Dreamers Awake

Dreamt last night that Dr J-Fletch came to class and performed a musical number. His hair was short like it was in his high school pictures and I realized that he could be the twin-brother of my good friend Mike Lane, a talented actor from Orlando. In the dream, Dr J was singing his lecture. He'd choreographed the piece as a surprise performative experimental and  interactive piece. My fellow PhD pal Macy jumped up and joined in. I remember being surprised that Macy was the first to jump up as she usually prefers research to performance. She was trying to compliment Dr J's movement by making extensions of his gestures rather than by mimicking or mirroring him. She left the singing to him. 

I remember thinking that it was an engaging number and while I cannot remember the lyrics of the song, I know it was about Professing Performance. I think the chorus was a kind of cheer-leading directive for students to remember that genealogy of performance studies should be FUN. In the dream, I was thinking that the lecture-show was fun but that the reading had not been fun. Not fun at all. 

I wish I could  clearly identify what it is about Shannon Jackson's writing that fails to engage me. I recognize that her work is important. I recognize that she is thorough. I can see that she clearly states her intentions, illuminates her interventions and makes known what she is intentionally leaving aside for other scholars to suss-out. I feel like her work represents something I ought to want to aspire to. Truth is, there is something in my brain that shuts down after every five sentences. I absorb the first line and a half and then I seem to go into some sort of auto-pilot mode. My eyes move over the text, I acknowledge what I am looking at as words. I attach the words to a notion of scholarship and further take note that I am encountering a dialogue about the fraught relationship of performance studies to the university empire. But aside from these vague pockets of awareness, I am reading blind. Eventually I will get five sentences in and realize that I have failed to absorb anything meaningful...the way a person does when looking at a menu without realizing until a waiter asks to take the order that they have failed to really look at the menu items closely enough to consider what they do or do not want. 

I spend more time LOOKING at Jackson's words than I spend absorbing meaning. 

Anyhow, that's my confession for the day. Perhaps that's why I dreamt of Dr J's lecture performance. I am looking for ways to feel engaged with this text. Wonder if anyone will sing tomorrow.