Hello friends,
This week has been wild. To start with, we’ve been learning about an incredible number and variety of performance artists over the past few days, which I’ve found exhilarating and so, so inspiring.
We’ve also been doing a lot of performances ourselves! I, for one, started off the week right by getting married a bunch of times. My group was set to go on Monday for the last of the performances about hierarchy. Our piece explored the way that cultural practices are institutionalized through repetition. We were also engaging several hierarchies: the unequal gender roles within a traditional heterosexual marriage, and the fact that some relationships are legitimized through marriage, while others are not.
The next step was to explore site-specific performances. In class on Tuesday, the majority of the class went to King Soopers, a local grocery store, and shopped in slow motion. Some people in the store became annoyed, others joined in, and an older woman remarked to one of my classmates that the performance was a great reminder to slow down and enjoy life.
While this was going on, two other students and I went to Wooglin’s, a local deli, and performed some ordinary actions (entering and leaving, asking for and drinking water, conversing, and muttering to ourselves). We then repeated the sequence of events four times. We were trying out this form of performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3hV1qSF-3U
We definitely succeeded in amusing and confusing Wooglin’s customers and employees, if nothing else.
Part Two to come soon!
XOXO,
Gossip Serb
