Giving Talk this Sunday in D.C. at The Shakespeare Theatre

Link: The Wicked Stage: Performing Christianity

Despite the Reformationist tone of the title, I will also talk about Christian theatre that is not always terribly wicked.

Monkbot

See also, NPR radiolab programming on 16th century automaton built by a Spanish clockmaker for King Phillip II:  http://www.radiolab.org/story/317902-meet-monkbot/

Arthur Zajonc, Prof. Emeritus at Amherst College, discusses "contemplative science" -- a philosophical, attention-based approach to scientific understanding.

Experiential approach to scientific-spiritual understanding

Zajonc discusses Goethe's proposal that science is not only about finding the mechanisms behind the "theatre of the senses," rather to understand being from an experiential point of view.

Scientific insight comes in a flash, it is a moment of transcendence -- a moment of perception -- what is the sensory-moral.  Poetry is at the heart of science.

"Knowledge is not an object that you acquire, it's not a mechanism that you provide to the human mind. It's actually an epiphanal moment." Which is true to the arts,  science, and faith.

The Search for King Richard III - Identifying the Remains

STEAM

The STEAM concept explained (tech/science/art research and education interdisciplines -- curriculum I'm working on at City Tech).

Nao d'amores "misterio del cristo de los gascones"

Segovia resident company reenacts the rites of Depositio, Elevatio, and Visitatio as recorded in the medieval Liber Ordinarius de Essen. Their puppet is designed after the Romanesque articulating Christ from the church of San Justa, Segovia (XI century).

Misterio del Cristo de los Gascones

a love letter

How to make accidents and contingency part of knowledge production: A) throw away all course descriptions. How to make accidents and contingency part of knowing a thing or being: A) cook a stir fry over the burning course descriptions. Give it to someone. Eat together. 

Sensus means to understand. To hear, taste, smell, see, and feel. Sense the world and you become the world. The world becomes you. Build a new definition of tragedy and form where Aristotelian progression collapses in on itself: mimesis, anagnorisis, and katharsis become in the same instant. Things are falling all the time and things are rising simultaneously. Falling and rising things pass each other on their opposite ways, occasionally bumping into the other and flying off in third directions. Death is only finite to the Kantian soul – it is not finite to the beetle and worm that consume the energy stored in flesh. 

Body skin is not impermeable; it is not an emblem or seal. It may proclaim "Bob" to some adjacent receptive body; to other receptors it is "purchase" or "food" or "portal." To another receptor it is "Bob" and "purchase." Purchase/portal. Bob/food. Through the skin and eyes, into the blood and out again into the earth, the material world circulates. Humans are not creatures as much as vessels that are filled and leak with matter and combustion, once held in other containers.  In a constant state of simultaneous decay and rebirth. From conception, we are always emerging and dying. Feel the precariousness of fluid movement by being in it. 

As if ash did not dust the wings of the flight of the Phoenix. Or the Anka -- whose life/wing span is unimaginably long:

"They say that the Anka lives to the age of one thousand five hundred years; and when it has come to the age of five hundred years it begins to sing; and when the time for the female to lay its egg is come, the male Anka comes with his beak full of sea-water, and sprinkles her till the egg is laid; and when it is laid, he sits upon it, while the female goes out for food. In one hundred and twenty-five years the young bird is hatched; and when it is grown up, if it be a female, the female Anka gathers much wood, and the male and female rub their bills together, from which comes a great fire and falls among the wood; into this the female goes and is burnt, and the young one becomes the mate of the male bird. And if the young is a male, the male Anka goes into the fire, and the young one becomes the mate of the female. Many other things are related of the Anka, but as they rest on no good authority, I have not thought it well to insert them here." - al-Ghazālī

And in that very long, nearly unimaginable time, chronology no longer matters. There is no more waiting.

Back from the Dead: An Eidophusikon for Richard III

Poster of the project I'm doing with Irina Nechaeva (Entertainment Technology student), funded by an Emerging Scholars Grant. Memory Machine indeed!

Do we need human?

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/25/172900833/do-we-need-humans

Husserl and Space

A quote I found on a phenomenology blog.  I need to follow up and read "Ding und Raum":

"...the constitution of space presupposes the constitution of one's own body: "Ding und Raum", where Husserl provides us with a phenomenological explanation of space constitution, does not give evidence for the process of one's own body constitution. The only passage in which Husserl speaks about the constitution of the body is notoriously to be found in "Ideas II". The touching-touched hand explains how my body can constitute itself contemporaneously as a Leib and as a Körper. It is important to stress this fact: the body can be constituted only insofar as it is apprehend both as my body (Leib), experienced subjectively, and as a thing (Körper) among other things in an objective space. 

So, you see that a circle seems to threaten Husserl's phenomenology of space:

- space is constituted through body's experience;

- the constitution of one's own body presupposes the constitution of space."

