the baltimore fresh stories project (continued)

. . .as luck and timing would have it, students in another of my classes were getting ready to host a presentation (another of the fall semester's highlights) based on Gunther Kress’ “‘My Gawd, I made it like Australia’: Making meaning in many media.” In prep for this group presentation we had booked a large, carpeted but otherwise empty room on campus since the presenters had planned a hands-on presentation, one for which we would need plenty of space to work, that is to say, build things like race cars, a rocket ship, a fort and a theater for a puppet show. Elizabeth, though not a member of this particular class (she had actually taken the course the semester before) attended the group presentation, hoping that the dolls her class made would be given new/other life in this presentation. Plus, having taken the class the semester before, she was familiar with Kress’ work, and having spent a considerable amount of time researching Pippa Stein for the play theory class (i.e., she was particularly interested in learning more about Stein’s work and how the piece assigned for 320 had been taken up, if at all, by others) she was interested in further exploring the connections between Kress and Stein's work.

Cognizant that the Kress presentation would have a theater/puppet show component, Elizabeth and I brought the fresh stories dolls to this group presentation, hoping that the group responsible for creating a puppet show might use the ready-made dolls, rather than creating their own.

It's important to note that at this point in the semester, Elizabeth had been planning to create a final, web-based project for the play theory class, one that would serve as a tribute to Stein and Kress’ work in that it would feature the writings and photos associated with the play theory course along with the video footage she’d take during the Kress presentation. Disappointed, however, to find that the members of the puppet show group were more interested in creating their own puppets from scratch, this as opposed to using the dolls made by the play theory class, Elizabeth didn’t feel that the video she captured that day was useable. To her mind, all she had was a lot of same-looking footage (see image below), footage that depicted the dolls “sitting on the ledge of the room unused,” footage that seemed more in keeping with the opening of a “really bad Lifetime movie” than with the dynamic website that she had in mind for her final project for the play theory class.

With that, the idea for the website was completely scrapped, and Elizabeth had to come up with a different idea for the final project in the play theory class. . . .and this gets to issues related to when, why and how the in-class memorial service for the fresh stories project comes into play.