Group Presentations 2

Group 4- Complimentarity
Okay I know that our was a little long, but that is the story Kane gave us, it was also a little disorganized, but that was due to group technical difficulties, meeting problems, but I think overall it was fairly entertaining and at least somewhat amusing. It is hard to portray with limited time, props, and room to portray the epic that was our scene, but basically it was the second part of a four part story, this one representing adventure. For a deeper explanation of what our chapter was about see the journal entry entitled Complimentarity in Myth on this ejournal.

Group 5- ALthough I am not sure what the groups chapter was about I feel it had something to do with cacophony. At least that is what I got the impression of. The fact that the group forced us to be blind folded made us as listeners more attentive, because we could not see the action or try to infer what we were suppossed to be interpreting. We were allowed to let the sounds of various converstations and music sweep us away, and at one point I do believe that I did feel a sort of rhythmn or music sweep over the disordent sounds. I felt like the man who could hear all of the animals voices at once, and it was a little disheartening at first, but then it became almost soothing. It was strange how my ears would focus on different parts of the many voices, at times I could hear a voice speaking of the raven and how it is a symbol or representation for many mythical stories, or the voice reading Joyce, or the idea that a story without a voice is dead, after trying to recall what was said later in the day, I could not remember all of it, even though I know that this speaker (I think Cindy) had used the techniques of repetition during this piece, and as I heard it, I remeber thinking, that is interesting, I won't forget that. But obviously my memory is not up to par with Lull or Bruno, so alas by the time I got home and tried to remember everything, I could only get pieces. I could see the frustration and reason that oral patterns had to be repetitive or used other wise nothing could be stored and pulled back. The overall mood of the performance was excited, agitated, yet in the end became somehow soothing, as in all of the voices, once I became accostumed to them, melted together to create a new song, that worked together. The group asked us to write a response regarding do you think that the oral aspect is more powerful than the visual aspect, kind of comparing Ong to Yates, or Camillo's theather, this will be addressed in another journal entry.
Group 6- I am always amazed how many different ways our class will come up with presenting different things. I have to admit I wish that our group would have done something a little more creative, but oh well. Just the fact that people can interpret and mold presentations in such differing ways is awesome. I really like Group 6's puppet show. And they way in which they broke the story up into 3 different narrations was great, really pulling together the idea of context. I thought the writing for the different contexts was great, and that they really hit home the idea of how myths, especially the same story can take on such different meanings put into different contexts. I thought the explanation at the end, with describing how stories have been stripped of much of what makes them memorable for oral cultures, such as the explicit details, and graphic images, and the watered down versions we recieve in the written culture. The reason for this is because with text and writing we do not need those graphic images to remember because we can always look up the information on the handy internet, just google it. All in all it was another great day in oral traditions, thanks so much for all of the presentations, each one helped to shed some light on the book by Kane.