A COGNITIVE THEORY for ADAPTING COMICS to the STAGE by Kelley Laurel Feeman This Thesis Develops
ABSTRACT
ADAPTING IMAGINATION: A COGNITIVE THEORY FOR ADAPTING COMICS TO THE STAGE
by Kelley Laurel Feeman
This thesis develops a new adaptational technique for visual media, such as comics and graphic novels, into live performances. By rooting adaptational practice in the theory of distributed cognition, I propose that adaptors can consider the cognitive task and distributed system of source materials. The adaptor can then also consider the distributed system of the host medium to ensure staged adaptations that both seek to replicate the cognitive experience of the source material, and account for the differences in cognitive tasks across media and in host media. Through this cognitive understanding of the adaptational processes, theatre makers can produce works that engage human imagination in unique ways; drawing on the cognitive engagement systems of comics and live theatre. To build this theory, I primarily draw on visual language theorist Neil Cohn as well as distributed cognition theorist Evelyn Tribble.
ADAPTING IMAGINATION: A COGNITIVE THEORY FOR ADAPTING COMICS TO THE STAGE
A Thesis
Submitted to the
Faculty of Miami University
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
by
Kelley Laurel Feeman
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2019
Co-Advisor: Melanie Mortimore, MFA
Co-Advisor: Christiana Molldrem Harkulich, PhD
Reader: Patrick Murphy, PhD
©2019 Kelley Laurel Feeman
This thesis titled
ADAPTING IMAGINATION: A COGNITIVE THEORY FOR ADAPTING COMICS TO THE STAGE
by
Kelley Laurel Feeman
has been approved for publication by
The College of Creative Arts
and
Department of Theatre
______Melanie Mortimore, MFA
______Christiana Molldrem Harkulich, PhD
______Patrick Murphy, PhD
Table of Contents List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….iv Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………....v Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….....vi Introduction and Literature Review………………...………………………………………….….1 Contextualizing Comic Theory and Discourse…………………………………...……….2 Contextualizing Adaptations for the Stage………………………………………………..6 Contextualizing Cognitive Approaches…………………………………………………...7 Chapter 1: Integrating Theory…….………………………………………………………….…..15 Introducing Distributed Systems…………………………………………………………15 Comics as a Distributed System……………………………………………………..…..21 Adaptation as a Distributed System………………………………………………...……34 An Adaptational Theory and Conclusions……………………………………………….38 Chapter 2: Adapting Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree: A Case Study….………………………….….40 Introduction………………………………………………………………………...…….40 The Red Tree as a Distributed System…………………………………………………...42 Adapting The Red Tree for the Stage…………………………………………………….49 Description of the Workshop Performance………………………………………………54 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………58 Chapter 3: Data and Results……………………………………………………………….…..…60 Chapter 4: Conclusions and Next Steps……………………………………………………….…68 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..71 Appendix I: Process Materials…………………………………………………………………...75 Lighting Cue Sheet…………………………………………………………………..…..75 Voice Actor Audition Sheet…………………………………………………………..…76 The Red Tree Storyboard……………………………………………………………...…77 Appendix II: Survey Data……………………………………………………………………….78 Survey Results Without Filters or Comparisons…………………………………..…….78 Survey Results Comparing Participants with Theatre Experience……………………....82 Survey Results Comparing Participants with Comics Experience……………………....86 Appendix III: Production Photos………………………………………………………………...90
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List of Figures Figure Page 1.1 Kermit the Frog on set of “Bein’ Green”…………………………...……………………….19 1.2 Jim Henson with Kermit the Frog on “Bein Green” Set……………………………………..21 1.3 Krazy Kat, January 12th, 1936………………………………………………………………..26 1.4 Krazy Kat, panels 1-2………………………………………………………………………...30 1.5 Krazy Kat, Panels 3-5………………………………………………………………………..31 1.6 Krazy Kat, Panels 9-10………………………………………………………………………33 2.1 The Red Tree, Scene 7...... 41 2.2 The Red Tree, Scene 7 Panels 1-2……………………………………...... 43 2.3 The Red Tree, Scene 7, Panels 3-4…………………………………………………………...45 2.4 The Red Tree, Scene 7, Panels 5-6…………………………………………………………...47 2.5 The Red Tree, Scene 7, Panels 7-8…………………………………………………………...48 3.1 Survey Response to Question 1……………………………………………………………...61 3.2 Survey Response to Question 2……………………………………………………………...62 3.3 Survey Response to Question 9…………………………………………………………...…66
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Dedication
This thesis is dedicated to Mike, whose patience, support, drawings, and love letters got me through this process. To my family for always believing in me and encouraging me to find what makes me come alive. To Claire Mahave for being the first person to show me the joy of writing. And, to Dr. Brian O’Camb for being the first person to show me the joy of research and for motivating me to study comics.
v
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge my advisors, Melanie Mortimore and Dr. Christiana Molldrem Harkulich, whose guidance, insights, and listening ears allowed this thesis to take shape. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Patrick Murphy, whose love of Krazy Kat and willingness to talk to me about comics shaped the foundations of my work. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge Shelby Scaffidi, Holly West, and Madison Kollig. The help, talent, and care that I received from these humans made our production process more beautiful than I could have imagined. Lastly, I want to acknowledge my cohort- Mackenzie Kirkman, Rachel Brandenburg, Stormi Bledsoe, and Kelcey Broomfield. The love of these brilliant and outstanding artists has inspired me beyond measure.
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INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW When adapting from one medium to another, people often talk about trying to adapt a “quality;” something intangible. But how can adaptational techniques be replicated if the methods aren’t suggesting a quantifiable system? In recent years, adaptations of comics and graphic novels have become popular in film, TV, and (to a lesser extent) on the stage. Their sister medium, picture books, have been adapted for decades, often in puppetry and rarely for adults. These trends can be interpreted as a human impulse to adapt visual media into performance, but why? Moreover, in any type of adaptation, how do we come to make choices about how one medium is adapted into another? I am particularly interested in the adaptation from comics (comix, graphic novels, picture books etc.) into staged performances. Adaptation of these media has been largely theoretically ignored, and distinct process for the adaptation of one to the other has lacked methodology. To understand comic adaptation for the stage, I started by questioning how we understand the respective media: comics and live theatre. If the adaptor understands the source material’s and the host medium’s cognitive task, a new adaptational system can be created. This new adaptational system would foster a mutual respect for the differences between media and would provide the methodology for replicating the experience of interacting with source material. A thorough analysis of the mechanics of movement and framing within comics can help us to understand both how readers participate in the reading of comics and their complex visual language system. Ultimately, this is a cognitive task. The comics reader draws on a system of learned knowledge of images and systems- visual language- to make meaning from a comic’s series of panels and illustrations. The comics reader also understands what they’ve read based on a multitude of factors, which I will explore in Chapter 1. These factors come together in a system to make meaning for the reader, or the theatregoer. Therefore, using cognitive theories, such as distributed cognition, can aid the adaptor in understanding how the source material and the host medium function. Adaptational technique rooted in a distributed approach allows the adaptor to view all components of the comic and of live theatre simultaneously and adapt with an eye towards the cognitive impact on the participant. I am invested in the ways in which cognitive processes work in the source material versus a live adaptation. Understanding the cognitive task of the source material, I argue, can lead to informed adaptational choices that quantifiably can be linked to the host medium. I offer that methodology based in cognitive distribution can help to
1 answer questions about how to merge rather than transplant media in adaptation. If we seek to understand how a source material engages the reader, I argue that we must understand the cognitive system at play. By understanding not only the isolated parts of the source material, but also the system that connects them, we can begin to forge a new adaptational technique. Adapting isolated parts of a source material into a new medium yields distracted and confused new works. Accounting for the distributed cognitive systems in each of the media (source and host), can lead us to staged adaptations that seek both to reference the cognitive task of the source material while creating a new hybrid imaginative event for the audience.
Contextualizing Comic Theory and Discourse Writing critically about comics and graphic novels is a relatively new endeavor in the academic world. However, there are some pieces of critical work that engage and analyze comics from a theoretical and academic standpoint. To understand how comics work cognitively, it is important to understand how my work fits into the larger comic discourse. Among the most widely used theory on the form of comic strips and sequential art is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.1 It outlines how and why the audience interacts with comic forms as well as how and why the cartoonist communicates through a complicated intermingling of image and text. McCloud’s work provides the rhetoric and beginner’s dialogue for an in-depth conversation about a text’s use of icons, panel transitions, time sequences, and author-viewer relationships. While some of his claims become unstable, narrow-minded or disproved when used in intermedia or adaptation contexts, his work in 1994 opened the door to theoretical discourse on the comic form. McCloud is interested in the expansiveness of pictorial representation, but some connections are lost for the sake of brevity. McCloud discusses the way that our brains process comic strips, but he doesn’t explicitly cite cognitive or academic research nor does he draw many connections between performative art and comics. His work, in many ways, was the necessary pre-cursor for highly abstracted visual and comic theory such as Nick Sousanis’ graphic dissertation—Unflattening.2
1 McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. 2 Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Harvard University Press, 2015.
