Capstone Weekly Reflection 1- 10/09/2018

This past week was fairly productive. I’m enrolled in Abhishek Majumdar’s ‘Fundamentals of Playwrighting’ course this semester and intend to use this class in order to write the script for this project. It’s the first time I have allowed myself to write creatively and while I still feel a sense of nervousness and uncertainty in coming up with ideas or the craft of writing, I am immensely excited to be a part of this course. Already I’ve begun to have a better sense of how to distinguish between character in terms of how they deal with their objectives and obstacles, how to view a scene as a unit of time within a play that portrays a reversal of character, plot or both and, perhaps most importantly for myself personally, that there are many different kinds of ways in which plays can be written, aside from the Western tradition. While I think I understood this last point intellectually, creatively speaking my mind was sold on a certain methodology in terms of how to approach the actual writing of the play. I think my mind viewed plays as exercises in writing compelling dialogue and ignored the fact that in other cultures, such as India or Japan, plays can take many different shapes and forms and play texts are not necessarily driven by the narrative or dialogue of a particular story. As I am hoping to use this project’s text as a springboard to investigate how physicality can generate stories, I am excited to begin approaching writing from a more open ended standpoint, rather than one end of an opposing spectrum to theatre and movement. This idea fits in nicely with a point raised in Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,” in which he describes that text and images are not binary ends of spectrum or opposing ideas but rather are part of a continuum in which meaning is translated and signified for the reader. This point was also emphasized in my meeting with Tomi, where she reminded me that comics are two dimensional medium and theatre is a four dimensional medium and thus the way something is translated from a comic book to the stage doesn’t necessarily have to be a one to one relationship. The example she gave me was the fact that while film’s make use of a close- up by zooming in on a character, in order to achieve the same effect in theatre, isolation is the goal and not necessarily proximity.

In trying to organize my research from the summer, I was also able to get a better sense of what is useful for my from Lewis Hyde’s “Tricksters Make This World.” Hyde’s text, while incredibly interesting is also extremely dense and I felt as if I needed to grab everything from this book and force it to be relevant for my project. I was able to talk through the main points of this book with Tomi and in doing so, discovered for myself what was most useful. I found that his assessment in the way in which tricksters achieve their goals was most intriguing for me, as I now have a better sense of how to approach writing about that character in my script. Rather than focus on more action or violence as a tool, tricksters make use of deception, misdirection, and escape. Furthermore, tricksters are regularly able to foresee and reframe potential traps and often create a new path in order to facilitate their escape or transgress borders and barriers that may have been previously viewed as impassable. Finally, I read one story from Mary Pamela Milne- Home’s “Mamma’s Black Nure Stories,” ‘Anansi and Alligator.’ In reading this story, I was not only able to see it as a new information but also began viewing Anansi as a trickster and gain a better sense of how he operates and upsets the social order. Rephrased, I felt as if by understanding what was useful for me in Hyde’s text, I had an analytical lens through which to understand and assess Anansi the trickster.

In our community we are open and respectful to one another and value listening as a reflexive act. In our community we communicate honestly and adopt a spirit of genuine interest and curiosity.