Webspinna Battle

Performing our Webspinna Battle was a challenging and enlarging experience. When we first heard of the assignment description, we had no idea what to expect or what we would do. Planning was difficult and finding inspiration took time. But in the end, we found an idea that worked, and we left feeling good about our audio clips and performance.

While selecting our topic of conflict, we came up with several ideas that were later combined and modified into “Old Money vs. Young Money,” a topic which we felt was a strong, age-old conflict to which we could apply a modern spin. However, after a few days of scouring the internet, we realized that it would be difficult to help our audience distinguish between mediated representations of old and young money. Cash register noises and clinking coins only go so far. We then went through a series of iterations of what old and young money represent, eventually settling on “Royalty vs. Rebellion.” This topic gave us more freedom to use a variety of both music and sound bites, and helped us to choreograph our battle, culminating in the beheading of the pompous bourgeois figurehead.

In the article The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem discusses how “any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony.” He further states that “the demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.” In the spirit of this writing, we searched for songs and sound clips which not only explicitly referenced royalty or rebellion, but also thematically explored these subjects. By doing so, we attempted to demonstrate what Lethem describes: engaging these media in a different context to add cultural nuance and complexity to their historical denotations.

For example, beyond using media explicitly referencing royalty and kingship, we also turned to more modern examples of men who may not have royal blood or authority, but through contemporary business practice and/or abuse of power, have come to exert the same influence over the common people as feudal Kings and Lords have throughout history. To accomplish this, we used clips of Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street and Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood: two very charismatic men who take advantage of and exploit the common man for personal gain. For the theme of rebellion, we sampled sounds from public demonstrations, news reports, and songs (i.e. “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy and “B.Y.O.B.” by System of a Down) which may or may not explicitly incite rebellion, but do criticize abuse of power by world leaders and other public figures.

The result of this process was very much a plagiarized mismatch of old and new voices, ultimately heralding the triumph of protest and rebellion. This isn’t to say that all rebellions are good, nor that they will all succeed, but we sought to convey to our audience a hopeful impression that good will triumph over evil, and freedom will defy oppression.

James May

Rollins Wimber

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