First thing, I am still reading Twyla Tharp's book The Creative Habit and I had a realization today about how useful this book is employing feminist design techniques and, thus, how much I wish I'd had this book when I wrote my paper last year. (And I'm attempting to get this paper presented at conferences... but have no time to update it with this new bit. Sadness.) Anyway, there was a passage today that specifically struct me as pertinent to my feminist design ponderings. In the chapter about spine, Tharp says the following:
"There's an obvious reason why, as a choreographer, I am constantly groping for a spine. Dance is preverbal; it doesn't have the writer's advantage of using language to establish meaning and intent. The vocabulary of dance is movement, not words. So I need something more in the form of an idea, an image, a memory, a metaphor to make my intentions comprehensible to the audience. I have to articulate this to myself because I won't be using words to articulate it in public."
In my notebook I wrote: Yes! This is why it is important to analyze your visual language as a female/feminist designer: you do not have words--it's all nonverbal! One must know your visual cues and those of the audience. Otherwise communication fails and either nothing is understood or the wrong thing is understood.
To elaborate, in Ringer's four questions about feminist design she calls on us to ask these questions: "How does visual language contribute to these explicit and implicit messages? How do I as a woman and designer relate to the visual language and the world around me? How do I visually process information?" In being aware of how I process visual language, I can better make decisions about how to communicate my ideas to the audience because I am cognizant of how visual language is created in myself and thus the population as a whole. And to be aware of how nonverbal the art of theatrical design is, is necessary in order to not just assume what I put on stage is going to make sense to the audience.
Take Oklahoma! for instance (which is the design realized part). I was giving a mini-talk about it to my stagecrafts class last week. I began by talking about my inspiration and process of turning that inspiration into a design. And then today, I got to see the theatrical realization of that design (in part) before the cast's first rehearsal in Aycock. The translation of my idea into reality has a bit of disconnect because the cast (as they are the only ones that have seen it yet) don't know the awe-inspiring, personal connection I have with the landscape of Northern California that I was inspired by. HOWEVER! My ability to interpret that into a majestic backdrop of sky and clouds atop a sumptuous yellow "waves of grain" gave them pause. They were swept up. I had achieved the awe-inspiring by creating the magic, even if the personal was left to be my own secret in my concept.
Now, think, if I had been more versed in how I viewed/interpreted/created the visual cues and how important my role as the nonverbal story-teller, how different (or better?) would my design be?
With this rolling around in my head I am ready to work on Pericles because nothing is getting by me now.
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