Sharing stories, expanding worlds

October 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I was recently introduced to the work of a wonderful British singer/songwriter  Catherine Paver. Her self-introduction reads: “I write storytelling songs in an acoustic/Americana style. I love deserts, rivers and dusty little towns full of stories. I am a London-based singer/songwriter and accompany myself on guitar and keyboards.” At the midpoint of the semester, when you’re swamped with work and terrified by deadlines, the expansive spaces of the American West and Southern Africa in her photographs are dangerously inviting, as are the touching stories told in her lyrical songs, as you can tell from their titles: “The Fire of the West,” “River Song,” “Thunder Gold.”

On Paver’s website, you can find mesmerizing photos of the places that have inspired her songs. Many of them feature proverbs and aphorisms originating in those places along with the lines from her songs. One saying stood out to me, mainly because it managed to express my dissertation thesis with the clarity, precision, and suggestiveness I could never hope to achieve in my writing: “People are people through other people” (Xhosa proverb).

I was also tempted to read this in connection to our last Great Works faculty roundtable that centered on the different uses of student writing in the classroom: modeling, peer reviews, blogging, writing workshops, collaborative writing (i.e., wiki). One faculty member voiced a very common concern that students are not always ready to give each other constructive criticism in peer reviews. One could add that more often than not the recipients of their peers’ feedback tend to ignore it, jumping to the professor’s comments for obvious reasons. Yet, we still try to find ways to encourage students to open doors into each other’s writing, and through that into each other’s experiential realities and thinking paradigms. Isn’t it, in the long run, about helping them grow as people through other people (other than the authority figure of their professor)? David Ignatow says it better than I ever could in his poem “My Place”:

I am good to talk to,

you feel in my speech

a location, an expectation

and all said to me in reply

is to reinforce this feeling

because all said is towards

my place and the speaker

too grows his

from which he speaks to mine

having located himself

through my place.

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Feedback, Music

2 a.m. Fail & Other Errors

October 28, 2010 By 1 Comment

Earlier this past summer, my wife and I moved into a new apartment.  We spent five years in the previous place, a 400 square foot “junior” one-bedroom.  It was small and seriously deficient in the storage column—one of the two closets served mostly as our pantry; the other one, by the bathroom, housed both of our clothes—but we loved its coziness, spent countless hours being homebodies till we could move in and through the cramped spaces without looking, like echo-locating bat-people.

Cut to the new place, week four or five.  I woke up in the small hours, for the usual reason one wakes up then (i.e., to pee, not to face down phantoms) and crept a stealthy, oblique path to the bedroom door.  The room was dark, so it was only when my outstretched hands touched a hinge instead of a door-knob that I realized I had misgauged.  I felt a bit to the left; opened the door quietly; squinted deeply into an oddly pitch-dark hallway (“aren’t there usually traces of light seeping in from the windows out there?” I thought); gave a bemused, half-sleeping shrug; stepped briskly toward the WC; and was immediately thereafter struck brutally across the bridge of my nose by some heavy, hard object.

The animal in me tensed for a fight with an apparent intruder, but my deductive-intuitive self, in a half-second flash, ascertained the situation: I had not walked into the hallway but into the bedroom closet, running into its eye-level shelf.  This all happened so quickly that I did not even jump back or cry out (my wife slept soundly on).

A misgauge indeed.  In the murky room, I had skewed my path not a wee bit too far right but several feet too far to the left, and then I had somehow accepted that the closet’s impossibly dark void was the path to the bathroom. (If the whole thing had been filmed, it would be a shoo-in for the Fail Blog.)  It may sound strange to say so, but I found this to be a sort of magical event, an exquisitely pure experience of being undeceived.  In spite of the painful purple dent (later unsightly swollen bump) on my nose, I was weirdly exhilarated.  My mind kept revisiting not the force of the shelf-attack but the force of the epiphany that followed.  The thoughts “how could I have been so utterly off track?!” and “how could I have fathomed my mistake so quickly and so perfectly?” were not really commensurable, yet together they constituted a rare, fascinating, crystallized instance of error recognized.

