Author Archives: dfz

By Desiree Fernandez

When thinking about political figures, or rather actors, it isn’t often the case that celebrity would come into play in regards to credibility. With the current US president Donald Trump, being a rich capitalist celebrity is his only credibility. In Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, the article focuses on how information and fact is now circulated due to a change of power. Having a reality tv star as president of the US has placed enormous value on social media and the dramatic. The information, or the “text”, is consumed through Trump’s main platform, Twitter, or circulated through fake news on Facebook, or debated on TV. The question is, what has caused us to teeter away from data and professionalism–“the analog.” It isn’t the president to blame entirely, but perhaps the digital era and pleasure his audience seeks from media and the many forms and genres it comes in.

What should the purpose of the internet be, especially for the political? Mark Poster in Information Please argues that the purpose of the internet has been primary for the development and sustainability of global economies. The internet has elicited international consumerism by the form of accessible communication. However, the internet should be used for more than the benefit of the economy but for global communication and engagement. Poster also asks us to rethink the term citizen and “the machine heterogenesis” of the human which I am not quite sure what he is referring to.

There is no arguing that technology and media platforms have a huge role in politics at this time. We see that in the above examples, especially in regards to Trump. Paul Starr in his Foreign Affairs article “Big Tech and the Business of Surveillance” points out that the power technology holds in politics and society will only cause more opposition towards technology. Many blame these platforms for what content and conversations are produced from them. Starr writes, “Nationalism is on the march today, and the technology industry is in its path: countries that want to chart their own destiny will not continue to allow U.S. companies to control their platforms for communication and politics.” When we talk about chart, we can literally think about marking on the internet in which things become materialized. But what is Starr referring to when he is discussing the liberation from the US and its use of technology?

by Desiree Fernandez

Macchiavelli’s The Prince is a handbook on how to conquer and rule a land. Macchiavelli prescribes chapters on how to be in power and stay in power through tools of force and persuasion. How does one lead and persuade people to fear and to follow?

“Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science” (Kolbert). This NY Times article uses information from a science experiment to explain why people can’t think straight. Even after giving people proven facts, it is hard to persuade them to change their mind or convince them of the absolute truth. This relates to tools of persuasion, or furthermore, and explanation of why people think the way they do or continue to have their beliefs even after shows evidence. So doing so, in current politics, we play towards people’s emotions more rather than the truth.

Performance Studies scholar Richard Schechner discusses the terms make believe versus make belief, which relates also to how we stage ideology and community. Make believe is something that is staged to be false, that we can clearly decipher as fictitious. Make belief is a world or character that has been fabricated and appears to be true and genuine to the audience, and often times can’t be distinguished as fake. This make belief is a tool of persuasion that is very familiar when we think of the US president Donald Trump.

By Desiree Fernandez

Ariella Azoulay, in conversation with french philosopher Jacques Rancierè, talks about the role spectators have, especially in regards to photographers. It is interesting to think of photographers as documents of truth. On the contrary, photographs could be manipulated like art to pursue one own’s truth.

The advocacy that is occurring by and for the “undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic” is due to means of the new digital platform. A voice is given to these people, fighting for immigration and LGBTQ+ reform, because of the accessibility through the Internet. The internet is a vessel holding what we see and what we want to see. It is interested to thing about what is on the internet and then what is then harvested in “the dark web.” There is a fearlessness for those minoritarian, often punished, subjects when they are allotted a platform where allies can work together to “cultivate queer democratic sensibilities that are unrepentant, audacious, and fearless” (Beltrán 104). The internet is the place for this alliance to take place.

Similar to Azouley, Jacque Rancierè is also interested in a new type of spectatorship. In Rancierè’s The Emancipated Spectator, there is a new call to action for the intervention and role of spectatorship. Rancierè not only advocated for a more active spectator, but a new type of performance that the spectator digests. In order for there to be a more active spectator, Rancierè argues we need more active images.

“[W]e need images of action, images of the true reality or images that could immediately be inverted into their true reality, in order to show us that the mere fact of being a spectator, the mere fact of viewing images, is a bad thing. Action is presented as the only to the evil of the image and the guilt of the spectator. [T]he only response to this evil is activity” (Rancierè 87-88).

However, Rancierè clarifies that through the digestion of images, the spectator will only be an active spectator, not one that takes action. Therefore, we need images of action or media that advocates for some type of action so that the spectator will be an extension of that action, yet still in a passive way.

by Desiree Fernandez

Since ancient to postmodern theatre, we, as theatre scholars and artists, have been striving to improve what theatre is and what theatre should be and do. Theatre was recognized as ritual, as a practice for change, or celebration, or even advocacy for something, whether that be resources or action. In a postmodern era, we are still fighting for rights of people who have been colonized and oppressed by those who still benefit from their ancestor’s actions. Beyond being a tool to entertain or to teach, theatre should be a vessel, an “incubator” (Parks 4) to create new perspective, alternate histories, and allow bodies to decolonize and recover from trauma within their ancestral memory stored in DNA. By looking at performances from Guillermo Gomez Peña, we can then discuss how performance can be used as a way to decolonize and create new history, a reclaimed self. I am interested in body politics and how through political protest, bodies transform from objects to subjects and back again.  

Peña’s Mapa/Corpo 2 is an example of how theatre is being used as an incubator to change our society’s opinions and functions of diverse bodies based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, ability, and size. A new truth is being created on stage and actors are standing in for characters who aren’t actually there, the post-colonial subject stands in for the colonized, a person who has been oppressed or discriminated based on race, gender, ability, or even size.  

