Identity Lectures

The lectures this week were very informative and quite eye opening. While I learned many things and thought about things that I normally don’t consider (identity), these lectures did give me the chance to think in-depth about how people display and present themselves and their constructed identities. Some of the main points that I walked away with from the lectures include: identity is not the same within each member of a “race” or “culture”, identity is not something that can easily be acted or displayed in a song, and finally identity can, and will, change multiple times throughout ones lifetime. These points, while vague and somewhat confusing, were the main things about identity that I was able to surmise from the lectures.

Each lecture had its own points and ideas that it tried to present. While it was hard to choose just one from each lecture, I felt each artistic field had its own special and unique points and values. For instance, in the theatre lecture, I was especially intrigued by the concept of “acting race.” For instance, when talking about a youth theatre producing Hairspray without any African American actors really made me think about how one, or a group, is to go about “acting” like an African American, or acting like a white suburbanite. I think these dilemmas, which aren’t exactly unique to theatre, defiantly get brought up in theatre more than in the average situation/workplace. For the art lecture, I was really intrigued by the idea of artists making fun of artists. The whole idea of making fun of “the starving artist” mentality is something that I can really fathom in theatre or in music. It seems that it takes the satirical and warped mind of an artist to think about how life as an artist really isn’t as bad as some make it out to be. For the music lecture, I thought about how identity for each musician and the identity of the music they make, truly is different from one artist to another, how the blues of one artist isn’t likely to sound like the blues music of another artist from the same time.

The construction of identity in each of these art fields is different and special in their own way. For instance, in Art, identity can be constructed through the processes of creating the art, in the case of Jackson Pollock, whose unique style defined his identity of his artwork and himself as an artist. In music, presentation is a influencing factor in constructing identity. How an artist sings a particular song, and how they style their voice and act upon stage I feel is a very influencing factor in their identity as a musician. Finally, for actors and thespians, I feel that their identities are a hodgepodge and melting pot of all the roles and characters that they have played in the past. I think that ones identity as an actor is uniquely created by past experience and previous knowledge.

When it comes to constructing my own identity, I find that it is a much harder thing to describe than talking about the identity of others. I feel that I define myself in the simplest terms, a student, a part-time employee, a journalist, and don’t think to deeply dive and indulge and describing and constructing a dense and explicit identity. I know who I am, because it’s who I say I am, and this is due to my simple and often constricting definitions and values that I define myself with. I am who I say I am, because it’s how I define myself. Deep eh?