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- All Subjects: Film
- Creators: School of Film, Dance and Theatre
- Creators: School of Politics and Global Studies
Description
In its totality, “Love and Everything After” consists of five tracks. In musical circles, this is considered an EP (extended play), a collection of music longer than one song but generally more brief than a full album. Each track combines varying degrees of my own acoustic and piano instrumentation with modern production elements, all tied together with a corrected vocal and a quick mix and master by my producer who doubles as my sound engineer for this project. I will outline my experience with the creative process here as well as break down the development of each song. A fair bit of the lyrical composition is dedicated to background information that may seem to verge on oversharing, but alas, I am a writer. I consider verging on oversharing an inevitable cog in any successful songwriting operation. I’ve decided to tackle the songs in chronological order, prioritizing the time during which the bulk of the piece was first assembled.
ContributorsNelson, Christopher Michael (Author) / Wells, Cornelia (Thesis director) / Swoboda, Deanna (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
The thesis I completed for Barrett, The Honors College was created as a method to develop and strengthen my long-form storytelling abilities. The goal of my creative project was to create the first draft of a stage musical and mount it in a reading or workshop of some kind. I reached this goal and then some with the help of my directors and two wonderful Barrett students that helped me along the way: Mallory Smith and Ethan Fox. We completed the first draft of the show and then held a read-through with a full cast of actors, with almost twenty people attending.
Then, I went back and used some of the feedback from the read-through to write another draft of the show. However, along the way, I took a few major creative turns and ended up with a story that was similar to the first draft in many ways but was ultimately a larger divergence than I originally anticipated. This was a blessing, as it forced me to re-evaluate multiple creative decisions I’d made and gave me two long-form stories with great potential to work with rather than just one. It also presented multiple opportunities to combine and enhance both ideas in order to write one strong story using both concepts. The beauty of this Creative Project is that my portfolio is much stronger for having completed it and I now have multiple paths to choose from to move this project forward in the future.
In the defense, I discussed the grueling process of actually writing these scripts, hosting a read-through as well as the possibilities for both stories in the future. We also discussed the possibility of taking these scripts and pitching them to companies like Samuel French and in hopes that they’re sold, licensed and performed in perpetuity. I’m grateful to my directors, Professors Jason Scott and Gregory Maday, for always pushing me and cutting me slack when I fell behind and to my friends and the wonderful support the Honors College has given me throughout the last four years.
Then, I went back and used some of the feedback from the read-through to write another draft of the show. However, along the way, I took a few major creative turns and ended up with a story that was similar to the first draft in many ways but was ultimately a larger divergence than I originally anticipated. This was a blessing, as it forced me to re-evaluate multiple creative decisions I’d made and gave me two long-form stories with great potential to work with rather than just one. It also presented multiple opportunities to combine and enhance both ideas in order to write one strong story using both concepts. The beauty of this Creative Project is that my portfolio is much stronger for having completed it and I now have multiple paths to choose from to move this project forward in the future.
In the defense, I discussed the grueling process of actually writing these scripts, hosting a read-through as well as the possibilities for both stories in the future. We also discussed the possibility of taking these scripts and pitching them to companies like Samuel French and in hopes that they’re sold, licensed and performed in perpetuity. I’m grateful to my directors, Professors Jason Scott and Gregory Maday, for always pushing me and cutting me slack when I fell behind and to my friends and the wonderful support the Honors College has given me throughout the last four years.
ContributorsWright, Andrew John (Author) / Scott, Jason (Thesis director) / Maday, Gregory (Committee member) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
For my creative project, I challenged myself to host my first ever photo gallery. After three years of documenting artists at music festivals and building an impressive portfolio, I felt inspired to display my work in a proper gallery setting. I partnered with another local music photographer and together, we hosted a collaborative pop-up photo gallery at Shady Park in Tempe. Research and analysis of the modernization and widespread success of the recent pop-up phenomenon suggests that hosting a photo gallery in this format is an effective way of appealing to a predominantly millennial audience. This notion was proven valid by the large volume of interest we received during marketing pushes, the high attendance at the gallery itself, and significant social media engagement and reactions received during and after the event. Although no prints were sold, the gallery was considered a success because it served its intended purpose of providing two young artists with a space to showcase work, open themselves to critique, and make new fans.
ContributorsElwell, Nicholas (Author) / Trujillo, Rhett (Thesis director) / Giles, Bret (Committee member) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This performance attempts to decolonize possibilities for love through unarcheology, an invented method intended to re-narrate artifacts "dug up" by institutions of oppressive power and utilized in service of particular ideologies. Through unarcheologies of Sirhan Sirhan, the performer's father, and the performer's own body, the performance offers a critical call for us to examine the ways that colonial logics of criminality, threat, and wrongness always already implicate Palestinian bodies and our relations with them.
Rhetorics of criminality have long been written onto Palestinian bodies. From Dareen Tatour's imprisonment by the state of Israel to the U.S. detaining Adham Hassoun indefinitely as a "security threat", these rhetorics lead to material violence against Palestinians on a global scale, as well as on a discursive and interpersonal level. Communicative work which seeks to decolonize the Palestinian body in its various settings is vital to our survival in literal as well as symbolic ways. From a postcolonial perspective, we cannot extricate the individual from the communal, the local, the national, the global nor the universal. A postcolonial understanding of "survival" demands that we reflexively interrogate the Palestinian body in its sociohistorical complexity and on its own terms.
