Ascendio: Saturday, with some side notes on the "trouser role."
Moving along.
As usual, on Saturday there was way too many things to choose from. I went to the official Mark Reads Harry Potter thing, and I enjoyed it, even if he got a bit sidetracked by "Hermione and the Pizza Boy." I'm not terribly curious about it, but honestly, while the blow by blow reading or watching of actual good things can get slow, the video readings he does of terrible things are really fun. Hey, he reads Fifty Shades of Grey so you don't have to. Side bar: I know that as a self-respecting werewolf researcher, I ought to read and watch every single new werewolf thing, but there are reasons I don't. One is that unfortunately, while I have been yammering on about werewolves for eight years now, I can't really handle blood and gore and horror freaks me out. That is really inconvenient. The other reason is that there is way too much YA paranormal romance out there and it is mostly all the same. No, it is, damn it. There are some I do want to read, like Sisters Red, but mostly they all go something like this:
""Rylie Gresham hates everything about summer camp: the food, the fresh air, the dumb activities, and the other girls in her cabin. But the worst part is probably being bitten by a werewolf."
Could you really read that? In bulk? Let's not even get into the "werewolves mate for life" trope, which for some reason just makes me want to scream. Like a lot of other werewolf (fan)fiction stuff, it comes from a misinterpretation of real wolf behavior. With "werewolves mate for life," we are halfway to "imprinting" like a freaking baby duck. Argh, don't get me started.
Next up was the "Say Yes to Gay YA" panel. Everything was on opposite everything else, and I probably ought to have gone to the Lev Grossman panel, but whatever, that was the topic most of my non-HP friends are interested in. It's a complicated issue and there has been a lot of intense debate about it lately. Well, I say "intense debate"--there was close to a full-out war and it got really ugly. As someone who officially teaches Children's Lit and Harry Potter, I just wanted to hear an interesting debate, and I did. The agents on the panel were pretty clear that they would like very much to see more gay YA characters in good books, but that they can't magically make those books appear on their desks and they can't magically sell mediocre or unsellable books to publishers. It's complicated. One thing I do think, channelling my inner Trelawney, is that there will be more and more GBLT characters in YA books, or at least I hope so.
Unfortunately, this banged up against Gail Callicott's Muggle Studies panel, and I feel really bad about that. I also wanted to get to the slash panel and missed it. Didn't get a Patronus picture, either. Oh well, as much as you want to do everything, you just can't.
Dag nab it, I didn't realize, or didn't remember, that there was a gihungous photoshoot at 2:15. By the time I got it together, it was probably 3:30 and all the excitement was over. If anyone has pictures of my regular day Lupin, that would be great, but I do have the ones from Infinitus if you want to check them out. I wouldn't have any at all if I hadn't run into Mark Oshiro in the hall.
Mark is . . . an incredibly good sport.
I think he also has a soft spot for Lupin, based on what he says in the Mark Reads entries.
But I was able to pick up My Little Remus in his tiny box! I also learned how to eat around a mustache, which is a useful Life Skill. I also did a fanfic reading of Butterbeer at 9 AM and A Present From Blackpool. I'm proud of those and I'm glad they were received well.
I went to the Wand by Wands concert, and that had some truly impressive singing by Chris Rankin and also by alabastard
I am fussy as Hades about countertenors, and as you'll see in a minute, I have a professional background in opera. I've even been the stage director on a production of Dido and Aeneas. I say he was really good. So he was.
At some point, I had to get ready for the fashion show. Understand that I've never, ever been in one of those, and also that I am officially one of the srs bznz professors at any one of these conferences. It's barely scraping "acceptable" to wear House robes as a real person professor, and actually dressing as a character, and then putting that on display, is jumping all over a line. My God, I don't even want to THINK about that. Hey, just walk into a room full of professors of Renaissance literature and say three little letters: SCA. Then stand back before the waves of contempt blow you back out of the room.
