I Want My MTV
Run time: 30:54
Review essay: Careening through the Chronotypes: Response to I Want My MTV (by Patricia A. Suchy)
Artist's statement by Tracy Stephenson Shaffer
On August 1, 1981 MTV premiered on cable television and changed popular culture as we know it. The station was the first of its kind, a revolutionary idea, playing music videos 24/7 and becoming the obsession of teens and young adults across the globe.
On the occasion of its 40th anniversary and as a continuation of my work exploring the impact of popular culture on our lives, I imagined a performance that was both a celebration and critical exploration of MTV and how it shaped the world in which we live. Because I work at a university, engaging with multiple generations (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z) daily, I wanted to create an intergenerational performance that had something to offer everyone. Finally, I knew this performance could not be performed for a live audience, that the rules, regulations, and reasonable expectations surrounding the ongoing COVID pandemic limited the production to a digital version. As such, I collaborated with seven Louisiana State University students, instructors, and alums to create a thirty-minute digital performance that featured both video remakes and interviews with individuals who were "there" when MTV planted its flag in our imaginations.
MTV is noteworthy not only for its 40th anniversary, but for the way it shaped our understandings of identity beyond our individual high schools and home towns. For some in Generation X (MTV's primary viewing audience), MTV was their first mainstream access to diverse representations. Race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation — MTV offered an alternative to the stifling stereotypes on their TV screens. I Want My MTV asked collaborators to either remake (swede) a video played on the station during its heyday or to identify, interview, and perform (ELP) a member of Generation X (someone born between 1965-1980) on their memories of MTV. We mashed these performances within the performance together with creative editing and reenacted and historical MTV footage. The following explains these methods more fully.
Swede: a budget-friendly, do-it-yourself, remake of a film made popular in Michel Gondry's 2008 comedy Be Kind Rewind (and made popular among performance studies folk through the research of Lyndsay Michalik Gratch). We used the method of sweding to remake videos. Swedes are almost always humorous as they do not rely on the budget or professional quality of the original, yet they approximate the original through details like staging, performance, costumes, and props. They can also have a critical edge, and ours certainly do. I Want My MTV offers four wonderful swedes of classic MTV videos made by Lyndsay Michalik Gratch, Jonny Gray, Michael LeVan, and Misty Saribal.
ELP: a performance method that assists a researcher/performer in collecting and performing the "everyday life" speech of another, taken from the research of the late Dr. Robert Hopper. I Want My MTV features performers, Bonny McDonald and Johanna Middleton, who identified, interviewed, and perform individuals who experienced the first decade of MTV in their formative years. In addition to offering the perspective of the interviewee, this method created an intergenerational communication experience for both interviewer and interviewee and increased understanding for each.
Mashup: originally used in DJ culture to describe combining two different songs or genres of music into one. Aerosmith and Run-DMC's "Walk This Way" is an early version of mashup. Over the last 40 years, and with much influence from MTV, the mashup aesthetic has broadened to include a variety of things (including video) that combine elements from disparate sources to make something new. For performance studies folks, mashup is one way to compile texts. I Want My MTV is a mashup of sorts. Charles Christian Jones (our editor) and I worked together to combine the sweded videos and ELP performances with memorable clips from classic MTV to create our project. We took the "mashing" seriously, knowing that form is content. The editing together is as much a part of the overall project as are the individual contributions.
I Want My MTV put out a teaser trailer on August 1, 2021, exactly 40 years after MTV premiered. It also had a "regular run" in LSU's Department of Communication Studies as the season opener for the HopKins Black Box's 30th season in late August. We are delighted to share I Want My MTV with the audience of Liminalities.
Works Cited
Hopper, Robert. "Conversational Dramatism and Everyday Life Performance." Text and Performance Quarterly 13.2 (1993): 181-183.
Gratch, Lyndsay Michalik. Creating Memes, Sweding Movies, and Other Digital Performances: Adaptation Online. Lexington, 2017.
Gratch, Lyndsay Michalik. "How I Learned to Swede (and You Can, Too!): In Praise of Amateur Aesthetics," Text and Performance Quarterly 38.1-2 (2018): 109-114.
» Lyndsay Michalik Gratch is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. Her research and creative work focus on the intersections of performance, adaptation, communication, and digital culture, exploring how the physical and virtual have become intertwined in everyday life and how social norms and discourses that develop alongside digital technologies affect everyday life communication and creative performance practices. She is the author of Adaptation Online: Creating Memes, Sweding Movies, and Other Digital Performances (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and co-author of Digital Performance in Everyday Life (Routledge, 2021) with Ariel Gratch of Utica College.
» Jonathan M. Gray holds the William and Galia Minor Professorship of Creative Communication and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His primary research interests involve performative inquiries into the social construction of nature. His other scholarly interests reside at the intersections of queer identity, environmental advocacy, and aesthetic communication. His published work has appeared in Rhetoric & Society Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Text and Performance Quarterly, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and The Drama Review, among other venues. He has been a director and performer in a number of solo and group performances that deal with environmental themes, including his solo performance, Trail Mix: A Sojourn on the Muddy Divide between Nature and Culture and Cross/Walking. Dr. Gray's illustration work has appeared in Rhetoric & Society Quarterly, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Palooka: A Journal of Underdog Excellence, Zeszyty Komiksowe, and Xerolage.
» Charles Christian Jones is a writer, editor, and aspiring filmmaker living in New Orleans, LA. Earning his Bachelor's in Film Production and Screenwriting from Louisiana State University in 2020, he is currently earning his Masters in Film Production from the University of New Orleans. Charles works on numerous local student film productions as an Assistant Director, Cinematographer, and Writer. He also works on several profession sets as a locations assistant.
» Michael LeVan teaches at Washington State University Vancouver and at Temple University. He is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Liminalities.
» Bonny McDonald is a teaching artist, performer, and educator interested in communication and performance pedagogy. She holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from LSU where she teaches in the Communication Studies department as the Director of Basic Courses.
» Johanna Middleton is a MA candidate in Performance Studies at Louisiana State University where she is focused on the applications of performing personal narrative. A storyteller and arts educator, she deeply values facilitating spaces for others to tell their stories.
» Misty Saribal is a doctoral candidate at Louisiana State University. Her research and teaching interests focus on prison abolition, race, gender, and class studies. She stages economic, political, and performance theories using a broad range of performance methods aimed at proposing a role for performance in wider discourse about prison abolition and utopian world-building.
» Tracy Stephenson Shaffer (Chair and Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Louisiana State University) is a scholar/artist who produces research on the stage and on the page. Along with the creation/direction of over twenty original performances, her research has appeared in outlets such as Text and Performance Quarterly, Global Performance Studies, and Theatre Annual.
» Patricia A. Suchy is HopKins Professor of Performance Studies and Director of the Screen Arts Program at Louisiana State University.
