A note on my internship. I have collected a narrowed selection of articles in varying lengths that I am reading and taking detailed notes on. From these notes I will write up my literature review, bibliography, and other notes and thoughts. I’m not sure exactly what this format will look like, but I am confident that it will meet the structures and requirements I set for myself at the beginning of the quarter.
Because this project is so very research based, there’s not always a lot to report at one time, because the time I’m spending is done researching in small chunks, or reading in large chunks. Progress reports are short and sweet. The time when I will really be able to dig in and describe what my time has been taken up doing, my thinking and writing and notes, will be primarily at the end when I will have had time to organize my thoughts and conclusions and experiences along with the presentation of my finalized research.
Besides the reading and collecting I’ve done for my internship, I have attended a couple of events in the last week that have been on my mind and seem quite worth thinking about.
The first was my attendance of the Chibi Chibi Con dance, which prompted a lot of thought while I was there about how people interact and have fun and meet each other and all of these dynamics that were present in various ways at the dance. People cheering for each other as they showed off dancing skills or learned new ones, making a circle in the dance floor. People dancing with likely strangers, and in vastly different styles and skill levels at the same time. It’s interesting to think about social interaction and social dynamics for me because it’s so rich and has so many variables and factors. I can’t come to conclusions about it, because I don’t know nearly enough on the subject and the many variables mentioned earlier. But it seemed at the dance, and from past experiences the rest of the day as well, a makeshift community is formed. And being able to feel that and think about how many variables and conditions and situations had to have happened to create this community that seemed to have unspoken agreements and traditions built in, is a really powerful almost visceral feeling, even when you don’t know all the chains of action that allowed for it to happen.
The other very powerful experience I had this week was attending the showing of Allegiance in theater on the 19th. Allegiance is a musical about the Japanese Internment camps of WWII, a project primarily spearheaded by George Takei. The recording of the show has been shown in theaters twice now, one day only back in December, and one day only on the 19th. I was fortunate enough to see it on the 19th.
It is an incredibly powerful, moving, masterpiece of a musical. It’s seamless in the way each element, piece, memory, and word flows together. It was a visceral experience for me; it made me cry, and ache.
There were so many powerful elements, and one of them for me was the beautiful showcasing of different kinds of activism and different ways to approach problems.
Each character followed their ideas of what the right action to take was, and many of them were upset with each other for those actions. The entire show was a flashback in that it was memories of the last time this old man saw his family that was torn apart by the camps influence and by the actions each of them took to try and change the camps. One went to war for the country, one refused to, another wrote letters and got them smuggled out of the camps.
They condemned each other’s actions because seeing those actions from the inside it’s impossible to see they’re working for the same goal, but watching you can see every single aspect of that common goal and how each action helps further it, even if it blocks aspects of another’s actions.
It was beautiful and powerful and so teaching, I wish I could make every single person in the world watch it, and think about it. There are so many connections this musical could make with activism, history, war, racism, it’s very rich.
It was set at the Heart Mountain Internment camp, and that is where I will be geotagging this post. I did not actually go there, but it is an incredibly important part of this week’s learning.