Matching Items (14)
Description
An autoethnographic clown show, founded in a solid core of both clown performance theory and queer theory, hoping to explore through embodiment the trials and tribulations of existing as a nonbinary person in a very binary world.
ContributorsCrick-Furman, Hugo (Author) / LeMaster, Lore/tta (Thesis director) / Linde, Jennifer (Committee member) / Ramírez, Pablo (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2021-12
ContributorsCrick-Furman, Hugo (Author) / LeMaster, Lore/tta (Thesis director) / Linde, Jennifer (Committee member) / Ramírez, Pablo (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2021-12
Description
The label of “honors student,” and the status it carries, implies exceptional academic ability, maturity, and accomplishment. The notion that “honors” students are more capable than non-honors students dismisses the particular needs of intersecting identities including gender, race, and/or ability. Said differently, the “honors” designation erases identity and difference. For instance, “honors” students who live with mental illness(es) navigate social spaces and physical structures that assert notions of “success” that are informed by conditions that inhibit bodily function, communication, and educational accomplishment as set by capitalist and ableist standards. Moreover, ableist notions of “success” are always inherently racialized and gendered such that “honors” students women of color living with mental illness are forced to navigate racist and gendered overtones informing academic “success.” Focusing on how students think about and embody the labels of “honors” and “mentally ill” provides unique insight on how the systems of higher education are based in ableist ideology. In this Artist Statement, I discuss my performance Crazy/Smart, a performance that features and stages students’ narratives detailing the means by which students navigate ableism as “honors” students. Using embodied knowledge through performance allows students to decenter dominant, institutionalized narratives about ableism and higher education, speaking up to administrators as people of power and redefining personal success. In this Artist Statement, I detail the theory and method framing my performance Crazy/Smart, a performance using “honors” student stories and narratives to highlight and resist ableist ideology informing higher education more generally and “honors” education more specifically. This Statement includes four sections. First, I provide the theoretical framework that outlines ableism as an embodied ideology. Second, I extend my argument and turn to critical pedagogy to suggest a performance means to resist ableist ideology. Third, I describe the specificities informing my performance including the choices I made to stage ableism as an ideological structure organizing higher education. The fourth and final section is the attached Crazy/Smart script.
ContributorsBishop, Molly Elizabeth (Author) / Rohd, Michael (Thesis director) / Linde, Jennifer (Committee member) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
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