Media

It has been widely acknowledged that media has an increasing importance in how we relate and communicate to each other, yet it was only while talking about it in class that there was a full realisation of just how much of an impact media has. A recent figure revealed that a staggering 95 per cent of thought process is now dictated by media, and there has never been one singular source of so much information in human history. So I’ve decided to find out some of the facts.

• The average American child spends more time watching television than pursuing any other activity, except sleeping (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2001)
• Companies market computer software for children as young as 18 months of age. Four of the ten best-selling CD-ROM titles are intended for children beginning at age 3. In one study, among parents with children under the age of 6 who had home computers, 62 percent had purchased software for their children to use (Trotter, 1996).

• By      the time the average child has completed elementary school, he or she has      seen more than 100,000 acts of violence on TV; including 8,000 murders      (Center for Media Education, 2001).
• During      prime-time television viewing, children see about 5 violent acts per hour.      For Saturday morning children’s programs, the average is actually much      higher—about 26 violent acts per hour (Center for Media Education, 2001).
• By      the time a young person is 17 years old, they have received over 250,000      commercial messages through the media.
• 69%      of girls in one study said that magazine models influence their idea of a      perfect body shape
• A      1997 advertising study showed that white women in roughly 62% of ads were      “scantily clad,” in bikinis, underwear, etc, while the same was      true for 53% of black women. For men, the figure was 25%. Women were also      represented in stances of powerlessness more often, and black women were      likely to be featured in animal prints, and in predatory poses.

Both as a theatre practioner and as a woman, figure like these continually scare me, and facts such as these seem to keep coming. Last year represented the fewest number femal roles in mainstream film. Ever. It would be my opinion that when movies from the 40’s and 50s contain more women roles, and display more accurate representations of women, we as a society are moving in the wrong direction. More and more I have come to realise that women’s roles are not as diverse as I previously thought, and it is becoming more likely that I’ll have to create roles for myself, because they simply aren’t there. It seems to me that there is a gross misrepresentation of women in particular, and when this representation shapes the way society views a certain group of people, it becomes problematic. Media also has much to answer for the increasing issues in men’s mental health. Studies are finding more and more that a culture of hyper-masculinity has been formed through extreme violence and exaggerated male stereotypes.  To quote the documentary miss representation, can we have a truly democratic society, when we are encouraged to view a groups of people in such submissive and dominant ways?

Phealan; Notes on her reading.

She starts off by stating that once something is seen it cannot be unseen.

The act of performance doesn’t fit easily into our current economic set-up as doesn’t parallel the practices of capitalism. Since performance happens through time, the only way to commodity it would be to document it. However, to document a performance is to alter it as it is inherently un-documentable. In a mutual understanding of an event/performance, one can never be fully part of an others understanding or connection since performance leaves its impact on the subconscious of the subjective viewer. (ie) All perspective is based on memory which is subjective so joint perspective can never be fully realised.

She then goes on to describe how the act of speaking is an event in itself. The intent of speech is acted out or performed through speech itself. She titles this “performative utterances” which makes me think initially that she may be describing the role of an actor, writer or poet. Then I realise this could extend to any type of public speaking, even the very mundane.

She then goes on to the role of women, and how women having often been portrayed as the promised prize, are unable to conceive such promises to them since they are the prize. She also demonstrated how the fusion of female and male into one gender, for the purposes of advancing in the workplace was not achievable because women as a whole are marketed. Media is pointed to as an obvious reason, and as much as I agree that media has a lot to answer for in terms of inequality, there are other areas she fails to mention. Our educational system for instance, fails to teach children how to read media, and fails to provide subject options stereotypically associated with one gender to the opposite gender. This is especially the case in same-sex schools.

As for the art I found it more interesting the more I knew about it. For the first piece, I kept on being distracted by how uncomfortable it must have been to be bound to a poll for so long. However once you began to fully realise that the time it took was intrinsic to the performances meaning, it became less of a distraction when looking at the piece. The moment/present only exists because of history and the future, and that cycle is paralleled by the fish video on a loop. The piece describes the video as a birth. For me, I see it less as a repeated birth but more of a copy, of a copy, of a copy, so on and so forth. To me it is more of a repeated pattern that occurs throughout history.

