Feelings as a Medium (Part 4, the final piece) - PS 4

Putting the pieces together!

We are going to use the work we made about our feelings AS the media to construct our self-portrait. Our artwork, scissors and glue are our only tools for today. We are going to work together, one step at a time to construct all the important pieces of our face and shoulders and hairstyles - and the left over bits will be used to create a backdrop for your portrait - nothing will go to waste!

Demo:

1. Choose which feeling is going to be the base - cutting out head shape and shoulders as a group, glue together immediately

2. Choose which feeling is going to be your shirt - cutting the shape out as a group - talk through a few style options, glue on immediately

3. Choose which feeling is going to be your hair - name as a group some possible approaches - in small sections, using specific shapes, layering, in one piece etc - glue immediately

4. Now that we are starting to have smaller scraps, plan which feeling pieces are going to be the different facial features - talk through simple shapes we can use to represent each feature, glue pieces as we go, cutting eye shapes together, and triangular nose shapes etc

5. Talk as a group about different ways to fill the background with the left-over bits - do we cut them into different kinds of shapes, or tiny pieces? Do we create a texture with ripping and frayed edges? Is there a way to create a color pattern? Do the pieces all come from one direction, or flow together in certain ways? - final moment for some freestyle, dependent on time. Will be clear it is their only time to finish, so making quick and clear choices will be the name of the game (and great practice)

I doubt we will have time in this session to share out - there's a lot to get done! We will start the next project/session by talking about why we would make a portrait out of emotions - as a natural segue into talking about how our support systems are also integral to helping us manifest a sense of self i.e. the family/community trees we will be starting at that time - and working on through December.

Product Photography @DYP

As customized pieces are finished, we'll be exploring funky creative ways to create a vibe and sense of story with props, camera angles and lighting - this is an experimentation zone, no idea is too wild!

Think about colors - similar, different

Think about different textures and things that might repeat

Think about the mood/vibe you want to create - what things help you create that mood? Props? Lighting? Backdrop?

Think about a story - what can you suggest with a single image?

Think about how familiar things can add power to a story - nostalgia, reuse of the familiar in unfamiliar ways etc

Story Thoughts for BXCSA Afterschool

Story Development, relationships between elements, skill building in a material as well as intellectual sense

Thurs November 9 - What we did

Talked about Main Characters. Some important questions: Does the main character need to be relatable? What is the goal of the Main Character? Debate over familiar characters - whether they are main characters or villains, like Elsa from Frozen, and Wednesday Addams from Addams Family. I specifically chose characters that have classical Villain qualities while still being the Hero/Main Character, so we could peel apart intention and POV as a driving force in the relationships within a story.

Using those Main Characters, we talked about who their specific Villains were, and how they fit together in a Yin/Yang way, are developed from the same basic needs and circumstances. Questions we talked about: What kinds of beef might a Villain have with a Main Character? What is a Villain's goal? Is it similar or related to the Main Character's goal?

Continuing with our 2 pop culture Main Characters, we talked about what their style/design communicated to us about their personalities and how those same qualities are reflected in the home/safe spaces they live in or create for themselves - Elsa is a cool blond, (while her sister has warm red hair) she creates an icy blue dress and a spiky ice castle to protect herself, feel comfortable, more like herself. Wednesday's home is as dark and unsettling as she is, matching each other in a deep way - it feels comfortable to us BECAUSE they match. Their personal environments give us a ton of clues about who they are, even if we don't know the characters yet.

Task for the day:

Come up with a Main Character (Students chose a Teacher - I suspect its related to their previous play Matilda, where the focus of the story was Ms Honey) and what kind of Villain feels like would arise from our sense of that Main Character (Students chose a Student as the Villain, they were torn between the kid coming from a wealthy environment/living in a castle or a kid coming from a broken home). Once we had a starting point we split into 2 teams to begin fleshing out the ideas of who these characters are and why they are this way. Glue and paper/fabric scraps etc are the main tools for visioning - responding to unusual shapes and textures will rapidly develop character potential beyond the safe spaces young people get stuck in, and working on the 2 characters separately gives us space to as a group bring them back into the same world together - deepens the narrative while asking the young people to thread storylines and details together - important practice for when we move into design for West Side Story in January.

