Mycroft,+Andrea



Assignment 1

1. The lecture in class today involved the making of holy water by a dalang puppeteer. Yet comedy may be introduced by the puppets during the most serious of events. Describe how comedy seems to be communicated by the clown servants in the two videos.

To an audience that understands the language being used, the dialogue of the puppets would more than likely be identified as the primary form of communicating comedy; however in a book I recently read called, “The Definitive Book of Body Language” by Allan and Barbara Pease, it cited a scientific study done by Albert Mehrabian that found, “the total impact of a message is about 7% verbal (words only) and 38% vocal (including tone of voice, inflection and other sounds) and //55%// non-verbal.” This quote clearly defines and even quantifies the methods in which humor, and indeed all emotions/ideas, are conveyed. The findings not only apply from human to human, but from personified object to human audience as well. The tone is very clearly comedic. There are all the familiar pauses and deliveries given in any punch line, the voices themselves sound very nasally and strained, often traversing through octaves to add to the ridiculousness of the characters.

Though the tone of voice is easily relatable to normal life, the non-verbal cues-which make up the largest percentage of modes of communication- are more difficult to convey when these are, after all, 2-d puppets. Body language and facial expression are the manners through which non-verbal communication is expressed, but in the case of the puppets the expressions are fixed (only mouths moving) and the body movements are limited. For this reason the clown puppets must be obviously distorted in comparison with others, so that their roles are clearly identified. Their faces are disfigured and features bulbous and cartoonish, their bodies are bloated and short, and their limbs are attached so that they can swing freely when spun around. These grotesquely hyperbolized physical attributes all contribute to building their haphazard and silly personalities. The only real body movements they can have are spinning, and the clowns spin often and quickly so that they lack the //lack// movements that are assigned to serious personas. When in the presence of more serious characters, the stature of the puppets is shrunk down even more than normal (often only displayed from their stomach up) and they lean forward towards the higher being, almost as if bowing in order to show inferiority and highlight their subservient positions.

2. Why do you think the puppeteer elects to use such tactics during these serious events?

In all forms of theater, the comic character appearing in an otherwise serious situation is meant to provide a quick escape from the intense emotions that often engulf the viewing audience. In the observed ritual/performance of the holy water creation clown puppets used by the puppeteer not only provide a release of tension, but may also serve to heighten the somberness of audience members during other parts of the ceremony. By providing an opposite emotion through the amusing clown puppets, the differences between the serious and humorous sections of the ceremony are more clearly highlighted and contrasted. This juxtaposition of two diametrically opposed emotions (humor vs. seriousness) actually strengthens the impact of each emotion.

Assignment 2

The long stories in the play __Joe Turner’s Come and Gone__ are used to tell the audience relevant details about the backgrounds of the characters, but also serve to enhance the drama of the play since it is highly unusual in normal life to interrupt a normal dialogue with a long monologue. The back and forth rhythm of the short dialogues is interrupted and the audience is able to recognize that the information in these long stories must be important since they stand out so much from the rest of the play. When Bynum is recounting his tale of when he saw the shiny man, we learn exactly how and why Bynum came to become so confident in himself and in his identity. His entire story is extremely vivid and plays out like a dream or a hallucination. After meeting a stranger on a road Bynum gives the stranger some food and then follows him in the hopes of learning the “Secret of Life.” He goes through almost a religious awakening in which the shiny man tells Bynum to cleanse himself with the blood that has appeared on his hands, similar to how later on in the play Martha says, “You got to be washed with the blood of the lamb…Jesus bled for you. He’s the Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world.” To me the most striking image is when the man begins to shine, “until all the light seemed like it seeped out of him” because it alludes strongly to a heavenly figure who possesses the power to rid the world of darkness and disillusion. Indeed, after the shiny man disappears Bynum then finds his larger than life father who takes him to the ocean and teaches Bynum to find his song. His previous lost wandering in the world is brought to a brilliant end and he finds his “binding song” which gives his life purpose and his existence meaning.

The recurring theme of the “song” is an important one because in essence that is what all the characters are searching for. Herald Loomis especially is a man who cannot find his song because he had to hide it while enslaved in order to protect it from Joe Turner. His detachment from his song is the reason that he cannot rebuild and restart his life; he is lost, but more than that, he is incomplete. Bynum’s story is directly paralleled by the last scene where Loomis slashes his chest and wipes his face with blood in order to cleanse himself. The description in the play itself says, “Having found his song, the song of self sufficiency, fully resurrected, cleansed and given breath, free from any encumbrance other than the workings of his own heart and the bonds of the flesh, having accepted the responsibility for his own presence in the world, he is free to soar above the environs that weighed and pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions.” Similar to Bynum, he is cleansed by his own blood and discovers his song at last. Bynum then concludes the play by shouting, “Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!”

AMassignment3 AM39Steps AM Life is A Dream AMrealism AMtheatricalism amallmysons AMmusical