In which I face some hard truths...

Sometimes (read "really often") I have trouble keeping up with this blog. It's not just that I'm busy and juggling a bunch of different projects. That's part of it, sure. But I have a confession to make ... most of the time I don't feel inspired to write. I don't feel like I have anything worthwhile to contribute to the conversation. I don't have anything to say that feels worth sharing.

2013 has been a pretty tough year all around -- work, school, the company, personally, you name it. A lot of things have got me down. But I'm starting to feel (at least a little bit) back in control, and I also finally feel like I've gathered my thoughts into a somewhat coherent ball. At least I'm ready to start going through the tangle.

This year I've done a lot of really hard thinking about ADK Shakes and my role here. The work I'm doing. Why I'm doing it. And honestly, if I even want to continue doing it. I feel like I've gotten swept away by it all. So much time and energy goes into these productions, and I haven't felt rewarded by what I'm doing in a good little while. I've felt sucked utterly dry. I need a reset button.

So I'm resetting.

I'm going back to basics. Why did I want to start producing in the first place? Why wasn't I satisfied with being an actor working for someone else? I must have felt that I had something different and worthwhile to contribute. Otherwise I wouldn't have agreed to embark on this adventure we call Shakespeare IN THE RAW. What was it all for?

After some time spent considering all of this, I've begun working on a "Manifesto for Working IN THE RAW." It addresses some of the fundamental questions that we've wrestled with since that May afternoon on the hilltop in the Brandywine Valley when the whole rigmarole began.

Brandywine Creek State Park Amphitheater, Wilmington, DE
where it all began...

• Why Word Perfect?
• Why So Minimalist?
• Why Not Rehearse More?
• Why Not Block?

And I think the most important question of all:

• What Kind of Attitude and Energy Does it Take to Work IN THE RAW?

THE RAW is a strange beast, I'll admit. But we choose to do it because we think it creates an energy of its own, a different energy than I've felt created by any other production I've seen or acted in. It's just different. Differences are grand.

Okay, but what do I mean by saying it's "raw"? I see this term bandied about constantly. And it's losing its punch for me. (Just like "accessibility" which is a whole other blog post. Back to "raw"...) What does it actually mean when we say it? Here's what I mean.

When I think about "raw," the first thing that comes to mind is food. Raw sugar, raw diet, raw meat. Raw sugar has been rather gentrified in the Starbucks age. We want something closer to its natural state than refined white sugar. The taste has more flavor, more boldness. The crystals have a larger shape, with more edges. It's less processed, less produced. Frankly I don't know much about a raw diet, except that it allows for no processed foods. The idea (at least as I understand it) is to consume foods in the most natural state possible, not to break down the vitamins and nutrients. On the other end of the food spectrum: raw meat -- bloody, slippery, dangerous. Of course we can't eat raw meat. It needs to be cooked, but beware of overcooking too. You can dry out the meat and kill the taste, make it rubbery, and completely unsatisfying.

This is how I think about our product, our RAW performances: More flavor. More boldness. Rough around the edges. Less processed. Filled with nutrients. But also bloody. Slippery. A little dangerous.

I know not everyone likes their theatre served RAW. And that's ok! It takes all kinds for this world. I want there always to be big budget musicals for people to enjoy. I want there always to be huge venues filled to bursting with people to see concerts, to see films, to see new media shows. I want there to be tiny black boxes playing brand new works. I want there to be cabarets, to be parking lots, to be parks performing children's theater, performing Shakespeare, performing modern classics, performing anything. And everything!

But this ... the RAW ... this is my kind of theatre, and I won't apologize for it.

Stay tuned for the Manifesto itself in future posts as it's still under construction!

Verse-Speaking for the Classical Actor

In the past few days since my last post, I have been eyes-deep in ADK Shakes work. While the immersion is absolutely wonderful, the downside is that I have (almost) completely neglected my reading for class! So after this post, I will be immersing myself in Arthurian Romances and Dante. Lots of immersion happening.

Here's a peek into the muddle that is my brain ... I have been painstakingly going through our Bookend scripts of Titus and Tempest, recording errors from our read-throughs of the 23rd. These are usually small errors in memorization -- transposing two words, perhaps missing or adding a word here and there. So I'm compiling them in order to email out a written record to each actor. Yesterday morning was also our first Board Meeting of 2011 and our big project is researching venues for touring our productions this summer -- pssst, upstate NYers -- leave a comment if there's a place you're dying to see ADK Shakes tour! In the vein of the summer, I am at a snail's pace with casting but it's like a constant hum in the back of my head :: visions of headshots, flashbacks of monologues, visualizing the coming productions. The buzz will hopefully come to rest by mid-March and everything will be settled. Until then ...