Will start next session with mini crit, letting the teams share where they got to and recieve feedback. After that, continue to flesh out characters, to be essentially finished (depends on the energy of the group, may need another session) - Same teams will design the setting for each of their characters next - will involve a group brainstorming session first, to make sure our narrative is clear.

The goal: To present the story with their designs (super rough and messy, its just the beginning) to the acting group, for feedback and to let the acting group figure out how they might want to embody this story - collab with Omar (other DreamYard ta) for this component. Do they create scenes? Do they pair off to plan? This would happen after thanksgiving/1st week of December - maybe a week or so later. 

Final week before Xmas break - practicing building miniature sets with graham crackers, icing, candy materials. Using low risk, messy materials is important practice here, as this is a rambunctious and easily distracted group of middle schoolers, and the actual set building will require some really conscious, thoughtful self organizing. Unclear yet if we will be using boxcutters and exacto blades as well as other tools during the final build process. I will modify whatever the outcome looks like to match where this group is at - there is still some time to figure out what is possible.

Story thoughts:

Warm ups or potential projects - 

If you could make a space, a house or room etc that reflects who you are - what would it look like and what would it have in it?

Imagine a character that you know and love, in a different kind of environment then they might normally be found - how might this different environment change what they value, what kinds of goals they might have and the opposition they face?

Thoughts on Hostile vs Friendly Environments 

Clues you are in a hostile place:

+ extremes - cold/very hot, very high up/very low drop, loud/silent

+ sharp edges, painful objects

+ darkness, shadows

+ unpredictable elements

+ inability to leave, being stuck, trapped, lost

Clues you are in a friendly place:

+ colorful

+ balanced - not too warm/too cold, too tall/too short

+ bright, light filled

+ gentle noise, rounded shapes

+ predictable, comforting elements

+ ease of movement, helpful guidance, sense of freedom

In a bright world - shadows are clues, give a sense of uneasiness - foreshadowing. In a melodic soundtrack - a discordant note signals to our sensory awareness that something is not right. From milk turning sour in the Barbie movie, to beautiful food beginning to rot in Renaissance paintings and poetry - trouble in paradise is signaled by a change, something different/unfamiliar entering into an environment - the normal world becomes unpredictable, less known. Neglected spaces, passage of time being made obvious, a sense of mortality via literal decay are common cues in storytelling because of their universality of effect on us.

What happens when an environment with friendly markers turns out to be dangerous? The natural response is to not trust it any more, and sometimes not even yourself and your ability to see what's real - because the rules of the world are broken. My current working thesis is that 'Good' and 'Bad' are reflections of each other, like a warped mirror.

Its gonna be so fun to explore with these students via the scenic elements of West Side Story how the cityscape and lighting can embody the narrative the characters are expressing.

Land of the Forgotten

 My sophomore year of college, the slides that were the standard for portfolio submission transitioned into digital files. It was also the last year that my very animation focused school offered traditional animation as a foundational requirement for first and second year students, because that style was quickly receding into the past. 

Graduation was a portal into an unfamiliar world that I was not adequately prepared for, and entrance into the labor force brought me face to face with the tectonic shifts taking place on an economic scale. We have transitioned from an economy that exported goods, made in American factories - into an economy mostly exporting intellectual and data driven properties. Prior to that, shipping required a labor force that loaded/unloaded the boats at the piers along the west side of Manhattan. By the time I was put in charge of utilizing the Longshoremen's Union to build fashion shows in those same piers, now empty - it was composed of elderly men in crocs, used to moving things with pallet jacks rather then the strength of their bodies. There are no new members - the Longshoremen's Union is literally dying, aging into past tense. It makes me think about people growing up in the rust belt, and what entire towns and family histories must feel like as factory work moved on, have also become past tense. Entire identities evaporating in the face of technological advancement. Lifestyles, hard fought cultures and trauma responses, history - no longer fathomable by a lot of the general public. It doesn't matter what politicians promise about bringing that kind of work back - it is literally gone, and the skills and living memories of the people who - in an earlier time - fulfilled those vital functions and defined themselves by it are like ghosts in this new landscape.