Autoethnography is uniquely situated as a method for postcolonial analyses of Palestinian survival. Chawla and Atay argue, "postcolonialism and autoethnography are inherently self-reflexive practices… that necessitate a centering of both the subject–object within a local and historical context" (4). In this performance, I introduce "unarcheology" as a postcolonial method for learning to love the Palestinian body. Using media and embodied performance, I stage a series of scripts comprised of poetic autoethnographic reflection, repurposed diary entries from an archetypal Palestinian "criminal," and the text of my father's indictment. These scripts, composed through a queer, collage-like method I call "unarcheology," are separated into temporal sections (past, present, and future) and audience members determine the order of their performance, thus demanding direct engagement in the performance's decolonial project. Staged on and around a single pile of dirt, this performance interrogates colonial barriers of criminality preventing the capacity to critically love Palestinians. It documents the survival that Palestinians are forced to embody- its goal, however, is the pursuit of critical, generous, decolonized love.
Rhetorics of criminality have long been written onto Palestinian bodies. From Dareen Tatour's imprisonment by the state of Israel to the U.S. detaining Adham Hassoun indefinitely as a "security threat", these rhetorics lead to material violence against Palestinians on a global scale, as well as on a discursive and interpersonal level. Communicative work which seeks to decolonize the Palestinian body in its various settings is vital to our survival in literal as well as symbolic ways. From a postcolonial perspective, we cannot extricate the individual from the communal, the local, the national, the global nor the universal. A postcolonial understanding of "survival" demands that we reflexively interrogate the Palestinian body in its sociohistorical complexity and on its own terms.
Autoethnography is uniquely situated as a method for postcolonial analyses of Palestinian survival. Chawla and Atay argue, "postcolonialism and autoethnography are inherently self-reflexive practices… that necessitate a centering of both the subject–object within a local and historical context" (4). In this performance, I introduce "unarcheology" as a postcolonial method for learning to love the Palestinian body. Using media and embodied performance, I stage a series of scripts comprised of poetic autoethnographic reflection, repurposed diary entries from an archetypal Palestinian "criminal," and the text of my father's indictment. These scripts, composed through a queer, collage-like method I call "unarcheology," are separated into temporal sections (past, present, and future) and audience members determine the order of their performance, thus demanding direct engagement in the performance's decolonial project. Staged on and around a single pile of dirt, this performance interrogates colonial barriers of criminality preventing the capacity to critically love Palestinians. It documents the survival that Palestinians are forced to embody- its goal, however, is the pursuit of critical, generous, decolonized love.
ContributorsTbakhi, Nissim Dawn (Author) / Linde, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Rohd, Michael (Committee member) / LeMaster, Benjamin (Committee member) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
A posthuman figure like the female cyborg challenges traditional humanist feminism in ways that make room for theorizing new subjectivities and feminist epistemologies. Rather than support a traditional feminism that assumes common experiences within patriarchal society and erases differences among women, cyborg feminism moves beyond naturalism and essentialism to acknowledge complex, individual, and ever-changing identity. Three films, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), all offer such a vision of the female cyborg. In these films, the cyborg subject is a composite of machine and human—sometimes physical, dependent on the corporal mixing of flesh and machine, but just as often mental. Human sentiment, human memories, and human emotion merge with mechanical frames and electronic codes/coding to produce cyborgs. Importantly, every main cyborg in these films is coded as female. For each cyborg, a female body hosts preprogrammed sexuality and the emotions each creator thinks a woman should have, whether those are empathy, compassion, or submissiveness.
The cyborgs in these films, however, refuse to let categorizations like female, or even their status as human, alive, or real, restrict them so easily. As human-robot hybrids, cyborgs bridge identities that are assumed to be separate and often oppositional or mutually exclusive. Cyborgs reveal the structures and expectations reified in gender to suggest that something constructed can as easily be deconstructed. In doing so, they create loose ends that leave space for new understandings of both gender and technology. By viewing these films alongside critical theory, we can understand their cyborgs as subversive, hybrid characters. Accordingly, the cyborg as a figure subverts and fragments the coherency of narratives that present gender, technology, and identity in monolithic terms, not only helping us envision new possibilities but giving us the faculties to imagine them at all.
The cyborgs in these films, however, refuse to let categorizations like female, or even their status as human, alive, or real, restrict them so easily. As human-robot hybrids, cyborgs bridge identities that are assumed to be separate and often oppositional or mutually exclusive. Cyborgs reveal the structures and expectations reified in gender to suggest that something constructed can as easily be deconstructed. In doing so, they create loose ends that leave space for new understandings of both gender and technology. By viewing these films alongside critical theory, we can understand their cyborgs as subversive, hybrid characters. Accordingly, the cyborg as a figure subverts and fragments the coherency of narratives that present gender, technology, and identity in monolithic terms, not only helping us envision new possibilities but giving us the faculties to imagine them at all.
ContributorsMargolis, Madison Lawry (Author) / Dove-Viebahn, Aviva (Thesis director) / Miller, April (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05