Introduction

EN343 - Practical Examination Journal

As part of my second year undergraduate English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University, I've written this blog as a reflective journal in support of my Practical Examination for the module Drama, Performance & Identity. The module was created and is currently being conveyed by Dr Nicholas Monk. The aims and objectives of the module are described as follows:

This module will ask to students to think of the many ways in which “drama”, “performance” and “identity” are connected and intertwined in late 20th/early 21st century culture. The module would seek to illuminate notions such as the nature of individual identity broadly, national identity, bodily identity, gender identity, racial identity, and spiritual identity. The more recent material would be used to reflect both upon the increasing prominence of consumer, hybrid, border, and marginal identities, and the notion that identity can shift, that it can be fragmented, and that a variety of identities can exist simultaneously. Students will be required to read a minimum of 1 play per week alongside relevant critical material. Students should also be prepared to work in CAPITAL’s studio or rehearsal room in a practical way that embodies their knowledge. No acting skills are required, however, and students with no “theatrical” experience at all are welcome to join. The first term’s work will involve 9 x 2-hour sessions in CAPITAL’s spaces, and the second term will involve independent guided study

As described above, the second term of independent guided study consists of a group project to devise a work in progress performance piece, whether this be a piece of performance art or a more scripted style of drama, the one and only main requirement is that its focused on some aspect of Identity. It's for this project that this blog is in support of.

The purpose of this exercise is to show a depth of understanding of some or several aspects of the material presented and discussed on the module. The task is intended to be intellectually demanding rather than an examination of any acting, directing, or artistic skills.

In my group is the Ben Canning, Jack Kelly, Kwaku Mills-Bampoe and Jessie Vickerage, and without them none of this project would have been possible. It's been a brilliant experience working with these guys, stimulating, hilarious, exhausting and exhilarating! So a MASSIVE thank you to my group for their dedication to support and again to Nick for creating a superb module! Also thank you to Jonathan Heron, Rob Batterbee and the CAPITAL Centre for their ongoing support.

For more information on the module itself, how it's been created, the success of the module and Nick's on research into Open Space Learning please visit http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/capital/about/people/academic/monk where you can find contact details and more information.

Unlocking the door

Our very first official meeting as a group of 'creators'.
A million possibilities.
Where to start?!

Sitting in our humble little circle as the other groups filtered out of the quietening CAPITAL studio, we decided the best way we were going to get the process started was to discuss what we each wrote in our essays. This told us what each of us were interested in exploring further and what subjects we wanted to avoid like the plague after having written thousands of words on it.

A key line of thought that arose from our description of our essays was our shared interest as performance and identity as something that was perplexing and troubling, with a want to revaluate the very foundations of them, rather than picking a specific grand, clichéd theme that could overpower our work. In other words, as a group the feel was that before we could start making sweeping statements about identities of race, sexuality, class etc, we felt a need to better understand the way we ourselves were aware of identity and its very composition.

To make the discussion useful, I also started a brainstorm/spider diagram to see how our interests and discussion was related. The first, in purple, was our first more of our general ideas. The second, in orange, was when we tried to distill our ideas a bit more, branching of from the themes and ideas we'd been talking about.

Click on the images to enlarge

One of the key sources that kept coming up in our conversation, the sources of our excitement, interest and intrigue, was that of performative experiments and performance art. By this I mean experiments that explored and challenged our ideas of identity through a means of performance or specifically including experiment in the performance, not necessarily having a clear set out narrative to tell but using performance as a means to explore something. I also felt this approach fits best with the timescale of the project and that it was a 'work in progress' piece, as if the means of the performance was to explore something and learn something new then we would hopefully focus more on the core of the project rather than creating a polished final piece, something that as a bit of a perfectionist and involved in theatre production would be easy to get distracted by.

This stemmed originally from the 'The Couple in a Cage: Guatinaui Odyssey' experiment we watched in class last term, not particularly for any statements it made on race, class or society as such, but in the way it explored the audience's reaction, presenting itself as being one thing, having a motive on the surface, but at the same time concealed another and even discovered things about their audience they didn't expect.

Coco and I lived for three-day periods in a gilded cage, on exhibition as 'undiscovered Amerindians' from the (fictional) island of Guatinau (Spanglishization of 'what now'). I was dressed as a kind of Aztec wrestler from Las Vegas, and Coco as a Taina straight out of Gilligan's Island. We were hand-fed by fake museum docents, and taken to the bathroom on leashes. Taxonomic plates describing our costumes and physical characteristics were displayed next to the cage.

As it travelled from site to site, it became more stylised, staged, and whimsical. Sadly, over 40% of our audience, no matter where we were, believed that the exhibit was real (at least during their first visit) and did not feel compelled to do anything about it.

Gomez-Pena Guillermo

For some, the audience believed what they saw, that the larger than life actors where in fact an newly discovered race, to such an extent that some happily paid to have their photo with them. But even those who weren't so gullible, seemed to have an even stronger reaction of disgust and confusion at the thought of being duped or led on, not so much as being on the same par with the creators in understanding a message they want to portray, but a sense of feeling attacked or ridiculed. Their reaction also varied according to their location or environment, from the trustworthy museum to the public park.

This inspired us as a group to research into experiments and instillations. Rather than creating a performance that showcased a certain message to the audience, preaching a certain theme or having a fictitious narrative to make up our theme, we were more interested in using the active audience and their experience of the piece to discover something new and allow the audience to discover for themselves what they were experiencing.

Task for next meeting: To research into performative experiments, whether in a drama context or not, that relate to the questioning of identity and the audience's relationship with the performance.

Texts & Links:

- Guillermo, Gomez-Pena, The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Century, City Lights Books, 1996
- Coco Fusco, 'The Couple in a Cage', http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/images/couplecage/cage_web01.gif

Experiment & Performance

PsyBlog - Understanding your mind - This was a particularly fascinating wesbite that I came across in my internet researching, giving lots of examples of psychological and sociological experiments carried out detailed from a serious of academic journals. While the site covers a wide range of experiements, these below seemed particularly relevant to our exploration of identity & are also rather interesting in the performative nature of how the experiments were conducted.

- Why Groups and Prejudices Form So Easily: Social Identity Theory

Two strands of this experiement interested me:

1. The way it explored the I's identity within a group, the way we copy and favour certain people in the group and prepare to fight and compete with people in other groups. This is particularly interesting considering how a person's identity can change when their on their own compared to in a group, as well as relating to the theory of constructing our identity according to the other.

