In the fall of 2002 I took “Issues in World Theatre” at UC Berkeley and immediately declared my major. The course covered not just various styles of world theatre, but also how it was used politically in South Africa, in Chile, in Europe.
Reading “Galileo” by Bertolt Brecht and how the play, like the science, had to smuggled out– the different endings, the implications of each– I geeked out and decided Performance Studies was the ultimate in humanities. Declared my major and never turned back.
We discussed the performative aspect of daily life, from religious rituals to “game face.” It was an interesting time and evolving era with the explosion of reality television, the birth of social media (computer based at that point) the line between performance and authenticity blurred.
A once smudged line is now near chaos as time and technological expansion have taken us from dial-up internet, film photos, and roaming fees (remember those??), to 4-5G, smartphones with unlimited data.
Our show-time has expanded from the 8-hour daily grind to a 24/7 bingefest.
The past twenty years have been a TRIP for Performance Studies majors.
Watching our thesis about the “Detriment to Democracy: Infotainment, performative politics and 24-hour news” come true is not the satisfying experience academia promised.
The micro-generation that started college pre-9/11 and attending through the acute-post witnessed so much degradation in real time in a way that very few experienced.
Those who were on MySpace and had a Xenga journal (you know who you are). Gen X’s younger siblings. We experienced Facebook when it was just for college students and have been on it so long it’s now how we show our parents pictures of our kids.
It’s very specifically WEIRD. We remember red-orange-yellow alerts becoming a thing (before we were just constantly hyper-vigilant and anxious). And maybe we’d done a lockdown drill in high school (I didn’t but maybe you did), but we didn’t have active shooter drills in elementary school (our baby cousins did. Our kids do).
I suppose it’s true that every generation experiences a huge cultural and political shift, as change and the swinging pendulum seem to be the only constants in the world. It just feels accelerated.
Because 2002 was TWENTY YEARS AGO which doesn’t seem possible until you think about all the things that have changed and then twenty years doesn’t seem like long enough for such a decline.
Yeah.
I’m fun at parties (I actually was sometimes, I promise).
So. Let’s hydrate and moisturize, who knows what waits ahead of us, so let’s face it fresh.
Goodnight. You are loved by me and others. Be kind to yourself and let that leak all over everybody. xox
Pretty Good Ugly 