Instructor: Theresa M. ("Terri") Senft

• COURSE DESCRIPTION
  
  
• TERRI'S GAME PLAN
  
  
• WEEK BY WEEK READING
  
  
• NOTE: CLICK HERE IF YOU ARE HERE LOOKING FOR YOUR WEEKLY ASSIGNMENTS

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course explores the role of acting in what Philip Auslander calls "mediatized performance": instances in which technology is used to present us to ourselves as, in a sense, "more live than live." We'll talk about what words like "reality", "truth", and "being natural" have come to mean in today's technological world of performance.

Theatre practitioners have long maintained that a knowledge of one's authentic bodily state is a necessary component of convincing acting--hence the expression, "Just be yourself." But what does "natural speech" mean for actors who are body-miked on stage? How does a film actor develop a "real" relationship with the blank blue screen serving as a stand-in for animation to be developed later on? What does it mean to perform live on stage for an audience who associates improvisation with heavily edited television shows like Whose Line is it Anyway?

Of course, actors aren't the only people struggling with being real in a technological world. Officials at tennis matches who re-check their line calls using court-side instant-replay technologies; police officers who videotape themselves to learn how they behave in high-stress situations--these are examples of non-actors who now adjudicate truth and reality not unlike a film actor who checks her authenticity through the lens of a camera. Surely, the embodied, natural self--the one we believed we could just "be"--is undergoing a profound shift. This class will be an attempt to think through that shift, both as actors and as regular people.

TERRI'S GAME PLAN

(Long, but important. )

This is an ambitious course, and all ambitious courses are well-served by a road map. What follows below is my attempt to map out what we'll read, what we will watch, and where our discussions might go in class. My hope is that once you see the connections I'm trying to make as a teacher (rather than trying to guess at them in class) we'll have more time to explore connections YOU draw from the material. All of this is subject to change, but here is my thinking, week by week:

During the first class, ("Introduction") we will introduce ourselves and I will go over the syllabus.

The second class (" Close Watching") will be spent discussing the basic principles of close watching, which will be expected of you thereafter. In order to help us ground our analyses, we'll be working with Jeremy Butler's chapter "Style and the Camera" from his book Television: Critical Methods. In order to supplement our discussions, we'll watch bits of The Truman Show (about a fictional 'everyday man' who discovers his life has been one continuous television broadcast) and The Jenni Cam (a web site dubbed by the press "a real-life Truman Show.") Throughout, we'll be posing the question, "In an age of surveillance, can any actor just 'be' themselves? Can any person?"

Our third and fourth classes ("Closely Reading the Spectacle"), will focus on the basic principles of close reading, which will be expected of you thereafter. To do this, we'll work with one of the most over-cited (yet under-read) texts in "surveillance studies": Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. In order to make our discussions more lively, I've arranged to broadcast our classover the World Wide Web, and I have volunteers who will watch the broadcast and communicate via chat about what it is they think they see us doing.

Classes number five and six ("The Cave and the Matrix") begins an experiment in new media and old texts. Lately, I've come to realize that no matter how cutting edge a technology is, when we speak about whether its effects are real (or true, authentic or live) we're smack dab in the territory of ancient philosophy. For this reason we start Class Three off with a reading from Book VII of Plato's Republic, from whence the famous "cave" metaphor is derived. We'll then turn to McKenzie Wark's argument that the recent film The Matrix is a contemporary re-working of Plato's cave through the story of high-tech dystopia.

In classes seven and eight("The Original and the Copy") we exiamine Aristotle's struggle to save art from Platonic damnation by way of mimesis, pleasure and instruction. To think mimesis through, we'll compare three "reality TV" broadcasts: Cops , The People's Court, and The Real World , asking of each, "What's pleasurable about these? What's instructional? How do each of these programs teach us to think about is normal, what is legal, what is right?"

Class nine is cancelled. You are expected to formulating your paper topics.

In classes ten and eleven ("The Legitimate and the Illegitimate")we'll read sections of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed to help us understand the racial/sexual dimensions of Aristotle's mimesis. Using the work of Sasha Torres on the Rodney King video, as well as Allen Feldman on broadcast of the Gulf War, we'll consider the case of non-actors who are unwillingly thrust into the media spotlight. To highlight our discussions, we'll screen footage from Cops; America's Most Wanted and news footage from the Elian Gonzalez incident.

In classes twelve and thirteen ("The Real and the Fake") we'll read Denis Diderot's famous rumination that the most successful actors actually feel themselves the opposite of what they appear to an audience. Using contemporary texts on the miking of Broadway actors and the staging of MTV's Unplugged, we'll try to discuss the difference between actorly affect and actorly intent. Using recent criminal cases, we'll also talk about how Diderot's question "are they feeling or are they faking" plays a crucial role in on shows like Court TV, and television news coverage of crimes.

