It's me and you Hamlet, me and you.

In reading Anna Deveare Smith’s introduction to Fires in the Mirror, the thing that stuck in my mind is her critique of psychological realism. She lambasts ‘bringing the actor’s self’ to the character’s psychology. It is really interesting that we would not value or keep ourselves enough to make the character come to our own psychology. What a hard life we are planning for ourselves to keep modifying our own identities.

I like the idea of bringing the character to me. Just ‘be myself’ as many directors have told me. ‘Don’t lose yourself in this.’ I think I have been trying to lose myself. Why do you like theatre? ‘Oh, I just like to get away from myself, be someone else for a while.’ vs. Why would I want to do that? I like myself. I have to bend to other people’s selves enough all day at work. Why would I want to keep doing that in my art?

That also raises big questions in terms of our relationship to the community we are working with. I don’t think that people in the community want their selves changed. We don’t want to change them. We want to honor the difference between them and us. And the similarities.

The other big question that fascinated me in Smith’s writing was: where is the character? even what is the character? It may have been based on someone somewhere in time, but it isn’t that person. The character doesn’t have anything outside of the words they say. No memories, no body, no thoughts. Smith writes that the character is the space in between her own identity and the character’s. So as we investigate the space in between us and Sports Fans, we are looking at our own characters but we are working on building a new way of building characters. Cutting Edge!

Boal Reality

I quite like the idea of the Boal form of theatre, where the audience does not know that it is an audience (Though, in a way, everybody is an audience member to reality). Instead of a stage, it is the world. Instead of a script, it is life. Really, they are two sides of the same theatrical coin: “Regular” theatre where audiences congregate at a theatre and buy tickets, etc. and this, where the people happen to be in a particular place. In both instances, they are bearing witness to something which is intended to change their minds about a particular topic. As an actor, I have always gone by the idea that our job is to make the audience feel that they are within the world of whatever play is happening at the time. In the case of the Boal form, the task of transcendence is irrelevant because they are their. The purpose for this type of theatre is to instill some form of change within the world. I feel that this method of acting would be more useful in that regard in that, when one goes to a “Regular” theatre, one knows that it is a show. That is to say, one knows that some heavy-handed will come along with the great story and wonderful characters. With the Boal form, since it seems so much like life, the message that is intended to reach the “audience” will have a greater chance of making a change in the world, or at least, the audience.

First Meeting Today: Sports, Theatre and Community at UofL

Today is our first meeting with members of the community who are not in our class. We'll be gathering information about the importance of sports and theatre in people's lives, and trying to figure out what the relationship is between the two, specifically on campus.

Here's the announcement for the "sports" part of it. The theatre part will be exactly the same, with the same people. We're trying to gather information about fans of both.:

We’re collecting stories about sports for a performance next semester.

Come and have some snacks and tell us about why you’re such a fan. We want to hear about your favorite sport, favorite team, and why sports are important to your life.

WHEN: Saturday, September 24 at 4:00 pm

WHERE: The Thrust Theatre building lobby (corner of Floyd and Warnock, next to Papa John’s, near McDonalds).

WHAT: Town Hall-style meeting. You can participate as much or as little as you want in the conversation, or just listen.


Here's a map to the Thrust Theatre, in case anyone doesn't know where it is:


View Larger Map

And we'll also be trying to livestream this. We'll broadcast it here, or you can go to our livestream page if you'd like to use the chatroom on the right side of the page to join our conversation:

Watch live streaming video from ensembleandcommunity at livestream.com

Hello Internet, my name is Jake Beamer and I am a second year Graduate
student at the University of Louisville, pursuing my MFA in
performance. I was born and raised in Louisville, specifically Pleasure
Ridge Park, so I am very familiar with Louisville, especially South
West Jefferson County. I received my undergraduate degree from the
University of Kentucky, and I spent two years in California working for
a non-profit children's theatre. In terms of what kinds of theatre I
have worked in or with, my repetoire runs the gamus, however, I have
yet to work in Community-Based Theatre, which is why this particular
class and the adventure we are about to take is so exciting!