2. The element of role play and performance that was created in the experiment, whether it was encouraged by the experimenters or not. As the journal describes, 'the most puzzling aspect of this experiment is that the boys had nothing whatsoever to gain from favouring their own group - there didn't seem to be anything riding on their decisions,' and the way they created or adopted these feelings rather than them having any signnificance in the 'real world'.

- I Can’t Believe My Eyes: Conforming to the Norm

Moving on from the concept that we copy others in creating our identities and exterior image, comes the idea about conformity and our compulsion to stick to the norm.

1. In the test they found that more people tend to rely on the answers of the group than their own oppinion, expressing feelings such as:

- Feeling anxious, feared disapproval from others and became self-conscious.

- Most explained they saw the lines differently to the group but then felt the group was correct.

- Some said they went along with the group to avoid standing out, although they knew the group was wrong.

- A small number of people actually said they saw the lines in the same way as the group.

2. 'What the participants didn't realise was that all the other people sat around the table were in on the game. They were all confederates who had been told by the experimenter to give the wrong answer' except for the last person to answer. This adds a whole new dimension of what's being said and what's going on underneath, as well as covert manipulation and control.

- Stereotypes: Why We Act Without Thinking

What was particularly interesting in this study wasn't so much about the existance of stereotypes in society or how we view them, more about the deeper effect of stereotyping and the unconcious way they can influence our behaviour towards others.'Participants were unaware of the manipulation yet they faithfully followed the unconscious cues given to them by the experimenters'

What this study demonstrates very neatly is just how sensitive we are to the minutiae of social interactions. Subtle cues from the way other people behave and more generally from the environment can cue automatic unconscious changes in our behaviour. And by the same token signals we send out to others can automatically activate stereotypes in their minds which are then acted out. As much as we might prefer otherwise, sometimes stereotypes can easily influence our behaviour and our conscious mind seems to have no say.

Jeremy Dean

I also came across this video, a massive hoax where the reality tv creators managed to convince the contestants they were sent into space. Whether it was more of a test of how someone could be so easily convinced by it or whether it was just for a big, voyeuristic laugh at their expense, the interesting part of it was the dynamic between the contestants, the creators and the audience and the blurring between reality and performance.



This is similar in those elements, maybe perhaps more extreme but is certainly a fascinating source of inspiration - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1V6rJ1qreA

Texts & Links:
- Dean, Jeremy, 'PsyBlog - Understanding your mind', Web, Wordpress, 2010
   Stereotypes: Why We Act Without Thinking, http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/11/why-groups-and-prejudices-form-so.php
   I Can't Believe My Eyes: Conforming to the Norm http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/11/i-cant-believe-my-eyes-conforming-to.php
   Stereotypes: Why We Act Without Thinking http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/01/stereotypes-why-we-act-without-thinking.php
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4wgJ3A2HnY&feature=player_embedded
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1V6rJ1qreA
- http://pics.livejournal.com/celeni/pic/001dk4bf
- http://profile.ak.facebook.com/object2/1471/104/l10191710921_9248.jpg
- http://www.creativeballoonco.com/acatalog/Snow-White.jpg

Watching being watched

When we came back together for another discussion, we were still very much in our sitting around talking stages as opposed to up on our feet making anything, but we were doing really well at getting an even clearer idea of what it was we wanted to acheive and were discussing more practical ways we could put our ideas into practice. We certainly had found a large and diverse amount of research and were throwing ideas around left right and centre....

- How people behave differently when they think they're part of an experiment or being watched

This idea came out of lots of our research areas, the way that in amongst all these experiements and the like, what was we noticed was never really raised or considered was the very fact that the participants could have been acting differently due to their awareness or self-awareness of being apart of the experiment. Part of this self-conciousness could come from the feeling of being judged or tested, as demonstrated in the conformity experiment in my previous post, but what might be interesting to explore would be how people are aware of themselves depending on their environment, such as whether it changes in a private space, a public space or a performative space.

- Fourth Plinth

Andrew Gormely's Fourth Plinth project, inviting members of the public to occupy a plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour to do whatever they pleased. What was particularly interesting about this project was the way ordinary people became performers and ordinary people became an audience automatically or even unconciously as they walked past. Also, the fact that it was putting the participants up on a pedestal and that it was being filmed for Sky Arts in an obvious way, makes it interesting to see how participants become more performative and out-going then perhaps they would in their everyday life, and the way the audience judge them as a performer rather than a normal person on the street.

"An open space for an open work that is about the democratisation of art"

Andrew Gormley

- Ian Breakwell's Auditorium

This example brought up in discussion was also particularly interesting in the way we can use the audience as part of the performance/installation in this fascinating juxtapostion of watching a performance and being watched...by yourself!

The cast, a group of spectators, is videotaped in two long takes by three cameras. In the first part they perform what the artists term 'coughsembles' and 'fansembles' and take us through a range of tics and fidgets as they wait for the show to begin. In the second they appear to be watching a circus-style performance, although we only see their reactions. The twist is that they had not been watching anything, but were invited to imagine what was happening on a footlit stage.

Auditorium is not literally interactive: it is a 32 minute videotape with stereo sound projected onto a large screen. Interaction is its subject, not its mechanism: its creators are intrigued by the different ways in which diverse audiences react. Joining an audience is a social act. Do we chat as we wait? Do we eat? What should we wear?

Hugh Stoddart

It would be very interesting to explore this technique further, not only looking at the way in changes the realtionship of the performer and the audience but also the way it reflects people's performative nature in life, whether people ever can show their true, unmediated identity or whether it will always contain an element of falseness.

This example spurted off a number of strands of thought that we thought might be interested to explore further...

Focus on one identity over another

Creating an identity for the audience

Creating a reaction they're not aware of

- Masks, Gillian Wearing

Not only is her work on masks beautiful, the mask and the face a key area to explore when performing identities, Gillian's artistic photography also begs the question of the effect of a person's identity when their image can be captured on film or in a photograph. Does it make it fixed, unbreakable? Also when a person knows they're going to be photographed how do they change the way they act or present themselves?Thinking in particular of the phenomenon of Facebook and the new age obsession of publishing our pictures

We also were thinking if we're going to try and do an installation where we've discovered something or experimenting something, we want the audience to be reflexive, looking back on themselves and realising something about they way they responded or about the experience they had. How overtly would we want to do this? Could we present the audience with having one motive for performance on the surface and then a different sub motive? What are we trying to achieve and what are we trying to cover? Would we have an obvious reveal or something to prove that there was a change in behaviour or identity? E.g. signng a petition. Or more subtle so the audience discover for themselves? Perhaps an after talk discussion.