From this vantage point, I can almost see how someone might not believe something as intense as the Holocaust actually happened - like a figment of someone's imagination, as impossible to fathom as maybe a European country, or anywhere outside of the rural and disconnected places people like this must all be from - while we still cope on a global scale with the aftermath of that kind of trauma. People are calling out the capacity for the Israel state (formed as an apology for the Nazis mass slaughter of Jewish people, carved out of Palestinian homes) to be exterminating Palestinians now - ironic - but so often, hurt people hurt other people, and abuse patterns get passed down through families until it becomes indistinguishable across cultures and identities.

While talking to an old friend, he gave me small pieces of his early life during the collapse of the USSR recently that I am still chewing on - 'You know what happens?' he asked me gruffly at one point - 'there isn't enough food'. 

While I was working as a figure model in Richmond Virginia, a professor I often modeled for was an older Russian man. While students drew me, he would fill the intense focused silence with lugubrious stories about living behind the iron curtain, how people got simple things like butter from the black market, or bribing the dairy truck to let you scrape the butter solids that formed during the rocking of transportation that gathered and clung to the metal apparatus inside. One day he described going to an American grocery store for the first time, overwhelmed by the rows of available products, free to choose as much as you wanted from a multitude of brands.

I had a 9th grade student last year, from a family that fled Russia when the war on Ukraine broke out - all he would say about it was 'There is no future there'.

It is a fallacy to think this is not where we are headed.

A large amount of Jewish refugees from the collapse of the USSR ended up being received by Israel - there is some relationship here that I haven't parsed out yet, either in political handshaking or trauma - but the bulking out of a region that was literally stolen land seems like an obvious motivator, just like the creation of the Birth Right trip in 1999 with its Headquarters in the US and 80% of participants coming from America. Prior to that, Israel went to Madison Avenue advertising companies in the 50's, trying to inspire the world to view the new state as a fully formed and ancient one. Round and round we go again - the heroism of the US in destroying the Nazis in the 1940s is like dust - but now the antisemitic, mostly conservative body of America is clamoring in a bloodthirst for support of Israel's active genocide on a deeply battered population surviving in the desert, the middle east a symbol they learned to hate way back during the time of Oil Barons - a thirst that is stoked by the fires of the industrial revolution and explosion of Capitalism/early 1900s Colonial expansion into the East as oil replaced the coal being mined in the Appalachian mountains of the US - so deeply embedded now, hatred of the Middle East has no connection to reality, just political symbols being fed to populations looking for someone to blame for anything. Gang mentality sanctioned on a global scale. Self vs other. Resource hoarding - here are all the reasons why I am justified in taking what you have. Politicians trying to unite us against some fabricated monster, to justify war and its often boosting effect on the economy while effectively distracting us from its Colonial intentions. And we lap it up.

What does community mean at this point in our collective development? What actually connects us to each other, other then survival and trauma bonds? The simplistic stories we are teaching our young ones with, about who our community is composed of and why - simply aren't true, nor are they useful anymore. It is often our loved ones that do the most damage to us in our lives, and it is impossible to expect people to be available in ways that they simply cannot. If we learn our only tether to this life and this world requires we submit to the crushing weight of history manifesting in the way our caregivers and politicians handle us - or that identity is a solid structure, unchanging, the pieces handed to us rather then springing from our attempts to process our experience of the world - fluid and responsive- then genocide will not stop. Identity will continue to be flattened to a symbol we would kill for, and the Crusades - fighting over the origin of western religion, from a story (the Bible) literally about Middle Eastern people - will recapitulate until there is nothing left. For the Warrior - how do they know themselves in peace, if their identity is bound up in one singular, symbolic representation? 

 

From the Book of Life - Manolo comes from a long line of famous bull fighters - but to his father's horror, he wants to be a musician. When he descends into the underworld to retrieve the soul of his dead love, he is tasked with fighting every bull ever fought and killed in his entire family history, combined into one massive beast.

Thinking of all of the people who have been effectively erased on this Dia de los Muertos - and the space between remembering and forgetting. Those that get to live in the Land of the Remembered, and those that are fated to the Land of the Forgotten.