What is Community? For me, a community is a group of people that have a link to
one another - connections from geography to culture, faith to
knowledge, and everything in between. Community is a familiarity you
have with other people, one in which you take pride and are willing to
promote, promote its health, wellness and sustainability. Every human
being on the planet belongs to one community or another and most people
have many communities they call their own. Some of my communities
include: theatre, UK alumni, UofL student, Graduate student, scientist,
iPhone owner, Harry Potter fan, gay, stage combatant,
Shakespeare-lover, liberal, actor, Louisville...the list goes on and
on. I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who does NOT belong to at least
one community. Even isolated hermits are part of the Hermit Community,
even though they may disagree. Whether or not they self-identify
doesn't mean they are not part of a community that prides itself on not
self-identifying. If you identify as something, anything, there is a
community out there somewhere that will gladly accept you as one of
their own.

I'm excited about this class because I'll be experimenting
with community-based theatre for the first time and I want to create an
exciting piece of theatre that raises awareness about a particular
issue within a community. Hopefully the process and the production will
lead to a dialogue as to why people feel for or against the issue at
hand. And perhaps that will lead people to rethink their opinions. I'm
not expecting anyone to change, that is asking too much. But I'd like
to tell another side of the story. So, going against the preamble of
most curtain speeches in the theatre, I ask you NOT to sit back, relax,
and enjoy the show, but to stand up, pay attention, and get engaged!!

Spect-Actors. (Boal’s Invisible Theatre) vs. Regular Actors

The idea of making a show in which people will unknowingly participate scares me. Regular theatre is protected from that disingenuousness by the many rituals surrounding going to a show. Buying a ticket, sitting in an audience, the lights in the house going dark, etc. Those signals aren’t necessary, but going through them does remind everyone that they are in a safe space, to keep one’s mind or heart open, it isn’t real. It’s not happening to you or a member of your community, it’s happening to an actor and they know what’s up.
Invisible theatre is meant to keep the audience in the metaphorical dark. To fool people. On page 15, Boal says “This is not realism, this is reality,” in this whole section where he’s talking about having to explain to the police that it was Invisible Theatre, but at all costs they were trying to hide that reality from the spect-actors.
Invisible Theatre is an opportunity to deceive people, where the outcome is positive. A random act of kindness or generosity of stories in an informal environment. I don’t think that anyone was harmed. In fact, the spect-actors involved in these pieces probably went home with a good story, a moral lesson and a sense of excitement at having gone through them. I too get those good feelings from performance.
What’s the difference between ‘running a con on’ and ‘telling a story to’ and unsuspecting stranger? In one, you are trying to get money (unlike theatre?). So there is this question of intent. Is this why actors are untrustworthy?

Creating a New Language

Pearl Cleage is quoted as saying, “What happens is that one brilliant person who did something wonderful for the race will be plucked out of whatever community they were a part of, and we study them in isolation. But they’re rarely placed in the context of a community of people. I was really interested in not plucking the person out of community. I didn’t want to write about Langston Hughes and Adam Clayton Powell and all of them. I wanted to write about the people who knew them […] because I think that we forget sometimes that these people are a part of a group of people. I think that’s real important.”

Working as the dramaturg for Cleage’s play, Blues for an Alabama Sky, I noticed that through all of her works Cleage focuses on a community, a community that is underrepresented, a community that stands behind or inside a larger and more well-known community. Cleage’s brilliance lies within her artistic ability to find these voices in the crowd of louder voices. For example, in Blues for an Alabama Sky, Cleage represents the struggling artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the social advocates and medical representatives of the Harlem Renaissance, and the migrants from the south to the north during the Harlem Renaissance whose identity is as fleeting as their locale. These are the voices Cleage chose to study and write about. Sure, she included the important figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell, and Josephine Baker, but only as a historical reference. The social, gender, and racial issues represented through this play are all voiced through the minority- those whom books are not written on.