- Internal

After Ben and Kwaku's experience of this performance at the Edinburgh Fringe, we thought Internal would be the perfect sort of way we'd approach our own installations/performance and so we thought we'd try to reinact it on a smaller scale to get some practice at interacting with an audience and staging something. Internal  was a staged, private date in a booth, with a member of the public and an actor, blurring the boundaries of reality and performance as you didn't know how much of what the actor, and the participant for that matter, was put on and what was real.



Scripted conversation
-Name
-Where ur from
- Study course
- Likes and dislikes

Task for next session: Prepare to put on a reinactment of Internal with first year students through Codpiece, and also to think of Instillation ideas, what different effects can we create and the sound, smell, sight that goes into creating it.

Texts & Links:
- Anthony Gormley, One & Other, 'The Fourth Plinth' http://www.london.gov.uk/fourthplinth/plinth/gormley.jsp
- Stoddart, Hugh, A review of Ian Breakwell's Auditorium, Frieze magazine, November / December 1999, LuxOnline, 2005, http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/auditorium(1).html
- Wearing, Gillian, Masks, Tate Collection Online,  http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2648&page=2&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=lightbox - Dickson, Andrew, Internal: the ultimate test for Edinburgh audiences?, Guardian Online Theatre  Blog, 17 August 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/aug/17/internal-edinburgh-audiences
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gfbDCi2RIA&feature=player_embedded
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KKD_u3skuA&feature=player_embedded

Awareness & Self-Awareness

Awareness

Looking at people's awareness and how easy it is to distract a person from what's right in front of them when you give them an instruction or a challenge.





Self Awareness

- Photo ID as part of the Welcome Trust's Identity project

Who are you and how do you arrive at that knowledge?

Some are genetically influenced, some are internally perceived and some - such as our fingerprints and DNA profiles - raise ethical, political and social issues.

While I've only been able to view a couple of images from this collection, the description and aims of the project are particularly inspiring in the way that it breaks down the different elements that make up a person's identity. This particular projects takes a very scientific approach and what I find especially interesting is the way it fuses the rather polar opposites of science and art; something that I have a personal interest in from my involvement in the Curious Directive ensemble.

- Digital photography: Has it become an obsession?

Everything we do is captured on camera – and our memories are being superseded by pixels

This has been the most widely documented decade in human history.

The head and shoulders of a love object snipped carefully from a 5x4 print is more real than the same thing Photoshopped neatly from a jpeg file leaving no trace of its theft at either end.

Michael Bywater

A step on from the Photo ID project, this article opens up another interesting avenue of the changing way photographs are used as a medium of art but also the changing way that photos are used as representations and documentations of our identity.

- Facebook Idenity: Fear of Theft

The truth is that you don't know who anyone is on the internet

Researchers found that two in five Facebook users happily divulged details such as their date of birth, phone number and workplace to people whom they have never met.

Tom Rawsorne

Obsession with Online Identity

What’s great about facebook is that unlike email, it creates a little online village of your friends – conversations are no longer singular, but circular, drawing everyone into the mix

What’s also great in a deliciously shallow sense is that it lets you act as your own personal PR agency. Careful selection of status updates, images and daily actions mean that “Brand Fryatt” is far more interesting, funny and having much more fun than the actual me.

Facey-B has also affected the way I act in the “real world” too. Going to a gig, meeting your mates down the pub, going on holiday – all are at some level Facebook events in my head before they’ve even begun – I start envisioning the Facebook presence before I’ve had my second pint.

When at their best, these new tools for communication, networking and citizen reporting give the world an amazing (and amazingly democratic) way to keep connected. But happy-clappy webtopia aside, the 55 unread Tweets I’ve received since I’ve been writing this has sent me into a state of utter hypertension.

Linsey Fryatt

The new influence of technology and how it has affected our representation and consumption of knoweldge and identity is something I would particularly like to explore further, as its something very current that my generation in particular have been surrounding by in our youth. This is something rather definate stylistically and would have to connect with or be on the same par with everyone else's ideas to work well. Yet, this element of technology, images and security are all themes I feel play a significant factor in our modern concept of identity.

Texts & Links:
- Photo ID, 'The Identity Project', The Welcome Collection, http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/the-identity-project/events-nationwide/photo-id.aspx
- Bywater, Michael, Digital photography: Has it become an obsession?, Independent on Sunday Online, Gadgets & Tech Features, 11th February 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/digital-photography-has-it-become-an-obsession-1606148.html
- Rawstorne, Tom, My Identity was Stolen on Facebook, Mail Online, Femail, 27th July 2007, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-471321/My-identity-stolen-Facebook.html
- Fryatt, Linsey, Facebook ruined my life, 'The Great Debate', February 4th 2009, Thomson Reuters 2010, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/02/04/facebook-ruined-my-life/
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4&feature=player_embedded
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkn3wRyb9Bk&feature=player_embedded

Composing Identity

Firstly, despite our enthusiasm and work towards putting on our own Internal, it was a fail. We had a distinct lack of participants and since they had to be people that we didn't know that well, so that it was just awkward and really mediated during the performance, it limited our pool of volutneers and we had basically over estimated the enthusiasm of people. This did teach us that people can feel against or uncomfortable being put in a situation like that, and also to make sure we prepare in advance for getting an audience for out piece.

So we decided to move from that failure with our heads held high and be really brutal about where our group was going, to criticise our progress and focus our ideas so we could come up with a tangible idea. We started this by forcing ourselves to summarise our different strands of discussion into one working title and then apply our installation ideas from there.

- Can we ever see a true identity?
- Person will always react differently when they're aware they could be being watched
- How do some people react on their own compared to in a group?
- How does a person act when they're feeling watched, when they're not?
- Where does paranoia fit in?
- Identity can't be narrowed down as its always changing
- How can you ever find a true identity? If you acknowledge it, then once you've made this acknowledgement you have an awareness and could change it.

