Performance Theorists

Some of the most famous theorists or writers on performance I have learned about and read about in this class are: Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, Judith Butler, and Gregory Bateson. Victor Turner was a cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage. His work is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology. Turner’s main interests were of social drama, ritual, and rites of passage. Turner created the new concept of social drama in order to account for the symbolism of conflict and crisis resolution among Ndembu villagers. Turner spent his career exploring rituals. As a professor at the University of Chicago, Turner began to apply his study of rituals and rites of passage to world religions and the lives of religious heroes. Turner published many books and his views are taught around the world to students being educated. Richard Schechner was a university professor. Schechner is one of the founders of the Performance Studies department of the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He also founded The Performance Group, an experimental theater troupe. Schechner was also a director and directed many productions. One of Schechner’s more popular productions he directed was William Shakespear’s “Hamlet” in 1999. Gregory Bateson was a anthropologist, a social scientist, a linguist, a semiotician and a cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Bateson was once married to well known anthropologist Margaret Mead. One of the threads that connect Bateson's work is an interest in systems theory and cybernetics, a science he helped to create as one of the original members of the core group of the Macy Conferences. Bateson's take on these fields’ centers upon their relationship to epistemology, and this central interest provides the undercurrents of his thought.

performance

The word performance has become extremely popular in a wide range of activities such as: arts, literature, and social science. As its popularity and usage has grown throughout the years, people have made a complex body of writing about performance. Performance is being used each and every day involving many different types of meanings. Performance can share different morals or meanings they want share with the audience making it become one of the prominent communication factors in many cultures. Performance has become so important to us in our world in the way we interact with each other, and how we communicate with each other. Some cultures use strictly performance to communicate with each other. Performance holds many different meanings to people, but mostly when the word is brought up people think of someone or a group of people performing out something on a stage with an audience watching the performance. What a lot of people are not aware of is that performances are occurring in every one’s lives everyday and they don’t even know it. Performance as role play plays a big part in peoples lives that they are unaware of in the fact that people (sometimes unknowingly) are putting on a performance when they change their role play regarding to the situation he/she is in at that point in time. Also, the crowd of people you are interacting with and the environment you are around.

Terrell Owens

As you all may or may not know, im from Dallas, Texas. I'm completely obsessed with the Dallas Cowboys football organization, one of the most honorable fans in the world. no matter what happens during the season i still love them. for example this past year they sucked. before the season they were predicted to go to the superbowl and had high hopes to even win it. They easily had the most talent on the field no matter who they were playing even the Patirots. But its not all about talent. Its not about how much talent a single person on the field has. its about how the team meshes together and how they play together as a team. ive been getting into pro football since i was a little kid and one of my favorite recievers in nfl history is terrell owens. He has been one of my favorite players ever since he scored a touchdown for the San Fransisco 49ers and pulled a sharpie out of his sock and signed the football and gave it to someone in the stands. He has even ran to the middle of the star in the cowboys stadium and disrespected it in "our house", but i still love him and when he came to the cowboys i was so excited and so was he he even said he has always wanted to play with the star on his helmet. and he started out awesome he played three years with us and no other reciever in the nfl had more touchdown than terrell owens in those three years, not even Randy Moss with his 23 touchdown season which i wont even start to get into because that was just a ridiculous season with tom brady. but anyways, we just recently cut Terrell Owens off our team because he could not get along with our quarterback and offensive coordinator. like i said im a huge T.O. fan, but i can totally understand why we cut him. The core of our football team is so powerful right now and not to mention the mnain part, is such a young group of core players that we didnt even need him, not to mention he made our quarterback feel pressured which is our most crucial player on the team. We can do fine without T.O. (better with him) but fine without him, but if we didnt have our quarterback Tony Romo we would be horrible. but we have tony romo, jason witten, marion barber, terrance newman, roy williams, demarcus ware, and felix jones for a multiple more season and every single name i just listed is no onlder than 27 years old. So get ready for a new decade like the 90's where the Cowyboys were the most feared team in the league. They will win 3 more superbowls in the next 10 years.