This led me to think about community based theatre and whose voices that we, as part of this project, are obligated to represent. If community based theatre’s aim is to foster understanding and awareness, shouldn’t we then strive to find those underrepresented voices? Shouldn’t that be a subheading under the goal of creating awareness? And is this an obligation, a responsibility, or an aspiration?

I look forward to working with whatever community we choose and searching for the voices that have not been represented or heard in hopes of creating a new language.

I am writing to find solutions and pass them on.

I am writing to find a language and pass it on.

- Pearl Cleage

hey :)

Hey there, my name is Grace Chandelle Bors, and community to me is a common interest or activity, or place of living a certain amount of people have together.

Besides being a UofL student, and being apart of that community, I am also a musician. There is definitely a community of musicians around town, at certain open mic nights or shows, we will definitely run into each other here and there. Then once we talk and hear each other’s sound, we can collaborate, become friends, all through music. It’s a beautiful thing.

Although community based arts is completely new to me, and almost Greek to me, I am super excited to jump right into it. I love to hear other people’s stories, and I love to listen. It’s a very intriguing thing to me to know that we are going to be writing a whole story based off real, average people surrounding our own lives. I wouldn’t say that I have fears or doubts, per se, but I do become invested with emotions quite easily. So, if we are in a circle with an intense discussion happening, it might be tough for me not to become emotionally involved in the situation at hand. But, that’s all a part of the experience and I am super excited to get started.

Image Theatre

Before we start to work in earnest on meeting with our communities and doing research for devising the play, we've been learning and practicing various techniques for creating work collectively and physically. This week, we've been talking about Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed, and because we ran out of time during our last class, the students did a very abbreviated version of Image Theatre.

For anyone not familiar with it, Image Theatre involves creating a still image as a group of a problem that exists within a community. The image is agreed upon democratically; that is, anyone in the group can suggest changes until everyone agrees that this is what the problem looks like. This is called the "real" image. Then, the participants create and "ideal image," which is what the arrangement would look like if that problem was solved. They then build an "image of the possible transition," allowing them to imagine how to get from the real, problematic situation to the ideal one.

The students in this class decided upon a problem they all share: that there are never enough hours in the day to finish everything they need to get done. The images ended up being somewhat abstract physicalizations of what the stress of that problem looks and feels like, and what it would feel like if it got better. That is, the image wasn't of an actual instance in which this problem manifests in the world; it was more of a sculpture of the feeling and the whole problem itself.

Below are the "real" image and the "ideal" image, and a short video of the transition. Because we didn't have much time, the students animated the movement from one point to the next.


This is the "real" image of the problem of having too much to do with not enough time.


Here is the "ideal" image, which to me suggests that one solution to the problem would be each person supporting the other, sharing responsibility for the work that needs to get done.


This was done hastily because we ran out of time (ha! Appropriate to the topic ...), but this is a short video of the students animating the transition from the problem to the solution.

Hello, Hello

My name is Lloyd Albert Timberlake III, but I would be very grateful if you called me Tad. On a side note, when I was still around a newborn baby's age, I was trying to do something, and a friend of the family said, "You're a tad too small for that", and the name stuck. Right now, in defining myself, I would say that I am a sophomore History major with a passion for acting and theatre. Well, in terms of one taking precedence over the other, I'm not sure.

A community. A community is a group of people who share a common bond, but simultaneously share their differences. For example: Every single person in this class is here due to the bond of theatre, yet each of us share our differences along with that constant bond. This this exchange of differences (from the perspective of the initial bond) new and more diverse communities can be formed, creating tighter bonds with those in the community.i Communities of which I am apart include: Male, blond, bass, actor, (though, when one thinks about it, one could be a part of any community if one has any inkling about it). I am quite excited about starting this class since Jake convinced me to join. The combinations of so many different experiences coming together will surely aid in the creation of a wonderful community-based show. Hopefully I will be able to help in the writing of a show that will not only show the full story of a particular community, but also create a show which any audience will be able to enjoy.