2
Unlike McCloud, who was concerned with the guiding rules, statutes, and categorical imperatives of comics, Sousanis seeks to bridge the gap between images and ideas and to encourage interdisciplinary mindsets. He theorizes, therefore, not that the comic form is the highest and most valuable form of communication, but that it is but one beautiful and impactful cross-section of spatial realities. He argues against images as merely illustration for text and instead suggests that a new way of seeing can be achieved through this medium that is not only about but is the thing itself. In other words, a comic book is not merely words suggesting images and realities as a novel might do; instead, a comic presents spatial ideas and realities for the reader to negotiate. Much like Marshall McLuhan presented in his 1964 article, Sousanis says that the medium we think in defines what we can see. Or as McLuhan’s title puts it, “The Medium is the Message.”3 Marshall McLuhan, though not a comic theorist, has had a great influence on the way that we think about artistic form. His work is especially interesting when applied to the adaptation of one material to another because as he argues, the characteristics of the medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study because it is form that affects the greatest impact on a society. Often using cubism as an example of this, he explains that when a movement or medium understands this concept, it can truly confront the viewer with an immediate sensory stimulation that relays the secondary implicit message. McLuhan’s work, then, seemingly fits very well into the comic discourse, but Sousanis and McCloud may agree for two very different reasons. McCloud argues in his book that the comic form invites a participation with the content in a way that is necessary and utterly unique. He may agree then that the comic medium is the ultimate message that only it can provide. However, Sousanis, the perpetuator of interdisciplinary thinking, may agree that yes, the medium IS the message, and while sequential art sends a unique message, it can only be further amplified with the addition of more and more media awareness so that we might “discover new ways of seeing.”4 Other visual and media theorists, like W.J.T. Mitchell, argue something subtly different about word-image relations. He theorizes that image and text can be co-present (the imagetext),
3McLuhan, Marshall. “The Media is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York : McGraw-Hill, 1964. 4 Sousanis, 27. 3 but the text will exploit that relationship.5 McCloud touches on this topic as well, but he suggests that this only occurs in poor comic writing. Mitchell is more concerned with other media and only touches on comics briefly in his work, but his media-centric approach to “imagetexts” in conjunction with other theorists like McCloud does provide a rhetoric for analyzing works in terms of effectiveness. Karin Kukkonen’s book Studying Comics and Graphic Novels also gives a primer for analyzing the ways in which comics and graphic novels work.6 She takes a far more educational and practical approach to the structure of her book, offering checklists, prompts, exercises, examples, and how-to guides. She also acknowledges those who came before her, like Scott McCloud, and makes corrections and additions for him where they are necessary. Her work also introduces some terminology and insights unmentioned in other comics studies works, such as media affordances, capabilities and limitations of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s ‘art of time’ and ‘art of space.7 Further, she acknowledges and helps readers identify the types of theoretical approaches they may want to take when analyzing comics. For example, she notes that one may take a cognitive approach to comics if they are interested in “how comics create meaning through cues and readerly inferences” or “how fictional minds and bodily experience are represented and elicited in comics.”8 More recently on the comics discourse scene are Charles Hatfield and Neil Cohn, who discuss comics in terms of literature and linguistics, respectively. In his book The Visual Language of Comics, Cohn goes into detail about how the reader identifies and receives the language systems of comics.9 Therefore, we can see that he is taking a cognitive linguistic approach to comics. One of Cohn’s main points is that comics are not language, they employ visual language. Just as a novel employs the written word, so too do comics rely on visual language. He also admits that visual language is something that one can have fluency in, just like anything else.
5 Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 6 Kukkonen, Karin. Studying Comics and Graphic Novels. Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 7 Kukkonen citing Lessing’s Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), 5. 8 Kukkonen, 130. 9 Cohn, Neil. The Visual Language of Comics:Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. Bloomsbury, 2013. 4
In his book, Cohn takes great strides to thoroughly delve into the visual linguistics that comics operate under. He is thorough, moving through concepts such as: navigational structure, conceptual structure, narrative structure, graphic morphology, and fluency. All these concepts are supported by research, case studies, experiments, illustrations, comic examples, and cultural acknowledgement. Cohn considers how the message of comics is being sent, and how readers might decode those linguistic systems. This work aids my work greatly, as it offers the substantial terminology for how comics interact cognitively with their reader. Though he does not talk in terms of cognitive distribution, his work shows the effects of this and supports my claim that analyzing source material as a complex system will yield more effective insights that inspire more effective adaptations. Charles Hatfield, in his book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, also discusses comics as systems, though, like Cohn, also does not seek to utilize distributed systems nor cognitive science. 10 Still, his chapter “An Art of Tensions: The Otherness of Comics Reading” offers a preliminary insight into the unique positioning of comics as a new form of literature. He posits that as comics develop in our contemporary time, “comics study encourages eclecticism, for comics urge the dissolution of professional boundaries and the mingling of theories and methodologies drawn from various fields.” 11 In this way, Hatfield does not suggest that comics study is interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, but rather anti-disciplinary. To that end, then, Hatfield questions what the reading experience of comics is, and to what extent it resembles or diverges from the traditional reading of written text.12 In some ways, Hatfield’s work agrees with Cohn’s; they both base their comics study in the comparison of literature and the written word. However, Hatfield is more interested in pointing to comics study and discourse as a field which requires eclecticism, and for which a “one size fits all” approach will not suffice. Alternatively, Cohn believes in the linguistic structure of comics as somewhat of a constant. Hatfield offers into the field a new way of thinking about comics as a complicated interchange of images and text. He multiplies questions and views comics as something much more “impressionistic” than Cohn does.13
10 Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: an Emerging Literature. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 11 Hatfield, xiv. 12 Hatfield, 32. 13 Hatfield, 67. 5
Hatfield argues that the comics reader “must grapple with four tensions that are fundamental to the art form.” 14 The tensions are: “between codes of signification; between the single image and the image in series, between narrative sequence and page surface, and between reading as experience and the text as material object.”15 Hatfield’s work on tensions provides an interesting mode of understanding how comics have developed and how they work as a form of literature. However, his four tensions do not provide the most effective method of viewing comics as the basis for stage adaptation. His verbiage about comics study being anti-disciplinary illuminates the degree to which comics operate as ever-different and ever-evolving systems and is worth carrying forwards. But, work that further delves into the specifics of cognitive science and distributed systems will more effectively suit the needs of creating an adaptation system that is built to isolate and transfer the distributed systems of the host and source material. Cohn and Hatfield’s work is mostly applicable to comics as opposed to other art forms, like theatre. However, Cohn’s work in cognitive linguistics, which draws from a wider category of cognitive research, more readily lends itself to being transferred to the host material.
Contextualizing Adaptations for the Stage It is important to note that while my work considers methods of adapting comics, I am not interested in utilizing sources on adaptation into film and TV, which are more widely available. The methodology of adapting a comic source to film or TV would require a very different set of considerations. Recorded media does not offer the same level of viewer agency that comics do. Film and TV limit agency by showing only one possible viewing of space and time. The movement between images is already chosen for the viewer, unlike comics. Theatre often progresses in one temporal path but offers the viewer the option to look wherever they choose. Both comics and theatre also have a liveness that recorded media does not. There is a real-time exchange between viewer and media in live theatre and comic-reading. Because of these differences, the cognitive tasks of the media are very different and sources that consider adaptation into film are not useful for my process. Though not based in cognitive research, Jane Barnette’s Adapturgy offers case studies on intermedial (book to stage) adaptations that are a starting point for answering the question: where
14 Hatfield, 70. 15 Hatfield, 70. 6 do we begin with intermedial adaptation?16 How do we blend two differing methods of engagement to make something new? Though none of the examples in Adapturgy (Red Badge of Courage, Moby-Dick, The Sound and the Fury) are illustrated, the productions she points to utilize puppetry to merge the intent of the source material with the possibilities of theatre. In this way, she is merging two types of media (novels and puppetry) through the process of adaptation. Although novels and comics are different media types, Barnette’s examples show the reader the process of considering the impact and intent of source material from a medium different from the host medium. She does not comment on the integration or adaptation potential of puppetry, which she uses in many of her adaptations, but she does talk about how the choice to use puppetry offers a more symbolic representation as opposed to human bodies.17 For example, she examines different adaptations of Moby-Dick, many of which utilized puppetry in different ways. In two different instances, puppetry and visual storytelling were used to symbolize the whale without necessitating the depiction of a whale (which the novel does not do). Barnette’s examples point to puppetry as an effective imaginative tool for her adaptation purposes. By integrating the suggestive, rather than literal, imagery that puppetry can offer, Barnette’s adaptations bring over an important cognitive element from her source materials- the ability to leave some things to the imagination. The whale in Moby Dick is not literally there, only a suggestion of it is. Why? Because the idea of the whale is one of the most important cognitive requests of the novel. Adapturgy starts the conversation of adapting media into live performance, but we can see how the integration of cognitive theory can help to describe more effectively what happens on the source material’s page, why, and how we can account for it on the theatrical stage. In many cases, adaptation without methodology can yield passable performances. Often, though, the adaptations lack specificity or fail to adapt the feeling and experience of the source material. Instead, the adaptor chooses a literal approach, such as painting the set to look like a literal comic book. Looking at Spider-man: Turn off the Dark, which was chronicled by Glen Berger in Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway
16 Barnette, Jane. Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation. Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. 17 Barnette, 110. 7
History, helps understand what can go wrong in the adaptational process and how.18 The musical is famous for the injury it caused its actors and stunt crew, but it is also infamous amongst comic book fans for producing an adaptation that didn’t feel like any Spider-Man they knew. Berger’s account of the musical’s process from conception to closing reveals mismanagement, yes, but it also reveals some common pitfalls of intermedial adaptation. Firstly, Berger points out that the writers and team members couldn’t help but to compare their musical to the popular film versions starring Toby Maguire, which had been released during this time.19 Initial drafts were described as “cinematic” and unstageable.20 Second, Marvel owns the copyright to Spider-Man and so held several restrictions for the production. Other than these stipulations, which were chosen without the consult of theatre professionals, Marvel and comic professionals were not involved in the writing and staging of this production. Instead, the writers and composers of the show were chosen from personal relationships. Berger admits that he wasn’t qualified to write the show. In general, Berger’s book gives an inside look into how a lack of research and understanding of media’s cognitive tasks can lead to a confused, and messy production. The book shows Broadway artists trying to solve theatrical problems with theatrical solutions, instead of looking to comics studies. The fundamental misunderstanding of the intent of the Spider-Man comics, and comics in general led to a flop. I discuss this example more thoroughly in Chapter 1 to unpack how adaptational practice rooted in distributed cognition can solve some problems that the musical faced.
