PHASE ONE SUGGESTIONS:

The available images are:

• Prohibited Reproduction Rene Magritte
• Two Lovers Rene Magritte
• La Corde Sensible Rene Magritte
• A Liberal Trade-in --a 1950's Ohrback's Ad
• Metamorphosis of Narcissus Salvadore Dali
• Ghost House (Terry Converse)
• Splitwoman
• Divine Metamorphosis (Jim Harter)
• The Dreamer and the Dreamed (Jim Harter)
• An Invocation of Forgotten Gods (Jim Harter)
• Prophecy (Jim Harter)
• Psyche (Jim Harter)
• Reality and Fantasy (Jim Harter)
• Shadow Play (Jim Harter)
• The Spell of Maya (Jim Harter)
• The Couch (unknown)

As with the play analysis project, the task at hand is to write a comparison paper. Creating a comparison where two or more different items are brought together seems highly appropriate for a course whose theme happens to be "colliding cultural words." In this project you are asked to make a comparison between a picture and two or of the plays we have read this semester.

The basic question to ask is: Why is this picture the perfect visual
depiction for two of the plays (or two particular characters) we have read this semester? If you opt for two particular characters approach, they can be either from either the same or different plays. Regardless of the approach you happen to take, begin by analyzing the picture you have selected. Some suggestions for this kind of analysis might include:

1. What are your immediate emotional reactions to the picture?  

2. Where did your eye go first? Then where? And after that? Think about
   why this happened.

3. Would you describe the picture as simple or busy? How does this affect the journey your eye took in question 2?  

4. Where is the light coming from? How can you tell? If this is an outdoor
   picture or photograph, what time of day might it be? Which are the
   brightest parts of the picture? The darkest parts? How do the answers to these questions about light affect the mood of the pictures.

5. Which parts of the picture are sharply in focus? Which parts are softer or out of focus? How does this affect the way you look at the
   photograph?

6. Look harder at the picture or photograph. List some of the details you might not have noticed at first. Include information about people, places and things and nature, including the climate or the weather.

7. Even if the picture is not a photograph, assume for a minute the picture was taken by a photographer. Where is the photographer? Is he or she above, below or at the same level as the subject of the picture?
   Is he or she near or far away? What kind of information do you get because of these things? What kind of information might you get if the photographer were closer up or farther away.

8. Keeping all these things in mind, if you had to write a caption which
   expressed in one or two sentences what this picture is about, what would you say.

9. In your opinion, why did the artist or the photographer want you to see
   this picture?

By pondering these types of questions, you'll ultimately be able to formulate a thesis sentence. Make sure you have a solid thesis sentence and that your main points are well supported. Make use of the comparison between the picture and the plays to amplify your basic ideas. Since this is a relatively brief paper, do not try and cover everything. Limit the scope of your to paper to what you adequately handle in 3 SINGLE spaced pages.

After you've written your comparison paper, you then need to post it on the web. Why are we doing this? The simple answer is to create an audience for you as a writer. In the traditional classroom experience, where the student is only writing for the professor, there really isn't a sense of audience. This is a theatre course, and theatre people love an audience--right? Nowhere else but in school will students ever produce work for no audience. Common sense tells us that we all take our writing more seriously if we know that we are going to have an actual audience.

Posting your Phase One Paper is easy; the few basic steps are:

1. Save you document on your word processor.

2. Make a copy of it (just as if you were going to cut and paste it) and then, without turning off your computer, get to World Theatre Project Postings site. Click on the FINAL PAPER button.

3. Paste your posting in the available window, making sure to enter youR name and title of your paper before hitting the submit button.

That's it; that's all there is to it. The absolute deadline is Wed. March 2

PHASE TWO SUGGESTIONS:

Read no fewer than 10 papers. While reading, search for writers who either harmonize and/or contrast with your views. You may want to search for writers who picked the same picture to discuss, but this isn't absolutely necessary. For instance, a writer who has picked a different picture from the one you did, might still be making references to one or more of the plays you've been discussing, and in which case, it could be highly useful to make reference to this writer's views.

Avoid like the plague, simply tacking on an extra page to what you have previously written. The primary objective of this exercise is to integrate
other students views with your own. The minimum number of student reference to integrate into your paper is three, but by all means, feel free to include more than three if the spirit moves you. To summarize, your objective is to:

10	Read at least ten papers.
3	Cite at least three writers of the ten papers you read..

Examples of typical citations in your paper might be:

• According to Sally Smith, the character of Berniece in The Piano Lesson picked the picture entitled Ghost House because the image suggests there is more than just a single ghost. Sally has Berniece tell it this way, "Just look at all them figures on the piano, and youºll know for sure there more than one ghost in this house." I too picked this picture, but came to very different conclusions ...
  

• Jack Jones in his phase one posting about Death and King's Horseman has Elesin explain that his vision of home is best depicted in Jim Harter's The Dreamer and the Dreamed because "my true home has to be the horse that will carry forth our King on his journey." Even though I have Makak from Dream on Monkey Mountain tell us why this same picture is home to him, I find that the reasons both Elesin and Makak give for picking this picture are strikingly similar because ...

Take time to carefully "weave" your citations into your paper. A well written paper will flow seemingly effortlessly between content and citation from other papers. Be clear about where your citation is coming from (i.e. the actual writer of the phase one posting youºre discussing), and what character from what play youºre mentioning. As shown above, if you use the actual words from the paper, be sure to use quotes.

As with the Play Analysis Project, please make sure you notify each person you quote. It might even be nice to let people know you read their paper even if you don't quote from them. Do this by simply going to the "respone to this article" window, immediately following a particular posting.

Then you will print out a hard copy of your finished paper for me, as well as posting your final draft to the document posting site. Ultimately you will be filling out a cover sheet asking you to specify:

• the names of the writers of the 10 or more papers you initially perused
• the names of the writers you ultimately integrated into your paper

Staple the completed cover sheet to the hard copy, check to make sure that your finished paper has been successfully posted, and you're finished! This second phase is due on the web by midnight, no later than:

Wed. March 23

 (hard copy due in class on Fri. March 25)

POST your
PERFECT PICTURE PAPER
RIGHT NOW!