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.

Week No. 13 of 16

Wierzbicka, A. Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese (1997)

Summary and Reflection: Our class discussion got off to an interesting start in noting that in the very first paragraph of the article, as Wierzbicka makes her argument for the importance of interdisplinary cultural analysis, design—as a knowledge field—is left off of her list (p. 1). I understand that the design domain is still growing and forming as an academic field (vs. its former characterization as a trade), so in the meantime, as we build that body of work and codify the domain, design research draws heavily on the fields of anthropology, sociology, cognitive psychology, etc., just to name a few.

Perhaps we could model an article after Wierzbicka's and call it "Understanding cultures through their design", since this paper, she is campaigning for recognition of linguistics as a crucial element of cultural analysis and building cultural awareness. She positions her thesis against critics who say theories such as hers give too much credit to words—"Let's not exxagerate the importance of language" (p. 9). Wierzbicka counter-argument is long and convincing (ex, all cultures do not feel "sadness", as it is expressed in English), and she relies on three points of investigation and analysis: cultural elaboration and the lexicon (p. 11), Word frequencies (p. 11-15), and key words (p. 15-17). To summarize, the words the cultures use, as well as how often they use them, reflect many aspects of their culture, including social structure, relationships, spiritual beliefs, food customs, environment, moral values, etc. For example, how many times to Russians use the word "Motherland" vs. American English speakers? It is revealing something, that much is certain.

Questions: Our class really responded to the article and people were excited to engage in discussion about it. It was interesting, and important, according to Wierzbicka, to take a class survey on how many of us were bi- or multi-lingual. Notably, I'd say over half the hands went up, but timidly--halfway-ish. It was like people either really didn't have the language skills, or thought they didn't have enough to consider themselves fluent. That's another point entirely, however, since fluency is rarely truly achieved by native speakers of a language...instead, it's a continuum of language competency.

That aside, people seemed to agree that including key words and language in a cultural analysis could be very enriching. I of course think to myself based on my knowledge of Spanish, what are the key words that seem to emerge? For one thing, when I was first learning the language, I was doing so through a lot of pop music. I would buy CDs, listen and sing along to the songs while reading the lyrics in the CD pocket. In this scenario, key words seemed very obvious—amor (love), corazón (heart), te quiero (I love you), olvidar (forget), siempre (always), etc. Obviously, a theme emerges here! Still, Wierzbicka mentions popular songs (p. 17) as a source for identifying key words in a culture. Certainly that was true for Latino pop culture! And upon further thinking, and now that I'm "fluent", those same words are still "key words" I believe...and really support many of the values and social customs of Latino people. I try to avoid stereotypes, but who can argue with the passionate figure of the Latin lover, the "fire in the blood" romance that is associated with Spanish television, movies, and literature. In this case, I think Wierzbicka has a point.