We came up with the title:

COMPOSING IDENTITY

Then we distilled how we'd break this title down, what was relevant and what was a logical progression for here onwards.

WHY - protection of life, of image, humanity,
HOW - more stereotyped, where they come from
WHEN - changes when you're on your own and when you're with someone else or being watched

AIM of PERFORMANCE

- People aren't going to be themselves when they know they're in the play, only way might get closer to this is when they're on their own, isolating the audience? Isolate some and not others?
- Recreating the way identity changes in nature but with an awareness of the performance context
- Explore how it is impossible to be the true self, in representation and in behaviour

From this spurted the ingenious idea of SQUARES

Dividing the studio up into a number of different 'squares' or sections, each square would have a different installation, exploring different areas of how identity can be altered according to environment & keeping the contents of the squares hidden from the other squares, so that the audience don't find out the full contents of the performance piece until afterwards.

Initial square ideas that we came up with included:

1) An audience member watching a tv screen (seems live but actually pre-recorded) of one of us acting normal, either going around our daily lives in a normal looking room or strolling up and down as if in another square, but then on the video we start 'watching' the audience. Using the Auditorium project as a reference point of how we might achieve this effectively, plus exploring the effect of a voyeur being watched.

2) An audience member watching someone else in another square (the other person not neccessarily aware of such), and putting the first person in a role of authority, e.g. shout out if they're do a particular act. In the second square, they'd be doing any of the other installations we come up with, we just use whatever act they're being encouraged to do as the particular act the viewer is picking up on. The combination of the power of watching others combined with the realisation that you're being watched. Also explore concept of survallience and big brother theories.

3) Give the audience member(s) a speech to perform, a monologue that contains very little stereotyped content but giving them a character who is usually very stereotyped and reflect on how much the automatically apply such a stereotype. Perhaps may also put up stereotyped figures that reflect this character to influence this. Also, exploring the way that like the Plinth, they make a performance of it rather than just reading the speech. Also for this performance to have an audience...

4) Same as above but without an audience, do people still perform even when the're not being watched. how much effort will they put into and will they feel self-concious, doing something performative with no visable audience. will they think there's a hidden audience.

5) A somewhat scripted but improv dialogue between one of the team and an audience member. Intimate.Looking at how we mimic other peoples actions, langauage, behaviours and how people react in a social situation. Subtley copying the other person's behaviours and see how this changes the situation.

6) A square to make the isolated audience member feel defensive and reclusive, looking not only at how environments can make people perform but also quieten and hide themselves in protection.Feeling of vunerablity. Thought about doing an audio commentary of what the person was doing, not in a personal way just so they think they're being analysed, 'you raised your left arm, you scratched your right knee'

7) Putting a person on their own in a comfortable, safe room so that they're at ease, where they could be themselves, have comfy seat, a selection of books, an ipod. Sense of escapism from the world and from the performance. How much can they forget about the performative situation they're in, how much can a person be themselves. Provides an interesting comparison to the stresses the other people feel.

8) Name, something to do with changing the person who has entered's name, making them adopt a different identity... lanaguage and name with identity very interesting, not sure how to realise it yet but worth exploring

9) Identity and the face. Perhaps giving the person something to draw a face onto, can give it any identity they like. Again needs exploring but great avenue to explore.

- Changing different environments

- Need to speak to the arts centre about borrowing black drapes

Task for next session: Think about does the performance have any setting or is it a hazy environment? Also research into 1 & 2

Images:
- http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2007/02/13/roses460300.jpg
- http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3620/3421779884_0cbb3b51e1.jpg
- http://gotgamepro.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/reality-tv2.jpg
- http://www.123cctv.co.uk/catalog/images/YC%2090PH.jpg
- http://www.publicspeakingexpert.co.uk/images/7858.jpg
- http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4043/4312033217_d0411343aa.jpg 

Loving Big Brother... the book

After our development into the ideas of different squares or sections, I took my previous research on awareness, images & online identity and a step further, looking into the first few square ideas of being watched and surveillance. Wanting to keep it applicable to performance and art, I browsed through the relevant sections of the library and came up with this really fascinating book about 'Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space' entitled Loving Big Brother. Not only does the book take an extensive look into theories and the changing social implications of surveillance, but as a theatre practitioner John McGrath also takes a close look at the practical uses and implications of using cameras and video in performance.

- Theories of Surveillance

Few of the connotations of surveillance are positive. And yet, in contemporary Western society we have largely embraced surveillance; while we worry about the limits of privacy and about things getting into 'the wrong hands', in general a burgeoning of electronic surveillance is accepted as a means of making our world safer...For a field which has such a vast range of imagery and ideas associated with it, the practice of surveillance had, for several years until very recently, undergone profound and massive growth with relatively little critical engagement.

A Baudrillardian reading can see surveillance only as a symptomatic of hyper-real society, of the need to repeat obsessively the mediation of our already mediated selves and experiences...I am interested not only in reading surveillance as yet another proof of the mediation of experience, but in exploring whether, within our mediated world, the current proliferation of surveillance practices provides any indications of new understandings and consciousness.

From the very beginning of the text, it opens up the multi-faceted dilemma that is raised when considering surveillance; what do we think about surveillance as an individual and what do we think about as a collective group? Are our feelings towards surveillance and privacy different within a social unit or group from that as an individual? There also seems to be too very different images connected to the idea; from being the epitome of safety and protection to a symbol of control and dictatorship. This answers up to many further questions: what is the hegemonic opinion of surveillance culture? Is this something that should be questioned rather than just excepted? How is each side of the debate promoted or demonised in the public eye?

 - Public Performance, Authorial Voice and Identity of the Individual

The interpellating voice of the policeman not only restricts us within the behavioural and rational framework of the state, it also makes sense of our relationship to the state and its police. It carries the promise that if we are in the position to answer politely - 'Who me, officer? I live here.' - we will not be arbitrarily crushed by the state's power. Yet with the policing camera we are offered no such opportunity to respond.

Because of the association with the domestic, the protection of privacy often becomes equated in public discourse with protection of the weak, of women and children.When the privacy of politicians is invaded by the press, it is the innocence of the 'wife and family' that is routinely defended.