What has been occupying much of my brainpower the last few days is -- at bottom -- the language itself. How it gets performed. And how I want to hear it performed. I just did a quick Google search on the percentage of verse vs. prose in Shakespeare's plays and found this book by Ulrich Busse. It has a really cool table on page 66 which indicates that 76.95% of the complete works is written in verse. 76.95%!!!!!! This is exactly why we require actors to audition with a verse monologue! This, of course, leaves only 23.05% of the entire Shakespearean canon that is written in prose. And it really, really, really gets my goat when I hear an actor speaking the verse lines of Shakespeare like they are contemporary prose -- even more so when I know they have been directed to speak it that way. Speaking verse as though it is utterly pedestrian prose muddles the meaning. It disturbs the musicality and the rhythm, which ultimately undermines one's appreciation in listening to it. And to revisit my big research question of last semester -- in the end, I think it can also destroy the authenticity of a performance.

Romeo and Juliet, Summer 2010

When Patrick and I first set out on our journey of Shakespeare IN THE RAW, we were placing the highest emphasis on the text of the plays themselves. By extension -- emphasis on the verse! (If anyone has seen the third season of Slings & Arrows, Charles Kingman comes to mind here...) Patrick is a percussionist so the rhythm of the verse comes quite naturally to him. Not all of us are such natural musicians, of course, but I am inclined to think that musicians have a one-up on actors in this case. One example, and then I'll step down off my soap box (for now). This summer, we produced Romeo and Juliet and I gave a note to our Romeo (who, incidentally, is a wonderful musician). There's one line in the balcony scene that I consistently hear mis-read wherever I go, and I wanted to make sure he was going to hit the emphasis I wanted. The emphasis that *ahem* the verse gives us. 

With Love's light wings did I o'er perch these Walls, / For stony limits cannot hold Love out, / And what Love can do, that dares Love attempt: / Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me. (II.ii)

Specifically: "And what Love can do, that dares Love attempt" -- I consistently hear this line read with emphasis on the nouns and verbs, the so-called "important" words: "And what Love can do that dares Love attempt", right? No! The verse tells us otherwise! This is a complete thought, a stand-alone thought. "That" is not a linking word here -- it is the key to the meaning of the thought. "And what Love can do, that dares Love attempt." And if we ignore the verse, suddenly the thought does not make sense.

So. The point of this rant is to respect the verse. Use the verse. Iambs are our friends. Next time, maybe I will rant on the opening speech from Richard III. And to all my Bookend actors, in particular, and to our acting community in general, I hope you will take this very sincere message to heart. I love the poetry of Shakespeare's work. Let's not obscure it by trying to turn it in to prose. Let it sing. (And PS - as an added bonus, you'll also find the memorization so much easier!)

 

Reflections

OK, it's that time of year. 2010 is coming to a close. The holidays are here. The semester is ending. It's time to be thinking about everything we have accomplished this year and begin thinking about 2011. This is going to be my final post of the fall semester and my final post (at least for class) about the question of authenticity. My inquiry into this question of what makes an authentic performance is certainly not coming to a close ... that is a question, I'm sure, that is going to follow me for the rest of my career. And I'm okay with that.

Over the course of the semester, here are some of the criteria for authenticity that I have come across in my research or in my own responses to that research. An authentic performance must:
- be compelling. To be compelled is to feel moved.
- have an audience. Not just any audience, but a willing, imaginative, and constructive audience.
- a transmissible essence (Benjamin)
- have a voice "that is constructed and expressed visually and orally, and ... heard, perceived, and constructed" (Royster)
- have a basis in biology and in our bodies in discrete energy centers (Reidel)
- have a sense of immediacy (Reidel)

In response to my own musings about how critical the audience is, I have included a short video clip from ADK Shakespeare's production of 3 Henry VI on April 19, 2008. I wasn't able to upload the shorter clip, so please take special note of the audience between timestamp 1:06 and 1:12. Richard and Edward and talking about seeing three suns in the sky, and two audience members actually LOOK! This moment has tickled me since I first watched the video of this performance, and after this semester of research, I am finally able to say exactly why:


Greg Davies (Richard) and Michael Pauley (Edward) have drawn the audience into the story. The audience is willing to construct this imaginary world with Greg and Mike, even going so far as to look at the organ loft in order to see the three fair suns that Richard and Edward describe.