Introducing Jocelyn

My name is Jocelyn Matsuo. I’m a second-year M.F.A. candidate at University of Louisville’s Theatre Department. I am originally from Salt Lake City, UT, but have been living the past 10 years in Los Angeles. (The municipality is West Los Angeles.) I am a pisces and love talking about myself.
To me, community means a group of people who have a part of their identity in common. Common-unity, maybe. I do believe that all theatre is community based. Theatre requires communal knowledge, even if you’re just creating the communal knowledge in the room while you’re putting on the show. To make a joke work, or a moment become an ‘Ah-HA!’ moment, you need to have some sort of understanding about the social situation. Every joke is an inside joke, depending on how large a community you are including inside. Favorite joke right now:

A: What are you doing under the table?
B: Getting paid.

Some communities I belong to: Sketch Comedy (www.deadhonkeycomedy.com), Theatre (www.jocelynmatsuo.com, (www.poorhousetheatre.com) Young people that use the internet, Rugby, Louisville, Women, The Aclands, The Pen 15 club, Alcohol users, and mimes. Americans, Asian-Americans, Gaijins, Marrieds, omnivores. Thinking about this is exhausting.

As we embark on the creation of this Community-Based Theatre, I am looking forward to the challenge of working with a community to which I don’t belong. I have seen Community-Based Theatre turn out some really bad plays that were self-serving on the part of the Community, but not the theatre artists. I have seen some self-serving work that ignored the Community. I look forward to hitting the balance that makes us and the Community proud. I also want audiences to feel good about having attended. I want them to think, laugh, cry and talk about it for hours.

Here we go!

Can community performance make change?

I feel as though this question has been a debate among theatre scholars and theatre goers for centuries. On one side there are those who say no, that theatre is merely a form of entertainment. On the other side, there are those who say YES- theatre can be a powerful agent for social and political change.

Proponents- Yes

Opponents- No

Theatre can be an outlet for creating both social and political change. Some even vouch to say that all theatre is political theatre mirroring politics and our current political state. Theatre should encourage audience members to think and to be as engaged in the performance as the actors themselves are. By the actors telling the most truthful version of the story that they can and being seen as an imitation of life, audience members are left with choices. Those choices can challenge the status quo and create positive change. The play does not end after the curtains close.

Theatre is merely a form of entertainment. People attend theatre performances solely to be entertained and not to be forced to think or make choices. After a hard day or week at work, an audience member doesn’t want to think but wants to relax, laugh, and view the spectacle at a distance. The play ends after the curtains close.

I, personally, am a proponent of theatre being an agent for change. For those who are not as familiar with this debate, I will offer an example with The Lysistrata Project.

This project was fueled by the attacks on 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan. Two actors, extremely familiar with the play Lysistrata and its plot of fighting for peace, began the project. Actors and community members came together to fight for the common goal of peace in a time of war. Actors read passages from the play Lysistrata to encourage others to promote peace at all costs. This project is ongoing and has spread across the US and the country. http://www.lysistrataproject.org/aboutus.htm

How can anyone view this project and deny its being theatre advocating change? This project takes a classical piece of drama and places it in the context of modern day to encourage social and political change. This project has become an influential project and has spread on a viral level.

So, I pose this question. Does a performance end with the curtains being drawn or can it go beyond the theatre staying with audience members encouraging them to create change on some micro or even macro level?

What does community mean?

My name is Cara McHugh and I am from Memphis, TN. What does community mean to me? A community is a group of people who share the same interests, values, beliefs, or social norms. I am an American, a female, a southerner, an actress, a dancer, a student, a downtowner, a Methodist, a Louisvillian, and a liberal. These are groups that I identify with and share common interests with those who belong to the same group.