I've always been puzzled by this. Historical reenactors by necessity get interested in things that until recently many historians didn't think worthwhile: breakfast or the lack of it, underwear, shoes. Archeologists do, bless them, but literary historians largely don't. Bluntly, this is stupid thinking. Think about your own life. How much of your own well being is affected directly by Great Political Movements? I'm sure some of it is, but then consider how much of your daily life is affected by breakfast, underwear, and shoes. How would you feel if you could only have single last shoes (i.e., with no right and left soles?)
It took a fair amount of chutzpah to do this, but then, that was true of the whole conference.
On the other hand, I've been researching and playing male roles since I was 16; I did my first extensive research paper on travesti roles when I was 20. Thank you, NEH grant! This is when I learned that you could do something with your life other than working in your father's plumbing and heating wholesale business and still get paid for it. I've followed it up by researching more male roles played by women and even all-female Shakespeare companies, so -- I suppose I could say "bring it?"
Basically, there are two kinds of women playing male roles onstage. There are honest to God drag kings, where the object is for the actor to look reasonably, convincingly male. Then there's the other kind, where everything is meant to shriek out, "that is not really a man under there."
(Are they implying that we are not 110% all-male red meat high-test testosterone, Mr. Baa-Baa?)
(Too bloody right we are!)
Those roles really took off in the 17th century. They aren't roles for a girl pretending to be a boy, although I've done research on those as well. They're roles intentionally written for a women to act, playing the role of an adolescent boy. Early opera was pretty interesting. Just as an example, Coronation of Poppaea: a castrato singing the role of Nero, a female soprano singing the role of Poppaea, a tenor singing the comedy role of the Nurse, and a female soprano singing the role of the Pageboy. That last one would be me.
Most of the time, these characters are adolescent males. Sometimes they're hopped up on bubbling hormones they have not a clue what to do with. Sometimes they're The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. Yep! Peter Pan, also written to be played by a woman.
There are a couple of theories for why this took off. One was that you HAD to have a woman playing those roles. Actual boys that age have a very short shelf life. Their voices go nuts, then it's too deep, then it's too late, plus the actress could have much more stage experience. That was the excuse Beaumarchais used, anyway: there aren't any very young actors up to the job.
Then there's the theory that as soon as the professional theater got over itself and decided to have women onstage, they quickly found out that actresses were popular. They were great box office. This might have had something to do with the tradition of allowing some of the male audience members to watch the actresses get dressed and made up. What was more logical than writing lots of roles where the girl had to have her clothes ripped off, or undressed before bed, or was a girl dressing up as a man, or really was a man? That was especially important in opera, where voice trumps appearance.
The nice part was that in a largely pre-camera and certainly pre-HD world, an actress or singer could do this kind of part forever, as long as she didn't put on too much weight.
See above: 1986.
2012.
But size! I hear you cry! It must be all about height and weight!
(This is droxy, of course. She takes her drag kinging really seriously.)
Nope! Take, for example, this lady:
This is Lisa Wolpe, the artistic director of the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company. We've got similar coloration, and I must have at least two inches and maybe thirty pounds on Lisa. If Lisa wants you to believe she's Iago:
--she will, dammit. I've seen people get out to the lobby, realize they were watching a woman do Richard III/Iago/Romeo, and clutch their heads. I've had large male students who already knew her and were working with her and saw her coming down the hall in character, and thought, "whoa! Better stay out of HIS way!" and then realize, "Oh. That was Lisa."
Obviously, I'm not trying to do that with my Lupin.
I'm not even sure why I'm not. Old habits die hard? Also, for some reason I'll probably get into explaining later, in print, Remus is often given feminine gender characteristics in fanfic and fan art. I don't even particularly like that, or the Magical Werewolf Womb (TM) he often has, but it's true anyway. I do have a certain body language I use, and it's easier to do it than to explain it.
A ton of money was made by women dressing as unconvincing men for a heck of a long time. It's still done in Great Britain during Christmas pantos. In the U.S., it's pretty much dead. It seems to have died out at roughly the same time that Sears Roebuck had to take their mysterious "home motor for housewives" out of their catalogues: people got officially clueful. (You used to be able to buy "home motors" with mixer attachments! Hand to God!)
