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We built a graveyard. Plaster and wood were manipulated until they resembled the demolished façade of a building. We put people there, too. People playing people—pedestrians, faces you see every day. We created a world besieged by tragedy, modeled after a very real decimation. The Bi-Co Theater Program at Bryn Mawr College’s production of “Antigone” took the infamous play by Sophocles and made it relevant in a post-9/11 world. For this production, I worked as the Assistant Costume and Set Designer, helping bring to life Director Catharine Slusar’s greater goal: to question where, how and if humanity exists after violence. Throughout the production, we continually sought ways to better represent the horror, the catastrophic events which have altered so many people’s world. To accomplish this, we confronted death; death became our facination. We scrutinized it in the faces of those in the very throes of death, and in the faces of those looking on. Death became a motif—which leads me to wonder, where is the compassion[i] in that?

Samantha Plate

Play In The City

12/20/2013

What Is Play? (Re-Write)

We seemed to have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Walking down the streets of Philadelphia, my group and I were in search of mosaics. At an intersection we randomly chose to go right, hoping this would take us the correct way. It did not. The street soon hit a dead end. While trying to decide where to go next, the sound of laughing children caught my attention. We were right near a playground full of children who had just gotten out of school. Wanting to follow our course assignment of “play in the city” we decided to go in and join all the children having fun on the jungle gym.  

What is play? This is a question that many individuals have tried to answer. Theorists, psychologists, and scientists are always trying to pin “play” down and give it a strict definition. Play can be specified as simple play, critical play, and deep play- all of which have been important to our studies of play in the city and all of which have very flexible and overlapping definitions. As a child plays it seems so simple and natural, but it is actually very complex. Play in itself defies definition- it is playful. Play sets all the rules and breaks them too. There are so many ways to describe this essential part of life.

Coming out. What people don’t understand is that coming out of any closet is hardest for the person actually having to do it. People receiving news like that selfishly feel blind-sighted and they blame themselves while not giving that person’s feelings a second thought. The sad part is, people struggle so much with coming out because of the fear of other people’s reactions and they only get proved right in many situations. I think the hardest person to come to terms with coming out with is yourself. With yourself you’ve always known who you are or maybe it hasn’t been that easy, but telling yourself who you are first, and really believing it is the first and hardest part of coming out. Even if people are receptive and accepting right off the bat, that doesn’t eliminate the fact that you had preliminary doubts and fears of their reactions. There is no easy way to come out of any closet, but it needs to be done in order to free yourself. It’s easy for me to sit here and tell you about my opinion on the coming out situation, and how it affected me personally, but that is hardly relevant, so I will back it up statistically. The Pew Research group  did a survey of LGB americans (398 gay men, 277 lesbians and 479 people who are bisexual) the questions were, when did you first think, when did you first know and when did you tell someone. The results are as follows: 

            Accessibility is defined as easily reached, easily understood, easily available, and approachable.  From this view accessibly is something that makes something else easier.  From my understanding accessibility, relating to the classroom, is the idea of making the classroom more open and more inclusive.  When thinking about the ways in which our class tried to make the classroom more accessible it came to my understanding that by making the classroom more accessible to some, was disabling to others.  Myself, personally found the structure of the classroom and the class overall more hindering.

Before this semester, I never have thought I could learn so many different kinds of plays. Simple play, critical play and deep play, every play has its special meaning and make the word ‘play’ complicated in my mind. In the final essay, I want to come back and re-write one of my works about critical play.

Critical play is the first strange definition of play that I attached. Artists use this kind of play to express their special ideas to the public. This definition seems to be abstract but the real trip to Philly helps me a lot to understand it. When I enter into Chinatown, I suddenly know, the total place is a critical play. For me, it remind me of something familiar when I stay in China. The words, the people, the language and the names of food make me excited. However, I find the language, although is a kind of accents in China, I cannot understand. The food is not orthodox, and buildings keep the style of that in 80s in China. They are different from my real life in my hometown. The Chinatown is a critical play that is played by people in Chinatown. They want to create a familiar environment but failed because many of them even never come to China. They follow the rhythm of their predecessors. Their impressions for China, sometimes is the China in old stories. The Chinatown is the critical play for me and it is different from the real China in my mind.

