Tuesday 27 September 2011

B1 mind map for the word Ephemerality (W1a)


Push your limits!
Feel! Live passionately!
React! Take action!

Make an effort, and capture the present..the moment...and life....


3 comments:

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  2. SPECTACLE - In Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, Thiong’o speaks to the events which transpired at the National Theatre in 1976 when the Festac Drama Group 77 proposed to have two of their productions shown at the Kenya National Theatre before Kenyan audiences before being presented in Lagos. As Thiong’o stated, “we were sure that there would be no problems: logic and good sense pointed to the selected time and place.”
    The Festac Drama Group 77 were denied the dates for the performance and, despite attempts to avoid these obstructions, they were given eight dates to perform their two shows between Bossman’s Jeune Ballet de France and the City Players’ A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Thiong’o’s responded to this by stating, “Kenya would be seen through the eyes of a French ballet and a British farce.”
    The spectacle of this event was now fueled with passion through personal and societal connections individual spectators would be internalizing. The identity of the Kenyan people was being confronted and, in a way, challenged by imported ephemeral acts. The Kenyan audience was now entering the National Theatre with very personal, passionate attachments to the performance and the spectacle surrounding in it. In this way, the ephemeral has a unique, personal meaning to each audience member and gives the ephemerality a life beyond the stage.

    WARWICK - GROUP 1A

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  3. SPACE - The Trial of Dedan Kimathi also serves as a basis for our examination of space in regards to ephemerality. As a physical space, the National Theatre of Kenya serves as an architectural structure designed for the ephemeral experience in the way of performance. These ephemeral experiences take over space in time, space in histories. As Thiong’o pointed out in Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, “the site was not a space empty of history,” but next to the theatre is the Norfolk Hotel which “overlooks the site where in 1922 African workers were massacred by the British police.”
    On the opening night of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi in which the ephemeral act rippled beyond the walls of the theatre as a result of enthusiasm for the production. The audience, those who were left with undeniable impressions from the ephemeral, reacted by spilling into the streets and dancing in front of the Norfolk Hotel, the site of the bloody massacre. And, in this way, space takes the form of the remembrance for those who lost their lives in the struggle for Kenya’s freedom. The remembrance of the space, the history of the Norfolk Hotel, takes on the form of an ephemeral experience and, in turn, has created an ephemeral space in time.

    IMPRESSION - Relating to the reception of an ephemeral act or performance, one can perceive that, as Richard Schechner points out, the interactivity that results or is created by a particular event exceeds the mere materiality of it. And that is what makes the uniqueness of that event. So, interactivity, may build a sense of connection between the ones who performs the ephemeral act, or a specific “action” and the ones who witness it.
    Impression, in a broader sense, may not refer only to the specificity of personal circumstances and judgments of the performer or the creator, as it appears to be from seeing the mind map. But also, on the effects provoked by the interactivity, that shared space caught in between the materiality of performance and its reception.

    TIME AND PERFORMANCE - From the ‘time’ and ‘performance’ arms of the mind map, Taylor’s reading on The Archive and the Repertoire provides several interesting points of departure to the idea of ephemerality in performance. Her reading deals with how performance traditions negotiate the fact that all performed acts are ephemeral, fleeting, limited by the forward flow of time and that the performed act cannot be truly repeated even if it is reproduced with complete fidelity, simply because it has to be reperformed in a new time, in front of a new audience, who is different merely because of the passage of time.
    Hence performance traditions make a conscious choice, with respect to what they preserve. performance serves as a means to crystallize that which cannot be restaged or repeated within the body, by embodying memory and serving as a vessel to preserve the ephemeral and locking it corporeally.

    WARWICK - GROUP 1A

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