Babbage Chapter 4

Today is the first day of an ITT performance for me. I'm excited and nervous, and there's a tiny little piece of me that doesn't quite trust the process yet, even though I've seen it unfold flawlessly before. Reading the final chapter in Babbage helped a lot to allay some of those insecurities.

I like her compressed version of image theatre moving into forum theatre, and I admire that she includes her own experiences. It makes me feel comfortable as a scholar being in her "presence". As a side note, I will say that most of the class has been referring to Frances Babbage automatically as "he," which is somehow bothersome to me. Not in a hurtful way, just in a kind of sad way. Like...even young women in the class have called Babbage "he". How strange! A highly critical analysis of Boal's work is assigned and we consent to assuming the author of any such book is male. It's sad to think that we've been taught, as women, that these are the things men write. That men write with forceful, opinionated, educated voices. Or just that men write and we don't. It's such a sneaky paradox, because most of our graduate program here is made up of women. Brad, Joshua, Chris, Will, Lawrence. I think that might be all. All the men in our department. There are EASILY triple that amount of women in our grad program, and yet we are all still unknowingly consenting to the idea that men are the ones who write books and men are the ones who can be critical of an established form of theatre. How subversive. How suspect. On some level, that's degrading, and it's not something we even realize.

Sorry. That was a tangent. A useful one, but still a tangent.

I like how Babbage details the warm-up games and tends to qualify her chosen games or activities based on a flexibility of space and bodies and abilities. She kind of hit all of the bases for me--"this can be done with a LOT of people" or "this can be done with people who are physically or mentally disabled" or "this can be done with very few people". Stuff like that. It's a very good resource as it stands for us moving forward into our community workshops. Very exciting and a very quick reference should things function differently. There would be no use in saying, "Oh. We only have five people. Nevermind." I think the spirit of TO dictates that we instead react with, "Excellent! We have a nice, cozy group of five people! Let's do something we'll get more out of as a small group!"