report from saturday

At Saturday's rehearsal we branched out in a lot of new directions. The performers were told to bring in other texts that they felt had some connection to our two poems. These ranged from Gilbert calling our attention to a Subway commercial to Kristina reciting the Internationale. We have more music on the way, too: in subsequent rehearsals, we'll be listening to songs by Lou Reed and Nas, suggested by Tabitha and Eugene.

One of the topics on Saturday was how America presents, or "sells," itself. The "American Dream" is a product like any other and one group presented a very funny commerical (inspired by Subway) that was meant to show how America was more free than other countries. We also talked a lot about the visions that people in other countries have of what America is like. Several performers concurred that their relatives back home in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad all have exaggerated ideas of how prosperous America is. Tabitha's grandmother, upon first visiting New York and seeing steam rise up out of the manhole covers, thought that it meant the streets were heated! This vision of America as a "land of plenty" has been around since the 19th Century and even before that. It is said that earlier generations of immigrants to America thought they would arrive to find the streets paved with gold.

Our discussion of opportunities in America continued with an extended analysis of the Will Smith movie "The Pursuit of Happyness". We talked for quite a while about whether this film, based on a true story, provided evidence that, with enough self-determination, someone could raise themselves up from poverty by their bootstraps and achieve financial success. Some people argued that Will Smith's character was an extraordinary person who put up with an incredible amount of setbacks, which the average job-seeker would not have been able to overcome.

We ended the day by exploring the notion of "freedom" in more detail. Inspired by Tabitha's refence to Rousseau's idea that "civilization begins with fences," we asked what complete freedom would really look like. Would it be a blissful state of complete liberty and cooperation or total chaos? Are some restrictions on freedom good just so that we can accomlish things as a society? The American poet Robert Frost includes a famous adage in one of his poems: "Good fences make good neighbors".

Judy ended the day with some exercises exploring what "total freedom" felt like. I'm going to write more about that on a subsequent post, because the results were so interesting. Or maybe Judy (or one of the cast) wants to tell us about it??