I have since thought how unusual it is to find oneself so dramatically mistaken, so unambiguously wrong, especially in realms of communication.  Most often, speakers or writers fumble and forge ahead in a sort of dusky half-light, doing the best they can, moving with unreflective boldness or with timidity, but in any case rarely bumping into something that might tell them: you aren’t going where you think you’re going or you’re in the wrong room altogether. I hope it’s clear that I don’t mainly have in mind here grammatical errors, discrete glitches at the sentence level, but larger tendencies a writer/speaker might have to move along misguided, counterproductive paths.

As communications instructors, we constantly operate according to assumptions about student error, at least in the pragmatic sense—what works, what doesn’t in a given case—but I wonder how often or how thoroughly we think through the concept itself.  The following passage, from David Bartholomae’s venerable essay, “The Study of Error,” offers a compellingly holistic view of the matter:

“Error analysis begins with a theory of writing, a theory of language production and language development, that allows us to see errors as evidence of choice or strategy among a range of possible choices or strategies.  They provide evidence of an individual style of using the language and making it work; they are not a simple record of what a writer failed to do because of incompetence or indifference.  Errors, then, are stylistic features, information about this writer and this language; they are not necessarily ‘noise’ in the system, accidents of composing, or malfunctions in the language process.”

His point goes to my interest in error as a modality rather than as a discrete flaw or set of flaws.  It also speaks as much to pedagogical practice, I think, as it does to student work.  How often or how thoroughly do we look for the erroneous—that is, the dysfunctional—in our own methods: our responses to student writing, our assignments, our use of class time, our way of speaking?  I mean to invoke conscientiousness as the objective here, not supposed elements of discernible badness.   “Errancy,” after all, simply means wandering.  Thus it can be one of the most exciting, productive ways to read, write, speak, or teach—through heuristic exploration.  It will only function this way, though, when one has a lively, working awareness of the stakes and purposes and ever-evolving options connected to some effort in language.

Running into shelves in the dark is no fun and no good unless you get the compensation of figuring out, each time, what the *&%# just happened.

Filed Under: Pedagogy

Writing, Speaking, Discipline, and Guilt

October 27, 2010 By 1 Comment

True phone
Creative Commons License photo credit: Florian SEROUSSI

In developing a support system for the communication-intensive introductory Theatre Arts class, Hillary, Linell, and I envisioned offering many of the same services that we had offered to the Zicklin School of Business’s CICs—helping the students brainstorm and organize their presentations, reinforcing good public speaking and performance practices, and setting up rehearsal workshops. But despite the fact that Theatre profs assign plenty of oral presentation assignments, relatively few students showed up to work on them, preferring instead to come and revise written assignments in our open office hours.

Turns out, the teachers echoed this preference. Some instructors reported that they are satisfied with students’ presentations and performances, but that their students need more help with their writing.

Plus, as Suzanne has pointed out, we academics sometimes aren’t held to very high standards in our own spoken communication. This all made me wonder: are we holding student writing to higher standards than student speaking?

And such a simple question opens a series of others: Is it unfair to provoke our students’ anxiety with high-stakes presentation assignments, or is that just a part of life they have to learn to deal with? Is it simply the physical presence of the performer that makes us feel guilty about handing out low grades on presentations (and the physical distance of the writer that gives us a feeling of license to criticize student papers)? Since, anecdotally speaking, it appears business professors assign presentations as high-stakes, culminating assignments, and writing as shorter, lower-stakes assignments, is the privileging of writing over speaking discipline-specific? Do liberal arts professors sympathize more with the diffident good writers than with the charismatic good performers because that’s how they see their younger selves? Is that last question too autobiographically revealing?

Filed Under: Presentations, Writing Instruction

So you want to get a PhD in the Humanities?

October 26, 2010 By 5 Comments

Here’s a tragically-funny-because-it’s-true video that speaks to some of the concerns Talia raised in her most recent post. Discuss.

