Week No. 14 of 16

Guest Speakers Meena and Dipankar from Pangea World Theater

Summary & Reflections: Meena and Dipankar spent about an hour and a half with us, sharing their work with Pangea, their reasons for breaking off on their own, and their commitment to human rights and erasing/eliminating the margin that always wants to define minority people as "marginalized" this or that. It was definitely interesting to hear how they have worked to redefine some of the ways in which they operate their theater business in order to better support their objectives. Mainly, by keeping a diverse staff, advisory board, and actor base, they find that they are drawing a more diverse audience than other theaters in the area, which are still surviving mainly on patronage by the white mainstream. Another interesting point about changing procedures to shift paradigms was the was they now handle auditions for productions. Dipankar spoke about an audition with an elder Native American man who arrived with no prepared monologue and no headshot. Putting his own theories into practice, Dipankar invited him to tell a story as his monologue. The man did it, and blew the reviewers away with his talent! The point is, however, that man's talent would have gone unnoticed in a mainstream audition process.

Questions: One of the main questions that arises from discussions like this one lead by Meena and Dipankar, is what is the purpose of theater in people's lives? Such a question is important not only in terms of measuring a theater's success (currently measured by ticket sales), but also in terms of how viable is a social justice type theater like Pangea in attracting mainstream audience members and donations? Are we looking to be challenged when we go to the theater? Or are we looking to be entertained? Why is High School Musical sold out at $75 a ticket, but Pangea can't fill 80 seats at $12 per ticket? We started scratching at the surface of these questions in class, but did not come to any sort of conclusion therein.



(W)rapped Space: The Architecture of Hip Hop (2000) by Craig Wilkins

Summary & Reflections: In this article, Wilkins works very hard to present a concept of space as defined by hip hop's sonic, historic, and cultural qualities, building on theories by Lefebvre and de Certeau. In doing so, he links social activities with spatial practices (p. 8), and posits that hip hop could not have risen out of architectural circumstances other than those that it did, since space and physical environment and are so deeply linked to the practices that they support.

When Dr. Hadjiyanni mentioned that this article's material had been expanded into a book, I thought, "yes—that's a better format for this information". I really felt that the article covered so much ground in so little time, that too many important points were simply glossed over, and other main ideas were not allowed to truly sink in. Furthermore, coming from a perspective that is not particularly well-versed in origins or characteristics of hip hop, I would have appreciated a more developed background on the musical genre. Undoubtedly, Wilkins has enough content on his hands to make a robust book.

Questions: In making this connection between hip hop and architecture, not so very unlike my own efforts to link tango and interactive design, I feel that Wilkins is definitely on to something powerful. It's not so much, I believe, a question of how can architects create a space that engenders more hip hop production, but more like, if hip hop is the cultural expression of a particular group of people under a particular group of circumstances, here now is an architecture that embodies that expression. From that point, in and around this new architecture, evolutionary patterns in hip hop can emerge, as well as perhaps entirely new genres. It is, in that regard, not a means of looking back to emulate hip hop's origins, but rather, seeking continual innovation that reflects the culture and values of the inhabitants, supporting their ongoing evolution.