Performance
I think one of the coolest realizations I came to through reading the section on performance is that people are finally starting to acknowledge the fact that performance is more useful in a classroom than a fun starter game. So many teachers thought they could never apply it to a subject outside of the arts, but now as we are starting to integrate more diverse teaching practices into our curriculum, educators now see how effective performance can be in influencing the minds of our students. If we can incorporate performance across the disciplines, we can incorporate what students see as something they do for a free-time activity into studies.
I loved that the article said performance places a new stress on the learning process—now it’s more about how we learn than what we learn. The point of middle school and high school isn’t necessarily to learn a base knowledge that we can carry on into college and the rest of our lives… Let’s be honest, I will not use, nor do I even remember, a decent amount of what I learned in high school. But if students are being taught how to work through situations in their minds and be proactive problem-solvers, they will be able to incorporate that core understanding into whatever subject they come across later in life. Performance activities allow their minds to process in new ways that allows that to happen.
Incorporating performance into my own classroom won’t be hard for me at all. Obviously, in a theatrical setting, performance is an integral part of the curriculum. But I think the important part of incorporating performance will be to not only show students that they know how to put on a character and fake it, but show them that they can create their own characters and manipulate them into an entirely new being in order to fully maximize and highlight the particular skills of a given actor. It’s all about effectively using what you have in your arsenal.
Appropriation
An interesting ism of our society is that we seem to be in the age of recreation. Old stories, myths, legends, are transformed into new Hollywood hits and XBox 360 games. But for me, the most interesting application of appropriation in an educational setting is how you have to get to the point where you can create a new form. Basically what I’m trying to say with that is that before a student can begin to pick something apart and make a new creation from it, they first have to be able to completely understand the original. It’s like when a director is breaking down a script and coming up with a concept. Before they can find a concept that works with the show, they have to know how that concept will affect every line in the play. You have to know everything inside and out.
For a student, this means that before they set their minds to work to create a new design, with appropriation techniques taught in schools, they will inherently be able to wrap their head around a project and go to work from that point. These teaching techniques can include teaching students to draw parallels between times and places, and understand the intricacies of human relationships and how those relationships affect the ways in which people interact.
1 comment:
Like you, Giselle, I’m glad to see the push to integrate drama with other curricula in the schools, and I hope teachers will embrace Arts Integration’s full potential. Sadly, though, I suspect that we still have a very long way to go. There are still a lot of tenured teachers out there who, I fear, will resist these “new” teaching methods until the bitter end.
I loved what you said about the importance of emphasizing process rather than product; I agree that parsing out the hows and whys is of far greater value to students than focusing on the whats. A related aspect of performance I kept thinking about as I read is the fact that each and every human being on this planet is really “performing” every waking minute of their life – with or without an audience. Sitting here in my kitchen at this moment, I’m performing “Student doing homework,” all by myself. Of course, there is an element of audience involved in that my professor/peers will read these words, but no one else is in the room with me. There are times in all our lives when we choose to perform certain pieces or projections of ourselves: for instance, one may choose to perform “confidence” when going through a job interview, whether one feels confident or not; one may choose to perform the various roles of “student,” “sibling,” “parent,” etc. throughout any given day; a person could choose to perform “straight” if they were uncomfortable being perceived as “gay” – whether they were actually homosexual or not. I think it’s so critical to help students develop an awareness of the performances already surrounding them in their everyday lives – not only their own, but the performances of others, too. If we can teach students to recognize the basketball player’s “hero” performance and separate that from the reality behind it, they will be far better equipped to observe, interpret, and interact more deeply and critically with the world around them.
On the subject of appropriation, I have also noticed in the last several years that properties are being reinvented, reinterpreted, reinvigorated, reissued, etc., etc. much faster than they used to be. I think we need to be careful, though, in our application of the word “appropriation.” My understanding is that appropriation stands apart from simply doing a thing over again; instead, appropriation seems to apply more particularly to not necessarily “creat[ing] a new form,” as you seem to suggest (although that can certainly happen), but to lifting, cutting, sampling, arranging and/or rearranging existing work and manipulating those properties to create one’s own artistic expression. I really like the article’s use of the collage comparison to give a clear understanding of what appropriation entails; the difference between “then” and “now” isn’t the act of appropriation itself, but rather the increased array of creative properties available to include in the collages of today. Once, appropriation was fairly limited in scope; today, due to the advent of technologies such as audio and visual recordings, the ready availability of massive numbers of texts (written or otherwise), and especially the world wide web, the materials available for appropriation are incredibly vast and varied – the modern “collage,” then, can take on a nearly infinite number of forms (and functions).
My question on appropriation is this: when does appropriation become mis-appropriation? It seems to me that issues of intellectual property rights – and responsibilities – have grown increasingly complex over the past decade, and I imagine that trend will likely continue for quite some time to come as we all try to figure out how intellectual property really works in our modern world.
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