viz. - musicals

The Artist's Speech

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:11:13 +0000

H/T: Emily Friedman

The audience hears violins sawing tensely as they watch a man scream on screen; only, he is mute. He moves his mouth, but we only learn his words through intertitles: “I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!!!” So opens the 2011 Academy Award-winning film The Artist.

Medium and message here easily coordinate as The Artist uses the techniques of silent film to tell the story of protagonist George Valentin, who refuses to speak.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

But why won’t he talk? David Haglund speculates that Valentin cannot act in talkies because his heavy French accent obscures his speech for American audiences; Marika Rose suggests that the film’s silence comments on changing gender roles. Both of these answers point towards interesting concerns that The Artist pursues. However, I’d like to think more about how The Artist privileges alternative forms of speech and how the film’s visual rhetorics comment on reality and representation.

Image Credit: The Northwest Trail

One obvious place where this comes into contention is the film’s return to portraits and images of George Valentin. We see his face reflected back to us—and to him—on magazine covers, front pages, film screens, and even full-length portraits. These images not only demonstrate Valentin’s popularity but show us a successful, charming, and talented artist. But his fall becomes visible as his angry wife repeatedly defaces his pictures and movie patrons step on them as they lay discarded on a wet street.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The image stands in so completely for Valentin that speech is unnecessary. As he later drunkenly stares at his shadow and castigates himself for being a “loser,” the shadow walks off, leaving George to destroy all of his films. Saved by the young ingénue Peppy Miller, Valentin himself runs away when he discovers that Peppy has purchased and saved his dapper portrait. When he walks up to a store window and stands in front of a tuxedo, seeing his face reflected above it, we see George alienated from himself. He can confront his image and almost recognizes himself as he used to look, but is pulled out of the moment by a chatty cop. His inability to recognize himself leads to the final climax where he attempts suicide, his burnt-out apartment mirroring his own despair, but the intertitle “BANG!” followed by the image of Peppy’s crashed car punctures the high drama. It is this visualized noise that then opens up his other possibilities for speech.

In fact, The Artist relies not only on the expressive power of the silent image, but also the moving picture. The Artist acts as a pastiche of silent film (specifically referencing its greatest star Rudolph Valentino) and the backstage musicals that comment on them. Certain scenes and plots—like Peppy and George’s scene in A German Affair and Peppy’s rise to leading lady—mirror movies like A Star is Born and Singin' in the Rain. Valentin’s slicked-back hair and overall physique resemble Gene Kelly’s, and The Artist underlines the similarity by making George Valentin a talented dancer whose comeback comes through a final showstopping number. Dance is the language through which Valentin may fluently express himself—he uses it to entertain his audiences, to express his growing affections for Peppy, and to sell himself to Hollywood mogul Al Zimmer. The language of dance, though, is clearly a heightened one, taking us outside of realism. Along with George’s images, the lingering shots of dancing celebrate non-mimetic rhetorics. Sound is too real in George’s nightmare; it threatens humiliation, alienation, and can deafen. Art and artistic expression happen through the visual medium, and can move us beyond speech. Peppy models the ideal viewer experience of Valentin’s film Tears of Love as she weeps over his slow sinking in quicksand.

Image Credit: The Fine Art Diner

While Peppy initially mocks “old actors mugging at the camera to be understood,” she here recognizes the power of melodrama. The scene where Peppy goes into George's dressing room and pretends that he is his coat actually shows characters thinking in the movie clichés that The Artist itself adapts. In fact, as Overthinking It further argues, the film does as well by embracing Jean Dujardin’s overexaggerated physical performance. The website traces through Dujardin’s career as a parodist to show how he uses his “proportionally large face, with big, expressive features” and his “nimble physical energy” to be larger than life, to “perform in a style,” to “imitate other actors who have performed in that style, and “to comment, though his imitation, on what that style means.”

Image Credit: Theiapolis

In The Artist’s case, Dujardin comments on the very silent acting style he embraces and so well embodies. By looking like Valentino and Kelly, he “look[s] backward, making a precursor of the present and commenting on what present movie stars are like by comparing them to a remanifestation of the past.” I might here suggest that his comment is to point out how our present in fact shares similar anxieties with the 1920s and 1930s about realism and representation. Websites like Pinterest and technologies like Photoshop allow for heightened self-representation, just as Peppy's film celebrity starts with a fake mole. While our culture may we recognize that they’re not perfectly mimetic, it’s easy to accept the reality of these unreal representations. In other words, when you live within media, it’s easy to forget the medium. The Artist and Dujardin’s performance ask us to confront this. By refusing traditional filmic speech and reverting to older styles, The Artist asks us to pay attention to these styles, these other forms of speech. By embracing the obviously unreal, we can—like Valentin—learn to speak again, and even find pleasure within it.

"Putting the 'Man' in 'Manifest Destiny!'": Making Populist Iconography and Queer Historiography in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 02:24:07 +0000

Image Credit: Theatre is Easy

Even though my Rhetoric of the Musical class has finished up, I can’t quit musicals. When I heard that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a musical I’d discovered when I was preparing my class, was moving to Broadway, I decided that it was the perfect karotic moment to tackle this rich topic. The musical’s Gothic visuals, emo music, and satirical presentation of American politics combine to bring audiences to consider not only American populism but also the act of history making itself.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson covers the career of Andrew Jackson: America’s seventh president, a military hero, a virulent racist, and the first President to claim he was born in a log cabin. However, it doesn’t try to tell the story straight in the way 1776 shows the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The musical’s opening lines set the tone for the evening as irreverent, profane, and visceral: “I’m wearing some tight tight jeans and tonight we’re delving into some serious, serious shit. I’m Andrew Jackson. I’m your President. Let’s go!” The song that follows, “Populism Yea Yea,” establishes the musical’s major concerns: the role of the President as Celebrity-in-Chief, America’s complicated relationship with power and populism, and how these concerns connect to the present day:

The rocking beat, along with the choreographed hip swivels and raised fists, don’t just help draw our attention to lead actor Ben Walker’s sexy Jackson and his tight t-shirt. They also attempt to capture the energy of populist sentiment, as strong today as it was in the 1830s when Jackson was elected. The lyrics blend the concerns of then with now, as the show’s cowboys and cowgirls offer to “take this country back / For people like us / Who don’t just think about things, / People who make things happen.” This language—emphasizing us versus them, action versus thought—could have come as easily from Bush’s western-inflected mouth as from a Tea Party pamphlet. What’s also remarkable here in the way that populist energy is associated with teenage angst: “Why wouldn’t you ever go out with me in school? / You always went out with those guys / Who thought they were so cool / And I was just nobody to you.” Here, the writers indirectly connect populist disaffection with the rebellion of lonely youth, left out by the “elite” who will be forced to “eat our dust.” This might seem a stretch, but the political nature of the musical hasn’t just been noted by New York Times review Ben Brantley, but has also been acknowledged by the show’s lead, the show's co-creator Alex Timbers, and the show's composer-lyricist Michael Friedman:

“Alex [Timbers, the show’s co-creator] and I had both been interested in historical figures and in ways of looking through a contemporary lens at history. And I think we found that Andrew Jackson - and this was five years ago - really spoke to the moment that we were living in and planted the seeds of so much of what we see now. And I think in recent politics, we've seen even more of that.”