In Sontag’s article ‘Against interpretation’, she propose her idea that the interpretation today is useless and not valuable. When I read her title, in the beginning, I disagreed because I thought interpretation was necessary for me to understand the meaning of art works. However, when I read the article, I notice that maybe I’m wrong. In her definition and explanation for modern interpretation, that is, people set some criterions and ‘put’ art works in them to interpret the art works. This kind of interpretation is so terrible for me. Thousands of artists use special ways to express different ideas. If I really want to understand their original idea, I should discard such criterions and feel the work individually.

Introduction

When thinking of topics to write this final web event on, my mind wandered to ecofeminism and stayed there. It’s a topic and issue that has been picking at me since we first discussed it briefly in class and it has been urging me to take a closer look at it ever since. When the final group to present during our last class did their presentation on ecofeminism, the picking only intensified.  I knew then that I needed to learn about the history of the movement and why it carries the images and connotations that we discussed during that class. I felt like this would solve my desire to understand ecofeminism and would help me determine whether or not I could place myself within it. And so, I did just that. I delved into the origins and philosophies of ecofeminism and I decided to look at it from the perspective of people of color. A lack of a presence concerning women of color involved in ecofeminism seemed to be the most glaring issue that I faced when originally analyzing the ecofeminist movement. Keeping this in mind, I concluded that when researching for this paper I would look at popular ecofeminist texts that help establish a general definition of what the movement is, along with ecofeminist movements and texts that directly or indirectly come from the point of view of women of color.

Bryn Mawr is my home.

            That one phrase is so much more than the five words it contains. Now more than ever before. To me, a home is much more than four walls or a campus. Bryn Mawr is home to me because of its people, because of its community. It is here that I have become comfortable with who I am - my sexuality, my past, my life.

            When I first began to think about this final paper, I knew I wanted it to be about this place that means so much to me. Bryn Mawr. I also wanted to incorporate in parts of my other papers. As I reflected over my work and growth in this course, I realized I left my third paper open ended without a firm direction in terms of education for Wabash. During conversations (usually over food) with my friends, I began to see that Bryn Mawr also needs a new form of education. An education in inclusion. I began to think of my second paper on the inclusiveness/discrimination of the straight community within Bryn Mawr's community. I concluded Bryn Mawr needs an intervention.

inequity at so many levels of the system.  i find the piece disturbing, and am reminded of our (many!) conversations about individual responsibility and institutionalized/systemic issues...

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/i-got-myself-arrested-so-i-could-look-inside-the-justice-system/282360/

Here are the notes that Marian, Piper, Amanda and I used for our presentation on Ecofeminism

Ecofeminist meal

• Salted kale chips
•      Reference to the “Book of Salt”
• Tabouli Salad
• Spinach salad

History of Ecofeminism

• Ecofeminism is new branch of feminism that focuses on riding the world of any hierarchical structures.  This sector of feminism addresses the “self” and “other” as a subject and an object.    
• ecofeminism as an extension of intesectionality
• need to be open-minded because this could be the way that people looked at first wave feminism
• “Particularly, ecofeminists attack patriarchal society's dualistic thinking, wherein one side of the dualism reflects the "self" or the subject, while the second represents the "other" or the object. The object is considered only insofar as it can benefit the subject.”
• “The movement wants to create an interconnected community, void of hierarchies, where all beings -- human, non-human, and members of the organic world -- have their own intrinsic value and are part of the same living organism, the earth.”
• Women’s Studies Librarians Office
• University of Wisconsin System
• http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/bibliogs/ecofem.html

Accessibility