Enjoy! And thank you for a wonderful semester.

Being presenced.

This will be my final post from my 11/20 interview with Leslie Reidel. It was difficult to narrow down our interview to a short series of blog posts, but I had a great time sifting through my transcript. This last post is about presence.

Usually we think about presence as a noun -- it's something that you either have or you don't. Right? Oh, that actor has so much presence. It's a noun. Leslie does not necessarily agree with this! He thinks that we can transform it into a verb so that presence becomes something you "do" not something you "have."

This is a skill that an actor builds. It's not inherent or innate. And it must be made anew each time. Leslie talked about presence in terms of foreground and background noise. The noise keeps us from being present and it never stops. Developing presence as a skill involves making what is in the foreground more vivid, and the background less so. Athletes are very good at this. Musicians are pretty good at this. Actors ... not so good at it. (Improv actors get pretty good at it.) Most actors are not so good at dealing with fixed things.

And this is what we are working with as actors -- fixed things, like scripts and blocking. But if the present is rooted (that is, newly rooted) from moment to moment, how do we work backwards? We must listen. All great acting teachers will tell you that. Even when you are speaking a long speech, you must listen. Presence is more in listening than in speaking. Remember, even long speeches are persuasive arguments, never description, so someone else is always present with you.

To relate this back to a few other posts ... I will fill in this "you" -- the audience.

And to relate it back to Delsarte ... being authentic is being able to say "now." Expressing here (Leslie rubbed his heart), not here (Leslie touched his head). We must feel. Now.

Reidel, Leslie. Personal interview. 20 November 2010.

Now. Now. Now. Now. Now.

Francois Delsarte

This will be the second post in a series of three on my November 20 interview with Professor Leslie Reidel. In the first post, I talked about Leslie's abiding interest in science and its relationship to drama, or rather the drama that is within us at a biological level.  In this post, I'm going to delve into the influence of Francois Delsarte on Leslie's work and how Delsarte's work can help create an authentic performance.

Leslie had mentioned Delsarte to me several years ago, and although the book is sometimes difficult (in part because pieces are missing from my facsimile and in part because it is just so so dense), it is an absolute treasure trove. For a long while Delsarte's work has been considered out-dated, artificial and "stodgy." (If you check out the wikipedia link above, the article describes how Delsarte's work was misapplied and how Stanislavsky's work came in response to this misapplication.) So during our interview, Leslie broke down Delsarte into some basics. Our bodies are made up of three expressive centers -- head, heart, and loins. Think, feel, do. Cognitive, emotional, vital. And Delsarte actually then breaks down the specific parts of the body that correspond to these centers -- for example, the back of your hand is "vital." The inside of your hand is "emotional." The tips are your fingers are "cognitive." Leslie demonstrated this: If you were going to hit someone with the back of your hand, it would be absolutely brutal, right?  Backhanding someone. It comes from your gut, right? But if you slap someone, with the palm of your hand -- your emotions are really engaged. This comes from anger, from your heart. Now imagine picking up a grape with the tips of your fingers and really examine it -- even the word examine indicates that now we're in a mental or cognitive state.

By spending a great deal of time with a given text, we can see which of our centers are being engaged for a character at different points in the play. So Delsarte's contribution to an authentic performance really comes from actively engaging these discrete energy centers in our bodies. Actively engaging. Every moment. The actor must be present and active in every moment of the performance.

More on presence -- noun and verb in my next post!

Here is a link to Delsarte's System of Oratory on Google Books.

The Glow

I had a wonderful opportunity on Saturday to interview Leslie Reidel, Professor of Theatre at University of Delaware and Co-Artistic Director of Enchantment Theatre Company, and ask him some questions about authenticity.  Talking with Leslie is always educational and inspiring.  From a conversation of about 2 hours, I can only extract a small amount in this particular post but what Leslie had to share sheds a great deal of light on this very pressing question of how to define authenticity.  Expect at least one more post on this!

I started the interview asking about physicality and movement. In a conference paper that Leslie gave me,  he referred to the physical a great deal, so it seemed like a very key component of an authentic performance. He began by talking about his interest in shifting away from a behavioral or psychologically based model of acting to get at something more fundamental. How much more fundamental can we get than particle physics?  (Interesting turn, no?)  Leslie told me about a NOVA program he had seen years ago on subatomic particles -- quarks. The physicists were able to predict certain directions of motion in the path a particle would take.  Sometimes it would move "up" or "down" but other times it was completely unpredictable and the scientists described this as the particles' "charm." Really fascinating stuff!