Contextualizing Cognitive Approaches Adaptation is often necessarily interdisciplinary, so how do you navigate from one to the other, or between the two? In order to answer this question, we can consider the ways in which the reader, or viewer interacts with media. To understand how to adapt from comics to the stage, the adaptor must also understand how participants view themselves in relation to the source material- comics- as well as the host medium- theatre. The field of distributed cognition offers one method for understanding the system at play within host and source materials, how the elements of the system interacts, and where the adaptor can pull from to create engaging
18 Berger, Glen. Song of Spider-Man the inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History. Simon & Schuster, 2014. 19 Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), and Spider-Man 3 (2007). 20 Berger, 14. 8 productions. Distributed cognition can be difficult to describe initially and is best understood through a collection of definitions and examples. David N. Perkins describes distributed cognition as 1). The surround—the immediate physical and social resources outside the person—participates in cognition, not just as a source of input and a receiver of output, but as a vehicle of thought. 2) the residue left by thinking— what is learned—lingers not just in the mind of the learner, but in the arrangement of the surround as well.” 21 Here, we can see that Perkins describes distributed cognition two-fold. The resources around us inform the way we think, and also participate in the way we think. Additionally, we leave something behind as we think in conjunction with our surroundings. Perhaps the most prominent writer on distributed cognition in theatre, Evelyn B. Tribble’s book, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, illuminates how and why methodology informed by distributed cognition is useful.22 Though much of her book is specifically looking at the distributed system of Shakespeare’s theatre, her work in unpacking how a distributed system works still informs my work. Her work emphasizes a systems-based approach, meaning that no one element can be identified as the unit of analysis. Folding this methodology into my own allows my adaptation process to look at the many factors that need to be examined in both the system of the source material as well as the system of the host medium. Tribble’s work, like Neil Cohn’s, addresses and acknowledges the need for cognitive work to always be embedded in culture. This work, as well the work of theorists such as David Kirsh, who she cites in her book, can give some insight into how the systems of source material and host medium can find compromise and production choices. She notes how physical environment layout plays a role in how audience members and actors interact with the environment. Kirsh’s 3 principal methods of using space from his paper “The Intelligent use of Space” are: Spatial arrangements that simplify choice; Spatial arrangements that simplify perception; Spatial dynamics that simplify internal computation.23 In his article, Kirsh notes: “the management of spatial environments, whether consciously planned as such or not, is a key
21 Perkins , David N. “Person-plus: A Distributed View of Thinking and Learning.” Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations , edited by Gavriel Salomon, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 88–110. 22 Tribble, Evelyn B. Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Palgrave McMillan, 2011. 23 Kirsh, David. “The Intelligent Use of Space,” Artificial Intelligence 73, 1995. 31-68. 9 mechanism for distributing cognitive burdens.”24 When we discuss the theatrical stage, as Tribble does, spatial environments indeed are consciously planned. For example, Kirsh mentions the modern theatrical convention of “blocking” a theatrical production.25 He says, “the technology of lighting demands that movements be planned and memorized in advance. There is some evidence that this kinesthetic encoding supports memory, and that actors retain a physical memory for action that aids them in recalling.26 As actors commit specific movements to memory in rehearsal, they are then free in the live theatrical moment during performance to bring more energy, and to respond more intimately to the scenes they are in. By building muscle memory for their movements, actors no longer must use mental energy to consider where they should be moving. In much the same way, spatial arrangements are made in comics to simplify choice, perception, and internal computation. Panel sequences are laid out so that the reader easily understands the progressive path they are meant to take. For example, a comic layout that offers a sequence of repeating squares in a line is a spatial arrangement simplifying choice. The reader understands that they are meant to move from left to right through the panel sequence. This spatial arrangement displays a simple example of distributed cognition. The reader is offered a sequence that is so easily intuited, the reader is hardly aware that anything happened. Through thinking about the ways in which humans interact with the systems around us, we can better understand the process of intermedial adaptation as well as how human audience members will interact with the adaptation. Through these understandings, adaptors can better pinpoint how to communicate to the audience witnessing an adapted performance and how to adapt from one medium to another. These understandings can aid my process of isolating movement and framing systems in comics and adapting the distributed cognition they employ into the distributed cognition that the live theatrical event employs. Karen Barad’s work, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” offers the tools to challenge the way humans view themselves in relation to the non-human world.27 “Non-human” doesn’t have to refer only to other living
24 Kirsh, 31. 25 Kirsh, 31. 26 Kirsh, 31. 27 Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward An Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter .” Material Feminisms, ed. By Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 2008, pp. 120–154. 10 entities, but also objects, concepts etc. This Posthumanist perspective then offers context for the systems-based approach that I referenced earlier. If we think of adaptation as the merging of two distributed systems, Barad can inform how we, as readers and audience members, understand our role in the distributed system. Barad says that “Relata do not preexist relations.”28 We may think that non-humans are distinct entities that enter into relationships, but Barad suggests that the concept of those entities are produced by their relations to each other. So, we understand the theatrical performance because of our relation to it in the lived moment. The audience enters into a relationship with the performance and there is no relationship between the two entities before that point. Likewise, the relationship between reader and comic is created in the moment of reading. As the reader moves through the panels, images and texts, the reader brings the final piece of the system into play-imagination. Therefore, Barad suggests agential realism, which states that agency is not something that can be possessed; it is something you enact and that nothing is permanently separable from anything else.29 If we think of the categorization of entities not in terms of human-centric views, but as Barad suggests, we may be able to consider source and host materials in terms of living systems, and not just a collection of parts. In other words, humans often want to put themselves at the top of a hierarchy. The system of measurement for that hierarchy is based on assumptions such as: that agency is something that humans innately have. If we believe that about agency, then it takes entities like plants, objects, and concepts and pushes them further down in the hierarchy. But what if we think of agency in terms of enactment, not possession? What if we think of relations as producing concepts of relata? Through disrupting hierarchical human-centric ideas, we can understand more clearly why and how the elements of a distributed system interlock and produce certain imaginative requests of readers, viewers, or audience members. Barbara Dancygier’s book, The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach utilizes cognitive methods in order to dissect and understand the ways humans tells stories.30 Her work is useful not only for understanding how we tell stories, but also how we receive them. Helpfully, her book demonstrates cognitive approaches to many forms of storytelling, including poetry, prose, novels, and drama. By looking to the roots of cognitive science and concepts like
28 Barad, 133. 29 Barad, 135. 30 Dancygier, Barbara. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 16. 11 conceptual blending, while also looking at examples that showcase cognitive functions amid storytelling, I can better understand the mind of the storyteller, the story receiver, and the character. In terms of the basics of cognitive science, The Way We Think is an important first step in understanding the way humans use “conceptual blends.”31 Conceptual blends, in the words of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, are the ways we “choreograph vast networks of conceptual meaning, yielding cognitive products that seem simple.”32 Conceptual blending and cognitive science suit adaptational pursuits because, as Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner point out, “we can never hope to know a causal effect for certain.”33 Applying cognitive science to adaptation practices won’t yield indisputable answers about how humans understand and process source materials and performances. Rather, cognitive science can help to start a conversation about how humans might understand and process, leading artists and adaptors to interrogate their adaptation practices, and pushing them towards works that are well-informed. The work that Fauconnier and Turner do in their book, in combination with work from theorists like Neil Cohn, can help to illuminate how certain comic language structures are built. For example, Fauconnier and Turner discuss “nonthings” and “non-events” to help describe how people understand absence.34 We understand things in relation to what isn’t there just as often as we understand things in relation to what is there. These concepts can be applied to comic studies to understand how readers make meaning of gutters, frames, and other drawn spatial awareness. How do we understand implied physical movement panel-to-panel by removing certain elements from our field of vision? Also useful to comic studies are the general character framing principles laid out by Fauconnier and Turner. The basic points of these principles can be applied as a blueprint for comics transitions and theatrical transitions in adapted versions. By using the principles of framing, which elucidate the idea that shifting frames are a way of changing perspective, trying things out, changing context in relation to story etc., we can see natural connective tissue between the ways humans understand themselves in relation to the world around them, and the ways that readers understand progressions on the comic page.35
31 Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. Basic Books, 2010. V. 32 Fauconnier, Turner, v. 33 Fauconnier, Turner, 218. 34 Fauconnier, Turner, 241. 35 Fauconnier, Turner, 252. 12
By using the elements of the distributed system that Tribble identifies, we can ask questions of the source material and the host medium such as: what is the system? How does it communicate? What are the elements of the system? Do they coordinate and how? What is the task that the system seeks to accomplish? How can that task be achieved? By asking this of the source material and of the host medium, we can pinpoint what cognitive tasks are being required of the medium. Then, plans can be drawn on how to begin merging these tasks.