However, the connection between the musical and politics is one of long-standing tradition, as has the connection between music and politics. Politicians have used songs to brand themselves, as Obama did with U2’s “City of Blinding Lights,” as Jackson himself did in “The Hunters of Kentucky” (the song that closes the show), and as Reagan famously tried to do with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” a heritage the show’s poster directly alludes to:

Image Credit: SpotCo

The tag line “History just got all sexypants” points out the musical’s willingness to appeal to audiences through tight pants and guyliner, but the reference to Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. cover also connects the show to the song’s dubious political legacy. Though Springsteen meant his song as a critique of Reagan, others read it against the grain as a populist song celebrating America. Writers Friedman and Timbers don’t shy away from critiquing this populist legacy. When discussing the musical’s end, Friedman stated that

“I think it ends trying to force the audience of having - giving them, I think, a lot of laughs along the way, something to really think about, which is, for me, how much responsibility we take for the people we elect, and how much responsibility we take for what the people we elect end up doing.”

This comes out in the way the show doesn’t shy away from depicting Jackson’s negative aspects. Both Jackson and his wife Rachel take slavery for granted, as she sings in “The Great Compromise” that “I always thought I’d live in a house / With a dog and some kids and some slaves.” The show also rewrites the song “Ten Little Indians” to highlight Jackson’s violence against the Native American population: “Ten little Indians / Standing in a line / One got executed / And then there were nine.” And as the song “Crisis Averted” shows citizens reacting to Jackson’s removal of the Seminoles from Florida, it also invites us to critique the public’s willingness to overlook the bad done by politicians on behalf of the citizens:

Florida Woman: I mean, I think it’s a real tragedy that Jackson moved all the Indians from here to Florida.

Florida Man: Me too. A real tragedy.

Florida Woman: And that’s why we hesitated to move here. Absolutely. I mean, we didn’t want it to seem like we were endorsing that kind of behavior.

Florida Man: No. Of course not. But, then we were like… it is nice that it doesn’t snow.

Florida Woman: Um, yes. It is. So, it’s like, it’s great that he did that. But we definitely don’t condone it.

The audience knows that the Trail of Tears was cruel, but like the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, Americans have been brought to condone it through silent consent.

Image Credit: Gothamist

What I find to be most interesting about the musical is the ways in which its re-mythologizing of Andrew Jackson as emo rock star brings to the forefront the question of history and writing history. The musical includes a designated Storyteller who undertakes to narrate Jackson’s life story, but Jackson shoots the Storyteller in the face before the show’s fourth song, “I’m So That Guy,” in order to take charge of the action and to “make his own story.” In “Rock Star” Jackson narrates his own version of history where “Adams tried to be an American idol / Jefferson tried to be a rock star / Madison tried to make the presidency vital / And James Monroe was a douchebag!” He then claims the mantle of being “a celebrity of the first rank.” After his wife’s complaint in “The Great Compromise” that she is being left behind by his campaigning, he sings after her death in “Public Life” that he will “give my life to the people now” in her honor. He turns tragedy into mythology, the public man sacrificing himself for a dedicated public.

History and the musical have been connected for a while, as my friend Michelle Dvoskin wrote about in her dissertation “‘Listen to the Stories, Hear It in the Songs’: Musical Theatre as Queer Historiography.” As she put it:

“This project argues that not only can musicals ‘do’ history, they offer an excellent genre for theorizing what I call ‘queer historiography.’ While sexuality remains one category of analysis, I use ‘queer’ to signify opposition, not simply to heterosexuality, but to heteronormativity, and normativity more broadly. Musicals' queer historiography, then, is a way of engaging past events that challenges normativity in form as well as content; a way of productively challenging not only what we think we know about the past, but how we come to know it.”

I would argue here that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson engages in similar acts of queer historiography as its rock style rejects normativity as plainly as its overall treatment of Jackson asks its audience to question the ways in which we think about executive power, political celebrity, and populist sentiment. It draws us to think about the past not just as distant history, but as lived experience and recurrent theme. We may know one Andrew Jackson through high-school textbooks, but the musical forces its audience to rethink that idea—by presenting us with “populajism” and some tight tight sexypants.

A Drop of Golden Sun

ladysquires — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:12:33 +0000

Let's get this semester started with some happy, shall we? This is a 2009 video of a flash mob in Antwerp performing a choreographed dance to "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music. This stunt was apparently orchestrated to promote a Belgian television show. Though common sense tells you that this performance was meticulously organized and rehearsed, it's hard to deny the arrestingly joyous quality of the video. As with most well-done flash mob videos, both the filming techniques and the performance itself promote the illusion that this was a spontaneous event. The camera pans to individuals who appear to be regular by-standers, individuals who later join in the performance just for the sheer fun of it. It's initially unclear whether the crowd of dancers rushing down the stairs is part of the performance or simply spectators trying to get a look at what's going on.

The rhetorical brilliance of this performance is that it really invites us to take part in the alternate reality evoked by musicals, a reality in which people spontaneously break out into perfectly choreographed song and dance numbers at the slightest provocation. The ethos of the flash mob, like the ethos of the musical, is in carefully walking that line between joyous spontaneity and contrivance in order to encourage the audience to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride.

Indeed, flash mobs, which can be deployed as performance art, political protest, or publicity stunt embody that line as examples of populist art that frequently get appropriated by corporate and media entities. A flash mob was organized for Oprah's Kickoff Party in 2009, an act that garnered a tremendous amount of free publicity for Harpo:

So, does it ruin it for you to know that these acts are so heavily orchestrated? Is the use of flash mobs as marketing tools obnoxious or refreshing in a media culture so saturated with hard, shiny artifice?

Finally, would anyone be brave enough to organize a flash mob as a class project? Anyone? Bueller?

Under Their Spell: An Interview with Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:12:38 +0000

Image Credit: Small Screen Scoop

I know that this post is a bit belated, but my excitement in posting this fabulous interview makes me unable to resist the potentially corny title. (And no, while these actresses are not my actual interview subjects, both of them love musicals as much as I do, and one has even written about the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from which this pictures comes.)

I had the lucky opportunity to interview Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis, recent graduates from the PhD program in Performance as Public Practice from the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin, at the end of May. The initial reason that I asked to interview these ladies was that both include musicals as a part of their research interests and that each worked with Stacy Wolf, a former UT professor whose book A Problem Like Maria made its way into my own syllabus this past year; however, both ladies were eloquent on the challenges of teaching students to enact visual analysis and to think critically about musicals. The lively and interesting conversation we shared can be found either on the views page or directly here.

Interview of Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:25:25 +0000

In the spring of 2010 viz. contributor Rachel Schneider interviewed Drs. Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis about their experiences teaching musical theater and performance for the Department of Theatre and Dance and the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. Here is the transcript of that interview, conducted on May 19, 2010.

Viz: To start off our discussion, I’d like it if you could introduce yourselves briefly for the viz. readers, and describe your academic and teaching experience here at The University of Texas: what kinds of classes have you taught here? Have you yet had the opportunity to teach your own research? And what is your research?

Dvoskin: My name is Michelle Dvoskin. I just finished the PhD in Performance as Public Practice. I taught Intro to Theater for non-majors for two years, which is a 400-student lecture class. I taught two semesters of Intro to Acting for non-majors, and then Theater History Post-1800 for a semester. My research is on musical theater as a way of doing what specifically I’m calling queer historiography: that is, a queer--counter-normative--way of communicating histories.

