{"id":132,"date":"2022-02-24T12:05:02","date_gmt":"2022-02-24T17:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/?p=132"},"modified":"2022-02-24T12:05:30","modified_gmt":"2022-02-24T17:05:30","slug":"week-5-2-afterthoughts-drama-and-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/2022\/02\/24\/week-5-2-afterthoughts-drama-and-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 5.2: afterthoughts (drama and performance)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello everybody, first off, please take a moment to vote for the poem we most didn’t read, from those assigned so far\u2014the one you really wanted to get to, but we never got to. That will be the basis of our discussion on Monday. You can vote here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And now some drama thoughts. That was an interesting discussion, to start, about Siri\u2019s \u201cperformance\u201d of Othello. We found ourselves giving many reasons why her\/their\/its reading should not count. Performance is:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Emotional<\/b>, affect-laden
\nContextual<\/b> (that is, it inhabits or implies a situation or a circumstance)
\nEmbodied<\/b> and\/or voiced, with the mix of intention and accident that characterized all human activity
\nRhythmic<\/b> (in that sense of rhythm we encountered with Blasing and Abraham, rhythm as intentionalizing)
\nIntersubjective<\/b> (voiced by characters, reflecting multiple vantages, responsive to social situations etc.)
\nIntentional<\/b> (in its rhythm and other qualities, it inclines us to attribute interpretive intention to the performer, related to but distinguishable from the intention inscribed in the original text)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However: Sam urged us to think again about whether the mere \u201chappening\u201d of Siri\u2019s voice shouldn\u2019t be construed as a performance; aren\u2019t their contexts in which we could receive it that was, e.g. as experimental art? Sydney gave us an interesting argument: that because each iteration of the Siri-reading must be different (because of different ambient coincidences, different hearers etc), we cannot simply treat it as neutral repetition.<\/p>\n

Somewhere behind the discussion was Sayre\u2019s basic distinction between the performance of x (e.g. a reading of a text) and performance itself, the happening, which need not have an original text behind it. Because we are concerned with performances of poetic texts, that first category\u2014in which the performance is also an interpretation\u2014is of greatest interest to us. But that idea of performance as \u201cthe eruption of the outside into the work\u201d (Sayre 96) ought to stay with us. On that account, a performance is to be understood not in its fidelity to the text, but in its deviation; and the purest performance may have no text at all, only a set of conventions to disrupt.<\/p>\n

OK: Othello! Zoe (in spite of not really being on deck today; thank you!) brought us into Othello\u2019s great soliloquy of his adventurous career, and Cassy and others observed its rhetorical patterning\u2014an instance of Othello commanding some of poetry\u2019s formal powers to persuade an audience. A performance in the most traditional sense. Sydney asked us to think about Brabantio\u2019s performed acquiescence to the Duke\u2019s sanction of his daughter\u2019s marriage\u2014a passage where both he and the Duke break into rhymed couplets, another formal expression of poetic power that serves very different purposes for the two speakers, ritual consolidation for the Duke, bitter, satirical resignation for Brabantio. Avaneque had us listen to the ways in which metaphors travel across speakers in the play, especially animal metaphors; we wondered, are those sorts of interpretive patterns native to the play\u2019s poetry, or might they be (or be made) dramatic, and if so how? Finally Jiwon pointed out the complexities of Desdemona\u2019s performance of her own authority at the moment when she insists on accompanying Othello to Cyprus. Each instance could be read as a kind of contest between poetry (as an interpretable patterning that solicits rereading) and drama (as a real-time, narratively propulsive situation). Sometimes poetry seemed to get the better of drama, sometimes the reverse, but throughout the scene you can feel each reaching for the special resources of the other.<\/p>\n

In my notes here and in class I have been freely interchanging “performance” and “drama”; maybe that\u2019s a distinction we can sort out with Nathan Davis\u2019s help next Wednesday. I have also tacitly been using a definition of poetry that is closest to what we call lyric, and that is a topic for the class after the break.<\/p>\n

We finished with a swift reading of Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s \u201cCasabianca,\u201d a poem that seemed to take Felicia Hemans\u2019 imperialist tear-jerker and make it wonderfully complicated, difficult to speak and to read, hotly embarrassed, and private; a kind of counter-performative gesture, pulling the lyric back into the space of close reading, and perhaps into the head. A refusal of performance. Is it entirely successful, we might ask? Can we ever altogether escape performance?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello everybody, first off, please take a moment to vote for the poem we most didn’t read, from those assigned so far\u2014the one you really wanted to get to, but we never got to. That will be the basis of our discussion on Monday. You can vote here. And now some drama thoughts. That was … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Week 5.2: afterthoughts (drama and performance)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":379,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/379"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/poetry-and-the-arts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}