Thoughts for your first Response Paper

Your first Response Paper is due on Thursday (Sept. 6). By class on Thursday, you should also have read pages 52-79 and have added 4 new links to your del.icio.us site. You should have at least 8 links on your del.icio.us page by Thursday. Please make sure to remember to add a sentence or two explaining the site and why it is of interest to you in the context of performance studies.

Your Response Paper should be at least one page long (double spacing is fine, but please use standard font sizes and margins, i.e., 16-point font is not cool). You should be responding to one of the performance types on your "Papers Chart." In your paper, you should include what you saw, where you saw it, and when you saw it. Please also remember to use academic writing style in these papers and to proofread, edit, and spell check.

After reading your exercises from class, I have a few points regarding your papers for you to keep in mind and consider. Your readings in the Schechner book will also have hopefully suggested considerations and perspectives to you.

• Choose one aspect of the performance to focus on for this length of paper. You can include peripheral information, but connecting all your main points to one focal action/event will allow you to delve deeper into the meaningful parts of your observations.
  
• Your paper should include some description of what you saw, but don't try to describe everything you saw -- you only have about one page and you need room for some analysis.
• Consider why what you saw happened, what choices by which participants were involved, and what the implications are.
• Be creative about the process of performing, observing, criticizing. Don't take the most obvious route, and remember that all of your suppositions do not need to be scientifically provable. We are dealing largely in theory and so you have some leeway, as long as you can back up your claim.

You will have your first longer paper due on Sept. 13. This will be largely the same as the shorter papers, but more developed with possibly a broader scope (you may decide to treat more than one aspect of the performance or compare two incidents to each other). You will need to give me a proposal for each of the longer papers, including what you will be writing about, and the angle you plan to take (what you will be looking for or how you will be treating your subject matter). This proposal can be written and given to me this coming Thursday, or emailed to me. Just don't wait until a couple days before it's due, since I may give you a response that will require some reworking.

As always, email me or talk to me in class if you have questions or concerns.