Dwayne Wade

Kobe Bryant is the best basketball player in the NBA. He is my favorite player and the Lakers are my favorite team. If there is anyone in the NBA right now i could start a team with it would have to be him. buuut Dwayne Wade has just impressed me more this season than any basketball player i have ever seen play in a single season. you have to remember after Wade getting all that fame after single handedly beating the Dallas Mavericks in the 06 NBA finals and winning the mvp of that series Wade gets hurt really bad and pretty much misses a whole season. after this of course he gets criticized horribly by the media because he went from extremely hot to cold and their team finished up with the worst record in the league. Wade gets sergury done and is determined to come back and be even better which is has not been done very many times after a serious injury but Wade first goes to the Olympics and plays for USA and just plays crazy good averaging the most points out of anyone on the team and playing a less amount of minutes than most players. He was a huge factor on why the won the gold medal. Anyways, this year he just came out of the gate playing out of his mind and totally carrying his team. Wade is playing with young rookies and even making them better just from playing around him. with not a whole lot of games left in the season Wade has his young team looking good in the center of the playoff race. But after his performance last night, there is not way in hell he cant be talked about for the mvp. He's only the 2nd player in the last 20 NBA seasons (at 82 games a season) who has gone for 40 points 12 rebounds 6 assists 3 steals and 3 blocks in a single game. The best part about that is the other player that has done it is Dwayne Wade on February 28th, 10 days prior to when he did it the first time. Ha.

Youtube

dont you love youtube? i love it. i just recently downloaded this software that has a youtube converter in it. so i can download all my music from youtube now instead of limewire. limewire always fucks up my computers and makes them so slow. now all i have to do is copy the url of whatever song i want and paste it in this program i downloaded it and it converts it to an mp3 file and automatically sends it to my music folder. so now i dont just watch videos on youtube, but i use it for prob half of my presentations that ive had to do for school, and i download all my music off of it. I think its hilarious how people say other people are famous on youtube. there are a lot of funny shit on there but i had no clue thats what happened to soulja boy. i remember when that song first came out and i was watching all the instructional videos and everyone was learning the dance and it was so popular forever and i just found that out that he got noticed or whatever by puttin his shit on youtube, ha. gotta love youtube.

Created story

So the next presentation needed to be done is the created story. this has to be done by next week where all you have to do is make up a story and read it in class. This should be pretty fun actually, but does anyone know if theres a specific length on how long this story has to be?? i thought the ctritical presentations were all good it's usually not fun sitting there watching performances for the whole class period but i thought all of them were good and interesting. i still cannot believe how fast this class went by though it feels like it has bee about 4 weeks. Spring break is comin up real quick and i always start to fuck off towards the end of the semesters or quarters whatever im in at the time and start to slack hard core, but im not going to do that this time i need to get my gpa back up some.

End of Quarter

So there's two more weeks left in this winter quarter. I feel like this quarter system thing goes by soo quickly. This is only my second quarter to be here I transfered from Texas Tech University where there were semesters. Anyways, There are two more weeks left in this quarter, and I have a whooole lot of work to do. Minus the three projects I have to complete in this class in the next two weeks, I also have two long research papers to write, two final performances in two other classes, and two finals. I already did one of the performances about an hour ago in my other class it didnt go to well I feel like I wasn't near prepared enough. But thats all the work I have to do in the next two weeks not to mention I have to find a job which has been an ongoing goal for the last 4 months or so. I just started stressing over all this work at about 10 oclock last night.. thats why i'm thankful for things that calm your nerves.

Story telling

I just wanted to write how much I have enjoyed taking this elective class. I wasnt aware of how many stories I actually tell during everyday to whomever I may be talking to. Just taking this class has helped me out to be a better story teller. This class is more along the lines of childrens story telling, but it still progresses you into a better story teller. I actually think about the things I learn in this class while I am telling any type of story to someone, or a group of people. I was also unaware (previous to this class) how bad you can be at telling stories, and it really shows so I can tell when listening to a story from someone.