So where the heck did this aesthetic go? Where are ladies still dressing as unconvincing men?
Um, Japan?
For extra credit: which actress is playing a man, and which one is playing a lady playing a man? Really? How could you tell?
Answer! Man, it took be forever to find these. The one with the red collar is "really" a woman. It's a little more blatant in the manga, Rose of Versailles:
Lady Oscar.
On the other hand, everyone in this manga is so freaking sparkly that it's hard to tell.
Oscar, Andre, horse, plus bishi-sparkles.
The images are from Berubara Land.
(This is why I sometimes call my Lupin bishi-Lupin.)
Excuse research theatre history geek digression, though I thought some of you might be interested. The important bit is that I had an absolutely splendid time.
Considering jamming gum up Peeves' nostril--
Posing for pictures with Perseus, Draco, AND the all important toidle--
And in general just partying down with Godric Gryffindor in the background.
I also may have had a Whomping Willow and a Shrieking Shack, because obviously I had to. I wish I'd done the Time Warp, too, but sorry, guys--from a distance it looked like the Macarena, and I wasn't getting involved. The wolf got his party on.
I also had a fascinating (to me, anyhow) conversation with ravenna_c_tan about the ways in which Fifty Shades of Grey was a wind that blew some people some good.
I helped shut down the party and hung around chatting with people and finally got up to bed and packed and didn't get to bed until 3:30. If I'd known my flight was going to get delayed by six or seven hours and that I'd wind up spending the night in Dallas, I might have done something differently, but I doubt it. Hey, I wanted to have a good time. And I DID.
I might have a tiny coda or two, but basically, that's it!
The fashion show section in which bishi-Lupin/ Formal Werewolf is here, roughly around seven minutes in, but watch all four segments if you can, because there are a zillion amazing costumes I didn't even fully appreciate at the time.
Mischief Managed, fellow wolves.
As usual, on Saturday there was way too many things to choose from. I went to the official Mark Reads Harry Potter thing, and I enjoyed it, even if he got a bit sidetracked by "Hermione and the Pizza Boy." I'm not terribly curious about it, but honestly, while the blow by blow reading or watching of actual good things can get slow, the video readings he does of terrible things are really fun. Hey, he reads Fifty Shades of Grey so you don't have to. Side bar: I know that as a self-respecting werewolf researcher, I ought to read and watch every single new werewolf thing, but there are reasons I don't. One is that unfortunately, while I have been yammering on about werewolves for eight years now, I can't really handle blood and gore and horror freaks me out. That is really inconvenient. The other reason is that there is way too much YA paranormal romance out there and it is mostly all the same. No, it is, damn it. There are some I do want to read, like Sisters Red, but mostly they all go something like this:
""Rylie Gresham hates everything about summer camp: the food, the fresh air, the dumb activities, and the other girls in her cabin. But the worst part is probably being bitten by a werewolf."
Could you really read that? In bulk? Let's not even get into the "werewolves mate for life" trope, which for some reason just makes me want to scream. Like a lot of other werewolf (fan)fiction stuff, it comes from a misinterpretation of real wolf behavior. With "werewolves mate for life," we are halfway to "imprinting" like a freaking baby duck. Argh, don't get me started.
Next up was the "Say Yes to Gay YA" panel. Everything was on opposite everything else, and I probably ought to have gone to the Lev Grossman panel, but whatever, that was the topic most of my non-HP friends are interested in. It's a complicated issue and there has been a lot of intense debate about it lately. Well, I say "intense debate"--there was close to a full-out war and it got really ugly. As someone who officially teaches Children's Lit and Harry Potter, I just wanted to hear an interesting debate, and I did. The agents on the panel were pretty clear that they would like very much to see more gay YA characters in good books, but that they can't magically make those books appear on their desks and they can't magically sell mediocre or unsellable books to publishers. It's complicated. One thing I do think, channelling my inner Trelawney, is that there will be more and more GBLT characters in YA books, or at least I hope so.
