John’s last post outlined most of what we did during First Week, but let me update you on Friday’s class, because it was awesome! We’ve been studying a lot of political theory (and practice) and we’re just starting to get into what for me is the most fascinating part of the “art of insurgency”: the …
Category Archives: TH200
The Art of Insurgency
Thursday, Week One, Block 7, Year 4. This week is the first of four in which a group of 14 Colorado College students will be focusing their academic energy on the connections between acts of insurgency, civil disobedience, protest, regime opposition and performance. The focus is largely in the Balkans. What roles did performance play …
Kris
Yesterday was amazing. I didn’t get a chance to blog about it, but now I’m sitting in Colorado Coffee and it’s cold out and I’m wearing flip-flops, so I basically have no choice. Anyway. Yesterday we had an incredible opportunity to Skype with Kris Diaz, the playwright who wrote Chad Deity and was nominated for a …
Cognito
Well, Idris found out about my blog, so I’ve got to be more careful about what I say. Hopefully he doesn’t find my secret blog where I just complain about him–no one tell him where that one is. Anyway, today we read a play called The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. It’s by a guy …
Hit the Wall
We read an incredible play today called Hit the Wall, by Ike Holter. It was a heavily dialogue-driven, witty, sad, razor-sharp, rhythmic play that I think will stick with me for a very long time. Hit the Wall is about the Stonewall Riot, an event in 1969 that many historians seem to agree was the catalyst for …
11 Pages
It’s not good. It’s not terrible either. It’s just alright, but it’s also the longest play I’ve ever written, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. I have not written a lot of fiction in my life. This play, while definitely angsty and almost definitely shitty, is still dialogue-driven, still meets the …
7-Page Regret
I’m 7 pages into my 10-pager, and I’ve fallen into every trap I promised myself I would avoid: I’m angsty, I’m not making jokes, I’m writing about things I haven’t researched fully, and I don’t know how I’m going to end it in the next 3 to 8 pages. Dialogue is really not my forte. …
Medical Plot
That was trying to be a pun on “medical pot,” but that’s not important right now. We’re in class right now discussing a student play about a writer who loses his wife to his incompetence in husbandhood in 1939, and we’ve spent an hour discussing reasons why it’s so great and saying “I don’t want …
I Said A Hip-Hop Hippie to the Hippie
Today was hip-hop aesthetics day in Idris’s class, and it was kee-razy. We spent a lot of time discussing the categories we use to judge hip-hop music, the history behind it, the future of hip-hop, and, of course, hip-hop as a form of theatre. That’s right, hip-hop theatre. We read an essay by a performer …
Framework Narrative
We read a play today called The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones. It was near-perfect: a tasteful mix of awkward Mormon comedy and painful identity-crisis drama. One of the most interesting aspects of the play, though, wasn’t the fact that the title character is a robot, or that the protagonist has OCD. …
