Sunday, October 30, 2011

Notes for 10/27 Meeting (Poster Session)

NB: I apologize for not catching all of Ellen’s comments and advice, and specifically the names of several of the authors she recommended; my little fingers twren't fast enough

Lucy: (Riff Raff) pursuing Victorian studies, and specifically the relationship of animals to nationalism, a sense of state and imperialism; Lucy ties these concepts to certain animal-oriented in passages from Edward II, Chaste Maid, and Titus

Tracey: (Taste) exploring the idiom of eating and tasting as they relate to both theatre and reading (the play as pie, the digestion of a work), which expands upon her interests in Titus; looking at the consuming/consumer/and the consumed, and the relationship between food and medical realms, such as food’s relation to pregnancy
Ellen: consider ties between food and humoral theory, as well as the bizarre “mummy” cure of the period

Emily: (witness/gaze/spectacle) the gaze’s relationship with performance, in terms of how performances within a performance conflate perceptions (the audience watches actors watching other actors); how do issues of sexuality and identity appear in these tensions of performance; how do performances work in a pointed, explicit direction in light of inevitable contradictions to and questionings of that intended direction; conversely, how might performances be designed to be open and invite individual responses that can still cohere more than might be expected
Ellen: look to audience studies, which have altered recently; consider also anti-theatricalists’ take on women’s spectators in particular

Abby: (ravish) the term is used to denote spiritual ravishing as well as sexual ravishing, and is used to denote rape specifically at a later period; interested in questions of who can ravish/be ravished
Ellen: think about monkey ravishment (both people ravishing monkeys, and vice versa; on stage and in real life)!


Steven: (odious comparisons) originally saw this concept in Women Killed with Kindness, but is really a common phrase; the oddness of this phrase in a play given the pervasive similarities, substitutions, and comparisons in plays;
Ellen: look to Manon on autonomy as queerness; look to the paratextual material at the opening of plays; Jonson especially seems weary of comparison, the anxiety of comparing plays to plays

Eric: (affect and bodies) focusing on the staging of bodies and the affective relationships produced on stage when bodies get eroticized; modelling his approach especially on Varnado’s ease with unknowing when bodies are being erotic or sexual; the continuous threat that bubbles through the role when boys are dressed as girls; considering ways of simultaneously being boy and girl, maintaining a sense of unknown
Ellen: Stallybrass deals with this constant doubleness and considers what the anatomical expectations of drama may be; look also to Michael Neil on Othello

Priya: (virginity) investigating the female body as it overlaps with science, religion and history; the fabilization of female bodies becoming fact based upon Vesalius’s dissection of bodies; Catholic/Protestant differences over how to conceptualize the body’s relationship to purity and faith; Elizabeth I’s relationship to sex given her parents’ ribald sexual history and how these interact with cultural/historical remembrances of sexuality and their performance; Lucrece and Philomel are again fables that turn into fact through repetitive performance and processes of metafiction
Ellen: Paster’s work may be useful for looking at humoral fantasies along gender lines; you might also look to an 11
th century nun’s plays about female martyrs wherein women maintain their virginity in amazing circumstances, which reflect patriarchal demands for purity and their absurdity

John: (investment) consider the overlapping relationship of finance, religious authority, clothing and performativity: social position, power, authority etc. as put in the clothes and the words associated with them, especially in royal ceremonies
Ellen: consider Materials of Memory by Jones and Stallybrass, looking at the economics of clothing; the props and clothing were aristrocatic hand-me-downs, so that the atristocrats are never gone on stage; Shakespeare’s Richard II would have used clothes from Richard’s period; clothing was highly visible and recognizable during the period, especially that of the aristocracy on stage

Mara (luxury): the term is associated with consumptive sins (overly rich clothes, food) but also with natural cycles; these economies combine within capitalism with consumerism, and they must obsolesce so that we can desire more of them; we consume goods but also art; economies of spectatorship and visceral hunger are involved as well
Ellen: consider Enders on deaths within drama; her book Death by Drama reviews how spectatorship encounters the economies of the body

Natalie (blush): her interests lies at the intersection of affect studies, modernist assemblages and aesthetics, performance/theatre and Amy Cook’s idea of performance as a shaping exercise that leaves a trace on the body; affect can have patterns (how are we supposed to feel at specific moments) as well as unique and personal, and yet also alienating and make you feel powerless; her project will explore the “weird terrain” of affect
Ellen: maybe think about the potential for disaster within performance and its embarrassment; actor training discussions at the period might be a resource as well


Savannah (disease): stemming from her interest in the AIDS crisis in Africa as it pushes against or responds to discourses in the west; interest in venereal disease, specifically syphilis given its stageability and its associations with foreignness, the body of the (French) other; this ties with her interest in French cabaret, the foreign body as a site of excessive desire, as well as to modern dance more specifically, given its inspiration by African dance; these discourses all continue to influence modern conceptualizations of disease; she will also look to disease’s affiliation with the monstrous
Ellen: consider Jonson’s Masque of Blackness; Prynne’s conflation of disease, prostitution, and the foreign-born queen’s body, and their meeting in the realm of theatre and specifically dance drama; for veneral disease, look to Gillman on the French disease and the pox

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