Manis: I’m Shelley Manis and I just finished a PhD in Performance as Public Practice. I taught a year of the theater history for majors sequence, which is first Theater History to 1800 and then Theater History since 1800. I have been a TA for Stacy Wolf’s musical theater class. I was a teaching assistant for the regular history class for two years before I taught it, and then taught for two years in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, including teaching the Rhetoric of Performance.

Viz: Great! Well, as I mentioned before the interview started, viz is interested in the intersections between visual rhetoric, visual culture, and pedagogy. While we come from different academic disciplines—you both have doctorates in PPP and I am in the English department—we all share an interest in pedagogy. What commonalities do you think there are between these disciplines of rhetoric, English, and performance studies, and is there any benefit to make our students of interdisciplinarity?

Manis: Actually, one of my biggest interests is in the intersection between rhetoric and performance, and I think that a lot of what they have in common for me is that rhetoric works in terms of time and place—specificity in time and place—and for me, performance’s power comes a lot out of where something was performed, in what circumstances, and who is observing it. I think that in terms of the underlying sort of things that come together to make performance and rhetoric powerful—they’re both very similar in that way—performance is really powerful because of its affective structure, because you can watch it and be invested in it either live or watching a recorded performance. It’s something that’s trying to speak to you at an emotional level, so I think teaching about the way a performance works affectively is a really useful way of teaching students about emotional appeals in rhetoric, and how emotional appeals can work both in terms of the text, which we spend a lot of time talking about in rhetoric, but also in terms of what we’re seeing, what the bodies are doing onstage, what are they doing to each other on stage, and how audience members are responding to what they’re doing both viscerally and emotionally.

Dvoskin: One of the things that’s most interesting to me about musical theater and reception is the thing that Stacy Wolf and others have written about: that musical theater is embodied. We don’t just watch and think, we don’t just watch and feel, we watch and do as we hum along or we’re tapping our toes, or—

Manis: Going forward at that first moment in Wicked where Elphaba soars up and the whole audience—

Dvoskin: Yes, there’s that small lunge that everyone around you is doing, and that there’s a way in which it becomes a kinesthetic experience as well as an intellectual and emotional one that is really powerful that I look forward to thinking about more. I also think that it’s so important to remember that performance texts—especially musical theater—aren’t just texts. Even for theater history majors or students whose focus is performance or design, those elements are so easy to lose track of when you’re reading a script. We need to remember that this can actually happen in all kinds of ways on the stage. When I teach Gypsy, which is the musical I teach most consistently, there’s an exercise I do when I bring in clips of four different women playing Rose from all the major productions and I show the exact same section of the “Rose’s Turn” number and have the students practice analyzing the performance through that. This helps students see all the ways in which what’s being communicated is both the same and completely different depending on what body and what production choices are happening. And I think that’s a really important thing performance studies can bring, that it's not just all page, it’s—

Manis: Three dimensional or even four dimensional. I think the thing that students in rhetoric can struggle with is what is an emotional appeal, what is an intellectual appeal, what is an appeal based on authority, and I think that the multidimensionality of performance is a nice way of getting students to sort of dig in beyond the text and understand the other aspects that come into play when making arguments.

Viz: Actually, this brings up a question that got answered for me a little bit when you, Shelley, came and guested and did a guest lecture in my class. Finding performance texts and getting students to have a text in front of them I found to be one of the difficulties of using pop culture pieces in the classroom because organizing discussions around a text that students have previously seen but don’t have in front of them on the page. Michelle, you said you deal with this by using YouTube clips. What are the ways in which (a) you make your students aware of the multidimensionality of the text and the strategies you use in the classroom and (b) on the practical level of having texts in front of you in the classroom, how do you deal with that? What advice would you give to someone who wanted to teach a similar class at Texas or elsewhere?

Dvoskin: Show stuff. That’s the basic thing. It takes time—and it’s an interesting problem; in teaching this semester I taught two units on the musical, one on the “golden age” of musicals and a post-1969 unit. In the post-1969 unit I had all this stuff I wanted to show and two days for the lecture and discussion before we got to specifically talking about A Chorus Line, which was the case study for the unit. And the first day I got through three slides because I showed so many clips. For each clip we stopped and talked about it and picked it apart and we looked at what are the lights doing, what’s happening, what do you see, while also reminding them that it’s not quite the same because what we’re seeing on a screen is a captured moment, an archive moment, and not the repertoire moment that we have in the theater. It was incredibly worth the time and I think it was one of the most rewarding days we had all semester, but it’s also a challenge because you can’t spend that much time on everything unless you’re going to teach very little over the course of the semester. And I didn’t show nearly as much the next day because I couldn’t if I was going to explain to them what, say, concept musicals were, since really it was all rock musicals that first day, and it’s a tradeoff. But I’m hoping that, since we spent so much time really watching and discussing and unpacking that first day, they were able to do some of that work themselves, and I think they were, based on the discussion we were able to have about A Chorus Line, which doesn’t have a great video archive.

Manis: Yeah, I agree with all of that, and one of the things that I do is that I usually start with is saying, “Here’s something that we’re going to watch, and this time, just watch it and lose yourself in it.” Then we’ll watch it and do some talking about what’s going on. Then I’ll say “we’re going to watch it again, and this time take careful notes on exactly what you see: so, what are the bodies doing, what are the lights doing, what catches your eye, what throws you off—whatever it is, take extremely detailed notes.” Then we watch it that way and then we start talking about what they saw, and I stress that it’s going from what you see to interpreting what you see and how what you see made you feel to get to a piece of analysis, so that it goes from observation to analysis and evaluation.

Dvoskin: Which is one of the most difficult things to get students to do—articulating what is actually happening in front of you is one of the hardest things for me to get them to do. They want to skip straight towards “I loved it” or “It was weird” or “It reminded me of this.” They want to skip to that comparison phase of the critical triangle. One exercise that I stole from a colleague of ours, Kelly Howe, is a Boal exercise that I’ll use to have them start discussions of texts. I’ll ask them to sculpt an image of the text and go through those three steps and stopping them—“Oh, it looks like she’s reading.” “No, what do you see?” because—

Manis: Sculpting an image is them using their bodies to make a tableau, either moving or still, depends on what you want. You break them into teams and then they make a tableau.

Dvoskin: Sometimes I’ll make them do it at the front, so the exercise is as much about getting the people in the audience to articulate what they see in front of them as it is about the people who are creating it. In my acting classes in particular I’ve found it to be a helpful thing to get them to step back and to get them thinking about what they’re seeing and what the literal visual is before you move on. It’s an easy way to push back against the tendency to do comparison or evaluation.

Viz: That was something I found to be difficult for my students, that they just wanted to go straight to aesthetic appreciation of “this was bad,” but we have to talk about “what is it trying to do, how is it trying to make that work,” more analysis instead of—

Dvoskin: “And what do you see that tells you that?”—that’s a question I go to a lot. “Well, it really looks like they’re not connecting at all.” “Well, what do you see that gets you there? What’s physically happening that gets you to say that?” “Oh, well, they’re not making eye contact.” “Great; what else?” “The lighting is different on the two of them; she’s in a purple-y light and she’s in an orange-y blue light.” “So, that’s an interesting judgment, but how do you get there?” I make them walk it back.

