Group Work

Group work is a challenge in and of itself. I'm very happy to be in the group I'm in, though. Our meeting today was calm and reframing--we established a time table to get all of our work done and have something really polished to present in class.

I feel like we got a little reamed on Tuesday. I think there were one or two people in particular who have trouble allowing space for mistakes. It seems to be a common theme among a certain strand of people, actually--thinking of things as finished products and handling them as such. I appreciated that you were able to remind all of us that what we were looking at was not a finished product but rather a jumping off point. Even at the stage in the process when we feel like something could be called "finished" it seems inappropriate to treat it the way that I feel some of my fellow students treated some of the work seen on Tuesday.

I think most of that--as I imagine I've probably discussed before--comes from a place of fear. My suspicion is that the fear that brings on that brand of quiet hostility finds its epicenter in the fear of inadequacy.

Today as we were re-framing our piece, we started by building a protagonist. We decided that our protagonist's struggle should be one about seeking information. While that doesn't feel very physically active, it strikes me that many oppressions have been aided by a refusal to supply the oppressed with knowledge--a disinclination to arm the people with the tools of rhetoric they would need to advocate for themselves.

So now our protagonist is a young woman struggling with misinformation and peer pressure on her quest for the truth. The piece begins in a sex ed classroom where a lot of misinformation is being suggested. The scene morphs into a second movement that takes place inside the protagonist's head wherein all of the misinformation manifests itself rather grotesquely in the form of three archetypal personas--a physician, a crone (though we've been calling her a "nana"), and a gossipy best friend. The spect-actors will be offered the chance to choose which entity they would like to combat in a quest for the protagonist's agency in sexual health education. At least, that's what we have for now. It's kind of like Iron Chef, but with TO.