I found the final piece with the African American woman extremely engaging as well.  There was something really interesting about the passive protest the figure was demonstrating to the situation. Sexual racial violence, which had formed part of a stereotypical identity relevant to her, makes the full realisation of herself problematic. There was a tension between her and what she thought about herself, which was influenced by outside forces, and it was interesting to sense this struggle through the image.

Film Centre/ Laura Murphy

As I looked around at Laura Murphys work , I kept thinking of the question of how something becomes a narrative, and if it is a narrative, what makes it a narrative. Is it just the person who makes it or is it a narrative in of itself? I know in every creative art there’s always that precursor that everyone will take what they will from a show/ piece of art. Most of the time, I go along with that theory with a casual ease but today in particular I was eager to cement down what exactly made a narrative. At least for me. When looking at the first piece (..) I was particular struck by what kind of narrative I was getting. it wasn’t the standard event-A-leads-to-action-B-leads-to-conclusion-C type of plot line, it was more of telling of a certain state of being. I felt Like witnessing the inner ramblings of someone’s mind, as if the four walls that made up- the enclosed scene encompassed a thought process. While I had a certain sense of this, I hadn’t quite worked through it until sometime later, certainly not by the time aura asked us to put to paper what we got from her work. For me, the video felt like a narrative, however I am aware that others wouldn’t consider such a deduction in the realm of a “narrative” but of something else. So I can take from this experience that, at least for me, a narrative needn’t have a particular storyline or even a focus.

The second piece which really struck me was the one of the orange being put back together. It felt as if the frustration of the act was being transferred to those watching it , the more we watched, the more involved and absorbed you go in achieving the goal. It was akin to when you start watching a sporting match with friends, you may not initially be interested, you become more involved in it the more you watch it.

The next piece was the biggest piece in which you saw a hand writing out a page of sentences and then erasing them. I still kept trying to make a narrative, and it was becoming amusing to see the lengths I would go to figure one out. I asked Laura why she picked the sentences she did, and it was because they were the plainest sentences her and her collaborator could come up with. It was just sentences describing the previous day.

The rest of the pieces followed on much like this, I finding myself attempting to make a narrative, but the more  went on the more I was able to hold myself back and just take in what I was seeing. I’m still not sure if I would describe her work as completely narrative-less but I did understand where she was coming from.

How to Truly Listen: Ted Talk

What I talked about for my project

Evelyn Glennie

Evelyn Glennie is a Scottish percussionist who, at the age of nine, started losing her hearing and by age twelve, was profoundly deaf. However, she insists that she is not deaf and can “hear” with the rest of her body, not just her ears. She often state that if the audience walk away from her shows wondering how someone hard of hearing could be a musician, than she has failed as an artist. I decided to do my presentation her because I was interested in her approach to performance and perception. Whenever she is asked about music she always insists that the best way to experience it is live, as you can then physically experience the music through the entire body. She encourages her students and listeners to open up the body to the vibration and quality of sound. In her documentary “Touch The Sound” she likens the creation of sound on a drum to a singer. The singer doesn’t just open their mouth; they draw breath from the diaphragm and produce the sound from a deeper source. Likewise a musician doesn’t just play their instrument, they are open to it fully, and are able to draw the sound out from within the instrument, creating a flow of movement between the musician and instrument. Her first instruments were the mouth organ and clarinet, and she studied at Ellon academy and was part of the Scottish youth orchestra. She was first denied entry into the Royal Academy of Music because of her diminished hearing, but was accepted on her second attempt. This changed the entry criteria by which all music schools were to allow students in across the UK. She has performed with the likes of Sting and Bjork, and is the first successful solo percussionist. She mostly performs barefoot in order to hear the music better and published an essay called hearing essay in response to her critics. The following is an extract from the essay;

 “Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this; touch can do this too… With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body’s sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing.”