Viz: Another question that I have is about trying to be interdisciplinary and trying to get students to think rhetorically about musicals is finding a vocabulary to use in the classroom to actually describe and discuss commonly together; how do we talk about how they move across the stage? My project last semester for viz. was trying to come up with such a vocabulary for what rhetoric would call delivery; I looked at Richard Schechner’s textbook, which didn’t seem to have a lot to offer—is there a language that performance studies uses or were there ways in which you found you had to come up with vocabularies for students in different places, like for you, Shelley, teaching rhetoric students who are not familiar with theater—

Manis: I use performance language. One of the first things that I do a section on what is performance and what is the vocabulary we use around performance, and then another section around what is rhetoric and what is the vocabulary we use around rhetoric, and then we spend a eek melding those together: what are the commonalities, where is the overlap in those, where are they different, and then how can we use those two things to talk to each other? There are always the basic things like setting, staging. With movement, I found this from our colleague Claire Croft to be “what do you see happening.” You don’t need to know what a pirouette is or anything technical about that. All you need to be able to do is describe, so I encourage them to use a lot of descriptive language and I have them read from a book called Writing About Theater which has an introduction about writing about theater for undergraduates and have them read selections from that which gives them a vocabulary to work with, and then whatever terms of rhetoric I’m using, we work with that.

Dvoskin: I guess I don’t really have a rhetoric vocabulary, so for me, I don’t work with that.

Manis: You use the language of history a lot! You’re still interdisciplinary in that you’re talking about historiography.

Dvoskin: Sure, I guess I just never found it difficult melding languages. That’s not something that’s come to my attention. And when I teach, even when I’m teaching non-majors, I make sure they have basic theater 101 vocabulary—what’s upstage, what’s downstage—but I think what you said about just describing what you see is what it always comes back to: what’s happening. If you can tell me that, I don’t care about a jeté or an upstage cross. Just tell me what they’re doing.

Manis: And what’s exciting about that is that students often will find more interesting ways of describing things that if we had just given them a word for it. Or a lot of times you’ll have students—as in my rhetoric of performance class, I had students who were good at math, and some students who had done theater and done directing and some students who had done music, and so gave each other that kind of vocabulary. So I think being open to descriptive language will often times add an expertise that you wouldn’t have arrived at other times. And when I teach rhetoric, I don’t teach things like the difference between pitch and tone because I don’t know how to teach that in terms of rhetoric; I teach it in terms of performance. That may be my bias as a performance scholar, but I have a really hard time teaching tone in writing.

Viz: To back up a little bit from where the discussion has been going, because I’ve just taught a writing class, how much writing instruction have you done in your classrooms and what kinds of writing assignments have you given them. If you have done that, do you think that learning to write better helps them analyze performances better?

Dvoskin: I always incorporate writing when I can; the courses I’ve taught have not been writing component classes. One assignment that I like to use, which functions differently in the three classes I’ve taught, is some sort of a performance review. And I start that out, whichever class I’m teaching—and I got this from Claire Croft—with the performance response triangle of description, analysis, and evaluation, where you’re building them on top of each other and you have to describe before you can make a useful metaphor, and that you have to do those levels before you can evaluate anything. We do a lesson on that and talk about how to do that. We practice that with the sculpting exercises, we do things like that. In an acting class we would practice that with the work they do on stage. Then I'd work with them on their written reviews of other people's work, offering read to drafts, and helping them to push on what they saw, because so often—and this is true across every class that I’ve taught—the impulse is to relate the plot: this is what happened in the show. I don’t really care. That’s not the point of a performance review, and that’s not the kind of work that we’re trying to do, and so really pushing them to think about—OK, if you need to give me a sentence or two of plot so I can follow what you’re saying, fine, but what’s physically happening on that stage? What are the performances doing, what are the design choices doing, how are they communicating? And how do you build that into—particularly in theater history—an analytical piece that also engages with theater history. In that assignment, I ask them to do a little bit of research into the history of the piece that they’re seeing and make an argument that fits the production that they saw into that theater history, which for a lot of them was very challenging. And that was a moment when I wished I had four TAs for my 50 students and we could have really taken time to go through multiple revisions and write a couple of them, but there were two of us and there were 50 of them, so . . .

Manis: I do very similar writing exercises. In my rhetoric of performance class I have them do a performance review. This year, my class was based around controversies, to follow the RHE 306 model that we taught last year, and I had everyone choose a performance that either was controversial, engaged with a controversy, or caused a controversy of some kind. And their performance review needed to incorporate not only those things that Michelle and I talked about, about what do you see, but also the rhetorical context, so what’s going on at the moment this performance was released, what historical moment is it coming into, and how does that historical moment influence the ways in which the audience would likely take up the show. So that’s one exercise that we do. I’ve been teaching writing for 8 years; I taught 3 years at KU, one including an intro to drama class, so that was a literary writing class, and 5 years here. Another writing exercise that I like is that I have them do dramaturgy casebooks, where I have them interpret, they have different sections that they have to do research about, so what is the history of their production, what major productions have been done of this play, what do we know about the playwright, what do we know about the people who were in the play, what do we know about the historical moment, the world of the play itself, how can we help people understand what’s going on in that world—that kind of work, so that they are doing research skills and having to synthesize the information that they find in order to say something about an argument they think that the performance is making.

Dvoskin: I would also throw in that the final project I had my theater history students do this semester was a performance project instead of a written piece, but it certainly incorporated writing as they had to turn in a script, as well as an annotated bibliography. I found that incredibly useful to get them to think multi-dimensionally and to get them to play around with those ideas in a way that’s not so much about learning to become better writers, but still push them to engage with those ideas and to do it in writing. Some of the scripts were quite good, and as writing were quite good, so I think that’s also a really useful tool when working with performance.

Manis: I also have them do a lot of in-class writing in teams, so a lot of times if I’m teaching them about, say, rhetoric and performance, and what were the differences in between them, I had the teams get together and write a few sentences about what were the areas of overlap and what were the difference between rhetoric and performance. I wanted to get them to make an argument about performances and the similarities and differences between performance and rhetoric. So, little things like that. Just every now and then we’ll have in-class work, like if I’m trying to teach them how to write a thesis, we’ll watch a piece of something, and I’ll get them into their teams and have them write a thesis sentence about the kind of thing they saw. I do a lot of in-class workshops when I’m not teaching a writing-specific class, so in my theater history class I gave another writing assignment where I would ask them to situate themselves in a particular historical moment that we had talked about, and as a particular person—so, say you’re a theater manager in Elizabethan England. What play do you think would be a successful play to do and why, so that would then ask them to bring in the historical aspect and bring in the context, but also the analysis of the play itself; so, things like that.

Viz: What seems to be one of the useful overlaps between all the work that we’ve done is to get the students to think about historical context.

Manis: Kairos! Performance is all about kairos!

Viz: But moving on from this, I wanted to ask a little bit about, since you both write about musicals in your own research, the ways in which your teaching impacted your writing or what kind of research do you do. Have these things worked together for you in your career here at Texas?

Manis: Teaching your class, Rachel—having them read a chapter from my dissertation and then having them talk about Wicked in your class—was one of my most successful teaching days ever. It makes me realize that I think teaching one’s own research, whether you have them read your own work or—I don’t know, there’s so much investment in it and I loved seeing them get excited about it. I always get excited about what I’m doing, but that was so magical for me to say here’s what’s going on, now watch this and let’s talk about what you see. I would like to do more of that in the future, and I think one of the things about teaching musicals too, and being able to teach writing—and I think Michelle can speak to this more than I can—is the affective investment in musicals. People get so excited about them. Whether they love them or hate them, there is something that you just cannot help but get invested in that.