Besides deflating grad students and recent PhDs, this video is great example of what you can do on Xtranormal.com, a fun site that allows anyone to easily create animated movies, about which Lauren posted some time ago.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Faculty Are Hungry

October 21, 2010 By 4 Comments

Artichoke Hero
Creative Commons License photo credit: Pabo76

As writing and communication fellows tasked with facilitating faculty development, one of our methods has been to organize workshops and roundtable discussions within specific departments. For example, we regularly offer seminars about low-stakes writing to faculty in the Sociology/Anthropology department. We’ve been gradually attempting to broaden the reach of this work, though, by inviting faculty from other departments to join in the discussion. This week, Alessandro and I organized a roundtable discussion on Designing Formal Assignments. We worked closely with a full-time faculty member, Sociology professor Susan Chambré, who took the lead in presenting material and facilitating discussion.

Although this was my fifth semester of helping to organize these workshops and roundtables, this particular one stood out for me in three respects:

  • We had the best turnout we’ve ever had before. The conference room was filled to capacity.
  • Faculty showed up from many different departments—far beyond Sociology/Anthropology, or even just the social sciences—including journalism, communication studies, physics, and English.
  • There was a real mix of full-time and adjunct faculty.

The large and diverse turnout reflects, I think, the advertising we did for this event through departmental emails, printed flyers in mailboxes, and a shout-out by Associate Provost Dennis Slavin. But I also think it speaks to the hunger of faculty to have more opportunities to get together with their colleagues and discuss the nitty-gritty of teaching. Things like, “How do I design assignments that make sense to my students?” Or, “Should we let our students cite Wikipedia?” Or, “Does YouTube have a place in the classroom?” Or, “What’s the best way to stamp out plagiarism?” Or, “What the heck is this thing called scaffolded assignments that you keep trying to convince me to use?”

So, while the answer to Talia’s question,”Does the University Labor System Undermine Faculty Development Initiatives?” is very often a resounding YES, it is also clear that despite long hours and low pay, many faculty really are still eager to develop their teaching toolkit. As for the faculty who are literally hungry, we also fed them lunch.

Filed Under: Faculty Development, teaching

A Tale of Two Conferences

October 20, 2010 By 1 Comment

Over the past week I’ve attended two contemporary art conferences: one focused on the social and collaborative process of curating, the other on socially engaged art practices. Aside from a few similarities—they both touched on a couple of the same subjects, were two days long, packed with speakers, and employed a time-constrained, but freeform presentation format—the two couldn’t have been more different in terms of both context and structure.

The first, at which I presented, took place at MACBA in Barcelona, and invited international curators to present their collaborations (undertaken over the past several months) with artists at a prominent residency program in the city. Collaborations, in some cases, resulted in an exhibition or performative project, but other participants found different ways to present the results of an intellectual exchange: read diary entries, presented an index of theoretical topics discussed over email, or yet-to-be-realized virtual exhibitions.

Aside from the jet lag, the staying up late to hone my own presentation (it happens to all of us!)  and the challenges of listening to most of the event in simultaneous translation (my Spanish is in bad shape, and my Catalan nonexistent), I had some trouble staying focused, and I wasn’t alone. For one, few of the presenters respected the time limits, and there was no attempt to enforce them. Half-hour time allotments routinely stretched into ninety minutes, and overstuffed Powerpoints gave way to tedious public meandering through iPhoto, unnecessarily using dozens of images—big images, that loaded slowly—to illustrate a project. A pair of participants decided to give their collaborative presentation simultaneously and separately, from their respective Barcelona apartments, using Skype. This was ostensibly to reflect some inability to communicate that persisted throughout their collaboration, and to enable them to humorously “swap” identities midway though their talk. Unfortunately, any self-reflexivity the medium may have promised ultimately failed to deliver: what the audience took away from the presentation was a dull march through every possible technological glitch associated with Skype, and a series of snippets of dialogue repeatedly punctuated by the Spanish equivalent of “Can you hear me now?”

In advance of a week spent coaching Baruch undergrads on presentation skills, this was particularly frustrating: however challenged some students may be at orally communicating, they inevitably recognize that their time and content need to be appropriately structured—even if this recognition is imposed by the class itself. Could I not expect a similar acknowledgement from the artists, curators, and conference organizers in my own field?

