AIDA

I grew up in a town in Northern Michigan that had very little diversity. A predominately white town, which led to my high school of about 1,500 students being predominately white. We had a thriving music department, and so my choir director liked to do new and popular shows for our musical every year. My senior year, he chose Aida. It is a rock musical, set in Africa, about a Nubian princess, Aida, who is captured and enslaved by Egyptians. Aida and the Egyptian Captain fall in love, though he is engaged to the Egyptian Princess. An interesting choice for our group. We had a big enough group that the show was double cast. However, even though we had a very large group, we only had three African American students. Two of them were sisters, and they both played Aida. The rest of the Nubians were played by white students, including Aida’s father, the Nubian King. Imagine a group of white high school students from Northern Michigan singing The Gods Love Nubia. Here is a clip of it, if you are unfamiliar with the musical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmgG6CjnNFI

We did NOT do black face, thank God. But we were told to use bronzer, and most of us wore scarves over our hair. Even as a high school student, not immersed in a diverse culture, the choice of this musical seemed a bit absurd. Now looking back on it, it was not just a bit of absurd; it was absolutely ridiculous. Our version had to be color-blind cast, because we simply didn’t have the choice. I take that back, there was a choice: we shouldn’t have done it. It is a great musical, and we gave it as much heart and soul as we, a bunch of angsty white teenagers from Northern Michigan, could, but don’t do it unless you have all the people to pull it off. It was a color-blind casting gone wrong!

            With that being said, I think there are many examples of successful color-blind casting. I think Shakespeare is a great example of this. There is a lot of freedom to play with Shakespeare: color-blind casting, gender-bending, switching time periods. Which is why I think Shakespeare is still done so often; his plays often deal with issues that are still relevant and are issues that cross barriers of race, heritage, struggle, and time. Romeo and Juliet is a wonderful example of a play that almost begs to be color-blind cast. Originally set in Verona with two feuding Italian families, but for most of us now-a-days, two feuding Italian families doesn’t really hit home. It is a still a heart wrenching, tragic story, but moving that feud to something closer to home allows the story to have significantly more impact. Aida, mentioned above, is a Romeo and Juliet like story between Nubians and Egyptians. West Side Story is a contemporary musical version of R&J pitting a white gang and a Puerto Rican gang in New York against each other. What would hit closest down here in the South? What would the reaction be to a version of R&J set during the Civil Rights Movement with the Montagues and Capulets divided black and white? An age-old play can have very different affects when brought into a new context, especially when that context is very much a part of our country’s history. 

Student Loan Debt

I’m going to be embarrassingly honest, and say that I have been so incredibly disconnected from real life while in this orb of Grad School, that I am completely unaware of the local issues in Baton Rouge, and I am also so far disconnected from my hometown in Michigan, that I am likewise unaware of issues there. This is, of course, completely on me for being stuck in an obscenely narcissistic mindset. I should come out from under the rock of our program, and be more informed about the state of current events. That all being said, I’m having a very hard time with this post, so I apologize in advance.

            My issue of social importance is student loan debt. This is, of course, a nation-wide issue, not simply local. In the US, the standard of living is high, the job market is competitive and difficult, and student loan debt is crippling. This is an issue that is important to me as I am getting ready to step back out into the world with a huge financial burden on my back simply for pursing higher education that may or may not allow me higher paying job opportunities (considering that my field is acting, I probably shouldn’t bank on higher paying job opportunities).

            I will form my protest in the style of a march. The choreography would be as follows: we would start at LSU on the parade grounds. The uniform would be to wear clothes representing your current school/Alma Mater or business casual (what you would expect someone in a well-paying job to wear). We would have signs saying what our plans would be after school if we didn’t have debt. Examples of this could be moving to other countries to expand our cultural knowledge, move to other countries or places around the US to research x, y, or z, go to grad school, start a family, etc. Underneath this on the sign would be “but I have X amount of student loan debt I need to take care of first.” Other signs could say things like, “What did I do to deserve X amount of debt? I got educated.” Or “My degree cost me X amount of debt. Am I guaranteed a job after school to pay it off?” The march would move from the LSU parade grounds through neighborhoods, where people from all walks of life and all ages who have struggled with or are still struggling to pay off their debt would join in. Our end destination would be the Capital building. So, in march fashion, this would be a demonstration of non-violent direct action.           

            Since we are so dependent on media and technology in this day and age, we would use that to our benefit. We could use facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. to make the community aware of the protest well in advance, to spread the word and get conversations buzzing. This would hopefully improve the number of people joining the protest on the actual day. Any media coverage on the day of the protest should show the planned choreography of a large group of well-behaved, well-articulated, and given the topic, well-educated people, marching in a civil manner. There would be nothing rowdy or seemingly disorganized about the march. If we are concerned that the media will portray us in a poor light, we can have some protestors filming throughout the march, creating a video of the protest from the inside that accurately depicts the image we are going for and shows us in the light we are hoping to be viewed. These videos can then be posted on facebook and youtube to counter any undesirable media against us.

            Our protest will end and be complete when more serious discussions start occurring about what must be done about the student debt crisis and when actual solutions start coming to the forefront.