Dvoskin: The vibe in the room is palpably different on days you do musicals. In 301, and I’ve guested in lots of 301s, even the 8:00 AM sections get so excited because it’s something they’re familiar with in a very sort of non-threatening way. It’s interesting that in the musical theater field, there’s so much angst about is it dead, is the form dead, “the young people, they don’t like musical theater,” and I just want to start telling everyone to come to my classes. Every time I do a lecture on musicals I start the class by asking everyone in the room if they have seen a musical, and at least two thirds of the 400 hands in the room go up, usually more. They know them, and the investment is huge. The day we got through the three slides on rock musicals, it was in large part because of the time we spent on the clips, but why we spent so much time on the clips was because they couldn’t stop talking about them. Particularly when I showed the piece of Rent, and the room of students who had no exposure to the original production, who had only seen the DVD of the last performance that was filmed on Broadway or had seen the movie version were obsessed and couldn’t—it got to a point when one of my students raised a hand to ask a question, and had to specify that it was for one of her classmates, because her classmate was clearly such an expert in this particular version of the show. I mean, it was awesome. But yeah, that investment level is huge and makes it so much more fun in the classroom. Those are the days when you’re really all on the same team, which is fun.

Viz: That is something I found to be true too; one of the things that I found to be interesting and sometimes difficult is that it can become so fun that that they have problems taking it seriously. Have you ever had that problem where they’ll be engaged, but find it difficult to take it seriously as an object for analysis—pop culture as something we can discuss and describe?

Manis: I make a clear division with that, about when we’re going to have fun with it, and then when we’re going to turn it back into an object of analysis. I like to give them the room to express the silly stuff, and I’ll do that with another pop culture reference, 30 Rock. On that show the writers have their two-minute dance parties and the writers break it down and dance around the table. If we start doing that, I’ll say, “OK, 2 minute dance party, let’s riff on this for a while” and then we do and then we go back to analysis. But I think that they find that because they’re such experts that they actually have a lot of fun talking about it analytically when they realize that, oh, they can do that and that they know that they’re doing.

Dvoskin: I’ve never had a big problem with that. Sometimes I’ve had them focusing on analytics that aren’t as interesting to me, particularly in 301 when I try to break down the history of musical theater in 50 minutes, and I usually end up structuring it by subgenres, the book musical, the concept musical, the rock musical. Often I’ll find afterwards that four or five students are running up to me onstage afterwards asking me what would this musical be, and they’ve missed the part where I said that categories are really flexible and provisional . . . But at the same time, they’re engaged and it is a mode of analysis and they’re looking at musicals as something to take seriously. They are thinking about genres, and it is important what kind of musical it is. It’s not so important to fit it into a tidy slot, but in terms of the kinds of work they can do, book musicals and concept musicals, for example, are allowed to play by slightly different rules.

Manis: And I think that a lot of times too when they—when I was in your class and would ask them what the music was doing, and they would want to go to something slightly different because that’s such a hard thing to do, so I think that sometimes just saying, “Yeah, this is really hard, but we’re going to grapple with it” is enough to get them to go, “Oh, OK, yeah, that’s true. You’re not expecting me to be perfect; it’s just hard.” For me, I think that sometimes that’s where it can go off the rail—and to give them a hook to think of it in terms of genre, or what does it remind you of, and your students said, “It’s like ‘Thriller’!”, that was so bizarre, like a whole new way of looking at Wicked, but there’s a moment where they do move their arms back and forth, but sometimes that opens up new ways of thinking about things.

Dvoskin: I think it’s also important that musical theater fits in a weird cultural space: it’s not precisely pop culture, and so I think in terms of their responses, there’s a difference. Talking about Glee, for example, is totally pop culture, but Gypsy, even though it’s a history of previous forms of popular culture, but it’s not—it operates in a really complicated culture space.

Manis: Some musicals are definitely popular culture; like mega-musicals.

Viz: Spring Awakening I also think crosses into that, in terms of what I had in my classroom and the ways in which my students responded to it and thought and felt about it seemed more like pop culture.

Manis: The touring mega-musicals like Wicked, with how many it sells, how many locations it’s got worldwide, and where it’s going—I don’t know that I would argue that Spring Awakening is actually pop culture because people still have rarefied access to it.

Dvoskin: Yes, but the same is true—the ticket prices on Wicked, who can access—I mean, it’s not a television show where anybody who can afford one television in their house can access it.

Manis: But they can afford the soundtrack.

Dvoskin: Yes, but the soundtrack is not the show. It’s something that actually fascinates me in terms of studying musical theater and something that using Stacy Wolf’s book pushes us to talk about on our musicals day in class is—what this is this thing in terms of cultural capital and cultural status. In part because a huge part of how the field does and doesn’t work at its best has to do with people’s cultural assumptions and their discomfort with something that is a lot like pop culture, but isn’t pop culture because of questions of access and those issues—there’s no easy way or place to get at it.

Viz: It’s also weird to think about the way in which in the 50s and 60s it was more pop culture than it is today. The introduction to A Problem Like Maria wants to go there.

Dvoskin: Yes, but she also explicitly sort of argues that it is and it isn’t pop culture. It has this weird middlebrow thing going on. The albums are pop culture and are artifacts of pop culture, but the actual production isn’t quite.

Manis: Though it is part of the zeitgeist. It’s complicated.

Dvoskin: That’s something I think is interesting and want to keep on the table because it’s useful as a pushback against the—“Oh, musicals,” which I say as I throw my arm back behind my head in a vaguely dismissive way with an ironic eyebrow raise.

Viz: Well, I think you’re absolutely right that that’s a good way to fight back against that assumption because it’s something that came up in my class with students going home and talking about taking a class on the rhetoric of the musical over spring break.

Manis: That’s one of my biggest investments; for me, one of the things is that I absolutely do not believe in separating pleasure and intellectual rigor. It’s not two different things.

Dvoskin: And one of the arguments I make in my dissertation is that this stuff matters because it’s stuff that sticks with us. They do have a wide audience, and in my conclusion I talk about reading Daily Kos, a liberal website, while finishing the dissertation, and in a discussion about something happening one of the comments quoted 1776 without attribution, just a line from ‘Cool Cool Considerate Men’: ‘Ever to the right, ever to the right, never to the left, ever to the right’—no attribution, no nothing; he actually misquoted it slightly, which tells me he didn’t look it up. That was the thing that popped into his head, that was the response—a line from a musical about history.

Manis: And the most recent advertisements for the Garnier Nutrisse skin cream are “Defy Gravity,” with the background in that Wicked green, and it’s all about skin cream, but “Defy Gravity” is a phrase in the zeitgeist.

Dvoskin: I have to say, I wish Macy’s would stop using Rent, though. That’s just disturbing. I’m like, “Why is ‘Seasons of Love’ on my—no!” Not that Rent isn’t terrifyingly commercial, and whatever, but—no! It can’t be a Macy’s ad!

Manis: It’s like that Pepsi ad that was with the—it’s the song that’s actually about a guy who’s struggling about coming out, “Break Free,” and there was a Pepsi ad with people break-dancing to “Break Free,” but that song is actually a really tortured story about a young man who’s scared to come out, and it’s selling Pepsi.

Viz: “Break out and be homosexual and drink Pepsi.”

Manis: “Homo drink Pepsi?”

Viz: OK, well, this is maybe a good point to lead into a discussion about Stacy, because I know both of you were her students while she was here—

Manis: And after she left!