In classes fourteen and fifteen ("Liveness")we'll look at sections of Philip Auslander's book Liveness. Auslander takes most of his ideas from Jean Baudrillard (the theorist most people will cite when they speak of "liveness") , but Auslander is easier to read and slightly more applicable to acting theory. During classtime, we'll consider liveness as it applies to a number of discourses on performance: the live audio concert, the detection of liveness in fetal imaging, and the impact of live broadcast on sporting events.

Class sixteen ("The Natural and the Unnatural") takes on the issue of acting "real" during natural disasters and trauma. As the image of the news anchor crawling under his desk during an earthquake makes clear, disasters are ostensibly times during which we all experience life through the lowest levels of artifice, regardless of our social roles. To think about the aesthetic effects of disaster on acting, we visit the notion of the sublime in representation, reading Schiller. We will then compare classical readings of the sublime to Mary Anne Doane's work on the impact of trauma on television.

Class seventeen will have a guest speaker, Bob Berger, director of Charlie Victor Romeo , recently nominated for two Drama Desk awards. CVR is a staged re-creation of an actual airplane disaster using actual "black box" audio tapes. Bob will focus specifically on actor training during CVR.

Class eighteen and nineteen ("Being and Acting")moves from one sort of disaster to another, utilizing the work of Stanislavsky on realism in the theatre in order to consider the performances of various "real" people in the talk show television genre. Watching Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael and Jerry Springer, we'll discuss the coding of panelists and audience members as more or less authentic based upon notions of naturalism learned from writers like Stanislavsky. Reading Joshua Gamson's Freaks Talk Back, we'll discuss how such naturalist readings beg to unpacked for their racist, sexist and homophobic underpinnings.

Class twenty and twenty-one ("The Actor and the Aura") segues from talk-show culture to "high art". Here we'll consider Teodore Adorno's complaint that "culture industries" serve to seduce viewers into passive consumers of mediated reality (as opposed active producers of the real thing). We'll read Walter Benjamin's counter-argument that even though it is based on consumption, technological art has the power to change political climates because of its capacity to reanimate viewers via "profane illumination." To consider both these claims, we'll compare Sting in Brecht's Three Penny Opera to Keanu Reeves in The Matrix_, discussing the Benjaminean idea of aura and asking whether it leads to progressive and/or regressive of ideas about reality.

In classes twenty-two and twenty-three ("Artifical and Natural Intelligence"), I'll suggest that the most urgent challenges to the question "what/who is real" aren't coming from new technologies like video and the web. Instead, they are being voiced by what I will call "post-Artaudian" theatre practitioners. We will look at key passages from Antonin Artaud's The Theatre and Its Double , considering how the thoughts of the mentally ill (Artaud was hospitalized through much of his life), stigmatized in ordinary culture, are often valorized in art. We'll read autistic author Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures , in which she confesses she feels "mostly like 'Data' from Star Trek ", and compare this to actor Brent Spiner's notes on preparing to play Data. We'll also look at Dustin Hoffman's performance as an autistic savant in the film Rain Man , comparing it to Robert Wilson's direction of autistic actor Christopher Knowles . Throughout, we'll be asking, How would our knowledge of who and what we are alter if our mind were "wired" differently than it currently is? What does it mean for us as actors and human beings to imagine a different way of thinking about reality and the natural? How do technological innovations force us into these thoughts, whether we're ready to have them or not?

Class twenty-four is cancelled due to Thanksgiving holidays.

Classes twenty-five ("The Challenge of New Technologies.) features guest speaker Tom Igoe, a former lighting designer for the American Repertory Theatre and faculty member of NYU's interactive telecommunications program. Tom plans to discuss Patrick Finelli's "10 Ways Technology will change the Theatre", and the current demand on film actors to shoot scenes against "blue-screen" backdrops. Against Tom's talk, I am placing against literature on 19th century spirit photography, and the television program Sightings. What we are trying to tease out here are both the ghosts in the machines of theatre, as well as the machines in the ghostly process of screen acting.

Class twenty-six will be our final meeting and we'll have a wrap-up session.

This rundown should be self-explanatory,once you've read the "Game Plan" section of this syllabus. Nevertheless, for those who will ask:

• Required reading means just that. To locate your required readings, head to http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/classes/actreal/requiredreading.html
  
  
• Recommended reading, on the other hand, need only be scanned--it is provided to elaborate or clarify the required texts.To locate your recommended readings, head to http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/classes/actreal/recommended.html
  
  IMPORTANT: The recommended stuff is often far more entertaining and/or elementary than the required reading. SO, if you find yourself struggling with a required text, check out the recommended stuff for help. Recommended readings are also terrific resources for final paper ideas.
  
  
• Anything marked "to view" will be screened in class in selected bits. If you want to see a video in its entirety, you may arrange to do so by visiting the Avery Fisher Media Center in the Bobst library, where I will arrange a reserve list for us.
  
  
• Finally, if you are here because you just want to see what's due for next class, there is a much easier method. Go to http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/classes/actreal/assignments.html