Unfortunately, this banged up against Gail Callicott's Muggle Studies panel, and I feel really bad about that. I also wanted to get to the slash panel and missed it. Didn't get a Patronus picture, either. Oh well, as much as you want to do everything, you just can't.
Dag nab it, I didn't realize, or didn't remember, that there was a gihungous photoshoot at 2:15. By the time I got it together, it was probably 3:30 and all the excitement was over. If anyone has pictures of my regular day Lupin, that would be great, but I do have the ones from Infinitus if you want to check them out. I wouldn't have any at all if I hadn't run into Mark Oshiro in the hall.
Mark is . . . an incredibly good sport.
I think he also has a soft spot for Lupin, based on what he says in the Mark Reads entries.
But I was able to pick up My Little Remus in his tiny box! I also learned how to eat around a mustache, which is a useful Life Skill. I also did a fanfic reading of Butterbeer at 9 AM and A Present From Blackpool. I'm proud of those and I'm glad they were received well.
I went to the Wand by Wands concert, and that had some truly impressive singing by Chris Rankin and also by alabastard
I am fussy as Hades about countertenors, and as you'll see in a minute, I have a professional background in opera. I've even been the stage director on a production of Dido and Aeneas. I say he was really good. So he was.
At some point, I had to get ready for the fashion show. Understand that I've never, ever been in one of those, and also that I am officially one of the srs bznz professors at any one of these conferences. It's barely scraping "acceptable" to wear House robes as a real person professor, and actually dressing as a character, and then putting that on display, is jumping all over a line. My God, I don't even want to THINK about that. Hey, just walk into a room full of professors of Renaissance literature and say three little letters: SCA. Then stand back before the waves of contempt blow you back out of the room.
I've always been puzzled by this. Historical reenactors by necessity get interested in things that until recently many historians didn't think worthwhile: breakfast or the lack of it, underwear, shoes. Archeologists do, bless them, but literary historians largely don't. Bluntly, this is stupid thinking. Think about your own life. How much of your own well being is affected directly by Great Political Movements? I'm sure some of it is, but then consider how much of your daily life is affected by breakfast, underwear, and shoes. How would you feel if you could only have single last shoes (i.e., with no right and left soles?)
It took a fair amount of chutzpah to do this, but then, that was true of the whole conference.
On the other hand, I've been researching and playing male roles since I was 16; I did my first extensive research paper on travesti roles when I was 20. Thank you, NEH grant! This is when I learned that you could do something with your life other than working in your father's plumbing and heating wholesale business and still get paid for it. I've followed it up by researching more male roles played by women and even all-female Shakespeare companies, so -- I suppose I could say "bring it?"
Basically, there are two kinds of women playing male roles onstage. There are honest to God drag kings, where the object is for the actor to look reasonably, convincingly male. Then there's the other kind, where everything is meant to shriek out, "that is not really a man under there."
(Are they implying that we are not 110% all-male red meat high-test testosterone, Mr. Baa-Baa?)
(Too bloody right we are!)
Those roles really took off in the 17th century. They aren't roles for a girl pretending to be a boy, although I've done research on those as well. They're roles intentionally written for a women to act, playing the role of an adolescent boy. Early opera was pretty interesting. Just as an example, Coronation of Poppaea: a castrato singing the role of Nero, a female soprano singing the role of Poppaea, a tenor singing the comedy role of the Nurse, and a female soprano singing the role of the Pageboy. That last one would be me.
Most of the time, these characters are adolescent males. Sometimes they're hopped up on bubbling hormones they have not a clue what to do with. Sometimes they're The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. Yep! Peter Pan, also written to be played by a woman.
There are a couple of theories for why this took off. One was that you HAD to have a woman playing those roles. Actual boys that age have a very short shelf life. Their voices go nuts, then it's too deep, then it's too late, plus the actress could have much more stage experience. That was the excuse Beaumarchais used, anyway: there aren't any very young actors up to the job.
