Metacognition: Mashups

Ever since I was a child in my kindergarten art-class, I’ve loved to create things.  Being able to escape by creating something, feeling something come to life in my hands -whether it be knitting, bracelet-making, or elaborate Valentines Days cards (yes, I was that child in elementary school) - could calm me down and provide a wonderful distraction.

As I've grown older, I've moved from the 'physical' creating to the virtual. I've discovered to love writing; filling pages with my own words or formatting and creating files for debate just to my liking. When I discovered the Jane Eyre Mash-up, I saw at as another opportunity to express this desire to build and make something.

Once I had settled on a topic, challenging the status quo, I knew almost instantly what elements were going to be essential. I was bursting with ideas: the recent Arab Spring revolutions, a current favorite song by the artist Linkin Park, and the feminist revolution in Jane Eyre. I was interested in all of them, which made doing the mashup a lot less painful than it could’ve been.

Unfortunately, in true Charlie fashion, I ended up doing what I liked first, finding all of the outside elements and quotes I’d need, and realizing I had less than 36 hours dig through Jane Eyre and other English texts to find the rest of my required elements. This proved problematic, after remembering that the book was over 300 pages long. I had to plunk down at the library on my day off, and work for nine hours. It was an exhausting, but productive experience. My thought process was focused and much less distracted than I would’ve been at home. I sifted through the pages, and the plotline began to come back to me, the small details that I’d forgotten that had the potential to fit perfectly in the story I was about to weave.

After gathering all the elements, I then had too decided just what to do with them. One of the greatest elements of the project was that it was open to a substantial amount of interpretation by each of us (or our respective partnerships or trios). I had created my website, and had pages for all of the separate categories of elements. I would keep flipping back and forth between the pages, reading Jane’s story, then Orlando’s, then those of protesters in the Middle East, the words of Margaret Thatcher, in hopes that combined I’d be able to make something of it all. I realized that they were all stories of defiance, brave stories with common goals: to create a better life for themselves, and draw strength from the fight regardless of its success. I thought more about it, and their struggles were all quite similar – it would be possible to combine certain elements to paint multiple stories of ‘challenging the status quo,’ and that ended up being how I organized my mashup. Playing around with the quotes, I put together six different tales, ending with the more modern form of status quo rebellion: the revolution.

My mind kept firing as I created the stories, I was back doing what I loved – combining snippets of dialogue and pictures into a larger meaning, like the yarn I previously intertwined into a scarf or a pac-man bracelet.  Putting the mashup into the perspective of something I was familiar with made it much less intimidating than I had originally thought. It also made it considerably easier, and much easier to ‘flow,’ or develop the single-consciousness dynamic that was the end goal. The rest of the mashup took less time, and was a lot more fun once I figured out the idea of stories, it was amazing.

 I’d heard from my peers that for them, organizing the mashup was the hardest part but for me it was the opposite. They found collecting the element to be easy, but I didn’t. In the future, I need to ‘suck it up’ and always do what I think I’ll dread the most first to avoid another time crunch, and possibly be able to enjoy my birthday next year. Overall, I was really happy with how my mashup turned out, even after I ended up cutting my favorite Dumbledore quote. 

A Midsummer Night's Dream Reflections

Going to see Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, I was excited. Over spring break, I had indulged in a little chick-lit reading of Sophie Kinsella's Mini-Shopaholic, the latest in her Confessions of a Shopaholic series. The main character, Becky, throws her husband a party based off of the play with an elaborate setting described as a wonderful, magical forest and one of Shakespeare's best creations. The description drew me in, and excited me to see it live.

We sat down in the theater and were transported into that same magical forest, this time on a wraparound stage instead of in a castle, like the book. The trees were a screen backdrop that would change by the scene, but still created an aura of mystery. For two hours, I was enchanted by crazy characters and twisting plotlines; not all of which I understood due to an iffy ability to comprehend the old-English language on the spot, but I felt I was able to get the gist of it. The actors were fantastic and I overall found it easier to follow than Macbeth, and much more entertaining. However, my classmates and I seemed to collectively be distracted by one thing: Puck’s gender.

When the lights went up to begin intermission, the first I did was ask Alex, who is much better at Shakespeare than I am, about it, thinking that maybe I had just missed something. The actor seemed to have both male and female ‘parts’ as well as both masculine and feminine characteristics. We were prepared for this phenomenon, due to our reading of Orlando, but were curious nonetheless. None of us had read or seen the play before, and didn’t have any context if Puck should’ve been a boy or a girl.

After some post-show iPhone-googling, it was determined that Shakespeare had intended for Puck to be a boy, leading us to assume that the actor was a women playing a man, or a male fairy. It was an interesting take on the original work of Shakespeare, where girls weren’t even allowed to be in the plays. Female roles would be played by males dressing up like girls, having a women in a play playing a male character would’ve been unheard of!

Our fascination with the sex and gender roles in the play was not surprising, given the current media frenzy surrounding birth control, reproductive rights and the Miss Universe scandal concerning Jenna Talackova. As we as humans evolve, we’re changing how we want to act and trying to break down as many barriers as we can – class, race, sexual orientation and now gender barriers. Our distraction by Puck is just an example of the traditional roles we’re used to, and how change and progress in this area will be slow to come. Maybe we’re just maturing teenagers, but Academy students tend to be fairly open in our beliefs and being shocked by the cross-dressing was not an open response.

The students did get over the issue quickly, instead focusing on how dedicated that woman was to her role – she clearly shaved her head to play the part. From a girl’s perspective, that takes guts. She played a fabulous fairy in her mischievous ways of confusing both the audience and the characters in the forest and for that, she gets a thumbs up from me.