Outline of Chapters Chapter 1: Integrating Theory lays the theoretical groundwork for my adaptational theory. Part 1: Introducing Distributed Systems describes in simple terms what a distributed system is, how they work, and the benefits and considerations that this framework provides for adaptational studies. The definition and function of a distributed system is illustrated through an extended example of Kermit the Frog in the 1970 video “Bein Green.” Part 2: Comics as a Distributed System examines the ways in which a reader or adaptor might view a comic as a distributed system. Part 2 also shows the limitations of past scholarship unrooted in cognitive science. This section primarily uses George Herriman’s Krazy Kat as an extended example. Krazy Kat is used to illustrate how certain comic scholarship fails when used for adaptation. It is also used to demonstrate how viewing the comic as a distributed system yields a more effective basis for adaptation to the stage. Part 3: Adaptation as a Distributed System takes the groundwork from sections 1 and 2 to demonstrate how and why adaptational approaches utilizing distributed systems can yield adaptations of comics for the stage. Further, Part 3 uses the example of the adaptation and staging failure of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and how the musical could have viewed the Spider-Man comics as a distributed system to avoid some of the pitfalls of the production. Lastly, Chapter 1 provides the explained methodology for adapting a comic to the live theatrical stage using distributed systems. Chapter 2: Adapting Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree: A Case Study describes the distributed systems-based adaptation and production process of one scene from The Red Tree. First, I describe the basic progression of The Red Tree book as well as my production, foregrounding the analysis and providing visual and thematic context. Next, I unpack how The Red Tree works as a distributed system, both on the page and in my adaptation. I move panel to panel through my chosen scene, applying first McCloud’s analysis strategies to exemplify the limitations of
13 neglecting cognitive science in comics analysis. Then, I continue walking through the scene in the book in order to highlight the goals of the system, the parts of the system, and ways in which The Red Tree uses its system to communicate movement of time, space, and mood for the reader. After this analysis, I move point by point to describe my process of adapting The Red Tree for the stage. I discuss my process for adapting the frame, adapting movement into sound, adapting movement into light, and adapting movement into object manipulation. In all these subsections, I describe how the system elements work in the source material, how I chose to adapt the elements into the host medium, what it looked like, and how each conveyed the types of movement. Chapter 3: Analyzing Survey Results and Data describes the circumstances surrounding the survey that participants were invited to take after the performance, the data I compiled, and what the results imply. While all graphs and data are in Appendix II, I refer mainly to percentages and overarching trends derived from my data analysis. In this chapter, I primarily place my focus on comparing data from the entire group to data comparing experience levels with comics and theatre respectively. I consider the effects of my adaptational choices in relation to participants who identified as being very familiar with comics, as well as participants who identified as being very familiar with theatre, as visual language literacy directly impacts a person’s ability to interact with a comic’s system.
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CHAPTER 1 INTEGRATING VISUAL AND COGNITIVE THEORY
Explaining Distributed Systems Art requires a participant, a partner in crime. Without a viewer, someone to observe and engage with, there is only the unrealized potential for art. Because of this necessary interaction between art and viewer, the question of perception predictably emerges: if we are making art for someone else to perceive, how do we guide their participation? How do we frame what they see? In thinking about the theatrical adaptation of comics, we must start with similar considerations. If we are attempting to adapt source material from one medium to another, we must think about the mechanics and implications of both performance and comics. There are performative aspects of comics that make them ripe for theatrical adaptation, but they operate in different ways that should be analyzed. Comics and theatre are two media that combine dialogue and image to create stories. Unlike film, which also combines a script with image, theatre and comics give the participant agency as they engage with the work. Film is much more forceful in the way it frames the story for its viewer. In this chapter, I will conduct a thorough analysis of the mechanics of movement and framing within comics. This will help us to understand both how audiences participate in the reading of comics and how comics manipulate time and space to make meaning. Ultimately, this is a cognitive task, and using cognitive theory to understand the source material and its cognitive distribution can then offer a new way of adapting comics to performance. Understanding comics as a distributed system can lead adaptors into informed performances that understand and acknowledge the ways in which comics are a system of parts. Acknowledging the source material’s anti-localizable system in adaptation will yield productions that understand and integrate cognitive tasks. Focusing on cognitive tasks in adaptation allows the adaptor methodology that is replicable and innovative. Comics are not equivalent to language; rather, they are equivalent to socio- cultural context.36 The idea of “comics” revolves around their status as a tool, a lens through which we understand other things about our society and our culture. They rely on our specific social and cultural understandings. But how comics communicate is visual language. As discussed in the previous chapter, visual language is what comics employ to tell their story and to engage
36 Cohn,7. 15 readers. Visual language is the grammar of the work, of the layout, the sequencing, and most importantly for me-- visual language is the grammar for the movement of comics. Understanding the cognitive rules of this grammar is essential to adapting the 2-D visual language to a 3-D performative visual. To understand the movement of comics, I propose three fundamental categories for analysis: spatial movement, temporal movement, and emotional movement. With spatial movement, comics show that someone or something is moving through space; with temporal movement, the person or thing is being shown through a progression of time. Emotional movement shows mood progression. That is, throughout the course of the comic, the artist achieves an emotional arc or journey. What causes these movements, though, and how do readers understand them? One beneficial framework for answering this question is distributed cognition. By understanding what distributed cognition is, we can see what systems comics employ and how each element of their system works together. Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that asserts that “Cognition is stretched, not divided among mind, body, activity and culturally organized settings.”37 Evelyn Tribble, in her book Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, notes that through a systems-based approach, “no one element can be identified as the unit of analysis,” making the parts of the system anti-localizable.38 I am using this approach, then, because it allows me to look at the many factors that need to be examined in an adaptational process. As Tribble states, “Cognitive Science must always remain deeply embedded in culture, and distributed systems offer the most robust framework for analyzing these relationships.”39 As I mentioned in the Introduction, authors like Karen Barad can give us the means to philosophize our interactions and relationships to the people and objects around us. Tribble offers that cognitive science and distributed systems are the means to pushing that type of philosophy into creative adaptational practice. To further understand what distributed cognition is, let’s look at an example. As aforementioned, Tribble tells us that by looking at something as a distributed system, we are conceding that our cognition is stretched, and not divided. Remember the example of the actor
37 Tribble, 4. 38 Tribble, 2. 39 Tribble, 18. 16 learning blocking in rehearsal. The actor commits movement to muscle memory. This partially allows the actor to distribute their cognition. They are stretching their cognition to include the movements they have learned. They are relying on that blocking in order to act more successfully in the moment. By thinking this way, we are also conceding that many factors relating to our mind, body, activities, culture, and settings inform how we understand what we interact with. For example, in Jim Henson’s 1970 video of Kermit the Frog singing “Bein’ Green,” audience members around the world found the singing puppet endearing, sweet, and cerebral. People of all ages understand the video performance easily because of the way we can distribute our cognition. The lyrics of “Bein’ Green” are as follows: It's not that easy bein' green Having to spend each day the color of the leaves When I think it could be nicer bein' red or yellow or gold Or something much more colorful like that
It's not easy bein' green It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things And people tend to pass you over 'cause you're Not standin' out like flashy sparkles on the water Or stars in the sky
But green is the color of Spring And green can be cool and friendly-like And green can be big like an ocean Or important like a mountain Or tall like a tree
When green is all there is to be
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It could make you wonder why But why wonder, why wonder? I am green and it'll do fine It's beautiful And I think it's what I want to be
And green can be big like an ocean Or important like a mountain Or tall like a tree
When green is all there is to be It could make you wonder why But why wonder, why wonder? I am green and it'll do fine It's beautiful And I think it's what I want to be40
The basic goal of “Bein’ Green” is to showcase Kermit’s progression from self-doubt to self-love. As Kermit sings this song, he walks through a predominantly green forest landscape. He pauses to look at some colorful flowers, but mostly walks until he decides that it’s not worth speculating about why he’s green, because he likes who he is. At this final point, we see him sitting in the middle of the forest with his legs crossed. Many audience members rely on prior knowledge about The Muppets franchise to understand who and what Kermit is. We can describe this as one way that our cognition is distributed to encompass cultural knowledge of Kermit. The audience also partially understands what they are seeing because they simultaneously believe that Kermit is an alive frog and know that he is a puppet object. Our minds process Henson’s skillful manipulations of Kermit and believe that he is alive. This allows the audience member to rely on the knowledge of what it looks like for a living creature to move and make sound. We also recognize that Kermit is speaking and having an identity crisis, all signs that someone or something is alive. But, we still maintain our knowledge that he is not real. Audience
40 Raposo, Joe. “Bein’ Green.” The Sesame Street Book & Record, 1970. 18 members aware or unaware of The Muppets franchise understand that Kermit is a puppet object, because of his cartoonish features that contrast with the real plant foliage in the background. This knowledge of Kermit as a puppet also contributes to the way we understand and process the song.
Figure 1.1, Still of Kermit the Frog in “Bein Green”41 In some respects, Henson manipulates Kermit to seem as if his cognition is being stretched as well. This aids in building his character as believably alive. When he sings, “red or yellow or gold,” he walks by the material anchors on set of red, yellow, and gold flowers. The bright flowers stand out against the thick green foliage that Kermit is passing, as seen in Figure 1.1. His internal dialogue is represented in this moment, he is speculative and conscious of the leaves around him. He is distributing his consciousness to include the material things around him. The leaves and flowers are helping him to think and process his emotions. The environment suits him, yet he fiddles with his hands. He is aware that he is green, just like all the foliage and grass around him and this makes him question his existence. His internal struggle is that he is no
41 “Bein’ Green.” The Muppet Show, created by Jim Henson, season 1, episode 12, The Jim Henson Company and Syndication, 1976. 19 more remarkable than all the billions of leaves or blades of grass, and he finds this fact reflected to him in the material world around him. He feels common because he was made to be green. In this connection point between the relata of Kermit and the relata of the foliage and flowers, therefore, we blend thinking, speaking, and material anchors to understand that Kermit has complex cognizance inside of him. This performance shows that Kermit’s character is capable of complex cognition. What is additionally important, though, is that Kermit is neither thinking “like” an animal nor “like” a human. His cognizance is blended. The cognizance of Kermit shows a character that knows he is green because he is a green frog. Green frogs are always green because that is a fundamental part of their DNA. However, Kermit does not talk about being an animal, nor does he position himself within the animal world. Instead, he thinks deeply of himself as a green object that sits among other green objects that are natural. When he does relate himself to the natural world, it is not to animals and it is only through similes. He thinks of green as an abstract concept that he possesses. He likens his possession of green as being able to signify many things, not just the literal color. In this way, the character of Kermit is using his own green material body as a material anchor in the scene. He speaks outwardly about what the concept of green is, referring to his own physical object body amidst other green objects. The conclusion of the song shows Kermit enacting agency in his relation to green. He decides that it’s not worth wondering why he is what he is, but that “it’s what I wanna be.”42 Because Kermit is a hand-rod Muppet, we have a different perception of who he is; this style of puppetry informs the audience’s understanding of him.43 We usually don’t see Kermit’s legs, but we assume he has them because frogs typically have legs and our brains automatically blend associations to reach that conclusion. Because we never see the puppeteer while Kermit is onstage, we develop a connection to his character, forgetting about the puppeteer. We almost never see him in the context of his puppeteer, except in the odd behind-the-scenes shots like Figure 1.2. In this image, we see Kermit’s eyes still focused as if he is alive and looking at Jim Henson. Yet, we also see that his lower half is just a long material tube.
42 Raposo. 43 The term “Muppet” refers to puppets made by The Jim Henson Company. 20
Figure 1.2, Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog on “Bein’ Green” set44 This does not matter to the viewer, though. The viewer understands that the puppet is “walking” not necessarily because Henson perfectly emulates how a human or frog walks, but because the viewer already believes the puppet is alive. The way Kermit interacts with his environment and is aware of himself makes the viewer perceive the puppet as alive and therefore the time and spatial movement involved in the scene is understood and decoded successfully. We can see in this example that distributing cognition is instantaneous and easy for us. We can stretch our understanding across mind and cultural understanding, like the viewers of the “Bein’ Green” video to understand and enjoy the performance. It is so fundamental to our thought processing that sometimes we ask puppets, comics, or cartoons to emulate these tasks to show the viewer they’re alive. Kermit thinks through his identity by talking out loud, by interacting with the material world around him, and by considering the cultural contexts associated with being a strange combination of frog, human, and object.
Comics as a Distributed System We can confront our adaptational source material in much the same way as the example above. Just as there were elements of the medium (puppetry) that I needed to briefly mention in order to talk about the system of the “Bein Green” video, so too are there elements of comics that need to be analyzed before adaptational choices can be made. As I have mentioned before,
44 Jones, Brian Jay. Jim Henson: The Biography. Ballantine Books, 2016. 50. 21 comics thrive on emulations and presentations of movement from one panel to the next. This is my primary entry point into understanding the distributed system of comics in order to create a method for their adaptation. A more thorough understanding of what comics are and how they work can lead to performances that more accurately blend the comics experience with the theatrical experience. First, let’s think about what a comic fundamentally is. In response to spotty discourse about what comics are and how they work, Scott McCloud wrote Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art in the late 1990s to give readers a vocabulary for comic analysis. In the book, McCloud provides the basics of comic engagement and the language of the comic artist. His work is a beneficial platform for beginning comic enquiries, but it is ultimately insufficient to describe strips that deviate from the norm. For an introduction into the way comics work, though, we can consider McCloud’s writing surrounding the different ways comics achieve visual participation and movement through time via gutter and frame construction i.e. panel transitions. Panels or Frames are the barriers, or shapes, that illustrators often draw around the sequential images in comics. The standard shape is a square or rectangle, but framing techniques vary widely. “Gutters” are the blank spaces in between these images. McCloud speculates that there are six types of panel-to-panel transitions: moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and non- sequitur. I will go into further detail later about these panel transitions, but summarized: 1. Moment to moment makes very incremental change between frames. 2. Action to action features a single subject in a succinct and clear active progression. 3. Subject to subject takes the viewer back and forth between subjects while staying within a scene or idea. 4. Scene to scene transports the reader across significant distances of time and space. 5. Aspect to aspect bypasses time for the most part and sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place, idea, or mood. 6. Non-sequitur offers no logical relationship between panels.45 These panel transitions offer us the first step in understanding movement in comics, for it is the transition between panels that takes the reader step-by-step through the world of the comic-
45 McCloud. 70-73 22 spatially, temporally, and emotionally. Of McCloud’s categories, the most common type is “action to action,” primarily because it creates the most movement forward in time. Imagine: if every panel in a comic strip showed a different action, one after another, the viewer would be catapulted through the scene. In theatre, we see “action to action” movements all the time. David Ball, in his book Backwards and Forwards calls moments that drive the plot forward “triggers and heaps.”46 Standard dramaturgical playwriting structure47 leads the viewer through the action of the play with a domino effect--this leads to that, which causes this which leads to that. A tighter trigger and heap sequence may lead to something akin to “action to action.” This type is followed not so closely by “subject to subject” and “scene to scene” as the most common forms of frame transitions in popular American comics. “Subject to subject” is a style that mimics film more closely than live theatre. Often in film, directors stage two people having a conversation in a static setting. The camera cuts back and forth between actors and the scene progresses. “Subject to subject” is still possible in live theatre but achieved differently. Staging may indicate that actors be placed on opposite sides of a room, forcing audience members to turn their heads with each line. Or, more likely, a lighting designer may illuminate the actors when they are delivering their line. Scene-to-scene is also seen in film often but is also represented in less realistic theatre. Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information is a good example of dramaturgical structure that shifts rapidly from scene to scene. Such structures often indicate or imitate confusion, long lapses of time, or sometimes seek to offer a wider commentary on a theme. For example, Love and Information is a collection of dozens of scenes, all without stage directions, character names, or line indication. There is a title for each scene and all lines are left- justified. It is up to the production team to decide who says what, where the action is taking place, and how many people are in the scene. The production team has a great deal of agency over what this show looks like; the scenes can be put in any order the producing artists see fit. Because of the play’s unconventional nature, a transition between two very short scenes could look like this:
46 Ball, David. Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. pg. 14 47 For an example of standard dramaturgical structure, we can refer again the David Ball who lists: Initial stasis; Intrusion; Forces drive the play; Final stasis as the basis for standard playwrighting, pg. 14. 23
KEYS You don’t know where I put the car keys, do you? SILENCE This can happen more than once, for different lengths of time.48 The transition between these two scenes, KEYS and SILENCE would be action to action. Based on where SILENCE is placed, the intended effect could offer many different types of commentary. The movement between these scenes is also very abrupt. The audience members would be transported through time and space very quickly, as the scenes are probably set in different places. Emotional movement here would also be very fast, since the tones of the scenes are very different. These panel transition tendencies change the more you look at comics alternative to popular American ones, such as manga and contemporary experimental comics. For example, Chris Ware’s The ACME Novelty Library is non-linear, follows no singular plot, occasionally has no discernable framing devices, changes format abruptly, and almost never follows any of the categories that McCloud suggests, but it’s still a comic.49 The book itself is 10” by 16.” Ware offers no explanation for the layout choices he makes, instead opting to create a reader experience. The first six pages of the book look like fictional newspaper pages. The font is so small, the reader almost needs a magnifying glass. The two pages after that show an embossed constellation map. The map shows in blue and black the traditional constellations. However, the embossing, almost invisible, shows letters and some of Ware’s characters. Throughout the book, there are interspersed comic strips with plots. Ware bounces back and forth between the plots. Something as seemingly small as a different type of frame transition can dramatically alter the movement and the reception of a piece. Many elements of Ware’s work are “aspect to aspect.” By depicting different details one at a time, the reader slows down in time, using the gutters to move between languid static images. The spaces in between the panels of The ACME Novelty Library or the space in between KEYS and SILENCE transport readers and viewers. Those gutter spaces influence the movement of the comic or play, and therefore impact their distributed systems. McCloud offers the vocabulary for comic enthusiasts, but the labels of the transitions
48 Churchill, Caryl. Love and Information. London: Nick Hern Books, 2012. 49 Ware, Chris. ACME Novelty Library, Pantheon Books, 2005. 24 don’t really help us with adaptational pursuits. His vocabulary only helps us to identify that transitions exist. When put into comic analysis, McCloud’s work begins to fail us. Let’s look at George Herriman’s long running strip-- Krazy Kat to analyze how the strip works. If you refer to figure 1.3, a Sunday strip of Krazy Kat from the 1930s, you will notice characters in relatively static transitions. You can see that the strip does not make use of motion lines, or even suggestions of running or walking. Instead, the figures are moved from place to place primarily by the content of their speech and the shifting backgrounds.
25
Figure 1.3: Krazy Kat, 193650
50 Herriman, George. Krazy Kat, January 12th, 1936, Re-printed by Fantagraphics, 2008. 26
Herriman has overlaid those exchanges with scene-to-scene transitions in the background. Every panel is set in a slightly different location and there is no indication how far the characters have moved, spatially or temporally. What vantage points are we looking from? Whose eyes are we looking through by the end of the strip, and in what location? What time is it? The standard convention of comic movement would center on the content of the frame, such as McCloud suggests in his six types of transitions, but Herriman shows how the understanding of frame movements can lead to interesting new blends and complications of the form. By looking at Scott McCloud’s work, we can quickly see that we need a larger theoretical framework to understand what comics do and how. Combinations of theory can help to illuminate complexities in strips like Krazy Kat. For comics like Herriman’s, which are filled with not only artistry, but master craftmanship, we might even consider the author as one of the theorists we consult. As I mentioned in the introduction, Charles Hatfield champions for an anti- disciplinary view of comics studies which favors eclecticism and “the mingling of theories and methodologies.”51 Herriman, though not an essayist or scholar, was using his comics in the early 1900s to theorize about how comics worked. In the following example, we will see continued evidence of this. McCloud refers to the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole as “closure.”52 This is a term borrowed from other psychological disciplines.53 Closure is used by humans all day every day, simply and complexly. Do you reach for your credit card automatically because the color or texture in the top corner indicated to you that it was your credit card? That’s closure. Did the shadow of a murderer appear in a movie, causing suspense because you knew what the shadow implied? That’s also closure. Closure ties in with the distributed approach we discussed before with the “Bein’ Green” example. McCloud suggests that it is closure that allows our brains to connect moments and construct a unified reality.54 Performance scholars like Maaike Bleeker discuss the similar concept of abstraction in her article, “Movement as Lived Abstraction: The Logic of the Cut.” Bleeker suggests that physical movement is both a series of individual positions and a complete whole that you need to step
51 Hatfield, xiv. 52 McCloud, 64. 53 McCloud’s “Closure” is a reference to the principle of closure in Gestalt psychology. 54 McCloud, 67. 27 away from to see.55 Her theory of abstracted experience and perception argues that we are enabled to understand and experience those mediums that are “hard to see” because of their live and fleeting nature. Her concepts of movement can be used in adaptation studies to understand how we perceive a succession of movements or indicators of movement. Though Bleeker’s work is based in imperceptibly fast transitions, and comics revolve around concentrated attention on the space between panels, these disciplines speak to each other in one crucial way that film does not account for- agency. The artist in each instance manipulates the specifics of movement (across both time and space). This results in a voluntary participant who is given the agency to look at and absorb those movements in their own timing. McCloud and Bleeker both consider the importance of transition. This understanding is crucial to the adaptation process, and cognitive theorists like Evelyn Tribble and Neil Cohn are useful for a complete view of the respective distributed systems of comics and theatre and how they interact with their viewers. I argue for an interdisciplinary discourse that considers theatre and live performance because it is through multidimensional thinking that new and exciting possibilities can be reached. Neil Cohn’s work, The Visual Language of Comics can help to build on McCloud’s work in comics studies and it is Evelyn Tribble’s work in distributed cognition that can help adaptation find its way more concretely through this multidimensionality. As we saw with the example of Krazy Kat, a wider understanding of comics through contexts of reader perception and performance, the cognitive impact of the work is more beneficial for adaptation. To build a system for adapting comics, we can look to Neil Cohn, who says that through the process of analyzing the visual language that comics employ, we can understand how readers process movement and meaning encoded in image sequences. The main concepts that Cohn points us to are: Schema, (a cognitively stored pattern), Navigational structure (the organizational elements of the comic that tell you where to start a sequence and how to move through it), and Conceptual structure (the encoding of meaning in memory), spatial structure, event structure, narrative structure, and graphic morphology. I will look at these terms in context later. All these considerations lead to Cohn’s process of understanding “what” is happening on the comics page. Cohn argues that comics employ visual
55Bleeker, Maaike. “Movement as Lived Abstraction: The Logic of the Cut.” Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, edited by Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou. New York, Routledge, 2015, 36. 28 language to engage the reader through time, space, and experience. He theorizes that we understand comics in a way similar to the way we understand any language system, through linguistic structure. Cohn builds on writers like McCloud, showing us that the dialogue for describing what is happening on the comics page needs more specificity and attention. Cohn gives us verbiage for a cognitive linguistic approach to comics, but the way he is approaching this supports a Distributed System. I’m arguing that comics should be understood as a system in order to adapt them for other mediums. Merely understanding the linguistic grammar of comics is not enough, and leaves adaptations unconnected to the form they came from. Cognitive science, like comics, is also deeply embedded in culture. Cognitive science is a way of understanding how we think, but how we think is dependent on more than just neuroscience. Tribble notes in her book Cognition in the Globe, that a theory of Distributive Cognition is about answering the question: “How can the elements in a distributed system be coordinated well enough to allow the system to accomplish its tasks?”56 If analyzing visual language can give us an answer to “what” is happening on the comics page, then cognitive distribution may be able to help with partially answering “how” those visual systems may transfer over into a live performative adaptational event. One of the most important strengths of utilizing a distributed system as a framework for an adaptational technique is the idea that the parts of the system are anti-localizable. This means that we cannot isolate or privilege any one element of the system.57 If we begin to think about comics, or source material, as a certain type of anti-localizable distributed system, we can begin to interrogate how the piece works together, producing specific reactions in the reader, and conjuring associations. As we learned from Cohn, these associations and reactions are not randomized or untraceable, just as any language system has linguistic patterns. The history of comics has embedded patterns that often require specific levels of media and visual literacy for the reader to effectively make meaning.58 As mentioned before, one term that Cohn discusses is “conceptual structure.” By this, he means the encoded meaning in the comic that we derive from memory. Cognitive science theorists talk about conceptual structure often, such as in the book
56 Tribble, 4. 57 Tribble, 2. 58 Cohn, pg. 111. Cohn cites a study (Nakazawa [2002]) which tracked the eye movements of experienced and novice comics readers. Novice readers have more erratic eye movements across the page, focus more on the text, and take longer to read. Experienced readers have smoother fixations, and tend to skip over panels more often, and yet have better comprehension and recall of different aspects of the story. 29
The Way We Think. As mentioned in my Introduction, The Way We Think is an important first step in understanding the way humans use “conceptual blends.” Again, conceptual blends, in the words of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, are the ways we “choreograph vast networks of conceptual meaning, yielding cognitive products that seem simple.”59 Conceptual blending and cognitive science suit adaptational pursuits because, as Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner point out, “we can never hope to know a causal effect for certain.”60 There is no sense in making an adaptational technique that seeks to make a piece that is exactly like the original piece; this is not possible. You can never know what causes reactions or feelings for certain. In fact, every human has a different, unique vantage point. Using Neil Cohn’s linguistic method, we can approach comics by observing how the comics system is organized, what meaning the comic is trying to convey, how readers encode form and meaning, and how they make connections across panels and frames.61 His theory can help adaptors to understand how readers know what images represent, and what memory of meaning leads readers to make conclusions. Let’s look back at Krazy Kat to see how some of Cohn’s concepts can show adaptors how readers are led to perceive movement in comics.
Figure 1.4 Krazy Kat, panels 1-262 In the first frame of figure 1.4, Krazy Kat peeps around a curtain, signifying a stage that he is on, and an audience that we must be in. It is not uncommon for films, cartoons, and comics
59 Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities. Basic Books, 2010., preface v. 60 Fauconnier, Turner, 218. 61 Cohn, 7-8. 62 Herriman, George. Krazy Kat, January 12th, 1936, Re-printed by Fantagraphics, 2008. 30 to feature a stage curtain opening at the beginning of a piece, but it is not very common in Krazy Kat. Here, Herriman is purposely drawing on the reader’s cultural knowledge of performance conventions. He is also, in this moment, positioning his comic strip in a lineage of entertainment. Previously, I discussed how Kermit the Frog’s performance partially asks the audience to recall their understanding of The Muppets franchise in order to understand certain traits of Kermit. This instance in Krazy Kat is similar, in that it asks the reader to distribute their cognition to include cultural knowledge. That cultural knowledge informs and provides new context for the reader of this comic strip. Therefore, the viewer is perhaps not aware, but instantly clued into the theatrical elements of this strip. As I mentioned in my introduction, Fauconnier and Turner would call this a conceptual blend, something that the viewer understands as a simple image because of a vast understanding of conceptual meanings. Cohn may have us look to this phenomenon partially as an instance of conceptual meaning and visual language, but Tribble would point to this example and ask us to notice that this instance of the theatrical curtain can be linked to all of Cohn’s terminology. In fact, by narrowing in on the framing device of the theatrical curtain, we are isolating one cog in the system of this comic strip. For example, this curtain gives the reader spatial awareness. We referentially deduce a role for ourselves based on those icon cues. From there, we see a series of interactions, mainly with Officer Pup and Ignatz Mouse. This strip, with a trademark seemingly simple plot, has a lot to uncover. There are a few notable framing and movement traits that we can continue to uncover as parts of this distributed system.
Figure 1.5: Krazy Kat, panels 3-5.63
63 Herriman, George. Krazy Kat, January 12th, 1936, Re-printed by Fantagraphics, 2008. 31
The first is the convention of Krazy Kat as the perceiver of this scene. In Figure 1.5, two frames after Krazy Kat’s introduction, the scene between Officer Pup and Ignatz is observed from behind a different curtain than the one at the very top of the strip. By adding curtains to the panel again, Herriman is not only suggesting a change in perspective on the scene but is also moving the reader away from the action. There is a barrier now between us and them; we are told by these curtains that Ignatz and Officer Pup are on one spatial plane—outside—and we are on another spatial plane –inside. This is Herriman exercising performativity over the comic medium. In subverting expectation, he echoes Christine A. White and Alison Oddey, who say in their book The Potentials of Spaces, “in performance, we are continually playing with familiarity and familiarization as part of the aesthetic experience of performance.”64 Herriman gives us an iconic convention—curtains in the title frame. But curtains within the strip? Now the identity of the reader is challenged along with a destabilizing of spatial awareness. By studying the spatial movement in this scene and analyzing the effects of the movement on the reader, we begin to see one part of Krazy Kat’s system. The influence of curtains guides the Navigational Structure of the comic strip. As readers, we infer where to move and how to move through the strip, partially because of the framing conventions that Herriman has chosen. When we look at this framing convention of curtains, we can also discuss it in terms of Graphic Morphology and Fluency. How the reader might understand what the curtains stand in for or imply, depends upon their differing levels of fluency in visual language. Novice and expert readers will have differing cognitive experiences with this, and all comic strips. Just as all novice and expert theatre patrons will have differing understandings of live performances. George Herriman, being the theoretical comic artist that he is, knows this. He is not merely using these concepts of comic linguistics to tell a story; he is also creating a new type of dialogue. By framing Krazy as the perceiver of the action outside, we become aware of the use of language in the comic. Before Krazy enters the scene physically, the language is heightened and formal. This contrast between simplistic plot and eloquent word play is seen often in Herriman’s work to different effects, but here it seems to signify dramatic barriers. In the first frame, Officer Pup says of Ignatz Mouse, “His face full of a fancy innocence—his posture, his eye, his mien,
64 Oddey, Alison and Christina A. White, ed. The Potentials of Spaces: The Theory and Practice of Scenography & Performance. Portland, Intellect Books, 2006. 15.
32 exude the aura of silly sanctitude- but.” With Krazy being removed from the scene, we can then consider that the heightened language of the other characters is the way that he perceives others’ speech patterns in relation to himself. When Krazy does enter the scene, the speech patterns are disrupted. Krazy speaks in his trademark dialect and Officer Pup loses his heightened words. We can see here, then, another element of Krazy Kat’s system. In order to understand how this comic works, we must see that the relationship that Herriman draws between spatial movement and language are tied together. The system that this strip operates under has individual parts, yes, but they are inextricably tied. There is movement from panel to panel, which is largely influenced by Navigational Structure. There is also physical movement of the characters within the panels, which is largely influenced by Conceptual Structure and Narrative Structure. There is movement through time, which is influenced by frame and panel design, but also by narrative structure. Lastly, there is movement of “mood.” That is, tone, meaning, and emotion shifts throughout the piece. This is more difficult to account for, as it is very subjective. However, mood can change or be altered by the comic artist through any and all these concepts.
Figure 1.6: Krazy Kat, panels 9-10.65 In Krazy Kat, we can see examples of framing choices altering the movement of time, space, and mood. While Krazy has entered the frames visually, there is still another curtain- framed panel at the end of the strip, now watching Krazy interact with his acquaintances. We can see in Figure 1.6 that the spectator’s identity and spatial awareness are again disrupted. A yellow and pink patterned curtain loosely hangs, obstructing the reader’s view of the scene. A boxy line, perhaps a picket fence, runs along the bottom of the panel. Who is the reader meant to be now?
65 Herriman, George. Krazy Kat, January 12th, 1936, Re-printed by Fantagraphics, 2008. 33
Where are they watching this scene from? Even though the same curtain framing technique is being used in the same literal way, there is now an additional layer of spatial movement, in addition to being emotionally further removed from the scene. The curtain and fence-like silhouette act as a barrier of sorts, dividing the reader from the action. We can see then that movement becomes a multi-faceted construct in comics. This panel does not rely on any different graphic morphology, the reader still understands that the curtain framing the last moment of the strip implies theatricality and distance. This move back to a framing curtain does not deviate from the narrative structure of the comic strip either, the reader has seen this convention of framing before in the stip. However, the difference in this panel lies in Herriman’s play on the conceptual structure of this moment by subverting the meaning of the framing curtain. Through Cohn’s linguistic analysis, we can begin to see that comics speak to the reader in a specific, distributed way, although he is not using those terms. The elements of visual language that Cohn explains rely on a complicated interchange of cognitive processes. We understand what we see on the comic page through stored patterns, and through cultural clues. It is a cognitive task to read a comic, so how do we understand that process enough to adapt it into a staged live event?
Adaptation as a Distributed System With examples like Kermit the Frog and Krazy Kat, we can see how distributed systems work in performance and in comics. When we isolate the goal of the system, and the parts of the system, we can see the whole of the source material’s system of relationships. What do we do when we have this information? Once we have analyzed the distributed system of the source material- the comic- the next step is to consider the host medium. The host medium of an adaptation has different benefits and limitations. Assessing how movement can be achieved in theatre is an important step for adapting comics to the stage. It is also important to assess the merging of the two media into one distributed system. In the next chapter, I will discuss at length my process of this merger in my case study on Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree. For now, let’s look at an infamous example of a failed merger of two media. In 2013, Glen Berger published his book Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History. The musical co-writer shed light on the
34 complete journey of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, from the story’s inception, to the multiple re-writes, to the injuries, to the firings, to the permanent close of the show. Berger begins the book by talking about the musical’s all-star production team, including Julie Taymor as the show’s director, and Bono as the show’s composer. From the beginning of the process, Berger writes that Taymor wasn’t interested in adapting Spider-Man unless she could find something that excited her. What excited her became the foundation of the original script’s conceit- Peter Parker contemplating his identity as a result of his encounters with Arachne.66 This idea came not from an existing plot line, but a scene in the beginning of Ultimate Spider-Man: Power and Responsibility Vol. 1. In the opening of this volume, Norman Osborn experiments with a spider test subject while retelling the Greek myth of Arachne, the first spider.67 Immediately, there is a potential problem in the way the system of the Spider-Man comics are being adapted for the stage. Taymor was drawn to this moment in the comics, because it started her thinking about the involvement of Arachne from the Greek myths in Peter Parker’s life. Already, she was seeking to adapt a comic series she was not familiar with and write her own Spider-Man story at the same time. To contribute to an on-going storyline without being highly knowledgeable is a risk. Additionally, the Spider-Man comics already have a succession of women who take the name Arachne. For readers of the comics, a musical adaptation that has a main character named Arachne that does not indicate any knowledge or understanding of the other Arachnes disables many audience members from decoding the musical’s version of Arachne and her character motivations. The movement of the whole musical began on a confusing foot. The musical failed to account for the system of the comics, but how and why? The system of long running comic book characters like Spider-Man can be difficult to pinpoint. After all, comic book series can run for decades, seeing spin-offs, multiple writers, illustrators, editors, and plot lines. The system of a Broadway musical is very different. Plays and musicals may be produced and revived any number of times. In this way, comic books and theatre are similar. They both allow teams of artists to pass around the material year after year, giving many people the chance to bring new perspective to the stories and characters. However, Broadway musicals
66 This story concept was loosely taken from the Spider-Man comics but does not refer to Julia Carpenter or Jessica Drew who used the alias Arachne. Additionally, no character design for the musical could have derived from the comics, as Arachne (Julia Carpenter) only appears as a large spider in The Thanos Imperative Vol.1, which was published in 2010, after previews for the musical would have started. 67 Glen Berger is referring to Brian Michael Bendis- Ultimate Spider-Man Vol.1: Power and Responsibility (1999). 35 are not continuing storylines. Even in revivals, the script does not change. The tone, style, atmosphere, and characters of comic books change quickly and often. This can be overwhelming to an adaptor, not knowing where to look or focus. Adapting such an erratic source material’s system, therefore requires both zooming in on specific sections and zooming out to understand the whole context, a daunting task no doubt. In the case of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, we can see examples of zooming in. Julie Taymor zoomed into the second panel of the first page of the first issue of Ultimate Spider-Man. She zoomed into a detail that occurred before Spider- Man’s origin story occurred. She also zoomed out. She zoomed out to think about the larger context of Peter Parker’s identity as half-man, half-spider, but without reading or referring to someone who knew the larger context of his struggle and identity throughout the series. Broadway musicals function on their ability to show scale and spectacle. Comic books also have this advantage. Because panel transitions can show action-to-action well, the reader can be transported quickly through cities, planets, history, and the future. Additionally, Berger writes that Taymor is drawn to opera and musicals because “singing [is] a mode of communication more emotional, more immediate than ‘talking’.”68 This is true, musical songs have specific intent. They are often very transparent in their goals, with characters openly and passionately proclaiming to the audience what they want and what they feel. It’s fundamental to their system of communication. Audience members experience the musical as a system that includes music, of course. How the character sings, what they sing, the structure of their song, their positioning on stage, and the visibility of the orchestra are all elements of a musical’s system. The immediacy that Taymor likes has similarities to comics. Comic books show immediacy often by showing the character’s inner or outer dialogue overlaying their expression. As you transition from panel to panel, the reader sees dialogue and its result simultaneously. Why didn’t this musical transition over, then? One point that Glen Berger makes is that Bono and the Edge were not familiar with the genre of musical theatre. In some ways, having composers who want to shake up the musical theatre world is exciting. However, Berger writes that a member of the team burned Bono and the Edge “a four-CD compilation. Sixty songs from the last sixty years of musical theatre, divided into the strictest of categories. There were exposition songs, eleven o’clock numbers, character-driven songs, charm songs, anti-charm songs, show-stoppers, torch songs” and one by one, they dismissed them all as “mawkish, dopey,
68 Berger, 45. 36 or just ‘pants.’”69 While many musical theatre songs might start to blur together, or sound the same, they are written with specific structural intent. Just as I mentioned earlier in this chapter with David Ball’s triggers and heaps, musical theatre pushes its plot along partially through the structure of its music. Musicals have a distributed system of their own, and without understanding the system of your host medium, failure is imminent. Transitioning from comics to the stage is hard enough but trying to transition Spider-Man to the stage with composers who do not understand the fundamentals of musical theatre’s dramaturgical structures is exponentially more so. Additionally, when the director/ co-writer isn’t seeking to adapt a specific iteration of Spider-Man, nor do the research about the larger scope of the character, the system combination becomes even more confused. To adapt a comic book character like Spider-Man for the stage, one would have to isolate the ways in which panel transitions operate in Spider-Man comics. The adaptor must understand how the types of movement work in the source material. They would also have to understand both what iteration of Spider-Man they are interested in portraying, and how that iteration fits into the whole of his or her universe. The systems demands of the source material chosen will be specific. A later iteration of Spider-Man likely draws on prior information about the character or the universe. These are cognitive demands specific to the chosen material. Confusion begets confusion and as the production progressed, a slew of issues emerged. Because the show had very little grounding in the source material, production decisions became hasty, often seeking to solve problems with theatrical solutions instead of going back to the source material and its genre. An added complication was Marvel’s stipulations on the copyright usage. After pitching the idea of Spider-Man and Arachne struggling with their human-spider identities, Berger writes that Marvel responded with, “The concept is entirely wrong and the tone of the treatment, which is quite dark, is not what Marvel anticipated at all. Get Arachne out of the script or we’re done.”70 Other issues Marvel had with the original idea were: Peter Parker needed a stronger love interest, The Green Goblin needed to be more prominently featured as Spider-Man’s arch enemy, and Peter Parker should not be painted as a dark character. Because the show had no strong foundation in its understanding of Spider-Man or rationale for its choices, the technical and bureaucratic issues the production faced only made the process more
69 Berger, 39. 70 Berger. 25. 37 difficult. There were reasons for the production failing beyond adaptational choices, but a more thorough understanding of how the comics work, what about Spider-Man the team wanted to adapt and understanding the similarities and differences of the musical theatre system would have aided in the process tremendously.