Viz: And actually, I, like you Michelle, I’ve used parts of that introduction to A Problem Like Maria as my version of the introduction to the musical genre, what is a musical, going off the things she talks about how the musical is conventionally defined. Since both of you have worked with Stacy, how do you feel her work has influenced yours, both in the classroom and in your own writing? Were you both TAs for Stacy?

Manis: Only I was. Actually both of these things—and what’s influenced me in both my pedagogy and writing is Stacy’s enthusiasm. She comes into a room, so excited to be there and so excited to talk about what she’s doing, and students get on board with her. Even reluctant students got on board with Stacy in her classroom respectfully. Stacy’s enthusiasm is how I model myself in the classroom as a teacher and dealing with students, both in being enthusiastic in what I’m teaching and what the students are doing well, and then in terms of writing. Her writing has given me—she’s got this great article called “In Defense of Pleasure” and that is sort of the essence of Stacy: I’m not going to apologize for thinking this is fun and writing about it as though I love it. That’s what I get from Stacy.

Dvoskin: Yeah. I think that Stacy offers a model for scholarship in musical studies that is really rigorous and theoretically engaged. That has not necessarily been the norm for that field, but it's been changing because of people like Stacy. I don’t think I’d be able to do the kind of work I’m doing without Stacy having first done the work she’s done, in a variety of ways.

Viz: No, I had the opportunity to meet her when she came back for Lisa Moore’s class conference on lesbian genres, and she was very helpful at sending me some of her materials and talking with me about some of the stuff that she’d done in the classroom, and I was able to use some of it, with tribute to her, a little bit.

Dvoskin: She’s incredibly generous.

Viz: Very much so, which is really appreciated. It seems to me that one of the nice things about UT that I’ve seen across many departments is that people in rhetoric, in performance studies are helpful about giving to each other, and supporting each other’s work in a way, which is hopefully what the DWRL does too.

Manis: It does!

Viz: Well, some random questions to jump to think specifically about what you’ve specifically done in the classroom in teaching musicals; in my first semester I attempted to teach rhetorical theory like J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and Kenneth Burke’s dramatism. Have you ever taught that kind of theory in your class or used it to apply to musicals?

Dvoskin: No.

Manis: I’m trying to think—I don’t think I have. I always stick to the rhetoric, whatever rhetoric they’re using because I’m new to this department, so I sort of—I’m still getting oriented to that, so I stuck to the rhetorics we used in the classroom. And I felt like since I was asking them to almost learn two disciplines that I didn’t want to go too theoretical. I wanted them to be able to grapple with it.

Viz: Are there particular theories that you do teach in the classroom that you think are relevant for thinking about the cultural work that musicals do?

Dvoskin: Not explicitly, and that’s largely a function of the classes that I’ve taught. Trying to cover all theater history from 1800 on, even in the case study model that we’ve moved to, I’ve got enough to do without trying to explicitly teach a lot of theory. I will use theoretically inflected work—when we talk minstrelsy I’ll use Eric Lott, things like that—when we do queer theater I’ll talk about queering and queer theory a little bit, even just to explain why I’m using that word, but—

Manis: That’s how it comes up: if I use a word that comes from some sort of theory I’ll say, “So I’m using this word, and here’s the way people who do scholarship in this area talk about it,” but I don’t assign theory.—For example, I had a student doing the movie Milk and talking about how one of the things it did was advocate for a day when gay people wouldn’t be queer, they would just be people. And that was a moment where we could have a discussion about how actually queer is a word that has been taken back and now it’s theoretically strong and here’s why, et cetera.

Dvoskin: If I were teaching a semester on just one aspect of musical theater I might, but not in the kinds of classes I’ve been teaching up to this point.

Manis: I did have them read a little bit of Schechner and Turner on what performance was, but only so that we could start thinking about performance and how we wanted to talk about it. It was never something that we returned to it in the sense of “Talk about this à la Schechner” or anything like that. It was just to give them a sense of where performance studies as a field was—one of the founding myths of performance studies, basically.

Viz: Because one of the things that’s come in the course of the discussion is sometimes about some of the issues that can come up in discussing musical theater: for example, Stacy Wolf’s work often deals with issues of queer identity, and audiences’ interactions with that. We’ve talked about moments like that; one of the questions I have is: is this something that you try to do in your own teaching work, bringing up some of the potentially controversial issues related to musicals? Is this too explosive, or the students are comfortable, or you don’t wade into those waters at all because it’s Texas?

Michelle: I guess again for me it’s about the classes I’m able to teach and the time I have. I don’t push away from it—when we talked about Golden Age musical theater, the section I had them read from the introduction had some information on gay men’s relationship to the form, and we certainly talked about that, as well as the relationship of Jewish men to the form, but it’s not—I don’t avoid it at all, but in the context of the specific courses I've taught, it hasn’t been something I’ve spent a ton of time or energy on.

Viz: That’s something just you work more with in your scholarship then—

Dvoskin: It’s very important in my scholarship. My scholarship is about queer theory and musical theater together, but it’s not something that—I don’t get to pick the classes I teach. We have some freedom to design our syllabi, but I didn’t get to say that I’m going to teach a class on musical theater, gender, and sexuality, which I would love to do someday. That would be awesome. But if I’m teaching theater post-1800, of the time I’ll spend in musical theater, about two weeks, I can probably spare about 20 minutes, if that. And when it comes up, great. And when we look at A Chorus Line and people talk about the ways in which sexuality played out in that musical, and how that was important it its moment, that’s great, that’s a part of the conversation. But I don’t feel like it would be fair to them to make that the conversation, because then they lose everything else they should be getting about that material on that day. When I get to pick my own classes entirely, I’m sure it will be a different story.

Manis: Same thing.

Viz: I find that stuff may come up in discussing a particular musical as a part of its context—

Manis: Yeah.

Viz: It never came up so explicitly.

Manis: In my class, which wasn’t just about musicals, but it was about their final projects, which they all chose film because they could see it and watch, everybody had to do an individual presentation on the argument they were making that their thing was making. And the last student to go said, “Wow, I just realized that all of us—our films have arguments about what it means to be an American, or what it means to have the American dream.” There are definitely courses you could design around those ideas of nation-building, identity building, or of subjectivity, that kind of thing, but I think the limited amount of time that we have in a survey or even in a topics class, in some ways.

Viz: Something you can touch on and have to move on?

Manis: I do a lot of “tuck this away for later.”

Dvoskin: I was fascinated in my theater history class with the final projects how many of the final projects took up gender and sexuality; they had to take two different movements and put them in conversation with each other in performance, because that was a central theme of my class. Stuff doesn’t happen in isolation. I would say that more than a third of the groups chose to use either lesbian, feminist, or queer (or some combination thereof, since they’re not easy to pry apart) performance as one of their two movements, which I found heartening.

Manis: You know, and I should—I have my students read Brecht, which is theoretical, and then we talk about—since Brecht is all about making arguments; that’s his shtick anyway—there’s some theoretical work that happens there.

Viz: And just as a final question about classroom affect, not just the students’ but your own, since the musical itself is such a theatrical, dramatic genre that is conscious of its own stylistic features, have you found that teaching musicals made you conscious of your own performativity as an instructor, and has that ever affected the way you’ve developed a classroom persona? Not that you would ever probably go in with arms wide—

Dvoskin: Depending on the day, I might. I performed a number on the day we did A Chorus Line.

Viz: Really?