Then there's the theory that as soon as the professional theater got over itself and decided to have women onstage, they quickly found out that actresses were popular. They were great box office. This might have had something to do with the tradition of allowing some of the male audience members to watch the actresses get dressed and made up. What was more logical than writing lots of roles where the girl had to have her clothes ripped off, or undressed before bed, or was a girl dressing up as a man, or really was a man? That was especially important in opera, where voice trumps appearance.
The nice part was that in a largely pre-camera and certainly pre-HD world, an actress or singer could do this kind of part forever, as long as she didn't put on too much weight.
See above: 1986.
2012.
But size! I hear you cry! It must be all about height and weight!
(This is droxy, of course. She takes her drag kinging really seriously.)
Nope! Take, for example, this lady:
This is Lisa Wolpe, the artistic director of the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company. We've got similar coloration, and I must have at least two inches and maybe thirty pounds on Lisa. If Lisa wants you to believe she's Iago:
--she will, dammit. I've seen people get out to the lobby, realize they were watching a woman do Richard III/Iago/Romeo, and clutch their heads. I've had large male students who already knew her and were working with her and saw her coming down the hall in character, and thought, "whoa! Better stay out of HIS way!" and then realize, "Oh. That was Lisa."
Obviously, I'm not trying to do that with my Lupin.
I'm not even sure why I'm not. Old habits die hard? Also, for some reason I'll probably get into explaining later, in print, Remus is often given feminine gender characteristics in fanfic and fan art. I don't even particularly like that, or the Magical Werewolf Womb (TM) he often has, but it's true anyway. I do have a certain body language I use, and it's easier to do it than to explain it.
A ton of money was made by women dressing as unconvincing men for a heck of a long time. It's still done in Great Britain during Christmas pantos. In the U.S., it's pretty much dead. It seems to have died out at roughly the same time that Sears Roebuck had to take their mysterious "home motor for housewives" out of their catalogues: people got officially clueful. (You used to be able to buy "home motors" with mixer attachments! Hand to God!)
So where the heck did this aesthetic go? Where are ladies still dressing as unconvincing men?
Um, Japan?
For extra credit: which actress is playing a man, and which one is playing a lady playing a man? Really? How could you tell?
Answer! Man, it took be forever to find these. The one with the red collar is "really" a woman. It's a little more blatant in the manga, Rose of Versailles:
Lady Oscar.
On the other hand, everyone in this manga is so freaking sparkly that it's hard to tell.
Oscar, Andre, horse, plus bishi-sparkles.
The images are from Berubara Land.
(This is why I sometimes call my Lupin bishi-Lupin.)
Excuse research theatre history geek digression, though I thought some of you might be interested. The important bit is that I had an absolutely splendid time.
Considering jamming gum up Peeves' nostril--
Posing for pictures with Perseus, Draco, AND the all important toidle--
And in general just partying down with Godric Gryffindor in the background.
I also may have had a Whomping Willow and a Shrieking Shack, because obviously I had to. I wish I'd done the Time Warp, too, but sorry, guys--from a distance it looked like the Macarena, and I wasn't getting involved. The wolf got his party on.
I also had a fascinating (to me, anyhow) conversation with ravenna_c_tan about the ways in which Fifty Shades of Grey was a wind that blew some people some good.
I helped shut down the party and hung around chatting with people and finally got up to bed and packed and didn't get to bed until 3:30. If I'd known my flight was going to get delayed by six or seven hours and that I'd wind up spending the night in Dallas, I might have done something differently, but I doubt it. Hey, I wanted to have a good time. And I DID.
I might have a tiny coda or two, but basically, that's it!
The fashion show section in which bishi-Lupin/ Formal Werewolf is here, roughly around seven minutes in, but watch all four segments if you can, because there are a zillion amazing costumes I didn't even fully appreciate at the time.
Mischief Managed, fellow wolves.