I think a lot of times communities create this wall between those included and those excluded. One of my goals with community-based performance is to break down that wall and unite and educate people to bridge the gap between the excluded and the included.

I think a common fear whenever anyone works with a group is what if people don’t have the same work ethic and some slack off while others are left carrying that person and their workload. While I doubt that it will happen with this group, it’s always a fear of mine in ensemble work. I am excited to develop a play based on other people's viewpoints and experiences and perform that for a public audience in hopes of educating and creating a platform for change. I hope to develop an unbiased piece of work where predetermined feelings can be challenged to create a new and deeper understanding of a community organization. Personally, I get very frustrated with art that tries to sway people one way or the other instead of providing all viewpoints and allowing audience members to decide for themselves.

I think it would be a wonderful goal to produce an un-biased piece of art that explores all views in hopes of educating, understanding, and changing the status quo. I am looking forward to working with such a great group of people and with an organization in our community.

So, How Are YOU Classified?

Hello!!

I’m Lauren Ashlee, a second-year grad student and a member of the Ensemble Performance and Community class. Woohoo! Let’s get started!!

First of all, I’ve been asked to explain what “community” means to me. It’s harder than you might think.

Go on. Try it.

See?

To me, “community” is more than just a show on television (though a Google search of the term would indicate otherwise.) When I hear the word, my mind instantly conjures up images of the small town where I grew up; grassy green fields, the smell of freshly cut hay, horses and tobacco barns, fireflies and crickets, and lots of old people who liked to tell me stories about my parents and grandparents when they were young. However, the idea of a community goes deeper than just common geography.

The Oxford English Dictionary has at least eleven definitions of “community” (I gave up after this, but there were more.) The one I considered most relevant to my purposes states: “Common character; quality in common; commonness, agreement, identity. nothing of community: nothing in common. community of interest: identity of interest, interests in common.”

My own definition isn’t too far off. To me, a “community” is a group of people who share common characteristics or ideals, which they acknowledge sets them apart from humanity at large. As such, community is a tool we used for self-identification. I see myself as a Henrietta farmer’s daughter, a Southerner, an American, a Christian, etc., and when I encounter another individual with whom I share one or more of those qualities, I instantly recognize the common ground. I feel a sort of kinship, even if only slightly, to the other member of my community, as though we are somehow separate from those around us who are excluded from our kinship. As the popular scripture says, we are “in the world, but not of the world.”

I won’t speak for everyone everywhere, but it seems Americans on the whole are obsessed with labels. If we don’t have a name for something, it frightens us. Therefore, identifying with a community can also be a way of defining, labeling, and recognizing those who are different. It’s our own version of scientific classification. For example, strictly concerning my philosophical communities:

Kingdom: I am a person (as opposed to a rock)

Phylum: With religious beliefs (as opposed to Without)

Class: Christian (because I’m not Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, etc.etc)

Order: Protestant (because I’m not Catholic)

Family: Baptist (because I’m not Presbyterian, etc.)

Genus: Southern Baptist (as opposed to Free Will or Missionary, etc.)

Species: a member of Mt. Hermon Baptist Church. (as opposed to Little Hope Baptist, etc.)

 File under "Really Cool Dead Things."

Each level of classification is a community on its own, and each step down becomes more and more exclusive (honestly, I could keep going… which services I attend, how long I’ve been a member of that church, what Sunday School class I sleep through, and on and on.)

In this same vein, those working on “community BASED theatre” are doing something different than those working on “community theatre.” The latter is a group of (usually) non-professional actors working without monetary compensation on a (usually) pre-written script to present to their geographic (usually) community.

Community BASED theatre is a group of people creating a show about a certain community (often of the non-geographic variety) with the intent to facilitate some form of change.

Get it? Got it? Good.