But the day after my return, I attended the Creative Time Summit that, in stark contrast, was rigorously designed to briskly move tens of speakers through two impeccably organized days of presentation and discussion. Images and video clips by presenters were seamlessly integrated into a single presentation. Talks, keynotes, and discussions were limited to 8, 15, and 25 minutes, respectively. Times were gently but effectively reinforced by a series of unique musicians—throat singers, sax players, a traditional Korean drummer—who signaled the end of the presentation by playing something compelling and making it possible, but uncomfortable, for the speaker to go more than a few moments over time. Those presenting remotely were subject to the same strictures: to boot, each presentation was made available immediately online, and the whole thing was streamed online, enabling lots of remote participation on Twitter. It might sound a bit draconian in practice, and there were people I would love to have heard more from, but having just experienced one alternative, I was one grateful audience member.

Watch live streaming video from creativetime at livestream.com

Filed Under: Conferences

Teaching something no one understands

October 19, 2010 By 4 Comments

Last Friday evening I had the pleasure of attending a reading and Q & A with American poet Diane di Prima, best known for her association with the “Beat Generation” of writers from the 1950s and 1960s, but whose prolific poetic output spans over the past half century.  Di Prima is the current poet laureate of San Francisco, and her visit to New York corresponded with the release of a set of chapbooks by CUNY’s Lost and Found Poetics Group.

During the Q & A, the audience of Serious academics asked Serious questions of the poet, hoping, ostensibly, for Serious answers. But Di Prima is too much of a mystic poet to offer that kind of straightforward analytical dissection of her life and work. The sometimes comically awkward discussion nonetheless provided many thought-provoking exchanges, the most intriguing of which concerned di Prima’s ideas about the creative process.  The poet described how she often sleeps with a notebook at her side, waking many times through the night to record fragments of poems received to her through dreams. With her mind close to the mysterious well of creative imagination burbling in the subconscious, di Prima discovers a deeper, “truer” poetic voice.  Thus, rather than describe a specific set of methodologies for writing, di Prima characterized her creative process as a nearly religious experience.

While I can’t say that my dissertation is being spiritually dictated from the universal Godhead, I can identify with di Prima’s overall point about creative inspiration coming at odd, unpredictable moments that seem to have little to do with my actual conscious thoughts.  I’ve made some of my most significant “breakthroughs” (if they can be called that) about my dissertation while in the shower, on the subway, or lost in thought in the new snack aisle at Duane Reade.  And yes, I’ve even had revelations about how to finish a chapter (or start a new one) in my dreams.  You’re telling me you haven’t dreamed about your dissertation?

What I’m wondering is how to communicate this idea to students.  While we are often able to give our students many straightforward methods and specific techniques for developing their writing and oral communication skills, how do we teach them about the kind of creative inspiration di Prima describes?  If part of intellectual development is learning how to open your consciousness to “receive” ideas from hidden parts of the mind, how does that process get written into our pedagogical practices? Should writing classes include sessions on meditation, astral travel, and dream journals?  Am I turning into the high school teacher from Beavis and Butthead?

Filed Under: teaching, Writing Instruction

On EdTech and the Digital Humanities

October 18, 2010 By

This post originally was published at my personal blog, Bloviate. If you wish to comment, click on the title and add to the discussion there!

Source of our power
Creative Commons License photo credit: myoldpostcards

Last Wednesday Matt Gold and Charlie Edwards invited me and a few of my favorite CUNYs to come speak to the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, a new group at the University “aimed at building connections and community among those at CUNY who are applying digital technologies to scholarship and pedagogy in the humanities.” Matt and Charlie were especially interested in bringing CUNY educational technologists to this meeting because the relationship between edtech and the digital humanities is something that’s been assumed more than theorized: we all focus on the intersection of technology and academic work in the humanities, ergo we must be doing similar and somewhat simpatico things.

With a field that’s been as nebulous in its boundaries and definitions as the digital humanities, this stance hasn’t been particularly problematic. There has, however, been significant energy within the digital humanities over the past year devoted to self-definition. At the same time, the loose, distributed community of educational technologists working with open source publishing platforms of which I consider myself a part has congealed around a certain set of ideas. I intended my contributions to the CUNY DHI to draw some points of difference between these twined trajectories, to look upon the digital humanities through the lens of my recent experience becoming an educational technologist after completing a graduate degree in history, and ultimately to raise some questions about the tensions I see between the two realms of academic life.