CUNY Pathways: An Assault on Orality and Performance-based Learning

I teach in the Humanities Department of NYCCT, CUNY.  CUNY is currently going through a university-wide restructuring of the curriculum called Pathways.  A longer description of Pathways (which has been publicly condemned by the Modern Language Association) is available here:  http://www.psc-cuny.org/our-campaigns/faculty-staff-and-students-mobilize-pathways-town-hall.  In short, all courses on the books on each and every campus--from Brooklyn to the Bronx-- has to go through a rigorous review and application process to see if it fits into the new core curriculum.  If a course is not accepted in the university-wide core curriculum, the course cannot be be included as a "Pathways Certified Course" on a student's transcript.  What this means is that if a transferring student has taken Chinese Language I at CAMPUS A, but that course was not accepted into Pathways, the credits will not be counted towards a language requirement at CAMPUS B.  So the student will have to take language from scratch again.  By the way, the process for approval happens at the college level; so the success of a course depends entirely on the review process at the local level -- there is no coordination between campuses about requirements for similar courses.

The consequences of not getting a course into Pathways have been enormous.  Students do not consider taking non-Pathways courses because they recognize the limitations on the course -- non-transferrable and not available for financial aid.  Registration numbers have fallen in non-Pathways elective courses, sections have disappeared, and the need for instructors of these courses has gone with them.

So, what kinds of courses are having trouble making Pathways? Performing arts courses are rejected outright.  Music Theory could make Pathways, but Music Performance will not (Theatre History: yes; Acting: no, etc. -- though there is no guarantee that history or theory would make the cut either).  Six definitional categories within Pathways have been established ("Individual and Society, "U.S. Experience" etc.), and course applications for Pathways must justify their adequacy for one of the six categories.  

I teach in the Humanities Department at NYCCT. Based on my own experience there, I can attest to the fact that courses in Communication, Theatre, and Music have been routinely rejected from the Pathways core curriculum. What I find disturbing about this fact is that the pedagogical engine of these courses runs on the energy of oral transmission and construction of knowledge. Learning outcomes in speech, communication, and performance courses are built around living, social activities that cannot always be evidenced in writing. By its own design, Pathways has marginalized courses that champion vocal and somatic expression. To someone who has read his share of Bhabha and Spivak, this is an alarming regression. Like the histories and customs non-Western cultures that were extinguished through the colonial suppression of oral and performance practices, spoken-word curricula are under attack at one of the most culturally diverse universities in the United States.

In particular, I can speak to how our Voice and Diction course has been damaged. The strictness of Pathways and a severe constriction of liberal arts electives that students can take has caused a dramatic drop in enrollment. Sections have been cancelled and adjunct faculty have lost teaching opportunities. Changes in TAP funding, which will no longer pays for an elective unless it's required or recommended, has discouraged enrollment as well. 

Unfortunately, Voice and Diction is a course that so many of our students (and some faculty) desperately need. Research has shown that articulate, comprehensible, and expressive speech is crucial in order to establish oneself as an effective and functional participant in academic and social communities. It is the single most important quality a majority of employers seek in potential employees.  At our technical college where career development is a basic objective, courses like Voice and Diction should be permanent, core fixtures. On practical, professional, and intellectual levels, without Voice and Diction a very large portion of our student body will not be able to function or advance in their chosen disciplines. 

The King in the Car Park

This Channel5 documentary (England) -- and the "performance" of Philippa Langley (lead Richardian in the restoration of King Richard III's historical and material images) in particular, is an incredible study in theatrical reanimation.  Restored behavior -- as defined by R. Schechner -- but with particular effort to fight theatre with theatre.  Shakespeare's play about the last Plantagenet King is, of course, not the only piece of Tutor propaganda supporting the playwright's contemporary rulers -- but it is the most famous and the most influential.  No other vehicle been more effective in disseminating a narrative of cruelty and deformity than Shakespeare's history play.  On the other hand, the discovery of Richard's bones in a parking lot is a drama for 21st-century audiences that matches the play's pathos, but in order to flatter rather than disfigure.  (I want to make it clear that as far as I'm concerned, I've never read Shakespeare's play as a wholly unsympathetic attack on the king--I think the Richardian's are a bit too literal minded.  For one, the character's cunning is not an entirely unlikable feature.)

When I say Ms. Langley is 'performing,' I mean so in a number of senses, not the least of which is her performance of research, discovery, and restoration.  There is also more than a small amount of theatricality to her persona, as one can see clearly in the documentary on the recovery of Richard's bones from the parking lot (see below).  Most interestingly, the protagonist of the drama is not a living human being, it is an object: the bones of the fifteenth-century English king.  Reminiscent of Hamlet at Yorick's grave, the work of the supporting players in the documentary is to bring Richard's bones back to life.

I am not particularly interested in confirming the validity of the King Richard III Society's claims, or duplicating their affections for the king; nor do I condemn Ms. Langley for her (unacknowledged) theatrical investigation of an historical subject.  What I am interested in is how the recovery of Richard intersects at the history of his body.  Further, I find it astonishing (but not surprising) that the work of reconstruction done in the documentary and at the University of Leicester is wrapped in multiple, supple layers of drama: a plot devised as a detective story, 3-D mask-making, deep emotionality (occasionally cut with a dose of irony), revelation, peripeteia, and finally resolution in the public display of Richard's bust.  Near the end of the documentary, Ms. Langley states (with Richard's clay head peering at us over her shoulder): "...after everything that's happened, after everything we've been through, to see the real Richard III [she points to the painted, clay resemblance of Richard III]...um...I'm just full of joy."