Dvoskin: Well, for a good reason. I had been joking about it for a couple of days beforehand since it’s a musical that I love and I used to do one of the songs as an audition number, but—

Viz: Not “Dance 10, Looks 3”?

Dvoskin: No, but I was joking that I should do that for my students, just to see what would happen. No, what happened was that a student asked, “how does the song ‘Sing’ work, because if she can’t sing, how does she sing a song?” When it’s on the page you can’t tell. And I said, “Actually, it’s very—I need an Al,” which is the other character in the song. And I knew that I had enough musical theater junkies in the class that I would get someone, and sure enough, several hands went up. And I was like “Great,” and performed a chunk of the song for them, because it was easier to do it than to explain how it worked. I mean, I could have probably done that in a sentence or two too, but with the singing there’s a visceral sense of “Oh. Yeah. OK,” and besides, it was a day on musical theater! But I’m also a performer deep down and so when it comes right down to it I’m likely to show that when I can. I actually think I’ve thought more about my persona in terms of teaching 301, where it was shaped more by: there are 400 of them staring at me, how do I craft something that will make me approachable and likeable but also authoritative enough to not have 400 students talking for an hour. I think that really helped shape my teacher-performer self because that was the first class I taught here.

Viz: Wow.

Dvoskin: Yeah, the primary thing—I also was a TA for the small Intro for Majors class, but I was a TA for 301 for three semesters before I taught it, so my initial experiences were, “Hello, large theater-like room full of people,” and I’m sure being a musical theater person had something to do with how I came up with who I am.

Manis: Yeah, my affect in the classroom is, I don’t know if it’s as influenced by me as a musical theater person as much as by me as a fan, and so for instance in the rhetoric of performance class the first thing I do on the first day is show them a clip from Lost and then we analyze it. So that’s one of the first things we do and I don’t hide my enthusiasm about it. I’ll show it and then I’ll go, “BOOM,” and then we’ll talk about it—we’ll talk about what’s so compelling about it and why we get excited about it. The other thing about me is that I have—even when I taught theater history which was a 60 person class—I must be performing something because one of the comments I got was that “she’s so happy all the time, I don’t know how I feel about it.” So it’s enthusiasm for me, and I guess that does come from a sort of—I’m sure that there’s an ethos of musical theater in there and an ethos of fandom for me. And because I want to model that fandom doesn’t mean mindlessness: that you can be totally enthusiastic about something and still totally thinking about it very seriously.

Dvoskin: And I do set myself up from day one in every class I teach, whether I’m introducing myself, part of what I talk about is that my work is in musical theater, but I’m also a big musical theater geek, and I may burst into song at any moment. It’s part of what I put out there, because it’s true.

Manis: It’s true.

Dvoksin: There’s an off-chance that I may find myself singing and not know it. It happens

Manis: I find myself saying things randomly like, “look at what we can accomplish—together.”

Dvoskin: If anything that’s a point of contact for the students. We bond. Some of them roll their eyes, and I’m always very careful to say that you don’t have to like musicals, I won’t judge you.

Viz: I did more straight theater in high school and not musicals, so I had to specifically promise myself and my students I wouldn’t sing, and it does make it harder to discuss the songs at times. But thank you both so much for doing this interview with me and I hope that this is a nice little capstone on your time here at UT. Thank you very much!

Hell-O?: Glee’s Karotic Appeals

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:24:34 +0000

Image Credit: Hulu

Glee’s return last night to television with their new episode “Hell-O” not only served to get my students excited this morning before class, but also demonstrated the utility of using rhetorical concepts to analyze the musical genre. In this unit of my class my students are considering how kairos informs musical performances.

Kairos, defined by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee as “situational kind of time, something close to what we call ‘opportunity’ (as in ‘the time is ripe’),” is a concept that works well for thinking through musicals as it asks students to complicate their ideas of context and audience. What appeals may work for one group at one particular time and place might not serve as well in another time. Arguments about, say, feminism receive a different reception today than they did in 1960, so an analysis of Bye Bye Birdie would want to take that into account. Because students can often assume that audiences’ dispositions are constant, looking at a contemporary cultural example like Glee can show students how kairos is both situational and can be created by careful rhetors.

In the case of this episode, which just aired yesterday, “Hell-O” seeks to draw viewers back into the world of Glee over four months after the previous episode, “Sectionals,” which showed New Directions winning their glee club sectionals competition. “Hell-O” also has to establish the new conflict between the club and their regionals rival Vocal Adrenalin as well as the new romantic developments between Finn, Rachel, and Rachel’s new suitor Jesse St. James. Thus the show takes advantage of this moment of re-introduction by incorporating a number of songs into the show that contain the word “Hello” in their title, as by including Lionel Richie’s famous number:

What makes this number successful is not only the charm of Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff (former co-stars in Spring Awakening) but also the winking inclusion of the number into the plot. This song sets up the lonely Rachel Berry to fall in love with the successful senior St. James as it simultaneously introduces him and his vocal abilities to the show’s viewers. The violinists who pop up in the background ready to accompany them acknowledge the musical genre’s falsity while also drawing attention to the moment’s created “magic.” After this scene, the teenage Rachel is ready to think of herself as “in love” with a man she barely knows, and the music sets the audience up to believe this. Likewise, the show’s closing number “Hello Goodbye” works towards a similar goal:

The titular hello and goodbye demonstrate the complex division and development in the Rachel and Finn relationship: while the episode started with Rachel assuming that she and the reluctant Finn were dating, it ends with Finn interested in Rachel, while she is pursing a secret relationship with Jesse. In other words, as she says goodbye, he says hello. Their body language as they move back and forth reverses the dynamic of the first thirteen episodes: now he is the pursuer, and she the pursued. However, coming at the end of the episode, this number sets up their new romantic conflict for this season’s remaining eight episodes. The show says goodbye for the evening, but lets us know that this is far from permanent. Here, Glee takes advantage of the kairotic moment to not only maintain its meta-discourse by winking to the audience but also to set up dramatic arcs and create narrative tension between the New Directions group and Vocal Adrenaline; the road to hell is paved with hello, in other words. While the reviews have been mixed about certain other elements in this episode, I only wish my students could grasp kairos as easily as Glee does here.

The Glee Effect: New Media Marketing for Old Institutions

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:52:57 +0000

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds! After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz. I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all. My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”

While I might critique the video for what seems to me to be an excessive length (it’s over 14 minutes, and starts to drag during the long list of student activity groups), what I find fascinating about this is that what seems to be one of the most traditional American universities is choosing to brand themselves using the most current cultural trends: the YouTube viral video and the unexpected musical. While Andrew Johnson, the Yale graduate who dreamed up the idea, disclaims that he was influenced by shows like Glee and High School Musical, the “campiness” noted by Matthew Nojiri of ABC seems very influenced by Glee’s particular brand of snark and softness.

What Nojiri doesn’t discuss is that these attempts to advertise colleges are a long-standing trend. A former professor of mine, Mark Edmundson, wrote a wildly controversial essay called “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students” for Harper’s in September 1997 which critiqued universities for marketing themselves to students “immersed in a consumer mentality.” This ad does just that, selling things like Yale’s residential colleges (and their organic meals) alongside experiences like “monitor[ing] a foreign election. / And now I volunteer at a law school clinic on human rights protection.” While both things might appeal to a student body, there’s something uncomfortable about suggesting that the university is another fashionable purchase to make alongside a Wii or a hipster shirt, or that volunteering at law school clinics is cool because cute girls do it while sitting in fabulous new buildings.