Here McGrath explores the differing relationship an individual has with the state or the figure of power in the context of surveillance. In the first instance, McGrath demonstrates how the peaceful, mutual relationship between the I and the state has been lost when the figure of authority, e.g the policeman, becomes disembodied, losing the humanity in interaction. Without this, McGrath suggests, surveillance can be seen as the invasion of the individuals privacy, the arbitrary crushing of their personal space by state power. Yet, in the second instance, McGrath points out that this concept also greatly depends of the individuals definition of their privacy and personal space.

- Privacy & Space

We also experience privacy very much in spatial terms - to be in private is to be in a special, often domestic, place.To explore in more detail the complex relationship between private space, public space and surveillance space, we could do worse than look at the experience of individuals who, we might say, are on the avant-garde of privacy loss, i.e. some of the many groups who never really had access to privacy in the first place.

A key figure here is Henri Lefebvre, perhaps the theorist who most thoroughly, and most unmetaphorically, extends spatial analysis beyond its relegation to the specifics of the familiar three dimensions in the post-Hegelian philosophical environment. In his typology of space - perceived space, conceived space, lived space and a hoped-for differential space - Lefebvre refuses a hierarchy between the space through which we move and the understandings of space we carry....and propagates a fundamental misunderstanding of the ways in which space structures our lives.

- Cameras, Video & Surveillance in Performance

With these theories and questions in the air, McGrath uses this awareness to have an insightful view into how the use of camera and video feeds in performance influence an audience's interpretation of the piece, and taking a practical use of how elements of survallience have an effect in a performative environment.

In one production, in which the audience was informed that it was under surveillance and instructed to 'act realistically', an extraordinary sense of improvisation took over among audience members, who used the opportunity of the instructions to play at acting.

The directors most accomplished in the use of on-stage video are very aware of the destruction of stage illusion that video equipment can enact...the use of video in theatre - and particularly uses that incorporated either live feed of performance or audience... - tended to emphasise the in-completions, the edges, the obscurities of the theatrical space. Introducing surveillance-like moments into theatre pieces myself - sequences in which the audience appeared, through video, on stage, or where the stage space itself was interrogated by its reappearance on screen - I found that the audience reaction was often quite gleeful, very different from the reluctant response that accompanies attempts to bring the audience bodily on stage, or to expose stage illusion through other means.

My key experience of using surveillance technology in theatre was one of the ways in which the presence of technology could - immediately it was switched on, revealed or noticed - alter the very feel, the mood, the dimensions even, of the space that we were in: our lived experience of space changed as soon as the space became surveyed.

...keeping away from an easy and lazy cliché of commentary on surveillance - the idea that surveillance is turning the whole life into a public performance.

From these examples and the reading of the text in general, I've gained an appreciation of the significant influence the presence of cameras has in modern performance, packed with complex ideologies. While this complexity isn't something to shy away from neccessarily, I think it is clear that it to start introducing such elements could dominate as quite a strong theme of the project. If this is a route we'd quite like to focus on then thats fine, but  I would be cautious to not include anything that could sway or overwhelm the audience's interpretation of the other sections.

Texts & Links:
- McGrath, John E, Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space, Routledge 2004
- Richard Potter, Return To The Silence, http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v349/123/78/755855608/n755855608_1997358_5677.jpg & http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v349/123/78/755855608/n755855608_1997362_6647.jpg

Video Blog

So after all that lengthy note taking and reading out of a book, I decided it was time for  a change.... Video blog! I've edited one of our group discussion sessions we filmed in the Writers Room at Milburn House, making note of the useful texts and links that we refer to in discussion...and yes, before it seems too exciting, it is just discussion at the minute, exciting stuff should come later, but its still interesting to hear...

Filmed by Jessie, edited by me.













Links

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16asA3oSLfw&feature=PlayList&p=96A61687EEC633AC&playnext_from=PL&index=0

Behaviour, Belonging and Belief

Picking up on the ideas of ritual discussed, as seen in the video blog, I decided to look closer at the Durkheim article, Behaviour, Belonging and Belief: A Theory of Ritual Practice, to investigate further into how the small things or the things that we follow and believe in without a second question, that we do are important in or influence our personal identity and our identity within a group, thinking about how we could also work this into our own performance using the such simple use of repetitions and rituals.

Just as belief is a step beyond knowledge, belonging is a step beyond membership. Group memberships arise via some combination of chance and choice, but in every case they are an external fact, a status that one may not be committed to or desirous of. Human social interdependence necessitates that at least some of these memberships become solidified into something potent and secure—in short, belonging. The role of rituals in the creation of belonging is suggested by the fact that social integration and a sense of unity are among the most noted outcomes and functions of ritual.

Co-Presence

As Durkheim noted and others have subsequently confirmed under “great collective shock . . . social interactions become much more frequent and active . . . individuals seek one another out and come together more". This impulse to assemble is independent of any intention to engage in ritual practice, and even apart from the larger ritual process, it has a profound influence over those assembled.

The Direct Effects of Co-Presence on Belonging. ( particularly useful to also think about in terms of the identity of the audience within the space and their feelings if they're isolated, thrown together in a pair or in a larger collected group)

At the same time that it has direct effects on belief, co-presence also has powerful and direct effects on belonging. Simple contact between individuals is a powerful source of liking and cohesion playing as it does upon multiple mechanisms of attachment, including mere exposure, propinquity, similarity, and mere categorization. Moreover, both the developmental and ethological evidence indicate that such proximity attachment linkages have strong biological underpinnings...Deindividuation and ritual practice converge in terms of both cause and effect. As the name implies, the gist of deindividuation has to do with the loss of a sense of self, resulting in three important effects: 1) a strong sense of unity with and liking for the group and its members, thus contributing directly to belonging; 2) behavior that is disinhibited and free from the normative and moral constraints that usually constrain it; and 3) a direct and positive impact on the participant’s subjective state via its ability to reduce self-awareness.