In advance of the visit, we were asked to circulate some readings, and I chose Mike Neary and Joss Winn’s “The Student as Producer.” This piece contextualizes the work that I and several of my colleagues have been engaged in over these past few years. Our work as educational technologists has emerged to meet a particular nefarious challenge that Neary and Winn powerfully delineate: over the past two generations, the function of the university has been increasingly shaped in response to the forces of capital. “Since the 1980s, universities, in response to government pressure, have become more business-like and enterprising to take advantage of the ‘opportunities’ presented by the so-called global ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘information society.’” At the risk of overdrawing the picture somewhat, we see the impact of such pressures in pretty much every nook and cranny of the university: in how resources are sought and allocated, in the corporatization and professionalization of athletics, in the anxiety over assessment and accreditation, in the structure and vicissitudes of the academic labor market, in the predatory student loan and credit card industry and, not least of all, in the classroom, where structures of instruction commonly lead to students being treated as vessels into which information should be dumped en route to the job market.

Blogs@Baruch and its sister projects emerged in direct response to these conditions. Our original focus was on nurturing student-centered learning by merging WAC and WID principles with the possibilities opened up by online publishing, in making more visible the pedagogy (both successful and not) at work in our classrooms, and at supporting an alternative to the proprietary course management system that still predominates across CUNY. Blackboard is itself an embodiment of the university culture that Neary and Winn rightly find so troubling: students cycle through a system that structurally, aesthetically and rhetorically reinforces the notions that education is consumption, the faculty member is a content provider, the classroom is hierarchical, and learning is closed. Less and less though do we have to convince listeners that open source publishing platforms and the many flowers they’ve allowed to bloom can create exciting possibilities in and beyond the classroom; we can show them link after model after link after model after link.

And yet our argument has quickly expanded beyond the classroom to engage broader questions about curricula, the social life of the University, the very way that our community members think about their experiences. Our engagement is a humanistic one in that it insistently constructs the university first and foremost as a site of inquiry and exploration, resists and complicates the concepts of deliverables and education as consumption, challenges staid structures of power, and seeks to constructively question motives and goals at every opportunity. Technology and the open web have empowered us in this endeavor, leveling the playing field in ways that give those who might imagine other trajectories within the university the means to counteract power.

I could say much more about the work we’ve been doing, where it’s succeeded, where it’s failed, and how it’s been a struggle. But the point here has been to situate our work, to historicize it in a way that brings to the fore its politics. This is something that I think the progressive edtech movement has done quite clearly, but that the digital humanities have not.

In many ways, the digital humanities is not really new. Or, that is to say, the methods and questions and processes that constitute its core are not new. Just drawing upon my own disciplinary (and professional) past, the folks at the American Social History Project have been exploring the implications of new technologies on scholarship and pedagogy for nearly thirty years, challenging orthodoxies and valorizing collaboration and innovative approaches to engaging with the past since the Kaypro II. The Center for History and New Media was founded in 1994 and together these two organizations built the first large scale efforts to digitally reimagine the past in the classroom and beyond. Randy Bass’s work out of Georgetown — which I first encountered as an undergraduate participant in the “Crossroads Project” at the University of Michigan in the mid-90s — has done much to promote the use of digital tools to remake the classroom and curricula. Additional examples in “humanities computing” are many.

What is new about the digital humanities, though, is the legitimacy, funding, and visibility that it’s found over the past few years, and those are the components that have sparked recent efforts to set some boundaries and define the field. Frankly, this process has sometimes bordered on the absurd. The recurrent presence of phrases like “big tent,” “expansive,” and “broadly conceived” give speakers a rhetorical tool set for drawing just about any academic work done with technology into the field. It gives graduate students who use technology in their research a language for demarcating their work from those who do not. This slipperiness makes formulating a critique a significant challenge, since the digital humanities resists being reduced to a single or even a handful of things. In trying to write this I’ve had a difficult time boiling my critique down to an unhedged essence. But, here goes.