Film- Daisies

I decided to blog  about this film because its one that I find really interesting and I feel it  would overlaps with our class discussions in relation to gender , use of film technique and  media. Vera Chytalova daisies stands out as a relevant example for many reasons but most of all for its visual style and gender representation. The film follows the exploits of two young women as they explore their nihilistic world. In a style that embodies the protagonists protantic enegy, the film is a mesh of colourful surrealist collage that contributes far more to the telling of the story then a simple framework. Its destructive and as changeable as the two women themselves, who are on a journey of exploration in this new world of anarchy. The performance and casting of Daisies ran very much with the tradition of nouvelle vogue.  Both the two main character’s, played by were non-actors and the script, which was co-written by Ester Krumbachova, was meant only as a starting point. The cast and crew were encouraged to improvise, and were to have the attitude of “anything goes”.  Chytalova herself stated “We decided to allow ourselves to be bound by nothing. Absolutely nothing.”  Her husband Kucera, who was cinematographer for the film, once expressed how effects which were supposed to envoke discussion produced scenes of which the aesthetic value outweighed the intellectual critique. Unlike his Hollywood counterparts, Kucera used methods such as multiple exposure and pixilation to achieve the numerous collage effects. These combined with travelling mattes shots, most notably the shot where the two marries cut each other up, all combined to induce feeling of loose movement and disorientation. Kucera often shot in two screen, most like to emphasise the tone of duality that runs throughout the film. By this I mean the idea of creation and destruction, of narration and character.

Irmgard Bartenieff

Rudolf Laban’s movement analysis extended to many other disciplines through the people he influenced and taught. One such student was a woman called Irmgard Bartenieff, who brought Laban analysis to the states and applied it to the area of physical therapy.

Born in Germany, she had interest in art, biology and dance growing up. She met Rudolf Laben in 1925 and quickly became a keen student of his. She toured and learned with her dancing company she had with her husband, however they were forced to flee from the Nazi regime in 1936. The fled to the states and while there she completed a degree in physical therapy from New York University in 1943, and became chief physical therapist of the Polio Service of Willard Parker Hospital, N.Y. There she enabled clients to take an active participation in their own treatment. This active development of a body’s efficiency and expressiveness became a pillar of  Bartenieff Fundamentalssm. To add to this, she later developed movement activities that were simultaneously therapeutic and recreational for children with disability, regardless of the severity of the disability. Between 1957-67 she worked at Day Hospital of Albert Einstein Medical College, using Laban notation to observe and take note. She eventualy went back to be Labans student for five consecutive summers in the 50s, and she graduated from Laban movement studies in Berlin in 1965. She was then the only holder of that certificate at the time in the US  and set up  the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in 1978.In 1978 she founded the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York to further develop Laban’s work, and her application of it. In 1981 a comprehensive book detailing her work called “Body Movement: Coping With the Environment” was released a woman called Dori Lewis. She took the concept of Laban analysis and created a new process of body re-education called  Bartenieff Fundamentalssm. A choreography, dancer and Laban notation expert, she became a pioneer in the area of dance therapy, and helped numerous polio victims through their rehabilitation.

Rudolf Laban & Movement Analysis

Rudolf laben developed his process at a time when the artistic community were questioning what art meant outside the tradition of art.  And colour theory, and music notation were being formulated, Rudolf laben started to focus on movement, how they were formulated and how they related to each other, the performer and the world. There had always been an observation and perception of movement, however when it came to communicating that movement on a basic level, there had always been a great difficulty in formulating a suitable language. Indeed as we saw in the phealans theory (see blog), any attempts to describe performance in traditional writing terms fundamentally changes the performance, and the piece of writing becomes a performance in itself.

The language that Laban devised was an intricate one that encapsulated a vast amounts of elements, reflecting the equally vicarious nature of movement. In very brash terms, it can be broken up into four sections: Space, Effort, Body and Shape.

Shape: Shaping in its simplest terms means how the body moves into space, over which dimensions and whether or not the form of the body changes (wider, narrower or in shape)

Effort : Effort indicates the quality of movement. I.e how much energy a gesture is given,. Flow and weight are accounted for in this also.

Body:

Space: Laban created the concept of a kenisphere, a combination of geometrical shapes that when combined create 26 points which encapsulates and area of space. With this it can be determined how much space and individual occupies, and how much they have access to.

