unconsciously amended in terms of time, context or details. Li’l Bit, as the main character and narrator in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive distorts (consciously or unconsciously) these aspects of her own memories in an effort to make sense of what has happened to her. As a critic of performance, it is necessary to be aware of the manipulation of these elements and what it means for both the performance’s significance and the artist’s credibility.
One way to begin to decipher trauma, as well as performance of trauma, is through the lens of psychoanalysis. In real life, a person who experiences a trauma may relive the event repeatedly in an effort to make sense of it; in performance, an artistic work or event may likewise be re-performed in an effort to search for new meaning. In an effort to cope with the traumatic event, a victim like Li’l Bit disembodies herself to become a spectator of the relived event; at the end of the story she recalls, “That was the last day I lived in my body.” In a broader performance sense, we see actors partake in a similar loaning of their bodies to the characters they play. Like victims of trauma might, actors sever their gathered notions of self from their bodies to live the life of a character that is separated from their own person for the sake of the performance. Schechner also discusses this distance between the performer and the character (Schechner 9). Li’l Bit, as a traumatized character in How I Learned To Drive, severs her body from her self to act out her memories in an effort to create meaning. However, in acting and re-acting these memories, they are at risk of being altered.
I found the readings particularly helpful in highlighting some of the entry points that performance studies offers in understanding social life and where those points branch out to expand that understanding. One interesting thread between them is that they assert that performance exists in measures outside of the linear mode of time. Through that lens, they are able to explore the relationship that performance has to other disciplines such as psychoanalysis, anthropology, or the archive, which are also subjects of time outside the linear. The points of contact between performance and these other areas of study are given allowance to mutually inform one another based on this.
ReplyDeletePaula Vogel, Anne Pellegrini, Richard Schechner, and Rebbecca Schneider explore these relationships in a number of ways. Schechner writes “The convergence of anthropology and theater is part of a larger intellectual movement where the understanding of human behavior is changing from quantifiable differences between cause and effect, past and present, form and content, et cetera…. to an emphasis on the deconstruction/reconstruction of actualities: the process of framing, editing, and rehearsing; the making and manipulating of strips of behavior…”(33) In this statement we are challenged to diverge from the idea that theater and anthropology exist only in dichotomies such as past and present. He also frames that their relationship focuses on reoccurring exchange of information and practice, situating that rather than existing “in time” these exchanges exist in actualities. These actualities are at once singular and multiple, coexisting, as they come from audience, spectator, or scholar. Schechner explores them by examining the realm in which performance may exist. He writes that the breadth of a performance, in some cases, can include the rehearsal, warm-up, cool down or even evaluation. They are included in the definition of performance because they are also sites that inform the practice and exchange of information. They produce actualities.
This idea of actualities is also key to reading Vogel’s play How I learned to Drive and Anne Pellegrini’s analysis of the play.
Part 2
ReplyDeletePellegrini questions in her lecture and writing, how does psychoanalysis and performance speak to one another? Her analysis of the play in Staging Sexual Violence: How I Learned to Drive explores what such a relationship implies for not only defining how trauma lives but also where and when agency can be found within trauma. Relating this back to time, She spoke of trauma being something that happens to you ahead of time, “a wound that is experienced too soon to be known or narrated” (414) and as something that “emerges at the juncture of destructive event and its survival.”(414) Where I find Pellegini’s work interesting is in her exploration of agency in this disorganization of time and actualities. She points to how the play stages these junctures and talks about loss and love happening simultaneously in so that we begin to have new understandings of the definition of trauma.
I leave pondering a new reading of Lacan’s mirror stage, discussed during the lecture, in relation to performance studies as a discipline. If you will indulge me, I propose we replace the infant with performance studies. Lacan states that the infant achieves a unified body, its selfhood, by failing to recognize its dependency on social relations. The failure to recognize those dependencies, in turn, I would argue, is what sets the precedent for social dilemmas. What these readings suggest is that performance studies insist when presented with its reflection, that it recognize the dependencies of social relations, the dependencies of other disciplines. In doing so, creates an opportunity to experience its reflection through multiple perspectives, perhaps enabling us with greater ability to navigate social dilemmas.
Works Cited
Pellegrini, Ann. Lecture. New York University: June 15, 2011.
