Idioteex

Posts Tagged ‘Performing’

Before the projects can begin, we spend one class period looking at the conventions and themes of traditional and literary ballads—rhyme, mercer, and stanza.

Narratives marked by the presence of supernatural forces, secrets, temptation, and violence, dialogues with questions that create mystery and a sense of ill-omen. That night, the students write a five-minute stream-of-consciousness piece that starts with the word guilt, and then they free write for 3CMlO minutes on their associations with the word, the physical and emotional and spiritual experience of guilt, images it calls up, ways it arises, recurs, and is sometimes resolved.

Some of these pieces turn out to be quite personal and private, so I ask students to keep the writing in their notebooks to revisit while reading the poem and creating the project. Next day we read Coleridge’s account of his nightmares, “The Pains of Sleep,” written perhaps five years after “Mariner,” in which he describes three nights of praying aloud “in anguish and in agony / Up starting from the fiendish crowd / Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me”. In nightmare he experiences a sense of wrong, a need for revenge, a powerless will, “desire with loathing strangely mixed / on wild or hateful objects fixed,” and an inexplicable shame and guilt over “Deeds to be hid which were not hid, / Which all confused I could not know / Whether I suffered, or I did”.

I tell the class a little about Coleridge’s sufferings from opium addiction and the nightmares that accompanied his efforts at withdrawal, as well as his statement in Biographia Literaria that in collaborating on the Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth, where “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” appeared, “it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge 264).  Read more...

Why take time for projects on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”? Why teach the poem at all, except, perhaps, in a British literature survey or a study of the Romantics or an AP course?

One of my students offered an answer last year in her project proposal: “This ballad is an old sailor’s tale that travels to lands all over the map, a tale that takes any listener from any time and place through a journey of enlightenment about self.” For this reason, Mariel gathered the class around her in a circle and unpacked from a battered suitcase the vintage album she’d made with stained pages on which she’d written, in faded ink, passages from all seven sections of the poem.

But she had replaced certain “key words” with equivalents in various foreign languages “to convey my sense of the poem’s mystery and universality.” For each page she made a visual representation of “the symbolism that lingers in the verbal images”—a different medium for each mood, including collage, cutouts, charcoal, and fabrics. “I want to show that this ballad is a universal story that can liberate all who read or hear it.”

Mariel had been struck by the penance required of the Mariner—the agonizing “wrench” that compels him to recount, over and over, his experience of sin, guilt, isolation, and grace.

I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; that moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach. (Coleridge 23)  Read more...

Setting up right at the outset four goals that the projects should meet and on which we’ll all assess them generally helps discourage weak proposals.

As Vic said, the goals make the project feel “important.” I preface my list of sample projects with four goals, fuller descriptions of which may be found in Figure 1: (1) to respond to the poem and engage with some particular aspect of it; (2) to draw effectively on the possibilities of whichever medium you choose; (3) to communicate memorably your particular response to certain aspects of the poem; (4) to enrich your audience’s experience of the poem. These four goals form the criteria for a rubric with which the students and I assess each project, and we all add specific comments to our ratings.

I encourage the students to start small with some part or aspect of the poem that has stayed with them, and to trust that this pebble, when dropped into the pond of their imagination and ours, will make ripples. One dancer, in her anxiety to do well, proposed retelling the entire poem through ballet! My list of possible projects has grown over the years as students come up with proposals that never occurred to me.

Some have created a journey of images altered by Photoshop, accompanying it with their own guitar or piano playing. The advent of iMovie has allowed students to draw on their love of music or art and their expertise in technology to make a movie with their laptops and no special film training, facilities, or advice. Nick describes. . . sitting out in my woods thinking and doing meditation, with my laptop and my copy of “Mariner” open.  Suddenly I had my project idea. I had musical ideas first, so I wrote the first half of the music    that night. Though I changed the instrument tracks a lot later on, I kept the vocals in their original form.  Read more...

For the first time on Long Island, An Evening With Charlie Todd and Friends: The Improv Everywhere Live Show, will make its debut.  Improv Everywhere founder, Charlie Todd, is invited to speak about his unique personal experiences as the organizer of Improv Everywhere’s legendary missions. The hour-long show will feature video clips of a few of their most famous missions with Charlie’s live commentary and an interactive question and answer session. After the intermission, the audience will become part of the show. Charlie, along with other members of his group, will perform a long form improv comedy set based on interviews obtained with the audience. An Evening With Charlie Todd and Friends will debut Friday, February 4, 2011, at 8:00 p.m. in the AU PAC Concert Hall, 1 South Avenue, Garden City, NY.

Charlie Todd is the founder of Improv Everywhere, a New York City-based group, created in August 2001, which causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. The group has executed more than 100 missions involving tens of thousands of undercover agents.  Notable instances include the legendary Grand Central Freeze, Grocery Store Musical, The MP3 Experiment, and the infamous No Pants! Subway Ride. He is also a teacher and performer of improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. The group’s videos have received more than 150 million views.

Individual tickets for this event are on sale now and are only . Student discounts are available. For more information on Improv Everywhere, please visit www.improveverywhere.com. To learn more about AU PAC’s 2010-2011 season, please visit aupac.adelphi.edu or call the AU PAC Box Office at (516) 877-4000.

Just for context: This is a 26-week English elective for juniors and seniors on reading, writing, and performing poetry. Our department doesn’t offer AP or honors English. Most of the upperclassmen get their first or second choice in their two-term and spring-term electives; those who wish to can take the AP exam and generally feel they’re well prepared. Every elective includes at least D&G jewelry sale one pre-20th-century work and a mix of genres, and all students practice incorporating research into their writing and create at least one analytical essay, a personal essay, and poetry, a story, or scenes for a play.

We emphasize that all writing is “creative,” and we offer opportunities to mix the genres and work in other media. For the first month or so, my poetry class explores diction, sound, and imagery, particularly in relation to their readings and writings about imprisonment and release, guilt, isolation, anger, and reconciliation. We travel backwards from Jimmy Santiago Baca’s prison memoir A Place to Stand to some of Blake’s Songs of Experience. Then we bring our individual and collective experience to bear on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

I’ve been offering this arts project response to “Mariner” for at least ten years, during which time we’ve had little alternative space other than the stage—when we could get it—or the practice room, equally hard to reserve, or the little outdoor acting platform, or a narrow and sinuous art gallery—not a good performance space. But any change of venue, especially if it allows for a change in lighting and more space for movement, can help students open themselves to new experiences, whether as performers or audience.  Read more...