Glowing bacteria!

Leslie's interest is in how drama is in us at the level of particles or DNA rather than something we acquire. How are we as actors behaving like quarks? Or are we? Should we be? I think absolutely we should. If anything is at the basis of authenticity, how do we get to a more basic building block than our atoms and our subatomic particles, our quarks? Obviously, drama and writing is a kind of construct but if we can construct these things with our most basic building blocks in mind, wouldn't that make the construction a more truthful, authentic one?

One other science-related item for this post. Leslie also brought up the work of Bonnie Bassler, a microbiologist at Princeton University.  Here's a link to a video of her speaking on "How Bacteria Talk." In a nutshell, she has discovered that when bacteria reach a critical mass, they become luminescent. And that is how the theatre works! Leslie made an explicit connection between Bassler's work and Aristotle's discussion of catharsis. This can only be reached when there's a critical mass of people. It can't happen when you read a play by yourself in your room. This point ties in to a some previous posts where I talk about the importance of audience to authenticity. You cannot truly achieve an authentic performance without the audience. And damn, if you can make your audience glow ... you've really got something there. Something authentic.

Essential building blocks

Finally! I feel like I had a breakthrough this evening. My semester-long delving into this question of "authenticity" in performance should ideally be relatable to the same question of authenticity in composition. "Ideally" has become a bit more practical tonight.

Last week for class, I read Jacqueline Jones Royster's article "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own." Tonight, I went back to this article for a closer look, and I'm so glad I did. Although Royster is more concerned with voice than authenticity, the two seem to go hand in hand and she defends her range of voices as being all authentic.  She does not clearly define what she means by "authentic," however. (I will come back to this by and by.) Royster takes issue with the current approaches to voice, which see it as strictly "a spoken or written phenomenon" (30).  So far, so good -- this can apply to performance as well. It comes from an author's written word (or voice) and is then spoken by the actors.  I agree with Royster that there is more to it than just that written and spoken word.  The "more" is that slippery, seemingly indefinable thing called "authenticity."

Royster goes on to argue that we should see "voicing as a phenomenon that is constructed and expressed visually and orally, and as a phenomenon that has import also in being a thing heard, perceived, and constructed" (30). Ding! ding! ding! ding! ding!  Voice is not just visual (written) and oral (spoken).  It needs to be "heard, perceived, and constructed," which means someone else must be there to hear, perceive, and construct.  Every voice requires an audience.  By extension, every performance requires an audience.  Without an audience to receive the performance, to hear it, to perceive, and to construct it, it will fall apart.  It will not be authentic!  I emphasized "construct" because, to me, it seems like the most important building block, the cherry on top, if you will.

Every performance has a voice.  Perhaps it comes from a written text.  Perhaps it is improvised.  Perhaps it is even silent (dance?  Lavinia in Titus Andronicus?).  Even in these cases, I would argue voice still comes through whether it be in music, or perhaps the voice of another character.  But it originates somewhere -- written -- and comes out of an actor or performer or musician -- oral.  Check.

Enter the audience.  The audience (whether a piece of writing or a piece of dramatic art) hears.  They hear the lines, or the music, or the sounds.  Check.  They comprehend them, they "perceive" them, and they process them.  Check.

But if the audience does not consent to construct, to build this world with you (whether a writer or an actor or a dancer, etc.), then I would argue there is no authentic performance.  It is the last and ever so crucial step.  Construction.  If we do not consent to work and build together, we'll have an empty shell.  Royster places a good deal of responsibility on us, not only as speakers but as listeners.  I think she is absolutely right.  She says, "voicing at its best is not just well-spoken but also well-heard" (40).  No pressure, folks.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own." College Composition and Communication 47. 1 (1996): 29-40. Jstor. 14 Nov. 2010. Web.

In pieces

I am recovering from two days of season auditions for our company, during which time we saw nearly a hundred actors. These lucky hundred people were whittled down from nearly a thousand submissions we received online. We are also accepting video submissions this week, and from this pool of talent and skill I have the happy and terrifying task of choosing two companies of actors numbering twelve and fourteen respectively.