From Behavior to Belief and Belonging

Contrary to the modern Western conception of human action as considered, purposive, and conscious, empirical evidence makes it clear that much of the time people act mindlessly or automatically, under the influence of preconscious social and emotional forces of which they are unaware and that they are unable to control anger. Consequently, though very much affected by the ritual experience, the participant is unlikely to correctly attribute these changes to the causes traced above. Durkheim puts it this way: "The ordinary observer cannot see where the influence of society comes from. It moves along channels that are too obscure and circuitous, and uses psychic mechanisms that are too complex, to be easily traced to the source"

The ironic counterpoint to our lack of accurate knowledge about the causes of our states and behaviors is our insistence on seeking explanations for them.We try to understand the causal relationships that populate our world in order to make it seem predictable and controllable, especially when faced with atypical behavior, states, or events. When this need to understand collides with our lack of insight, we attempt to locate the cause of our experience via some combination of three heuristics:

- Cultural causal theories. Actors and observers both draw upon preexisting, socially shared, and culturally diffused schema and expectations in making causal attributions about actions. In short, we tend to make the causal connections that our socialization predisposes us to see.
- Social comparison. Actors look to co-present others for information and validation concerning the definition and attribution of ambiguous affect and behavior.
- Perceptual salience. Attribution follows attention in that salient elements of the environment are more likely to be integrated into causal models than less salient but potentially causal factors.This returns us once again to the second way in which attention is of primary importance: it not only affects subjective states, but also channels attribution toward the totem.

Between the lack of accurate causal introspection and the need to account for affect and behavior, we can conclude that ritual participants will probably not attribute the effects of participation to their actual causes, and probably will ascribe their experiences to a source that is primed by their culture, is shared with their co-participants, and is the focus of ritual attention. This lack of insight, and consequent misattribution, is the hinge around which the four core mechanisms of belief and belonging creation swing.

Self–Perception.

Self-perception theory  assumes that actors have little actual insight about the causes of their own behavior, and that our self-images are largely constructed in the same ways our images of others are: by observing our behavior and using our implicit personality theories to interpret them and discover who we are. From this perspective, the ritual participant would be induced by the ritual situation to enact behaviors that she would later incorporate into her self-schema along the lines of “Well, I was speaking in tongues, so I must be a believer,” thereby fortifying belonging by bolstering her identification as such and by increasing her sense that she is, in important ways, even more similar to those around her.

Texts & Links

- Marshall, Douglas A,  Behaviour, Belonging and Belief: A Theory of Ritual Practice, 'Sociological Theory', Volume 20 Issue 3, Pages 360 - 380, 17 Dec 2002, 2010 American Sociological Association, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118953492/PDFSTART
- http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3428/3728604649_de245b90fc.jpg
- http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3344/3484430856_77b2e0a156.jpg

Squares Ideas Develop

As we talked through the ideas for the squares ideas, we reduced them down as we went along, making them more manageable and making sure that everything we do is at the same good standard. From the long list we originally had we decided to keep 'Language', 'Cyber', 'Date', 'Labelling or Stereotypes' and the 'Normal' section.

Techniques for creating defined 'squares' or sections:

- Masking or LX Tape
- Bodies, us, invite extra ensemble performers, audience
- Flats
- Curtains/drapes

How do people navigate around the space?

- Map
- Directions on the floor/signs
- Paper along the floor, can leave comments, feedback, feelings

Date

- Coffee shop or restaurant
- Get a server/use whoever is spare at the time
- Crowd noise/Café music
- Coffee cups, coffee, biscuits or wine and bread/snacks
- Theory needs more developing

Cyberspace

- Duality
- Is language being compromised?
- Man reduced to machine, the body as a tool used to just press the keys on a keyboard, loss of physical presence in online communication. Even with webcam or skype its mediated form of the individual. Not face to face but face to facebook.
- MSN with a script, talking to audience member
- Lost mind searching for its body
- Cosy living room, the life behind the story, home, how the home represents/is an extension of your bodily identity
- What is your social role in cyber space?
- Numbers, quantities, number of people, number of friends, photos
- MSN, Facebook, Twitter, Chat Roulette (!)
- Does emotion come from the body or from the mind?
- Virtue of the body, importance of the body to the mind and vice versa

Descartes

- The loss of a bodily presence or identity

- Thinking thing exists apart from body

- Mind & Body interact

- In cyberspace, the viewer defines the other by what they read or hear, no other presence. The separation of the body from the mind. When we

Is there not a God, or whatever I may call him, who puts into me the thoughts I am now having? But why do I think this, since I myself may perhaps be the author of these thoughts? In that case am not I, at least, something? But I have just said that I have no senses and no body. This is the sticking point: what follows from this? Am I not so bound up with a body and with senses that i cannot exist without them?

By a body I understand whatever has a determinable shape and a definable location and can occupy a space in such a way as to exclude any other body; it can be perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste or smell, and can be moved in various ways, not by itself but by whatever else comes into contact with it

...thought; this alone is inseparable from me, I am, I exist - that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist...I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason...a thinking thing.

Rene Descartes

The picture, from Descartes' Essai sur l'homme, illustrates his conception of the human as a machine presided over by an immaterial soul. One needs to appreciate that each generation imagines humans in the image its latest technology, so that just as we imagine the human brain to be a computer, so Descartes imagined the human body to be a pneumatic automaton, inspired by the inventive designs in of Salomon de Caus whose Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes, published in 1615, was studied intensely by Descartes. He thought that the nerves were pipes that conducted control fluids to the various muscles, and that the ventricles of the brain were the reservoirs for these fluids. It was thus natural to see the pineal gland (the almond-shaped object in the picture), which hangs down into the the third ventricle, as the control valve of the whole system, and hence the place where the action of the soul could have most effect. This mechanisation of the body represents the final loss of any sacredness of matter

Language

- The vocals and the body

- Voice & identity

- Sign language

- Barriers of language

- Development of language
- World of language
- Divided into 2
- Jack & Jessie to write a speech each
- Jack: about different languages, cultural impact of languages, barriers, confusion, disrespect or misunderstanding
- Jessie: rhythm, fundamentals of language, mechanics, sound, origins
- Interaction between each other - Do not speak, do not mouth etc
- Events within Language (Version 1)
1. Sit them down

2. Press play

3. Listen to speeches

4. Ends up with them standing on the table and shouting their name

5. Raise/move the screen

6. Interaction
7. Told or taken to join the rest of the audience in the ending

This article was of particular inspiration to Jack's speech

Language, Identity and the Ownership of English

Under what conditions do language learners speak? How can we encourage language learners to become more communicatively competent? How can we facilitate interaction between language learners and target language speakers?

Identity relates to desire-the desire for recognition, the desire for affiliation, and the desire for security and safety

Identity is not so much a map of experience-a set of fixed coordinates-as it is a guide with which ESL students negotiate their place in a new social order and, if need be, challenge it through the meaning-making activities they participate in.

