#youngjeanlee

[janedoesnthelp]

Attended the theatre with @yasisalek and audibly gasped when we bumped into @mirandajuly in the bathroom #straightwhitemen #theatre #himiranda #youngjeanlee (at Kirk Douglas Theatre)

[myexquisitecollection-blog]

One of my favorite playwrights didn't even know she wanted to be a playwright after years of academia! 

[leardramaturgy]

Korean Buddhism

Not to put any autobiographical pressure on our playwright, but I started my investigation of the play's invocation of Buddhism by exploring features of that religion (teachings and practices) specific to Korea. Professor Robert Buswell, director of the Center for Buddhist Studies at UCLA, has been driving much of the US study of Korean Buddhism since coming to that faculty in 1986. In July of 2012 a 13-volume collection of translations, The Collected Works of Korean Buddhism, was published by Buswell with the help of a handful of supporting scholars. Buswell got the commission for this work from the Jogye Order, the largest of the 28 official sects of Korean Buddhism.

To give a sense of the scope and influence of Korean Buddhism, consider this snippet from Professor Buswell's preface to the 13-volume  set:

BUDDHISM HAS NEARLY A 1,700-YEAR HISTORY in Korea and the tradition continues to thrive still today on the peninsula. Buddhism arrived in Korea from India and China by at least the fourth century C.E. and the religion served as the major conduit for the transmission of Sinitic and Serindian culture as a whole to Korea. But Korean Buddhism is no mere derivative of those antecedent traditions. Buddhists on the Korean peninsula had access to the breadth and depth of the Buddhist tradition as it was being disseminated across Asia and they made seminal contributions themselves to Buddhist thought and meditative and ritual techniques. Indeed, because Korea, like the rest of East Asia, used literary Chinese as the lingua franca of learned communication (much as Latin was used in medieval Europe), Korean Buddhist writings were disseminated throughout the entire region with relative dispatch and served to influence the development of the neighboring Buddhist traditions of China and Japan. In fact, simultaneous with implanting Buddhism on the peninsula, Korean monks and exegetes were also joint collaborators in the creation and development of the indigenous Chinese and Japanese Buddhist traditions. 

Given this interweaving of understandings and traditions, and given the rather recent English publication of germinal writings from Korean Buddhist teachers, I will draw on general sources (like Buswell's Encyclopedia of Buddhism Macmillan Reference, 2004) to explore terms directly connected to the show. 

  At Duke, Asst. Professor Hwansoo Kim also specializes in research on Korean Buddhism "in the context of colonialism, imperialism, and modernity." His book, Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism 1877-1912 will be published by Harvard University Press in March of this year.

[leardramaturgy]

Visitor footage of one part of Yayoi Kusama's installation "Dots Obsession" in the "Walking in My Mind" exhibit at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2009. You might recognize those polkadot forms as inspiration for elements of the LEAR set design. 

[leardramaturgy]

Kubler-Ross & acceptance

Last night we were talking a lot about the word "acceptance" and, in the context of death, the name of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross came up. In a course I taught in 2008, "Documenting Death," students read parts of anthropologist James Green's book Beyond the Good Death. In his study, Green tries to recuperate the ambiguity and fluidity that Kubler-Ross found in her original research. Far from the five, fixed linear stages/steps that most associate with her work -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance -- Green argues that Kubler-Ross's foundational interviews and observations with terminal patients actually uncovered that there was "no lockstep or idealized process that anyone had to go through in order to die well" (Green 9). Note that emphasis on dying well. 

According to Green, Kubler-Ross was wanting to shine a light on processes of death and dying so that Americans could start examining, discussing, and shaping their end-of-life experiences. The tendency to avoid such a difficult subject, for patients, their families and particularly the medical profession, was a hinderance to palliative treatment processes as well as healthy mourning processes. And while she did achieve part of her mission, the dilution of her study to five steps that must culminate with acceptance actually stunted the depth and breath of conversations about death and replaced them with a idealized script to which many (from patients to doctors) began to subscribe. Green spends the rest of his book describing newer, contradictory, and incomplete processes by which contemporary Americans experience and understand death and dying.

All the characters in LEAR spend some time fearfully considering a father's mortality and, by extension, their own. The idea that "what is happening to him will happen to me ... it is already happening" could be an opportunity for recognition, for drawing two generations of a family together across time in a common understanding that somehow, someday, each will die and each is terrified at the prospect. But as these characters are "borrowed" from  King Lear, a text in which most do die, they are always already connected to that storyline and to a lack of recognition, in death, of their common ties. Save Edgar who, by virtue of his Poor Tom experiences with Lear and Gloucester, does seem enlightened and transformed by the play's end. Interestingly, Lee gives the moment of potential recognition and acceptance in her LEAR to Edmund. 

More on that and further ruminations on acceptance and recognition a bit later. 

[leardramaturgy]

Given the campus events of this week, it seems only fitting to share this trailer for an early Young Jean Lee's satire and deconstruction of race and racism, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (2006). This video is for the Crowded Fire and Asian American Theater Company production that happened May-April, 2011. 

[leardramaturgy]

Conrad/Edgar. A whole page of Dolphin sounds for your perusal and practice. 

[leardramaturgy]

The English had an ever increasing appetite for sugar, now imported from territories in the West and East Indies as well as from Morocco and Barbary. Sugar was used for anything from dressing vegetables and preserving fruit to the concoction of medical remedies. But it was still an expensive ingredient, and therefore eaten mainly by the rich. As a result, the wealthier you were, the more rotten your teeth were likely to be. Queen Elizabeth was said to have loved sugar so much that her teeth were black.

1500s food

"I am Cordelia and I am good and there are fine candy-spun things sweetening my dreams."