When I got home this evening, from the depths of my deeply fried brain came all these bizarre thoughts about the audition process. I am supposed to make an incredibly difficult and crucial decision based on very little data -- data which suggests how authentic a performance an actor will give me in February or next July. But the audition process has to be one of the most manufactured and awkward processes ever.

Many companies do a two- to five-minute audition slot. Actor enters, smiles, states their name and prepared piece, smiles, states their name, and exits. How on earth can you get to know someone and their work in such a short amount of time? And as an actor, how on earth are you supposed to manufacture an authentic performance? And yet ... it happens. I've seen it. (PS - It's so cool.)

Over the last few days, I've been watching a lot of video submissions as well. As difficult as offering an authentic performance in an audition is, it is confounded by the addition of a video camera. Walter Benjamin in his excellent article "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction" argues that "situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated." I realize, and I know our actors realize too, that submitting a video audition is better than nothing, but it's not as good as being in the room. The art (at least this kind of art) is somehow "depreciated" by the camera. These are not carefully crafted films in which the camera is being used in a particular way to tell a story. The camera is a tool so the actor can convey to the auditor certain information -- but the information will hopefully be an inspired and authentic snippet of a performance. I think the camera tends to get in the way somehow, in such a case as this.

Benjamin defines a thing's authenticity as "the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced."  But what is an object of art's "essence"?  What does it have to do with its duration, its place in time?  This is even more confusing with theatrical performances which are constantly re-produced.  Furthermore, if we look at an actor's performance of a single monologue, how can the question of authenticity be applied?  The monologue is lifted completely from the context of a play, and often does not make sense unless you happen to know the context.  How can it possibly be considered authentic if the "beginning," as well as the middle and end, of the story have been removed?  (Incidentally, this is partially why there are so few really great audition monologues, which are self-contained stories with a beginning, middle, and end.)

I don't feel like I am any closer to answering these questions.  I would say definitively that I have seen authentic performances in an audition -- both in person and on camera.  They do have an "essence".  A connection happens between the actor and the audience -- but I'm not certain that can be defined either.

All of these questions are supposed to tend back at some point towards Composition Theory.  This is always at the back of my mind in these posts, and I'm going to try to bring a little more to the forefront here.  I think I can translate these questions about theatrical authenticity to writing as well.  Writing is an activity of contrivance -- so is theatrical performance.  Benjamin's "essence" could apply (at least in a modern, though not so post-modern sense).  And I think a connection is established between a writer and his/her audience.  I find it just as difficult to define these essences and connections, but I do at least think there is a parallel.

Now, I will end these particular ramblings for this evening.  But I have talked so much about auditions, I feel it only right to end with sharing a video audition of my own from about two years ago for your viewing consumption.  So:

Hello, my name is Tara Bradway and today I will be reading for you Joan la Pucelle from William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 1.

Thank you.

*Eyes* and *Qualities* finally rhyme again!

It must be like watching the original, unadulterated, completely undigital versions of Star Wars!

In ten days, students at Kansas University will be performing the first original pronunciation performance of Shakespeare to take place in the United States: A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I encourage you to watch their video on YouTube, where you can watch them in rehearsal and hear the original rhymes preserved.  Click here for a detailed article on the production.

This production, of course, has me thinking about authenticity.  Is the production going to be more authentic because the actors will be speaking as Shakespeare did?  Because the rhymes are finally going to ring true in our ears, as they haven't in hundreds of years?  I really enjoy listening to original pronunciation (OP), not that I have many opportunities to do so.  The first place I heard it was in Ian McKellen's Acting Shakespeare, which aired on TV in 1982 but has just come to DVD in 2010!  He does a very small bit of Macbeth in OP and it's just extraordinary to hear.  I really couldn't say what the experience of hearing the entire play in OP would be like.  I suspect my ear would get used to it rather quickly, but I have a pretty decent ear for accents.  Would I get too caught up in the rhymes?  What if the actors themselves are not very good?  The novelty of OP is not going to last very long if Helena is not terribly compelling, right?  I can only speculate, since unfortunately there's no way I can make it to Kansas to see the production.

But it's quite a question, does OP make the production more authentic?  I think perhaps it does to a certain extent, at least historically speaking.  In calling us back to our language's past (as Paul Meier points out in the video, this is the accent the first Americans would have had), there seems to be a sense of the authentic.  We tend to value our roots, our origins.  This, however, is not the sense of authenticity I am seeking this semester.  Not quite.  As I mentioned above, if the actors do not present a compelling story, I don't care what sort of English is coming out of their mouths.  So it appears I have one small requirement to add to this definition... for something to be authentic, it must be compelling.  Well, it's a beginning.

