The Fox's Findings

My last year at NYU, I took a stage combat class with a professor who, as he liked to remind us, was kind of a “big deal.” “Bill” had worked on many movies and many, many Broadway shows and told stories from these various experiences many times over the course of the two-credit elective class.             But this isn’t about Bill and his Spring Awakening  or Spider-Man: Turn of the Dark stories. This is about one of Bill’s exercises.               He called it his Vietnam Death Exercise. The name alone should tell you a lot. Looking back now, it’s hard to explain why he included it in his curriculum because the exercise itself had more to do with acting than with combat.             This is how it worked: the class was divided in half. Some of us were to be the Vietnamese prisoners. The other half of the c...

When thinking about and discussing gender performativity, it seemed impossible not to write about the new wave of feminism that seems to be sweeping the country. Although there is no denying that women have come a long way since, say, first earning the right to vote in 1920, ask any women and she will tell you that archaic expectations of what it is to be a “proper” or “well behaved” woman still annoyingly find ways to slip into our subconscious and cause us to edit our behavior. Whether it’s those moments when I see friends getting engaged and feel a weird sort of panic about “needing to find a man” (what?!) or not wanting to seem too confrontational or contradictory to those around me (really?!) because someone somewhere told me that wasn’t very ladylike, these moments are always simultaneously maddening and heartbreaking for me. So this wave of movements (perhaps spurred into action by our election of Drumf into office, who’s to say) has been pretty exciting to witness and be a...

When I "performed" my devised Vocal History for my professor and my class at the beginning of my graduate school experience, I included a moment in which I talked about all the different ways I used my voice depending on the different roles in my life. There was my hospitality voice, my teacher voice, my friends voice, my family voice, my actor voice, my real voice, etc. Though perhaps I was unaware of it at the time, this part of my vocal history implied that I was aware of "performing" different versions of myself depending on my surrounding environment.  This personal experience causes me to be drawn to the connection between theatre, performance, and Carlson's idea of the fact that "[p]erformance is always performance  for  someone." When you think about the idea of “performing” gender or “performing” a power dynamic, it is worth considering whether or not that performance would still be taking place if the only audience present is the self (w...