Eleanore Dykes
Kate Hoyt
Communication
through Literature
10/7/13
Critical
Feedback
The person whose
performance I am critiquing for this assignment is Li’s, who re-interpreted
Will’s original piece. Among the five views presented by Pelias and Shaffer in
the text, I chose to look at Li’s performance as a textual study, as a communicative
act, and as a cultural process. Let’s start with the first one, shall we? When
we look at a performance as a textual study, we are basically looking at it as
a communicative act, focusing on the power of the performance to explicate, or
interpret, aesthetic texts. Here, the aesthetic text would be Will’s original
piece. In regards to the content of the text, I thought it was interesting how,
because the original piece Will gave him was fairly short, Li added in his own
text; in fact, the piece that he performed was mostly his own text. I thought
Li displayed a lot of creativity here in being able to make something out of
nothing, so to speak, in essentially crafting an entirely new piece rather than
only tweaking the original here and there. However, when he was explaining his
choices for what he did to reinterpret Will’s piece, Li admitted that because
the original was short, he didn’t have a lot of words to choose from, so he
added in his own to make a new story, since he didn’t really understand Will’s idea. I think it
might have helped give the performance more power if Li had had a clearer idea
of who he was as a speaker in the text. However, even though the message Li was
trying to convey through his piece- that of hope for a better life- was somewhat
vague, I think it’s a very powerful idea, and it would have been nice if his
performance had mirrored that power. As
for the delivery of the piece, I think that Li could have spoken louder and
made more eye contact with the audience in order to connect with them better. I
think he could have also slowed down and added in some pauses for more drama
and effect, such as at the end when he finished reading the piece to let the
words sink in more fully for the audience before transitioning into his
explanation. So, going back to the first view of performance as a textual
study, while Li’s interpretation of Will’s original piece was not entirely
faithful or authentic to the original in that it was mostly new words Li added
in to make his own story, and while the message of hope for a better life he
tried to convey through his piece was rather vague, Li certainly expressed his
own creativity and persona through his performance.
In
the second view, I chose to look Li’s performance as a communicative act, which
focuses on the interchange between the performers and the listeners. This view is
also concerned with how performers and listeners make performance events
meaningful , and whether a genuine understanding emerged as a result of the
exchange. I feel that for Li’s particular performance, because he was a little
hard to understand sometimes due to his quiet voice and the fast pace at which
he read the piece, the meaning of the piece got a little lost in translation.
As a result, the piece’s message of hope for a better life was not fully
understood by the audience. In order to achieve
better clarity, I think it would have helped if Li had worked on the delivery
of his performance. Speaking louder and
slower would give the text more presence and power within the space the
performance is set in, allowing the words to be understood better and their
meaning to resonate more with the audience.
The
third view, performance as a cultural process, looks at performance events as
an indication of cultural assumptions and beliefs. In a sense, performances are
ongoing cultural practices, reaffirming cultural understandings as well as
producing new cultural values and meaning. This view is also concerned with how
performance and culture comes together to teach people about who they are.
Because of Li’s Chinese heritage, growing up in a different culture would have
shaped his perspective of the world and the way he interprets it in an entirely
different way from someone like myself, a Caucasian female, for example. It is this difference in culture is what informed
Li’s interpretation of Will’s original text. In his introduction, Li stated that he didn’t
know if he got Will’s idea; because the original piece Will gave him was short,
Li didn’t have a lot of material or words to work with, so he added his own to
get a new story, one that made sense to him.
Finally,
since we are talking about performances here, and performances are, at their
core, basic human action, that human action is going to have ethical
consequences. Since part of this assignment is to take someone else’s original
work and reinterpret it, I think that there is a certain obligation of the
performer to maintain the original meaning and integrity of the text. I think
that performers should be encouraged to experiment with the texts they’re
given, but to work within the parameters of those texts. Ideally, the perfect
performance, if such a thing existed, should be a balance of give and take, of
originality and creativity. I think there is a certain amount of responsibility
and duty of the performer to honor the work of the original creator and the
work that has come before, but, as a performer, there is also a responsibility
and duty to yourself and to the audience to create something new and different,
your own work, and to put forth your own effort, to give back to the community
you are taking or drawing from, so to speak.
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