Crit studies

Angela.campbell@federation.edu.au

3/3/14- Critical studies- The Broadway Tradition

- America is a vast conspiracy for making you happy. John Updike

What is Critical Studies?
- Studying theatre in relation to society
- Studying society in relation to theatre
- History
- Literary studies
- Philosophy
- Anthropology
- Sociology
- Theatre/film studies
- Ethics
- Semiotics
- Phenomenology
- Aesthetics

What is Theatre?
- A place for viewing action
- A place to feel pleasure, be entertained, challenged and to think
Music Theatre:
- Words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling and a
song makes you feel a thought
- Bobby Mcfarren
Communication across time:
- George Gershwin quote- True music must repeat the thought ad
aspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans I try to
put the pulse of my times into my music and do it in an original way.
- Walt Whitman- The subtlest spirit of a nation is expressed through its
music and the music acts reciprocally upon the nations very soul.
- Adrian Piper- Funk lessons were a series of participatory social events in
which the artist taught white participants about black funk music and
how to dance it. The aim to transmit and share a physical language that
everyone was then empowered to use.
- People sharing an experience- about the enjoyment not ability or
technique/structure.
- Less about sexism, more about sexuality.
- Black funk music brings people together, forgetting about the fear and
anxiety of racism.
- Funk is black, and funk is back.

A way to consider lived culture. Funk lessons.
- The workshop allowed white people to physically express black culture.
- Talk about the feelings- Racism/fear from college educated white people.
- Embarrassment from European descended traditions as it involved being
sexual to and extent.
- Acetic differences in the kinds of dance, example; Ballet/funk.
- Workshops sometimes elicited condescension and embarrassment from
middle class blacks.
- The reason for Adrian doing the workshops was that it gave her the
chance to affirm and explore the culture dimension of her identity as a
black in that that illuminate her personal and political connect to other
cultural heritage

What is a musical?
- A stage, television or film production utilizing popular style songs,
dialogue optional- to either tell a story, or showcase- Musicals1O1.com

How can we study musicals?
- Popular culture
- Musicals in relation to the market place
- In relation to gender
- An anthropological approach: thick description
- Through musicology
- As a part of history

- WALSH AND PLATT- musical sociologyBOOK SHOP

- The musical as the portal to the American Dream- know your part, learn
your lines, sing the notes you are given, if you can do that better than
anyone else you will become a star.

- Musicals are part of the so-called entertainment industry, ruled by a
brutal bottom-line philosophy.

- KURT WEILL

The self-reflexive artist- Anthony Giddens:
- What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for
everyone living in circumstances of late modernity
- A persons identity is not to be found in behavior, nor important though
this, in the reactions of other but in the capacity to keep a particular
narrative going.
- The self-reflexive artist knows that creativity is informed by historical
knowledge, social awareness, and critical and technical expertise.