Glee, as I’ve already noted, markets itself as dramatic irony; what is more interesting about the Glee
phenomenon is how successfully it has turned itself not only into a popular television show, but also an iTunes phenomenon where individuals can buy cast recordings of the songs, and season DVDs before the season is even fully finished. Taking advantage of the appeal of old 80s songs and new R&B htis, Glee is helping make FOX serious money in a time when media conglomorates are trying to find ways to monetize the web. While it’s understandable that in a time of financial crisis even Ivies like Yale want to seek out the greatest number of possible undergraduates to fund their coffers, there’s something disturbing about a university marketing itself like a musical. Is the slick marketing of “That’s Why I Chose Yale” a little too knowing? What is the substance underneath which this video is meant to express? Or is it a good sign that professors seem to be rethinking what they're doing as not merely educating, but selling valuable skillsets and educational services for a newly media-savvy generation? Maybe Yale's Glee-ification is just all in good honest American fun, like the musical itself.

Teenage Wasteland

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:46:18 +0000

Image Credit: Spring Awakening

This weekend I happened to attend a performance from the Broadway Across America’s tour of Spring Awakening, which was incredibly enjoyable. The show, based on Wedekind’s 1890s play, deals with issues of teenage sexuality, rebellion, depression, and even abortion. Spring Awakening does a very good job in its staging and design of making the connection between teens of the 1890s with teens of the 2000s.

The costumes on the National Tour in particular help make this connection: the young Moritz wears shoes that strongly resemble Converse All-Stars along with his knickerbockers, and Georg styles his hair in a fauxhawk. The set mixes over-aestheticized Victorian pictures of angels with neon lighting, and the lyrics also reflect a contemporary sensibility, with songs like “Totally Fucked” and “The Bitch of Living.” However, while Spring Awakening has uniquely seized the attention of its largely youthful audience, it seems to be part of a particular phenomenon.

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Amanda after watching Spring Awakening about our mutual love of Fox’s new musical television show Glee, in which it occurred to me that one thing the musical does very well is express teenage angst. Off the top of my head, some popular musicals set among high schoolers include Bye Bye Birdie, Grease, High School Musical, and Hairspray. While organic form is a more Coleridgean concept than rhetorical, perhaps there is something about the way in which this genre involves visual rhetoric that is particularly appropriate for the “drama” of teenage life.

Image Credit: Photobucket

While Glee is about teens, it directs itself towards a slightly different audience than Spring Awakening. The advertising for the show uses the L hand sign for loser as a part of its logo, which has been a part of teen movie rhetoric as far back as Clueless, if not further. However, over the summer Fox built up its teen audience by advertising the show over an extended mall tour. The musical selections however reflect a desire to appeal to a wide audience, with such choices as Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison,” Kanye West’s “Golddigger,” and “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret. Glee’s audience is expected to be in the know, and to enjoy the irony of its extremely stereotypical characters (such as the gay kid who enjoys dancing to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”), but at the same time to feel a wholesome glee in its colorful costumes and slick marketing. This heightened reality in which characters sing works particularly well for characters like the dramatic Rachel Berry who dreams of Grammy awards and popular boyfriends, but also for the hapless Mr. Schuster who is trying to relive his glee club youth through his students.

Maybe what is interesting about these works is that teen years work well with musicals because both are about heightened realities, but both work as metaphors for life in general. Joss Whedon mined high school and tropes of high school life in order to make larger arguments about the world in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and what Glee and Spring Awakening can do works along similar lines. All of these texts require multigenerational audiences that can read their visuals at different levels of allusive comprehension.

Some Enchanted Image

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:23:56 +0000

Right now in my class we’re preparing to turn in the first draft of the second paper assignment, which is a comparative rhetorical analysis between two productions of the same musical where I’d like my students to talk about the different rhetorical arguments made by each production using sets, costumes, and performance, as well as changed scripts. In order to alleviate student concerns, I’ve set myself the task to write a sample paper for them. It’s been an interesting experience for me, and a somewhat difficult one. For my texts, I’ve chose to compare the original 1949 Broadway production of South Pacific with the 2008 revival.

Image Credit: CastRecordings.com

What I wanted the students to really do in this assignment is to analyze the visual rhetoric of each production and compare their different strategies each uses to make their argument to their audience. One of the striking issues with the 2008 production is that it was designed to look visually similar to the original 1949 production. Clive Barnes noted that the actress who plays the play’s heroine Nellie Forbush gives “an uncannily precise re-creation of [Mary Martin, the actress who originated the role on Broadway]’s ‘Honey Bun’” in his review. You can see below how the costume O’Hara wears for that number in 2008 deliberately invokes the original worn by Mary Martin:

Image Credit: Playbill.com

This may be in part because this is the first official Broadway revival of the piece, and so is thus more bound to the visual heritage of this popular musical, but I’m also interested in how maybe this intertextual visual creates a rhetoric of nostalgia. Ben Brantley’s review for the Times describes the production “as if a vintage photograph had been restored not with fuzzy, hand-colored prettiness but with you-are-there clarity.” There’s an interesting argument going on here: South Pacific thus allows us to access a pure American past without mediation, while being itself part of a highly mediated genre. Nostalgia thus isn’t about accessing something lost or absent, but is rather a real history that we can actual replay over and over again. (Look again at the Cast Recording cover at the top here, too: the visual is strangely faded and impressionistic, and in particularly interesting place. How does this visual rhetoric work against what Brantley observes?)

While I quite like this argument (which follows my recent fascination with Colonial Williamsburg as “history come to life”), my concern at this point is whether or not I can expect my students to do this sort of subtle distinguishing, or if I should just warn them that the more different the presentations, the easier it will be for them to discuss the differences. Hopefully my paper-production can serve as inspiration for theirs.

Blogging Pedagogy: Or, How to Make Students Read Musicals as Rhetorical Texts?

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:10:53 +0000

Andi, I enjoyed reading your post from Saturday, as I'm struggling myself to think about how to teach visual rhetoric in my classroom-although, the concerns I'm undergoing are much different from yours. There may be ethical concerns about using podcasts to teach a variety of songs united around a different theme, but most of what I do will involve looking at pretty pictures.

Credit: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

As I'm moving from unit one (where we've focused on introducing the basic terms of rhetorical study and mastering discussions of musical lyrics and songs) into unit two (where we'll begin watching full musicals and stage performances), I had the students watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog as an example of a short musical (link to the musical in full here), and discuss how it relates to American values. On Friday we'll move into a discussion of visual rhetoric by looking back visually at Dr. Horrible (to save time), but I'm struggling to think about how to discuss the visual elements not just of the static photo, which can be easily captured, but also the moving image.

What kind of language is necessary to talk about how running a hand through one's hair builds ethos? Some of the static imagery should be easy: as with the pictures below, where the shift in Dr. Horrible's color-coordinated costume signifies a move from innocence to experience/evil:

Credit: Dr. Horrible Screencaps

However, while delivery is one of the five classical canons of rhetoric, it doesn't get much play in modern textbooks. If anybody can recommend any sources to me, I'd be happy to test them out on my students. I imagine we might end up adapting a vocabulary from performance studies to serve rhetorical purposes, which should work. I'd appreciate having something more to say than just pointing out Evil Thomas Jefferson to them, though.

Credit: Dr. Horrible Screencaps