Naomi Lew, Wafa Hazem and Evan Yu, all students from Perf and Tech Fall 2008, are acting as peer reviewers for this summary of all student projects from our class.
We are starting with the Group Performances. For each of the nine units that comprised the class, a small group of students took on the themes of the unit, and engaged the rest of the class using various performance techniques, and drawing on the readings for the unit.
For this unit, the class read Daphne Brooks' Bodies in Dissent - the chapter on the escape of Henry "Box" Brown from slavery using the postal office (Brown, a tall man, squeezed into quite a small box and mailed himself to an acquaintance in a northern state, thus obtaining his freedom from enslavement in the U.S. Brown went on to re-stage his escape and the history of U.S. slavery, in panorama throughout Britain.
Each of the four students created a 3-5 minute video which they displayed on their laptops arranged around the perimeter of the class like a panorama. They used zip ties to "cuff" the rest of the students' hands together, and then the students were "chained" together in groups using a rope. Each group was stationed in front of one of the laptops to watch one of the videos at a time, and when the performing group announced it was time to rotate (using a foghorn), the groups moved around the room in a circle and moved on to watch the next video.
Then, the performing group put a box - the same dimensions as Box Brown's tool of escape - in the center of the room and invited the other students to attempt to fit themselves into the box.
The performing group then led a discussion of the readings for that unit, with a cleverly designed handout featuring Vin Diesel's visage (we had watched portions of The Fast and the Furious in class).
Daphne Brooks attended this group performance.
Evan: I really liked the box. I actually got into the box and it didn't feel good to be in a tiny box. It was terrible that he got shipped in the box, that would be terrible.
Wafa: It was very creative of the group to put us in small groups and make us watch different "episodes." You really wanted to see what video was next. And it was good to bring the class together in the performance.
Evan: I liked their use of technology. One video used Daft Punk which is all about humans and machines.
Naomi (who was in this group): I liked the idea of breaking down Box Brown's panorama into something we could feasibly do.
Wafa: I remember the discussion - we talked about how people are so dependent on technology, and the whole idea of addiction and it's something we are so dependent on nowadays, it's hard to imagine ourselves not having specific technological stuff - cell phones, computers - and it really grabbed our attention, made us think about technology at another level.
Naomi: Since it was the first student presentation, everyone was very willing to go along with it, even though we were chained together. Even though later, some people got more suspicious, though others got more comfortable. It shows that with technology, we mostly just go along with the flow, we adopt is so readily, we don't realize we become addicted to it.
Wafa: Every performance, I thought, We are all performing, as a class. "Group performance" meant oh cool, we're going to do something again.
Gail: What I loved about this performance was that it really brought the readings to life in a very visceral way. It engaged the class 1000% and people were INTO it. And they literally got "into" the box. The videos, the panorama, the suggestion of enslavement and making students experience that, was so awesome. And Daphne Brooks came and she was a terrific audience member and participant in the Q&A!! It also kicked off the class' group performances in a major way. It set the standard REALLY high for everyone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment