Her Opponent

FILM AND PERFORMANCE STUDY IN PERCEIVED AND IMPLICIT BIAS

An ethnodramatic re-staging of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, in collaboration with Maria Guadalupe (INSEAD), and Joe Salvatore (NYU/Steinhardt). The gender of each candidate has been reverse-cast, so that the words, pauses, gestures, body movements, and expressions of Donald Trump are embodied by a female performer, and those of Hillary Clinton are embodied by a male.

For more about the original performance project, visit www.heropponent.com

By coding and notating the pitch, loudness, gestures, word choice, expressions, movements, and even the emotional undertones - as codified by the performance-researchers - and recreating the televised debate with the candidate’s genders switched, the project creates an unprecedented tool for revealing deeply hidden biases in the viewer and identifying what triggers them.

For a paper about how Artists' Literacies helped shape this project, click here.

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ARTIST’S LITERACY: Interpersonal Dynamics, Narrative Knowledge

Research Based on Dynamic Performative Knowledge and Causation Data

Performing artists’ unique literacy lays in their ability to visually, subtextually, and physically read the behavior of fellow humans - audiences or co-performers - and to also embody these forms of expression for their re-presentation as acting. Slowing down this decoding and encoding allows the performative research- er to capture these bits of data on which they base their work, and can enable them to share them productively with non-performatively-literate researchers in social systems.

Ethnodramatic performance is the root discipline of this method - a research-based process of embodiment that frames the actor’s role as that of social mirror or documentarian. Combining ethnodramatic methods with visual and causative analysis can mean new insights into human social exchanges that can help the social sciences identify conflict points or lay bare hidden behavioral patterns to individuals or large groups.