Here are two of my attempted starting posts for this blog that I wrote earlier in the summer. I have cleaned them up a bit:


Second week of July, 2009:

So today was the first day of the rest of my life. I am writing this first blog in a word document because I am too afraid to post my thoughts directly to the internet; it is frightening releasing my impulsive thoughts straight to cyber-reality. I feel that in time I will become more used to it though.

This blog was intended to be a reflection on every book and intelligent thought I had, but I just couldn’t get started with that in mind. It seemed too fake, too forced, like a really poorly designed high school assessment. I had a conversation today about how good writing and blogging in particular can be when it is impulsive, impromptu-ed, and altogether fluid and true. So here is my first true blog.

This summer has been very difficult for me. This morning was one of those mornings that I woke up with a little black rain cloud over me. My job hasn’t been working out, and in general I just feel stagnant and lousy. As the day went on, however, things took a turn for the better. I had a simple breakfast sitting on the back porch with my mom. She always seems to make things better when we talk. I also found that I could volunteer teaching at children’s theatre classes next week. Now, not only will I have something to wake up for in the mornings, but this will give me the chance to work with children and theatre once again. I have been craving these opportunities for the past year. I miss the learning that working with students can bring, and the role-based understanding that theater can shed on my life.


Blog 2: 20.7.09

Title: Free Revelations in a Park, or, Why Did I not Know the True Story of Cinderella Until Now?
It's about time I blog again. Much wonderful life has happened since my last post.

Last night Abby and I accompanied her friends to a free performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in West Goshen park. Seeing a play put on in an outside theatre was the perfect end to a week of contemplations on theatre. One of the books I have been gleaning insight from this summer is "Role Playing and Identity", which analyzes through a phenomenalogical perspective the benefits of "the world" of theatre in manifesting aspects of the world. This book has been shaping and guiding my thoughts on theatre and appearances for some time now. This past week provided me with a perfect opportunity to see theatre in person, because I volunteered at a children’s theatre camp. Every day for a week I worked with children and had many conversations with Mr. T about theatre and life in general. So you can imagine how excited I was to apply all of my knowledge when Abby and I sat in the park watching the Commonwealth Classic Theatre Company play on a Midsummer's Night.

"Role Playing" begins by explaining the relationship between an Audience and Actors in collaboratively giving authority to each other during a theatrical performance. The actors play a concentrated image of life as the audience authorizes them to represent life and to represent the individual members of the audience as the characters in the work. In Midsummer, Shakespear brilliantly calls this agreement into the foreground by showing how ridiculous theatre becomes when it tries to explain this inherent agreement. Bottom tells Quince that the play (within a play) that they plan to perform needs a prolougue to explain that he is not in actuality Pyramus, and will not, in all actuality, kill himself during the performance. He goes even further to recommend that Snug the Joiner, as he comes on stage dressed as a lion, should speak through his mask to let it be known to the women in the audience that he is not actually a lion, and therefore, they have nothing to fear from his (intended) frightening performance. The audience of the play laughs at their unesscesary explanations. Shakespeare gives the absent, unspoken agreement presence.

The book also talks of the human phenomenon to stand in for roles, and the danger to the human psyche of not being able to fill a role. Ageus in the beginning of the play demands that his daughter Hermia marries not her true love, Lysander, but rather, the man that he has picked for her husband (Dimitrius). In typical Athenian style, the duty of the role of daughter is given much more importance than her role of lover. Shakespeare reverses this role in the end. He claims through the verdict of Theseus that the young couples' roles as lovers are more important than the duty that children owe to their parents. Whether this message contains more significance to life than pure comedy is left up to the audience's interpretation.

[Aside] I enjoy hearing bells toll the hour of the night as I write on my porch.

Alongside theatre, I have been meditating on the structure and meaning of storytelling to humans. As a great professor of mine once summarized, humans are symbol processing machines, and many times the best way we can communicate and remember ideas are through stories. Abby and I were talking of humanities and the stories that have been passed down through generations this evening when she asked if I had ever seen the movie Ever After. I had not. So we watched it.

This film does a fantastic job of bringing modern sensibilities to the lovely fairytale of Cinderella. The main character in Ever After, Danielle, is a strong, independent charachter, compared to the Cinderella of olde who sits and wishes and washes and waits. Danielle reads, has ideas, works, and never fails to stand up for herself. I also really enjoyed that the film gave more emotional and psychological depth to the rest of the characters. The "wicked step-mother" is shown as loving Danielle's father posthumously and at one point in the story almost shows love and affection to Danielle. One of Daniell's "evil step-sisters" develops from a timid character to a young woman who is able to stand up to and defy her mother's cruelty. The prince goes through an internal battle over the worth he places on a person's station in life compared to their personality.

These deep characters made me question whether or not this version of Cinderella should even be called a fairytale. Fairytales, as a genre, typically feature somewhat flat charachters in order to portray a moral. What's more, all fairytales include magic. Instead of her magical fairy godmother, Danielle receives help from Leonardo DaVinci. What does that say about the nature of logic? An even deeper question, which Abby posed to me, is what does that say about the nature of magic?

Acting and storytelling both serve as lenses through which men, women, and children can take pause to view and analyze life. What is amazing about these stories is that as an audience, we have the advantage of being able to view these lessons either as an objective observer or as an intimate character who is being represented by an actor or story character. I plan to study closer the benefits of theatre and story telling as pedagogic and philosophic tools. For now, I am elated to discover how much there is to explore in things I have naturally cared about since childhood.