Performances, Audiences and Ventriloquising Prince Charming

 “Once the audience is committed to the realness of the performance, it is only the socially disgruntled who have any doubts about what they see.”

 

In week 5 we addressed the creation of self and society’s influence. Week 6 has us looking into dramaturgy, essentially how we present one’s self and most importantly how/why we manipulate it for the public.

I was intrigued by the correlation between the two topics. Society affects the individual self that each person creates, and each person conveys their perceived ‘self’ through ‘performances’ to the public. The ‘self’ is fluid, and its presentation is different depending upon which ever social situation we stumble into.

We perform whole-heatedly what we want others to believe,“to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them”. However we manipulate our performances based on what we think they think. We internally ventriloquise the audience before us and adjust our performance accordingly. While it doesn't directly relate to my train of thought I found an interesting article relating to the Royal Wedding and explored how the media ventriloquised Prince William using reporters as commentators who attempted to give him a voice based on what they thought/believed.

We as performers intend to present a specific self to our audience, however we manipulate how we act based on how we think the audience receives our performance. Example...

The media commentators would have reported the Royal Wedding based on what they thought Prince William was thinking, and it is likely that much of the Prince’s performance on the day was moulded by what he thought people were thinking of him. Every part of his performance would have been manipulated based on the media and public reaction to his performance. And no doubt he was ventriloquising his own interpretations of his audience and realigning his performance to suit their needs.

Did Prince William deliberately perform as a Disney Prince?

I guess we'll never really know.

Dekavalla, M 2012, ‘Constructing the public at the royal wedding’, Media Culture Society, vol.34, no. 3, pp 296-311, accessed on 29^th August 2012 http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/34/3/296.short.

Goffman, Erving. 1971. “Performances.” Pp. 28-82 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

http://vi.sualize.us/disney_funny_royal_wedding_disney_kate_middleton_picture_nRdG.html 

 

Goffman and Andy: Do you think babies have souls?

As we talked in our tutorials Andy asked some probing questions to get us thinking. While the presentation about Goffman was very informative and explained his concepts well enough, afterwards Andy asked some difficult questions which had almost everyone in our class scratching their heads. Mainly we struggled with determining when an identity is established. We also grappled with ‘who’ can have an identity but there’s no way that debate will fit into less than 300 words.

When is a sense of self created? Ideally we decided that we are born with an identity and we mould it as we grow. However Andy then asked us how a baby, who cannot communicate with others (society) can develop an identity as a major part of development relies upon interaction with others.

We were stumped.

Some people weakly argued that a baby can communicate with its mother, but in the end a baby who is relatively newborn has very little communicative methods to convey what it wants/needs, it cries when it’s hungry, it cries when it wets itself and it cries when it is tired. So when is an identity first formed? When a toddler learns sign language to communicate wants/needs or when they begin to talk using words? We talked about ventriloquising babies and whether this projected communication gives them an identity. But this didn’t really answer our conundrum either.

To be honest I don’t think we really found an answer.

Goffman states that we communicate ourselves based upon our social status and rules. Therefore this allows for different personalities and identities to develop in different places across the world. Essentially our identity is based upon the society we are raised in (or it will at least have some significant bearing on the person we become). So as Andy put it, ‘do babies have souls? If not, when do they get them?’