The (un)structure of the digital humanities has led to a careerism and opportunism that, to the outsider, often obfuscates the genuinely pathbreaking work that’s happening around the field. It’s here where I see the biggest point of difference between educational technology and the digital humanities. Edtech is necessarily implicated in constructing the university of the future, and one of the many reasons that battle is so important is that its outcome will in fact go a long way towards determining the future of the humanities. While there is significant political content within the digital humanities — the valuing of openness, the emphasis on sharing, the location within technology of particular tools and methods for empowerment — one gets the sense that ideology is not the main thing. In other disciplines (history and educational technology being the two I’m most familiar with) political debates abound, often times propelling ideas forward. In the digital humanities you tend to see much more agreement than disagreement. While it’s well and good to be agreeable, and I far prefer people who are, we are in high-stakes times. The humanities have been and continue to be in crisis. Budgets are burning, departments are being axed, and in many places the very value of a humanistic education is not only being questioned, but boldly denied.

And yet, a tone predominates in the discourse around the digital humanities that often seems to sidestep this crisis, or miss it altogether. Part of this is no doubt attributable to the fact the the digital humanities has become so dependent upon Twitter and is thus subject to the distorting echo of the hive mind. Part of it is also contributable to the new sense of community and connectedness within the field, which has also spurred a significant amount of navel-gazing and those efforts to self-define. I admittedly suffer from enthusiasthma, but the “I’m okay, you’re okay” “RT congrats!” cliquishness that flows across my screen and predominates at DH gatherings seem to me to be a bit misaligned with the current trajectory of the humanities in higher education. DH jobs, funding, and departments are becoming more widely available while the broader humanistic project — to which universities are central — crumbles around us. Are new tenure track positions, attempts at building a canon and establishing authority, and a dozen new conferences representative of progress, or are they reentrenching and reinscribing power along traditional paths? (Yes, I realize the answer can be “both.”) And why do digital humanists seem to celebrate scholarship much more deeply and publicly than teaching and learning? These questions are at the core of my discomfort with aligning my work with the digital humanities, as much as I’ve learned and benefited from scholars at its center.

Some might ask, “well, what about #alt-ac?” I appreciate the extent to which that phrase articulates, illuminates and validates the variety of labor paths and modes that make the university function and evolve (including what I do). Yet I can’t help but feel that something might be lost by, as Jim Groom has said, “naming and reifying my alterity.” Adapting for myself the pressure to publish, travel to conferences, keep up with the canon, to constantly produce and present new research — all of the things that seem necessary to establish one’s self within the digital humanities, even as an “alt-ac” person — doesn’t really seem “alt” at all. It’s seems about exactly what I expected from a career in academia.

I realize this argument is deeply personal, perspectival and located mostly within my own struggles to navigate professional terrain. I’m not trying to shit on anyone’s work. Some of my best friends are digital humanists, I swear. But I know that I’m not the only person to feel some of the things I’ve written above. At the end of my brief, wholly unpolished presentation to the CUNY DHI last week, @mkgold tweeted “@lwaltzer argues for a more muscular, progressive version of the Digital Humanities that questions/critiques power.” I initially wasn’t comfortable with that conclusion being drawn from what I had said because I don’t feel myself enough of a DH insider to make any arguments for what its future should hold. And yet upon more reflection I do feel nurturing that ethos is and must be central to the humanities. It’s simply too important to be absent from or even unclear in any future vision of the university.

I guess that, thanks to Matt and Charlie’s invite and the struggle to write this post that ensued I’ve learned that I’m interested in the digital humanities only to the extent to which it helps me use technology to do the work as a humanist I’d try to do even if we had no computers. So does that mean I’m in, or out?

Filed Under: cac, EdTech, Education

Friendship and the Love of Art

October 15, 2010 By 1 Comment

Marian Seldes– actor, director, teacher, and journalist– was the guest lecturer at yesterday’s Clair Mason Women of Distinction Lecture Series. “Lecture” might be the wrong word to describe the event, however; Seldes, regal in a shimmering pink and purple flowery wrap-type dress (yes, hard to explain), presided over a fairly remarkable Q&A session. She began by putting her purpose right on the lectern: she was there to discuss the importance of the arts, and her career in the performing arts as about more than rewards and prizes: “To talk of theatre as friendship and love of the art.”

