Theater/Theatre

Stansbury Theater Seating Chart (Image Source: Lawrence.edu)

Theater: The space itself
Theatre: The art in that space

“In particular if one takes the map in its current geographical form, we can see that in the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse, the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition its possibility. “ The Practice of Everyday Life (pg. 120)

As a Theatre Major with emphasis on Production, Design and Directing, I have worked on shows since I was a freshman. I went from the simple jobs like painting the nuts and bolts of a door to ultimately directing and designing large productions. During this past fall term I completed my capstone that combined my two passions of film and theatre together in one coherent project. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - The Staged Adaption, was born.

 
For this project, I wanted to show footage of this show in a way that detailed how a vast empty space can ultimately become a place where entire stories and journeys are told. When you walk into an empty Stansbury Theater you see seating for an audience and you see an elevated empty space. That's it. There is nothing interesting or special about the space other than its constant underlying potential. When my show opened, my co-creator Kayleigh Kitzman and I took our audience on a journey that unfolded on that very stage. We showed the progression of two characters lives and the world that surrounded them. What was once an empty meaningless space forever changed due to the events and moments that it housed.

I matched this project with the quote above about the changing nature of places and how a space can be disconnected from what it has or could ultimately become. Stansbury, like the map in the quote, goes through constant discourse and changes to encompass the world that it is going to present to an audience at a particular time. Stansburys existence has changed for me because, even though it has gone back to its “mundane empty space” mode, it is ready to house another potential world. Stansbury Theater was the place where I took on the hardest project I've ever done in my life and where I learned the most about my work and myself. 

DREAM

“Everyday Practices depend on a vast ensemble which is difficult to delimit but which we may provisionally designate as an ensemble of procedures. The latter are schemas of operations and of technical manipulations.” - The Practice of Everyday Life, De Certeau (p. 43) 

       Within my project I wanted to explore one of the everyday practices that transcends what Certeau notes as the issue with generalizing a vast ensemble. I wanted an everyday routine that everyone takes part in no matter who they are, where they come from, what they do or what they believe. I wanted a fundamentally human procedure but also wanted to find, within that universality, some form of variance or abstraction to explore. Exploring sleep became my focal point because it is something everyone must do to live, yet how we sleep and what happens when we sleep can differ from person to person or even from day to day.

       Sleep is a fascinating thing to me. I think that it is while we sleep that the beauty and power of our minds manifests itself. Dreams are windows to our vulnerability and show just how powerful our minds are. While we sleep and dream we are shown the weakness of our senses that can be tricked into believing things and events that are not real or have never happened. While we dreams our senses are tricked and it is only until we wake up that we realize that we were asleep the entire time. I wanted to explore this universal act in my video and show the progress of someone falling asleep and eventually entering a dream state.

    

The Everyday Mundane (Work in progress)

For Project #1, I am planning on exploring the everyday ritual of falling asleep. The action itself is not special or specific to one person; it is a universal thing we all do. However, how we experience sleep or the process of falling asleep can vary greatly. I believe that it is in this variety that I will be able to find beauty or find ways to abstract the action to create a visually intense video piece. I will like to explore the emotional arcs that I have personally experienced throughout my life with the action of falling asleep. From experiencing fear as a child afraid of the dark to the constant murmurs in your mind as you wind down from a busy day, this piece will explore the complexity of sleep.

WAR V. YOUTH

WAR V. YOUTH - Video Still Frames

WAR V. YOUTH is a video project that revolves around McLuhan’s notion of the global village. When I was younger I had heard the saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and in the context in which McLuhan presents it, the world has become itself a global technological village. Due to modernization, we have reached new levels of communication that had only ever been part of science fiction. My take on the global village theory will be represented in this video where I explore the effects of news media on our modern day youth. I believe that the phenomenon that we are observing among our deteriorating youth is linked directly to what they are being shown by the media. We are slowly removing the youth and innocence from the child. The modern child has a vast understanding of things that one could argue is well beyond their years. My video tells the story of the removal of youth from a child and the ultimate empty vessels that we as a society are producing. 

Lao-Tze: The Value of the Non-Existent

     Researching in depth, one of the references of Marshal McLuhan's book, surprisingly changed my outlook on what I, once perceived - and still to a varying degree still perceive - to be a glorified "magazine". The more time I had spent reading McLuhan's book throughout the term, the more it seemed like a piece of abstract art rather than informative literature. However, as I researched Lao-Tze as referenced in, "The Medium is the Massage" I pieced together how McLuhan had used Lao-Tze's passage to prove a commentary of our media culture.

     The Passage that McLuhan used from the ancient writings of Lao-Tze's from Tao Te Ching outlined how we, as a modernized western world, have come to define ourselves by what we are not. Using both Lao-Tze’s ancient passage and McLuhan’s commentary it becomes clear that it is our isolation that has defined us, but it is the extremity of that isolation that has now pushed us into the realms of technological communication. I believe that these passages together are trying to prove that we have gone from one extreme to another. We have ultimately gone from the isolated, personal, individualistic ideologies of the West and have entered (as McLuhan calls it) a fused "oriental" way of life.

Collage of Iconic representations of both Lao-Tze and Marshall McLuhan. In the center they are morphed into one. 

Individual photo-credits to: 

Marshal McLuhanby JustinRandall 

WordPress – Marshal McLuhan

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