Duff and Uchida examine the "inseparability" of language and culture; and Schecter and Bayley conceive of language as embodying in and of itself "acts of identity." Fourth, most of the authors note that identity construction must be understood with respect to larger social processes, marked by relations of power that can be either coercive or collaborative.

I also researched some other articles looking at the origins and foundations of language...

All social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to whales and apes, but only humans have developed a language which is more than a set of prearranged signals.Our speech even differs in a physical way from the communication of other animals. It comes from a cortical speech centre which does not respond instinctively, but organises sound and meaning on a rational basis. This section of the brain is unique to humans.

Languages are linked to each other by shared words or sounds or grammatical constructions. The theory is that the members of each linguistic group have descended from one language, a common ancestor. In many cases that original language is judged by the experts to have been spoken in surprisingly recent times - as little as a few thousand years ago

Texts & Links

- Descartes, Rene, Second Mediation: The nature of  the human mind, and how it is better known than the body, 'Mediations', Trans. John Cottingham, Cambridge University Press, 1986
- Clarke, Chris, Spirit and Matter: the Death of a Dichotomy, http://www.greenspirit.org.uk/resources/spirit_and_matter.shtml
- Norton, Bonny, Language, Identity, and the Ownership of English, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3, Language and Identity (Autumn, 1997), pp. 409-429, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3587831
- Gascoigne, Bamber, History of Language, History World, From 2001, ongoing, http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab13
- Sketches drawn and uploaded myself

Work In Progress Check Up

Looking forward to your presentations of work in progress tomorrow. Please be ready to offer a maximum of 5 minutes of practical work. Jonny and I will then offer comments and guidance and we will be happy to answer questions and provide clarification.

Nick

Oh no. Now all our brilliant and yet abstract ideas have to come together. Be tested. Judged. Its hard not to admit that this tester week was very rather nerve-wracking but ofcourse completely neccessary and helpful.

We tested out Jessie's language script for which Jonny volunteered to test out. As previously described, we had two tables and chairs divided by a screen, one for each script on language, and on each table we had an ipod (althought at this stage the script wasn't recorded, so Jessie read it out), a blindfold, and instructions.

An extract of script (full version included later)

Now hear that water. We are interested in your count, can you now tap a rhythm on the table in front of you that sounds like the rhythm of the falling water hitting the still water?

Keep up – please you aren’t.

A little longer please.

Are your hands hurting?

Keep the rhythm up.

Thank – you, that has being recorded, in fact you are – the whole of you but perhaps your weren’t aware?

Your hands probably sting. This is good, we can measure that type of physicality.

Things we learnt/advice

- Health and safety
- Make sure there is space around the table to do all the movements asked,
- Make sure the table is secure if you ask them to get onto the table
- Make sure the table is big enough so that its not cluttered
- Blind on the table? good idea?!
- Length of pauses, too long, too tiring, too quick and not enough time to do things? Test
- What are we expecting asking from the audience?
- Are we trying to embarass them?
- Do we expect them to be performative?
- Do we want them to perform or to be themselves?
- In letting them into the space we're agreeing a contract with the audience
- Warning, letting the participants know what they're in for
- Type of audience we invite
- Is it a performance or not?
- Don't overcomplicate things for yourselves
- Make sure that physically capable of creating everything, regardless of how many worthy ideas you have
- Make sure that you can control it, someone to watch over everything, stage manager figure

Beat Goes On

Language

- Pretty happy with it
- Need to read through with everyone when J & J have had a chance to write the speeches.

Date

- Ben as the date participant
- No script though, more improvisation

- Inspired by Internal but not about just getting private secrets out of the audience member, about how humans interact, how we present, emit our identity to others, how our interactions with others create our identity.

- These are some articles Ben found that make an interesting observations at human interactions and what they say about us.

Meet New People Without Being Creepy

Everybody knows that first impressions count. And if the first impression you're giving is on the creepy side, you're probably tired of being misunderstood. This article will go over what makes someone seem creepy, and how you can stop giving off that creepy vibe.

For a start, its fascinating that even such an article exists! Not only is 'being creepy' shown as being such an issue that an article is needed, giving a glimpse into the paranoid problem society we live in, but that the way the writer has analysed and picked out the key techniques to 'solve' these 'vibes'.

1. Understand the stereotype of a creep

2. Commit to changing your behaviour

3. Become a good conversationalist

4. Let go of any neediness you might have

5. Respect boundaries

6. Pay attention to body language

The article goes into great detail about each of these aspects and while the advice given does some what ring a strangely precise bell, it does also seem to greatly simplify every aspect of human interaction. Is the way humans interact this fundamentally simple or is this way of thinking, trying to find a fast track way to connecting with others, damaging our ability to communicate with each other? Do or should we really be able to be put into a box so easily? Luckily, the article is kind enough to publish its own warning for its advice:

There are some people who will label anything different as weird and creepy. None of these steps will work with them because they're too shallow to appreciate individuality of any kind.

Remember - someone you perceive as 'creepy' could really be on the autism spectrum. Individuals on the autism spectrum usually do not have very good eye contact, talk constantly about their favourite subjects, are unsure about space. Try to accept someone who is 'creepy' because in their world they are one heck of a person.

Have a Great Conversation

Thank goodness this next article exists too or there might be many out there who might never had been able to have a 'great' conversation with another.

The art of conversation takes practice, and is not as hard as you might think. With some patience and these steps, and you can learn to relax and enjoy a great conversation.

The first guideline is a bit problematic to say the least though,

Find out about the person you'll be talking to before you actually talk to them, if you can. If it's someone who you work with, or go to school with, look at their department website and see if they have any projects in the works. (Do not, however, dig any deeper than these suggestions. Coming into a conversation equipped with personal information about that person comes off as creepy. That means researching a person on social networks before talking to them for the first time is not okay!)

Luckily, this article also has its own warning section too.

Choose carefully when asking personal questions. You do not want to venture into overly personal issues. Even if the other person might be willing to talk about it, you may end up learning things that you really do not want to know. You certainly do not want the other person to think afterwards that you coerced them into revealing personal information.

