Thinking dramatically in a few spots, what I like, two people in opposite places – creature appears from out of nowhere – can almost see a movie – Star Trek frozen wasteland – talking about joys of life and then saw man advancing towards me, bounding over the ice – monster smiling in the window – the dramatic presence being suddenly there – or for laughter – thumbs up – the creature confronting Victor doesn’t happen until hours later – the presence – an oh shit moment.
Calculating things – Victor started university at age of seventeen, within two years experimenting, our age if not younger when he created all of this – want us to think about our capacity to do something like that as such a young and vulnerable age – but we invent new characters and new people – think that someone as young us could do something beyond our thought process. Thinking of him as a 19-20 year old, it also starts to sort of explain why he doesn’t have any conscience about it – not that he’s morally and ethically bankrupt, it’s because he’s young and optimistic and eager to learn and experiment and not thinking of consequences.
I hate Victor and the monster – bullshit – the monster knows, maybe I didn’t need to be so violent, so then you didn’t make the choice not to be why? – why don’t I go ahead and strangle some people, justified in framing young woman because she can’t love – that aspect upsetting – when we focus on Victor, how testosterone driven his project is, and how selfish, and isolationist – we shouldn’t be operating in a vacuum and making choices on our own and doing these things so internally – what if we didn’t do an examination of his as being horrible character, but what if he’s been victimized and is also trapped in his masculine thinking and trapped in what is supposed to be male – you should be a scientist, etc., ways of educating men into thinking. Something I had been thinking of – thinking about Elizabeth, who is always this sort of idealized, pretty thing who has no brain and no personality, she’s just a charming pretty thing and the book is written by a woman – just there and then victimized – all the women in the book are tools, or they die, they’re not really fleshed out – and he refuses to create a woman and this goes into the idea of the race of devils and him rejecting motherhood in general. Political issues of the book – Mary Shelley’s father and his ideas as Frankenstein and Frankenstein as revolution and governments creating Frankensteins that rose up against them and destroyed them.
The feminine idea of – I can almost understand the want and the need to create life and having the balls to not create the female side and then say “fuck you” is pretty ballsy. I don’t know whose side to take – in a way, when he says he’s scared that they might have devils walk around the earth – [but if they have parents to raise them] – pretty much all Victor has seen is him killing. He doesn’t trust him. The DeLaceys and all he wants is love and to be accepted. Hard not to be on both sides.
Victor is humanized by his youth – hard not to sympathize with both characters – monster is an abandoned child and has to learn things about himself – didn’t have a mentor, just had a community he was separate from, to learn from, and then he became self-aware and can’t fit into the community from which he springs. The same thing happens to Victor, but it’s his fault and he others himself – and then tries to go back to society and brings a wake of destruction. In the end, the monster and Frankenstein can only find solace in each other. The passion and blind obsession are the same thing – trying and succeeding in destroying each other. Creature weeps over his creator – what have either of them done?
When reading/hearing something, how do you think about Frankenstein? Can a prison be better than the outside world? It’s like he was in a prison for so long, in this prison, the monster – trying to get out and be free, what do I do?
I think it was totally fine that the monster killed all those people. Every creature has to have a sense of purpose. He tries so hard and so desperately to have that – with the DeLaceys’, learns to speak, shovels snow and firewood, sees their appreciation, “my heart yearned to be known and loved.”
Nature v. nurture – the choices we make, we can never really define if they’re our own, even if they are basic choices – or did society tell us?
Wedding night. I never thought about my wife. Victor is really selfish but thinks of himself as unselfish – more dire situation with him.
[No one thinks of the monster as part of the self. How interesting. If the monster is in all of us and Victor just incarnates him as flesh. Can we kill a part of ourselves?]
Language and the monster as he/it. It’s a pretty crucial pronoun – the language of the whole narrative – story-telling – all of this language – teaches himself to speak in grandiose vocabulary – It’s interesting to see the perception of language in the novel and how we’re affected by it.
Shelley describes a lot of landscape and setting and is anyone interested in man to natural surroundings – standing in the middle of ice and it’s him and the monster – huge environment nature and the unnatural. It can exhilarate you or make you dread. Set on
Creation/creature vocabulary. Nature for both of them – they have a connection without realizing it. Every natural thing calms them.