Shakespeare IN THE RAW - Richard III Trailer

While I search for a way to post this in a "gadget" that will stay put, here it is at least as a post.

All the footage/audio in this trailer is taken from our April 19, 2009 production of 3 Henry VI, performed at the Philadelphia Cathedral, Philadelphia, PA. It begins with a small clip of Queen Margaret (played by Christine Demuth) right after **spoiler alert** the murder of her son, Prince Edward, by Richard III and his two brothers, Edward and Clarence. Hopefully, I can find the time to edit that scene from our video archive and post it as well. I can unequivocally say that that scene was one of the finest, most moving, and most authentic (yes, that's right, I said it!) moments I have ever experienced in the theater. Ever. (And I cannot even begin to tell you what kind of harsh critic I am.)

Ms. Demuth's performance was absolutely extraordinary. She is in her mid-twenties and does not have children, but in this production, she plays a character who would be 41 years old, witnessing the murder of her 17-year-old son. The memory of this performance still (a year and a half later) moves me to tears. What makes such a performance authentic? It is a performance, after all.

In THE RAW performance, we have no "backstage" that is hidden from the view of the audience -- there is only on- or off-stage. We usually play in the round, and actors set prop and costume pieces off-stage behind the audience. So the audience is able to see actors changing costume pieces and transforming from one character to another (as we also nearly always play more than one character), waiting just off-stage "in the wings" for their entrance. We don't actually have wings. We don't hide the actors backstage. We're very "in your face" about the constructs of the play, and we very clearly ask the audience to play and imagine the world with us. I think acknowledging this imaginative element and actively playing together (actors and audience) makes the performance stronger, more effective, and a more authentic, moving experience on both sides of the stage.

Is this why it doesn't matter what age the performer is? Because we all agree to pretend that she is 41 and a mother. We agree to pretend that Prince Edward (who, by the way, was played by a woman) is her son. We agree to pretend that he is murdered. And by agreeing to do this and then actually doing it, we somehow make this experience authentic and meaningful. What matters is the work of the audience and the actors constructing and being invested in this world of pretend. We have made it mean something. We have made it authentic.

Enjoy the (slide)show!

I've added a slideshow of some pictures from our 2010 Summer Season on the sidebar.  These are from our Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet photocalls.  Unfortunately, no pictures from As You Like It yet, but I will upload some more soon.  I'm also hoping to upload a trailer from our production of Richard III which we performed in January, 2010.

I just sat and watched these forty-some pictures scroll through randomly on the slideshow, and I was immediately taken back to this summer: all the anxiety of putting up these three productions but also the joy of working with such an amazing group of people, the immense pride in what we accomplished, the sense of camaraderie and community we were forming with our audience.  All this from a few pictures!

This semester, I'm trying to dig into some literature about "authenticity" and figure out what that means.  Can you sense authenticity in a picture?  In a video?  How does it differ from the feeling you get when you're present in the theatre?  How does it differ depending on which side of the stage you're on?  I sense genuine feeling in these pictures... is it only because I was there?  Or is there some sort of definition or criteria I can use to determine if something is authentic?

A New Semester Project!

I have completely overhauled my semester-long professional development and my key terms project from my Comp Theory class.  Previously, I was planning to create a course sequence for a Shakespeare class but I wasn't very interested in this idea.  Then I had considered a reading list doing double duty as Artistic Director list and as precursor to Comp list.


This has all gone out the window with the revision of my key terms project.  At first, I was going to tackle "rhetoric" - and specifically how Shakespeare uses rhetoric.  But this wasn't really fitting into the purpose of the project.  After class last week, I was so interested by our discussions of authenticity.  This is exactly the question I struggle with in producing THE RAW.  How do you create the most "authentic" theatrical experience possible?  Especially when theatre is inherently a fake, constructed space.  It's not real.  We know it's not real.  How, then, can you create something truthful or something authentic in this kind of space?


I must love this blog so much already, because I am thinking of creating another blog specifically exploring this question of authenticity.  Maybe it can be the same blog?  Why not?  I'm hopeful I can attract some guest authors who can post their own thoughts and experiences with this question.  I'd also like to post some video from our productions.  The plan is (at least for now) to have this blog reflect the work of the semester dealing with this question of "authenticity" and also to compile (for the key terms project) an annotated bibliography of sorts to handle the literature I am digging up on the subject.