As if to illustrate this theme, Seldes had a posse of theatrical grande dames with her; seated in the front row were blockbuster stage actresses Angela Lansbury and Joan Copeland. Seldes would occasionally comment on their presence; “Angela, just seeing you there…calms me.”

Fantastic Four: Lansbury, Mason, Copeland, Seldes

After opening with a monologue by playwright John Arden about the blessings of art– “business and politics I leave to the crooks”– Seldes said firmly, “this is what I believe.” With that, she was done with her talk, and announced that she would answer any questions that anyone had– otherwise, she had not much else to say. As expected, the questions flowed from every corner of the audience, allowing Seldes to transfix with stories from her rich career, recollected with ample grace and humor; from her early aspirations as a ballerina, to studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse (“you don’t have to be nice to teach acting, but you have to be demanding”), to her well-known roles in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women and Peter Shaffer’s Equus, to her unfulfilled dream of playing Hecuba.

When asked by an audience member which women of distinction had made an impression on her own life, she recalled the head of Theatre at the Dalton School: “Her name was Mildred Geiger, and she was very important to me,” she said simply, and left it at that. While she was critical of the high prices of theatre tickets today, Seldes shaped a most non-judgmental, gratified, and appreciative theatrical figuration– one who is equally enthusiastic as a performer as well as an audience member. She is never bored at the theatre, she maintained, not even when watching a boring performance– there is always something, or someone, interesting to look at. “I think just watching other human beings is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done.” Soon, the final question was posed, there were flowers to present, and talk of a car waiting outside; time to go.

Later, I reflected on Seldes’s point of linking the individuality of actors to the plays they are in, taking the stance that the original cast is just one of the impossible-to-reproduce, ethereal aspects of the theatre. (When asked if Three Tall Women might be revived, she claimed it wouldn’t work without actress Myra Carter in one of the roles.) This insistence could make any of the younger audience members at yesterday’s talk pine for the opportunity to hop into the time machine and head for the box office circa 1967. I went home, curious for more Marian, and found a bizarre little trailer for a documentary on Seldes that somehow manages to capture just a piece of the intensity she brought to Baruch:

Filed Under: Art, Baruch College, Liberal Arts, Style Tagged With: , , , ,

Check the technique, see if you can follow it

October 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Katy Perry’s auto-tune free performance on Saturday Night Live was surprising and compelling to me, after a summer of the ubiquitous post-production high gloss sound of “California Gurls.” Seeing her on SNL, working to hit the notes, her voice going thin and strained at times, other times really off tune, was fun because she seemed to be taking a risk. The riskiness seemed kind of theatrical to me, but also like a sports event—it was a physical chance she took, and if she fell we’d actually watch her physically wipe out or stumble.

Katy Perry, SNL

See how relieved she looks when she gets to stay in the middle-register, with the back-up vocalist and louder music behind her? What a relief, she’s home free. That’s entertainment! And also kind of sport.

As studio production gets more sophisticated, are singers having to work harder to recreate the recorded version live? In 1992, LL Cool J was maybe trying to put some heft to his lightweight, commercial image by performing a song from the slickly produced album “Walking with a Panther.” On MTV, he sang a stripped-down version of “Mama said knock you out,” with a band. It looked like a physically demanding performance—you could hear him working to finish phrases before he ran out of breath.

He was competing with heftier musicians like Dr. Dre, and much wittier, defter musicians like A Tribe Called Quest and Gang Starr, whose chorus—“Check the technique, see if you can follow it”—tagged its own sophistication as a dare. So it seems telling that we still come back to the performer’s body for authenticity—I’m surprised that SNL even stages un-auto-tuned songs. If physical training and technique is a hidden scaffolding behind pop music, then things like auto-tune might draw more value to the physical in terms of authenticity. It was fun to see then, like now with Katy Perry, that performers still use their voices and physicality to prove something.

Filed Under: Art
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