Skip to main content

Katharine Means What a Riot! Response

In 2005 Mady Shutzman was invited by CalArts CAP to write a play for the teenage participants Plaza de la Raza arts center in East Los Angeles to perform. At first I was intrigued by this, as my limited knowledge of Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed techniques has been around the participatory games, activities, and techniques used to build community. I know some about Forum and Legislative Theatre, but had little conception of what a TO play would look like. Shutzman's piece, UPSET!, was modeled using Boal's Joker System. There is a character called the Joker who probes the characters and audience during the play with the "ultimate goal to raise questions, offer multiple points of view, and encourage dialogue". Shutzman used this form as a "means to incorporate the teens curiosity, dismay, outrage, confusion, fear, and inspiration in relation to the subject matter of the play within the play." The teens decided upon Rodney King and Claudette Colvin (a young African-American woman who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger nine months before Rosa Parks but did not receive the same national attention) as the historical characters they wanted to explore. These teenagers were predominantly Latinx and did not want to be cast as "poor Latinos", but "in the spirit of what the theatrical arts have to offer, they wanted a different part". Some of the methodologies Shutzman and the teenagers used to construct the piece include obviously Boal, but also Brechtian, and poplar theater techniques from the San Fransisco Mime Troupe and Teatro Campesino. It is this melding of pop culture, like the Wheel of Fortune segment in UPSET! to comment on both historical and contemporary life that I am most drawn to.

Some questions I have for Mady are:
Why in the roundtable discussion you held with the production team of UPSET! that is heavily quoted in this article were there no voices of the teenagers included?
How did you balance your desires as a playwright with the desires of the teenagers? For examole, it seemed many students expressed a desire to play a single character. How did you weigh their wants against your own?
Can you explain further what you mean by Manichean?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HIP HOP AND THE PRISON SYSTEM

“With five percent of the world's population, the US incarcerates 25 percent of the world's prisoners” (Daisy Hudson, Noisey Magazine. 2014). That same year “African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population, though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015 (NAACP). The prison system in America serves not as a correctional facility, but a container for which black bodies are buried alive. The conditions of which inmates are kept, the disparity in numbers and portrayal of those incarcerated. There is no question that factors such as education, employment, mental and physical health; the lack of access to such resources targets and propels African Americans through the pipeline to prison. In our history, it seems that prison, or largely the criminalization of African Americans, Black men in particularly, has been used as a tactic of oppr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tuition meeting

Speaking point: We have spent over 60 thousand dollars on this school so far, we have tolerated the raise each year. At some point we do not have more money to give and we are pushed out along with all of our debt including interest. With this false start we lack the motivation to attend another school in the future, therefore leaving us uneducated and in debt. Other than the knowledge gained, this would be a waste of two years of my life and in fact sets me back in my career.
Post a Comment
Read more

CalArts Garden

The reason why I choose this topic is that I know a lot of students are complaining that CalArts is too plain. It is just one main building with a small campus. I would like to design a space for the CalArts campus where students and teachers can work together as a community and taking care of the plants. The community can hold a farmers market, season food festival or food-related artwork competition.    Few things I read about the benefits of school garden:   -  Gardens create opportunities for students to work cooperatively and to take on responsibilities.  - Gardens provide unique opportunities for cross-generational connections.  - Students learn to focus and patience, cooperation, teamwork, and social skills.  -Combining language arts and gardening activities brings a hands-on element to a subject normally taught lecture-style, providing inspiration and motivation for students who struggle to focus in traditional cl...
Post a Comment
Read more