Workshop Leaders
Fiona (Freddie) Harris-Ramsby, Bloomfield College
Jacqueline Rhodes, University of Texas at Austin
Drawing from Augusto Boal’s focus on aesthetic practice as transformative action in Theater of the Oppressed, Freddie Harris and Jackie Rhodes will lead a two-day workshop in which participants explore theater and documentary filmmaking as venues for critical, creative, and embodied rhetorical practice. Creative critical practice, as Ames Hawkins writes, “imagines knowledge-making as fueled by/in terms of a desire to explore and articulate critical gaps, fissures, cracks, and interstices in cultural, disciplinary, ontological and/or epistemological assumptions” (CITE). We argue that engaging in such practice necessarily involves focusing on mind/body interplay, a sort of somatic literacy that refracts and revises Boal’s practice of “Making the Body Expressive” (126).
Participants will read and discuss a number of works on embodiment, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and creative critical practice, especially as those works intersect feminist and queer theories of embodiment. How does such work articulate the critical gaps in Western assumptions about mind and body? In the midst of this discussion, however, the bulk of the workshop is body work facilitated by Harris and Rhodes. On the first day of the workshop, that is, Harris will lead participants through an acting workshop using CDA to stage and block performances of textual power. In these performances, wherein agency is often suppressed, actors will “express [these relationships] through the body, abandoning other, more common and habitual forms of expression” (Boal 126). Thus, through collaboration and rehearsal, as in Boal’s tradition of Forum Theater, and using CDA methods, these relationships will be played to the audience of other workshop participants through blocking, props, gesture, and expression. Scenes will be recorded from multiple angles on workshop participant cellphones at the end of day one.
Boal states that one should “practice theater as a language that is living and present, not as a finished product” (126). With this in mind, Rhodes’ collaborative approach to revision and regeneration in documentary filmmaking, on day two, asks participants to work their short cellphone video into “living and present” works of critical creative practice. Participants will use cellphone apps like PowerDirector (Android and iOS) and iMovie (iOS) for this work. Balancing the voices and bodies of scene participants with a director’s vision is a maker’s practice, leading to a process of constant reflection and then generation of new versions of the film. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a version of their video that reflects this regenerative approach to revision and also the critical means to write and talk about it.
Note: This workshop is not available for remote participation.
Freddie Harris is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Writing and Analysis at Bloomfield College. Her recent publication Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage examines the stage as a site from which to observe, see, and feel 20th-century rhetorical theories of the body. Harris is the Producing Artistic director of The Company@BC, the first collaborative student/faculty run theater company at Bloomfield College. The Company is dedicated to producing only plays by underrepresented and emerging performers–performances which evoke meaningful conversations about social justice that affect and shape Bloomfield’s historically diverse community.
Jackie Rhodes is professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin. A three-time winner of the CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, Jackie focuses much of her critical energy on queer approaches to multimodality and film. Her first feature film is the award-winning documentary Once a Fury (www.onceafury.com), which profiles the members of a 1970s lesbian separatist collective. She is currently filming the visual “song cycle” I am my beloveds, a set of short films exploring queer kinship.