State: The combination of two efforts

Drive: The combination of three efforts

These were layered upon again by more philosophical components. Laban motif is a simpler version of Laban notation: The motif version, the simpler version, consists of a series of symbols which when put together, express a single moment of movement. The notation version is far more detailed. It is so detailed that it has symbols which can track the movement of a joint over space and time. Striped symbols indicate a higher plane, dark filled in symbol indicate the lower, and a dotted symbol corresponds to the middle plane. The symbols themselves indicate the degree to which the body is forward or back.

The combination of effort and space resulted in what Laban liked to call space harmony. Combing the special gestures to effort created a scale, much like one found in music. This relays a more 3 dimensional view of gesture, expression and space that can be used for communication and practice (again much like a musical scale). Of course our anatomy and primal responses affect these relationships. The effort scale for example is affined to the dimensional scale, because it would be counter intuitive for our structures to be heavier when pushing upwards, and vice versa. Vertical dimension for instance, is affined to our weight effort. Indirect movement encapsulates any gesture which leaves your body open, meaning you use your body indirectly. Direct movement describes gesture which moves across your body, a closed off motion, an efficient use of space. Planes contain uneven tensions because of this. We were built to move through planes, and will always flow into the missing dimension to correct our stability. Laban notation has contributed to body-mind centring and alexander techniques. This language has not only enabled a discussion of movement to start and continue, but has also created awareness to areas if movement previously over looked. Observation ceases to be a singular perception and can now be tool for recording, creating and understanding movement.

Video Blogs

The first piece of video I had to do was my uncut piece. I spent a while trying to think of something to do, and finally got inspired when I remembered Laura Murphys orange peel video at the film centre. I wanted to create that same sense of anticipation and expectation. So I decided to play snap and film it. The concept and execution were simple enough; I even had a fresh pack of playing cards! They only difficulty I had with shooting it was trying to get the angle of the camera right as to show the cards and my hand. I t was important for me that the viewer see the cards so that they could get involved in playing the game also. I tried to speed up and slow down the speed at which I threw down the cards to play with the idea of duration, and to see if that would add anything to the video. In my opinion this variation in speed made up for the lack of sound on the video.

The second video I had to do was the montage piece. Again I was initially stuck for an idea, but then thought I’d show various things that have been part of my life but that people wouldn’t necessarily see. These weren’t things of an extremely personal nature; they were simply spaces, objects or people that have contributed in some way to my life. I payed particular attention to spaces as I have been interested in the way physical space influences people and their personalities since reading theatre & the city last year. In the video you will see the road on which I grew up, my garden, a park and other places. I also tried to input some contrasts such as night and day, still shots and fluid shots, and of course my dog, both awake and sleeping.

Visual Blog Reflection

When we were first asked to do the visual blog at the start of the year, I thought that would be the part I would have the least trouble with, but it’s actually the part I’ve been struggling the most with. This has been surprising to me as I always considered myself a very visual person and art was my favourite subject in school. It’s not that I’m having trouble with the drawing but I can’t seem to pinpoint an expression of movement on a daily basis. That is, I’ve been finding it difficult to pinpoint where in the body the expression of movement has originated from. This has prompted me to look and slower moving or sedentary expressions of movement lately. In the beginning I was mostly looking at people and the odd flick or quick movement out of character that they would make. Now I’m enjoying looking at patterns and or rounded geometrical shapes.  I recently went into the Crawford art gallery to have a look at the canova casts and to look at what kind of shapes expressed movement. Neptune and his sons stood out as the obvious one but my favourite was the one of the boy holding back the goose. I like the subtle lines of expression which emphasised the idea of movement and struggle. What I also noticed was how the contrast of the white cast to the red background seemed to instil an even greater sense of movement then a white background would have. If I were to do this task again, I would use different coloured paper and pencils to replicate this. Overall I think I developed a greater awareness of movement around me on an everyday basis from doing the journal. Though I was more alert during the past couple of months for the purposes of the journal, I’m hopeful so of that new found awareness will benefit me.