Audience members in Mapa/Corpo 2 becoming involved in the performance piece. Audience members used bodies of performers as canvases as well as helped them relieve pain and to even move. Seda and Patrick 2009.

This is exactly what is occurring during Guillermo Peña’s Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium, a performance piece that allows the participation of the audience to help those characters emancipate from colonization, trauma, and violence. ​

When both bodies have been decolonized with the audience’s help, the performers look each other in the eyes, as if recognizing and acknowledging each other. The performers’ bodies in Mapa/Corpo 2 become La Pocha Nostra’s artistic canvas. They function as intentional instruments of artistic agency that display the effects of colonization and violence. Thus, the bodies represent the memory of violence against the Other; they create a narrative of resistance to violence and colonization. This resistance can be understood from the multiple perspectives of gender, ethnicity, and nationality. If, as Richard Schechner has argued, “There are no clear boundaries separating everyday life from family and social roles or social roles from job roles, church ritual from trance, acting onstage from acting offstage, and so on, ‘the per formers’ genders and multiethnic backgrounds also contribute to the overall meaning of Mapa/ Corpo 2’. Thus, the individual body becomes emblematic of everybody that has endured pain, violence, discrimination, and colonization. In other words, the performers’ bodies play a vital role in this cross-cultural analysis of violence and colonization in which art becomes a holistic weapon aimed at decolonizing the body politic. Seda and Patrick 139

In this performance, bodies become objects that represent subjects that need to be decolonized. Peña is making a comment that by witnessing, you are taking responsibility to what has and will happen to these people. Therefore, it is only with action by those who have power (the audience) that these people can be relieved of oppression, trauma, and colonization. Though not to forget, these decolonized people will remember a new version of their existence henceforth. This memory and experience will rewrite what is their past history. 

In Guillermo Peña’s Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium, everyone in the performance space is involved in creating a new history for the artists and the people the artists represent. “This is evident from the moment the audience enters the performance space and sees two bodies lying motionless on gurneys. These are part of a visual code that refers to pain and, simultaneously, to healing. The actions throughout the performance unfold as a metaphorical healing ritual enacting the decolonization of the bodies lying on gurneys” (Seda and Patrick 135). 

When the acupuncturist begins to insert needles topped with small flags of occupier countries, the woman’s body on the other gurney becomes a metaphor for colonized and occupied territories. [I]t becomes clear that the fear and pain caused by colonization and the violenced inflicted on the bodies by means of the weapons has left on them without verbal language. The performance aims to restore voice and agency to the suffering, colonized bodies through the audience, as they help to heal the bodies by writing on them and removing the needles… By removing the needles from the woman’s body and writing on the man, the audience engages in a personal and communal act of ritualistic healing of the body politic, empowering themselves. Seda and Patrick 136-139

 Through witnessing the trauma and harm of bodies, audience members are more likely to carry that empathy they feel within their own bodies to the outside world. New stories and perspective of both the performing and the witnessing will help rewrite the cultural memory of these diverse bodies in society.  The audience member was an observer, never immersed, blinded to the suffering in order to feel relief and comfort. Colonization occurs when there is a restriction on the body, an inability to look or act a specific way according to the rule or conformities set on by society or the colonizer itself. Therefore, decolonization is a political movement allowing the individual agency and citizenship, these bodies are no longer objects but subjects of society.

Works Cited

Parks, Suzan Lori. “Elements of Style.” The America Play and Other Works. Theatre Communications Group, 1995. 6-18.

Seda, Laurietz, and Brian D. Patrick. “Decolonizing the Body Politic: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s ‘Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium.’” TDR (1988-), vol. 53, no. 1, 2009, pp. 136–141. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25599456.

3 Key Terms: 

Make Believe vs Make Belief

Archive (what is remembered in the body and in “history”)

Emancipation

By Desiree Fernandez

“Without action to bring into the play of the world the new beginning of which each man is capable by virtue of being born, ‘there is no new thing under the sun’; without speech to materialize and memorialize, however tentatively, the ‘new things’ that appear and shine forth, ‘there is no remembrance’; without the enduring permanence of a human artifact, there cannot ‘be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.’ And without power, the space of appearance brought forth through action and speech in public will fade away as rapidly as the living deed and the living word” (Arendt 204).

Both Arendt and Butler in these quotes above and below are talking about performance in regards to the live–the living and the livable. The living is looking at those who are participating, existing. The living is a condition of a subject. The livable describes the environment or conditions of the environment of the subject. In addition, the livable is the likelihood of existence. Also, when thinking about the live, it brings the idea of participation and who has the right to live. Political performance is a tool and cry for those to live in order to become the living and have the livable. Arendt believes without this action, there is no possibility for the living. Butler argues that bodies are “still here and still there” but it is through performance that there is presence. If there is no recognition, then these bodies are seen as objects rather than subjects that have a right to exist, to speak, to move through space, to be recognized. What about those bodies who don’t have the resources to perform politically? Are there specific spaces and environments that were made for bodies to not exist in the live? Perhaps examples of this are where bodies are meant to be permanently objects–prisons, concentration camps, etc.

“So when people amass on the street, once implication seems clear: they are still here and still there; they persist; they assemble, and so manifest the understanding that their situation is shared, or the beginning of such an understanding. And even when they are not speaking or do not present as set of negotiable demands, the call for justice is being enacts: the bodies assembled ‘say’ ‘we are not disposable,’ whether or not they are using words at the moment; what they say, as it were, is ‘we are still here, persisting, demanding greater justice, a release from precarity, a possibility for livable life” (Butler 25).