Projects

Final Project Assignment

For your final project create a three-part invention that includes

• creative text
• analytic discussion of your text
• performance of your text

Your creative text should be an autobiographical narrative that describes your emergence into an ethnicity. While acknowledging that ethnic identity can be a "contingent" status - that people claim ethnic identities for different reasons at different moments in time - choose a moment of realization for yourself that holds some importance to you, and dramatize that. Your text need not be realistic in any way; in fact, it might be best served as a creative poetic invention.

Refer to the different analytic and theatrical texts that we have considered in this course over the semester. For instance, you might make reference to popular culture and television ads that revealed you to yourself in a particular way (Richard Schechner and Marlon Riggs); you might make reference to political events that have persuaded you to "become" a particular ethnicity (Vincent Chen incident); you might make reference to peer pressure or class issues that influenced your choices (Gordon Liao, Miguel Piñero); you might make reference to experiences of gender identity that emerged as you matured and started dating (Diana Son). Ultimately, your text should aspire toward the density offered by the play the bodies between us.

Your analytic discussion of your text should be concise; 1-2 pages in length. This discussion should articulate and defend your creative choices. The discussion should also place your text in relationship to plays we've read in this course: how is your text similar to that of Diana Son or Miguel Piñero?

Your performance of the text should draw on techniques that we have engaged in class and seen in performances of "Last Rites" or "Yellowman." It might include naturalistic gestures; expressionistic or abstract gestures; it might include words or nonsense sounds; it might include music and dance.

Important: Your performance may be no more than 5 minutes in length!

Before both final project presentation sessions, students first went through several sets of warm-up exercises:

• Session Warmups: (MP4 - 27 MB)

Example student projects from Spring 2004: