Election Day: Looking back on a private transformation

I have voted in two presidential elections, and the only constant for me between the two was watching the election results in my room from my computer. I've undergone many changes in the four years that passed between, my party affiliation not the least of these, and in some ways, voting in this election was a consummation of that change. It's a very neat way to track cycles of personal development, and it will be interesting to see where I am at and how I am thinking when the next election comes around. I don't expect to careen crazily between parties again as I have these past four years, but I do hope to see a refinement of my views and a filling in of the fine lines between broad platform statements.

The way I spent both election nights--sitting up late with my laptop, wearing pajamas and flipping between Facebook and news and Netflix--speaks to the privacy of this transformation, and also the ways in which I have kept it silent. The election polarized my Facebook friends pretty neatly according to rural and urban geography, and I chose not to add my voice to the mix. My brother and I have been having a lively series of political debates via private messages on Facebook, and I received and sent a message to him the next day, but I didn't make a single public comment on the election results. I often keep silent because I am unsure what to say, and I don't like to say anything until I'm sure about it, but I hope that by the next election I will have found a voice in this discussion. I want to find the right balance between confidence and picking fights with my younger cousin over a pro-Romney blog.

Best of luck to future-Andrea in her 2016 voting.

Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and the New Zealand Hobbit

http://www.theonering.net/torwp/category/hobbit/

http://www.nme.com/filmandtv/news/
the-hobbit-star-martin-freeman-calls-bilbo-baggins/289698

As I read Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett's article on how museum curation is heavily tied to tourism, "Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Culture," my mind turned to The Hobbit, a common occurrence when I am reading anything lately, but this time it seemed applicable to the article. New Zealand has been in the news a lot lately with Hobbit-themed marketing ploys/displays of national pride. It's increasingly difficult to separate the two as the nation has embraced Jackson's Lord of the Rings industry with enthusiasm.

These Hobbit-themed gold coins, featuring elvish runes and the movie faces of Gandalf, Bilbo, and Thorin, are not only collectibles but also legal tender in New Zealand.

This New Zealand airline safety video also made the social media rounds a few weeks ago.

With these kinds of ads, New Zealand is positioning itself as Middle-Earth--the place to come when you want to visit the actual land of Tolkien. It's the only place I know of that has so successfully supplanted the original 'real location' of a fictional world. England still has its claim on Middle-Earth, as illustrated by the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremonies, where many saw a stadium recreation of English countryside as a hobbit village. But if you want to actually walk in Middle-Earth, you go to New Zealand.

http://www.comrz.com/blogs/my-blog--stefan/london-2012-
olympics---opening-and-closing-ceremony-highlights

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from all this. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, who is quick to point out the imperialist and cultual heritage motivations behind museum-keeping in different ages, might decide that the use of New Zealand as surrogate Hobbiton still whispers of imperialist disregard of the cultures of places that aren't England--we need an exotic and faraway land to serve as a real-life fantasy world, and we can cover over its native culture in favor of our imported one. But I don't think this interpretation fully explains the pride that many New Zealanders seem to take in their image as Middle-Earth, not the sizable benefits they gain from it. To me, it is most interesting how we have cultivated so many different locations and museum preserves for Lord of the Rings--it exists in England and in New Zealand, in movie studios and sound stages and scale models. 

Impressions of the IU Dance Gala

via indiana.edu

http://madeira.hccanet.org/project1_2011/devinep1/gamestats.html

http://centaursleepover.blogspot.com/2010/06/

Kealiinohomoku

Ethnic qualities of ballet, as listed in "An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance":

-proscenium stage
-3-part, 2-hour performance, curtain calls and applause
-French terminology
-Western customs enacted onstage
-romance, sorcery, mistaken identity, tragic misunderstanding
-biblical themes, Christian holidays, afterlife
-humans as animals, fairies, witches, step-parents, beautiful virgins
-bodies create long lines, legs revealed, slender bodies, airy quality
-set and props: horses and swans (not pigs, buffalo, eagles), grains and roses (not yams, coconuts, acorns)
-economic pursuits portrayed

This list in Kealiinohomoku's article reinforced for me that these are the kind of things that make study interesting for me. I've only seen a ballet once in my life, when I was invited by a friend to see The Nutcracker in elementary school, and the main thing I remember is being disappointed that there was no dialogue, so ballet has never been an interest of mine. But for a moment this list made it interesting because ballet was no longer a omnipresent high-toned blandness but a cultural artifact made up of myths, religion, and conditioned expectations. On this list, what most attracts me is the styling of human actors as animals, fairies, witches, beautiful virgins, and sorcerers.

Conquergood and Hybrid Scholarship

"Performance studies struggles to open the space between analysis and action, and to pull the pin on the binary opposition between theory and practice. This embrace of different ways of knowing is radical because it cuts to the root of how knowledge is organized in the academy."
-Conquergood, "Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research," in The Performance Studies Reader, p. 145-6

"Scriptocentrism is the hallmark of Western imperialism."
-Conquergood, p. 147

"I want to be very clear about this point: textocentrism--not texts--is the problem."
-Conquergood, p. 151

-hybrid scholarship produces creative performances alongside written research
-Conquergood, p. 152

Conquergood reminds me of Jackson in impressing that we should be departmentally inclusive and try to cultivate practical and creative projects alongside research. As someone who is neither a performer nor really a researcher of performance, I still think this injunction has value for me. We all end up in the English department because at some point in our lives we really liked to read, but many of us also arrived here harboring a desire to write. Some of the scholars I admire most were active both in research within their field and creative writing outside of it, and you can see both sides of their work overlapping and enriching each other. In the same way, I want to hold onto the enjoyment of writing as I delve into a research-heavy field. Even when my creative writing is not suitable for the light of day, it helps me better appreciate and understand the things that I am reading.

Kinetic Empathy

"In what ways might one come to feel inhabited by the sense of motion, but also emotion conveyed in and by another's body movement?" (Susan Leigh Foster, "Choreographing Empathy", p. 81)

-Rainer's analysis of dance separates the kinetic from the emotional
"Rainer worked assiduously to cultivate and valorize a 'pure' physicality and to imbue it with its own kind of power and dynamism, in part in order to eschew claims of universal sharings of values based in universally shared emotional states." (Foster, 89)

"In contemporary discourse, empathy is frequently viewed as embodied simulation and sympathy as a response involving feelings." (Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds, "Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experience of Watching Dance", p. 53)

Two different interpretive motivations in dance:
Don: "engagement and empathy are produced by intimacy and intensity."
Nicole: "a degree of distance, facilitated by music, is necessary for a kind of empathetic engagement, which involves a suspension of reality." (Reason and Reynolds, 70)

-three different methods of engagement with dance: sympathy, empathy, contagion (Reason and Reynolds, 71)

Ngai, "Stuplimity" in Ugly Feelings

Stuplimity creates an "open feeling" in the reader: "a condition of utter receptivity in which difference is perceived (and perhaps even 'felt') prior to its qualification or conceptualization."
-Ngai, p. 261

Could stuplimity offer one way to overcome Davis' objections to transport? Open feeling could create empathy on the part of the spectator for difference without "insisting on sameness as a criterion of worth." (Davis, Theatricality and Civil Society in Theatricality)