The first event that I attended for this class was the Artist Services Weekend at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange on February 10th. The one panel that I attended was called Process as Product, and it looked at different works of art (including photography, interviews, and performative pieces) that, as the title suggests, were meant to be presented as processes rather than just looking at a final product. I think this panel is important to this independent study because most of the work we are doing is going into the process, and the process of staging this reading is supposed to help us learn how to ethically present work that may not be for us to present. I also thought it was great and relevant that most of the panelists were people of color. All of the works spoken about were difficult to present in their own ways, because the artists all poured extremely vulnerable parts of themselves into them, and a lot of them also carried political weight, as does O, Earth. The photographer’s (Tanisha’s) piece “Bathtub” was particularly moving, and responded to state-sanctioned violence against black people, and it was heavy with depression, anger, and grief. Another panelist, Nina, collected seven generations’ worth of archived material from her own family, and questioned whether she has a right to own those stories. This connects to our project as well, because as white cis people, I wonder if we and Casey Llewellyn should be telling the story of O, Earth. Finally, the last panelist brought up the question of whether or not work is worth doing if only two people see it. Are we still willing to put in the work of creating art if there’s a chance of there being no audience? I want to say yes, because if nothing else, O, Earth is a learning experience for us. Right now as I’m writing this on May 7th, our reading has not happened yet, and I do not doubt the marketing work that I have put into it, but perhaps it is worthwhile to consider our motivations behind staging this particular piece.
The second event that I want to talk about is a staged reading that I attended with Zeynep and Ruthie on March 27th at University Settlement downtown. It was done by Honest Accomplice Theatre, an organization that focuses on highlighting women and LGBTQ+ (specifically trans) issues. The reading, titled A Chip on Her Shoulder, was about women and trans people working in the engineering field, and how the experiences of these individuals are almost always erased and overshadowed by men. The script was devised entirely by members of Honest Accomplice Theatre in collaboration with playwright and director, Kristin Rose Kelly. I honestly didn’t feel like I really learned anything new about the experiences of the women being portrayed–a lot of the scenes were kind of like, well, yeah, that’s what happens in those environments. That’s not to say that workplace sexism is okay or acceptable, just that I wish they had found a way to present it in a more insightful manner. However, I did enjoy some of the individual scenes. One in particular that I liked centered around a black woman who was told that she couldn’t do something in the office because it was deemed too difficult for her, and she shot it down by saying that she used to play with tarantulas when she was younger, so she’s not afraid of anything. There were also several scenes about coming out at work, and how difficult it is to decide to do so. My favorite scene was probably one where the trans programmer of the company sent out a mass email to everyone announcing her new name and pronouns, and answering her coworker’s questions over email. She also included that since she is the company’s programmer, she took the liberty of changing all her work usernames to her new name and her pronouns to “she”, and everyone in the office was super supportive of her transition. Despite the reading being a bit bland, I did enjoy some aspects of it, and am glad that I attended it and got to learn about specific issues that trans individuals face in the engineering field.