Beware of topics that can be inflammatory - such as religion and politics - and don't venture into them unless you know the person has roughly the same convictions as you, or the circumstances otherwise allow for pleasant discussion. Again, it's fine to disagree and can be nice to talk about differences, but it can also be a quick step toward an argument.

Try not to ever cut the person off mid-sentence, or when they naturally pause between sentences (or when trying to remember a detail). It seems disrespectful and it makes it seem like you think that what you have to say is more important than what others have to say. Let the person finish their thoughts and then continue on with thoughts of your own.

Cyber

- Ideas need more developing
- Using the projector screen as the technological focus and then the actual activity more about the body
- Quite like to use this square for the chance of something more performative
- Losing action, inaction, all done from a computer screen, ritual
- Creating a cyber identity, reduction of body, name and profile
- Body reduced to a tool, mind & body never been as separated as now
- Body parts, disembodied
- The voice being severed from the mind
- Want to show the importance of the body to identity, body language
- Polaroid, human interface
- Identity of the face - individual, recognition, social e.g. gender, age, expression, emotion, gaze
- Each body has an interaction
- No eyes, no mouth, no hands, no ears... but steer away from the don't see, don't hear, don't speak campaign that has become a cliché.
- No speech, no face/external manifestation of self, no expression/emotion
- One face can represent so much, and another so much completely different
- Expression, security, sensuality, machinery
- Body as just a tool, an instrument, vacant, marionette, machine
- Hard to be yourself when you're physically exposed, social graces, system of manners
- Voice, expression, masks, emotion, same person, mask of the screen, what is being concealed online
- Smell, sound, senses, lost, absent, touch
- Safety, can be very real or very fake over the Internet, yet we can't tell the difference. Safety to conceal oneself but dangers that others can also. Can't tell if we're being told lies
- Takes away social awkwardness, takes away the silences
- Formulaic
- Who has the power? The speaker or the auditor? How does this differ from the norm?

Identity of the Face

When we were discussing the bodily identity and the exploration of how this is or isn't lost through cyberspace, one particularly interesting aspect of body identity was that of the face. Our facial identity is something that we are born with, its in our genes, and is a part of every living animal since the dawn of time. Its something that is fundamental to our everyday existence and natural, yet in this modern day, the image concious, beauty obsessed society people are going to great measure to even change and alter their own faces to fit into a hegemonic mould, from make up and beauty products to botox and surgergy. More about that later, but first to look at just why the face is so significant to our identities...

Discussions of face invariably refer to the concept of self.

Debates have occurred on a range of issues, such as the extent to which face is an individual or relational phenomenon, whether it is a public or private phenomenon, and whether it is a situation-specific or context-independent phenomenon.

Simon’s (2004) ‘Self-Aspect Model of Identity’ proposes that a person’s self-concept comprises beliefs about that person’s own attributes or self-characteristics. These can be huge in number, and include elements such as:

- Personality traits (e.g. shy)

- Abilities (e.g. poor dancer)

- Physical features (e.g. curly hair)

- Behavioural characteristics (e.g. usually gets up early)

- Ideologies (Christian, democrat)

- Social roles (e.g. project manager)

- Language affiliation(s) (e.g. English)

- Group memberships (e.g. female, academic, Christian)...

What, then, are the functions of identity? Simon (2004:66–67) identifies a number of functions, three of which are particularly pertinent for the study of face:

- Identity helps to provide people with a sense of belonging (through their relational and collective self-aspects) and with a sense of distinctiveness (through their individual self-aspects).
- Identity helps people ‘locate’ themselves in their social worlds. By helping to define where they belong and where they do not belong in relation to others, it helps to anchor them in their social worlds, giving them a sense of ‘place’.
- The many facets of identity help provide people with self-respect and self-esteem. People’s positive evaluations of their own self-aspects help build their self-esteem. However, self-respect and self-esteem do not result simply from independent reflection; the respectful recognition of relevant others also plays a crucial role...

According to Goffman (1967:7), face is something that is ‘‘diffusely located in the flow of events’’ of an interaction, and it becomes manifest only when people make appraisals of these events. Similarly, Lim (1994:210) argues that this social element, which involves claims on the evaluations of others, is a defining feature of the phenomenon of face.

‘‘. . . face is not what one thinks of oneself, but what one thinks others should think of one’s worth. Since the claim of face is about one’s image held by others, one cannot claim face unilaterally without regard to the other’s perspective. . . . The claim for face is the claim that the other should acknowledge, whether explicitly or implicitly, that one possesses the claimed virtues. . . . Face, in this sense, is different from such psychological concepts as self-esteem, self-concept, ego, and pride, which can be claimed without regard to theother’s perspective.’’ 

Face is a complex phenomenon that needs to be studied from multiple perspectives. Theories of identity suggest that face has a number of characteristics that need to be held in dialectic balance:
- face is a multi-faceted phenomenon, yet it can also be a unitary concept
- face has cognitive foundations and yet it is also socially constituted in interaction
- face ‘belongs’ to individuals and to collectives, and yet it also applies to interpersonal relations

This diagram was also in the article and I just thought it was pretty interesting looking the different qualities we can identify with a person and the different ways attitudes we have towards ourself:

Images, Texts & Links

- Spencer-Oatey, Helen, Theories of identity and the analysis of face, The Language Centre, University of Cambridge, Science Direct Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 639–656, 5 December 2006, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6VCW-4MYF650-3-1&_cdi=5965&_user=9253452&_pii=S0378216606002608&_orig=search&_coverDate=04%2F30%2F2007&_sk=999609995&view=c&wchp=dGLbVzz-zSkWA&md5=9e60dd6889c1b9559398fed61fc16d27&ie=/sdarticle.pdf
- Meet New People Without Being Creepy, Wikihow, 2010, http://www.wikihow.com/Meet-New-People-Without-Being-Creepy
- Have a Great Conversation, Wikihow, 2010, http://www.wikihow.com/Have-a-Great-Conversation
- Rossetti, Christina, After Death, 'The Broadview Anthology of Victorian poetry and poetic theory', Ed. Thomas J Collins & VivenneJ Rundle, Broadview Press Ltd. 2000
- http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3135/2976221785_1531b810d4_o.jpg
- http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3086/2874693272_2c001892c1.jpg
- http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01184/arts-graphics-2008_1184484a.jpg
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/aftonflynn/3851859474/
- http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2775/4324009649_fabbc0e02e.jpg