Victor says something about the monster being his child and him abandoning it – paradise lost, etc.
Part II
Sun Salute – lead by example. [What is a creature? An outsider asserting herself to call herself into being – how often do we unwittingly create “monsters” who are outsiders in our communities?]
Breathing and moving together- the body in motion, communal yet individual. We’re going to start with sun salutations/physical work every time. We’ll do three or four to warm up.
[This focus on the body is great, I think. Because think about the creation/creature – he is only called into being by the creation of his body – he has no self before his body.]
[Permission to take your place – to stand in your space. I am so good at being meta about this. It is about listening and reacting and paying fucking attention to the community. I love it. And then we take away the language. Must be just about bodies in communication – ever present in the moment because as son as you lose focus, you are behind, you have lost what is supposed to be happening.]
10 minutes to talk together and then 10 minutes to stage the story.
[There is a lot of conversation about gender – I think it is super interesting that this is what we have glommed onto. The idea of how to stage in pairs? Also, the debate about gender assumes some kind of difference – a different experience of the world, biological access, what? Switching people – how is the story telling – connections, rejections, masses and monsters – creator is also the monster at different points. Interesting.]
[Victims and monsters and creator – separate, different, all linked and bound together. See self in mirror and that is how you die. Monstrous impulses. Destroyed items come back to center – the center does not hold.]
PERFORMANCE:
It starts with a mass – the group breathing and pulsing together. The men emerge and reshape the women. Lucas really lives in his body – he is comfortable in his own skin. Julien shapes the women. There is a heartbeat. The women are lifted from the group and supported. Then reshaped, the are repositioned as part of the monster. Trust is critical here – Chelsea and Lucas have it, we are resisting control. The women are still linked. Reaching out for the creator – pushing back in to become the monster. Fighting the joining and the separation. Holding each other. The men break away with horror at what they have created. The men hide. They are afraid. The monster collapses. Parts of the monster break away. The women chase the men, who flee. They will catch them. The women capture the menthe women kill the men with the mirror. When you see yourself in the light as a man, you die. There is no escape. The women mourn the men. They hold them. They shape themselves back into a monster. Jessica reshapes them. And joins. We are all one. The monster, the creator, the victims.
With interruptions! (15)
Did I hurt anyone? Interesting. The monster doesn’t start off violent – interruptions are lessons the monster learns. Pick three themes and use them. Things we could learn. Math, speech. Awareness – interruption of creation. Noise as interruption? Wanting to be loved, is that an interruption? Development of the monster – five stages of monsterhood? Vocalizations as interruptions – language as an interruptor. Emotions – pleading, wanting affection, innocence, compassion, obsessing.
PERFORMANCE II
[They are more nervous this time – the interruption of what they think the story is seems traumatizing for them. But isn’t that what Grotowksi is all about? You never know what the story is – in the interruption, you might find something new.] Seem to be moving much faster. Shaping, moving, building something that seems to be beautiful. Trust, trust, trust. The monster comes alive with sound. Breath. They are trying to stay together but they can’t. These are the interruptions? Sounds. Horror? The words the monster wants to use. The things the monster feels. Victor holding himself. LOOK LOOK LOOK PLEASE CAN I CALL YOU MY OWN I’M RIGHT HERE.
REFLECTIONS
Things changed – so much changed in terms of relationship even between each specific person. Every time I looked at each of the facets of the monsters, I had a different – there was a close relationship with each. Whole but I didn’t because Lucas wasn’t there. A lot of shit changed.
Everyone was their own individual character. I found that I can be easily overpowered – Lucas. Cassie – felt vulnerable – first time, in control. Yelled “look at me” and I felt vulnerable. Anne expected something totally outside the world – but they were part of the story.
Assignment:
Everyone has a character from the story. Bring in something about that character – something that connects you – dialogue, a letter, something about them, them speaking, someone talking about them, something that stands out. Skim through the text. Bring in whatever that is to share, up to two minutes in length. Just within the text this time.
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