Pellegrini, Ann. “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive.” Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Schechner, Richard. “Points of Contact between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought.” Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
Alyssa Pereira, part 2
ReplyDeletePellegrini notes in her Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned To Drive, that, “We never see the reality, but only its representation.” (Pellegrini 413.) Her comment in relation to trauma and performance accomplishes two things. First, it implies that in reality, one can relive a memory but only through a singular point of view and that that memory is fallible and vulnerable to unconscious tampering. The memory will never be the reality. It is here that confabulation becomes a hazard to the purity of memory. In How I Learned to Drive, we are not sure of the truth to all of Li’l Bit’s stories; this does not make her a problematic narrator, but it draws attention to the fact that her memories are very likely romanticized. Was Peck truly as handsome as the stage directions present him to be? (Vogel 5) Probably not, but we as the audience only know Peck through the perspective of Li’l Bit, so we must accept her description of him. Second, Pellegrini’s statement also infers that any copy of the original performance is not the original. In considering Schechner’s performance sequence, this must be true because while the scripted performance is at least the same as previous events, the performance itself is only one segment of the complete sequence (Schechner 16). In comparing this performance sequence to the replaying of memories by victims of trauma, victims may frame and reframe their memories on different occasions, leading them to a different experience with each replaying and the ensuing inevitable distortion.
One more aspect easily manipulated for the sake of meaning in performance, especially in the portrayal of trauma, is time. Time, within a performative sphere, has no rigidity. Events may be rearranged anachronistically, as we see in Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, or otherwise manipulated according to the artist’s subjectivity. In the play, Li’l Bit attempts to “first teach a lesson” in order to tell the audience her secret (Vogel 9). In doing so, she is informing the audience that the story she is about to tell may not obey the rhetoric of traditional storytelling, nor follow the chronology of her history. Li’l Bit doesn’t even divulge her own emotions, despite candidly addressing the audience; she relies on the objective correlative (ignoring taking consideration of time) to personify her emotions and set the tone as she remembers it (Vogel 9, 12, 16, 35, 58).
In being aware in how these elements in performance are manipulated, we can better understand the obstacles that victims of trauma face. With the aid of psychoanalytical reasoning, the approaches to time distortion and memory manipulation can be comprehensively interpreted and overcome to fully understand the artist's purpose.
Verda Habif
ReplyDeleteN11134358
Introduction to Performance Studies
Report #3
06.15.2011
Trauma and Representation of Reality
The psychoanalytic definition of the concept of trauma brings up an understanding of reality, representation and repetition, crucial concepts through which the mimetic nature of performance and arts can be discussed.
In terms of representation, the term mimesis comes forward as the initial defining phenomenon of theatre used by Aristotle to build up a theory. Mimesis was understood as representation of the daily reality for a long time and this understanding constituted the basis of conventional forms of theatre. Then, how can this term be situated with regards to forms of performance that do not comply with the conventional characteristics of representational forms of the past? Underlying this question is the philosophical interpretation of the Truth and the perceptions regarding its accessibility.
Another phenomenon that accompanies representation in understanding performance is repetition. In his writings on Antonin Artaud, Jacques Derrida reminds his reader that the inherent paradox of theatre is that it tends to be the repetition of that which does not repeat itself (Derrida, The Theatre of Cruelty, 1978). This paradox, which confronted Artaud, is likewise one of the main concerns of contemporary theatre, regarding its connection with “real” life. The paradox of how things disappear and remain at the same time has been a central issue of performance as the nature of representation itself is.
Psychoanalysis provides a way of thinking to interpret how contemporary performance practices tend to base their relationship with representation and repetition.
Pellegrini, in “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive” a psychoanalytic reading of Vogel’s play, discusses the definition of trauma in psychoanalysis. Trauma according to Pellegrini embodies the paradox of going away and remaining, a disrupt in memory. In the case of trauma repetition can never be realized in the same way that the incident initially occurred. On the other hand, it is a constant state of repetition of a truth that one never has access to.
Psychoanalysis illustrates that there are aspects of the Truth that are inaccessible. Then what will be represented through the work of art? Perhaps, mimesis as a means of characterizing performance or theatre, cannot be interpreted today as the imitation or representation of Truth, but rather can be taken as an act of imitating the very nature of it that constantly reconstructs itself in the present time.