An Adaptational Theory and Conclusions: Even within the concept of framing, there are groups and subgroups of movement to be uncovered. Movement in comics can refer to the temporal movement that different panels take the reader through. In theatre, text and stage are conceived together in a similar way to comics’ fusion of text and illustration. Visual and textual stimuli craft an experience for the willing participant. As your brain registers the content of a panel, confronts gutter space between panels, and then meets the next piece of visual stimulus, you are being propelled forward. In another sense, there is the inter-dimensionality of a single panel, which may ask you to enter or retreat from its spatial planes. In these complex layers of participation and audience placement, comic theory like McCloud’s becomes unstable. Much of visual art revolves around a common denominator—the frame. Whether it is a narrative framing choice in a book, a literal proscenium arch on stage, a picture frame around a painting, or a pen and ink box around a comic strip, artists frame the way we interact with their visuals. They guide us through the process of the encounter, and they manipulate the perception of their content. Therefore, we can craft a new adaptational theory based on this movement in between frames, or panels. To adapt from comics to live theatre, we should first consider all media as distributed systems. If a comic is a distributed system, we can assume that readers understand what they see in and between panels by stretching their cognition, as described in the Kermit the Frog example. If we believe this, we can move on to step two: understand the system. If comics are a distributed system, then the adaptor must understand how the system works, what its goals are, and what anti-localizable parts are in the system. In comics, we saw that one crucial piece of the comics reading experience is the reader agency that comes with panel transitions. The moments from image to image allow the reader the space to understand the three types of movements I mentioned earlier: spatial, temporal, and emotional. By isolating this effect of movement, we have begun to consider both the goal of the system, and its parts. The goal of the
38 system is to convey movement to the reader. The parts of the system that communicate that movement are visual cues, cultural cues, and grammatical structures of visual language. We saw examples of this type of system in the Krazy Kat example. After isolating the goal of the system, and the parts of the system, the adaptor can begin to consider the transfer of one medium into another. Because the idea of anti-localizable parts is crucial for a distributed system, adaptation may not be a straightforward process. For example, the adaptor must consider the comic systems goal and means of achieving that goal. To adapt an effect, the adaptor must consider all parts of the whole at the same time, and not one at a time. It cannot be a one-for-one transfer. Rather, the adaptor is considering the cognitive task of the comics reader and the theatre audience member simultaneously. They are analyzing the cognitive stimulus and system of the comic while they are considering how the theatrical system is different, and the same. Moreover, they are considering how the merging of these two cognitive tasks, comics and theatre, can create one new hybrid system that highlights the unique engagement of each. Human imagination should constantly be challenged, developed, and asked to imagine in new ways. Through analyzing different methods of cognitive engagement, I am hoping to stimulate new routes of imagination. In the following case study, I test the unique methods of imagination stimulated by comics and merge them with the unique methods of imagination stimulated by live performance through an adaptation of Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree. We can start to understand distribution in the theatrical event in a new way as it becomes informed by the unique ways that comics ask us to move through their visual language. We can combine theoretical approaches from theorists like Cohn, Fauconnier, Turner, and Tribble to fashion a path forward in adaptation studies. This path is based on distributed cognition, and on the idea of anti-localizable parts of a whole system, how we can identify the parts, the system, and the task of both the comic source material as well as the performed adaptation.
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CHAPTER 2 ADAPTING SHAUN TAN’S, THE RED TREE: A CASE STUDY
Introduction To test my adaptation methods outlined in the previous chapter, I adapted and staged an excerpt from Shaun Tan’s short graphic novel, The Red Tree as a case study. The Red Tree follows a nameless, silent young red-haired person through a myriad of dramatic and abstract settings. The story consists of the person waking up, and moving through expansive landscapes that depict depression, loneliness, isolation, fear, and alienation. The person never speaks, but in the last frame of the story, we see their face change from a blank expression to subtle relief when they see ‘The Red Tree,’ a symbol of hope. The goal of this case study was to test my theory that adaptation based in distributed cognition will yield stage productions that are both truer to the source material and also effectively merge media. As argued in the previous chapter, an adaptation of this short graphic novel would consider the distributed system of The Red Tree, and how it conveys spatial, temporal, and emotional movement across panels. The adaptation should also consider the distributed system of live theatre and how it conveys the three types of movement. Analysis of how the systems can work together to achieve a new version of The Red Tree is crucial to the adaptation’s success. Partially, I chose this piece because it presents itself as difficult to stage. There is hardly any dialogue, only one character who has an obscure identity, and the scenes shift rapidly. If we want to make better adaptational techniques, they must work for all types of source material. I also chose this book because of the way Tan’s work often blurs genre. Many of Shaun Tan’s works are not necessarily a graphic novel, children’s book, picture book, nor an adult book, and yet they are all of these things. Because of this crossover appeal, and because The Red Tree speaks to large human emotions instead of targeting an age-range, it becomes an excellent case study for understanding distributed processes. Cognitive science tells us that it is impossible to account for every audience member, their background, identity, and mental process. However, The Red Tree purposely offers varied abstract perspectives on a theme. The story is meant to circle around the different ways in which we all feel lonely and sad, creating a system that should necessarily appeal to a wide variety of people. Because Shaun Tan has written a book with ample
40 room for the reader to insert themselves, adaptation that considers the same cognitive demands should be similarly successful. For the sake of my research, a full production of The Red Tree was not necessary. The goal of this research is to test the adaptation of movement from panel to panel by understanding the comic source material as a distributed system. This can be accomplished with an excerpt so long as it demonstrates movement and panel transitions. Therefore, I chose one scene which meets these requirements to adapt, instead of exhausting my resources on a full production. The chosen scene, shown below in Figure 2.1, was the most efficient example to test my adaptational process. Because I have focused my process on how readers and audience members understand framing and movement in comics and theatre, this scene most effectively showcases framing, transitions, spatial movement, temporal movement, and emotional movement. It also contains a complete imbedded storyline, which yields a better workshop performance.
Figure 2.1: Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree, scene 771
71 Tan, Shaun. The Red Tree. Lost & Found. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2011. 41
The Red Tree as a Distributed System The first step of adapting this scene for the stage is to consider the ways in which it is a distributive system. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the first step of my adaptational method is to assume that the source material is a distributed system. Step two is to understand how the source material’s system works, how it asks the reader to stretch their cognition, and how it communicates its fundamental system goal. Later, I will look at how the specific elements of this scene could be merged with the distributive system of the stage. Identifying the distributed system of the source material, The Red Tree, is a good starting point, but if the adaptor does not understand how distributed systems of the host medium are similar and different, the adaptation process will not work. Again, the goal of this adaptational system must always be to combine the systems of the source and host material and never to transplant the system of the source material into a new medium. Lastly, I will discuss the adaptational choices I made and the results and repercussions of those choices. If we look at this scene as a distributed system, then we must understand the different components of it. I will break down this sequence using the vocabulary from the previous chapter from scholars and theorists McCloud, Cohn, Tribble, Fauconnier, and Turner. If we start with McCloud, we can see, as we saw before, that his categories fall apart quickly and offer little quantitative assessment. For example, in Figure 2.2, we can see the first panel transition of the scene.
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Figure 2.2: The Red Tree, panels 1-272 The first panel focuses on a pencil, while the second zooms out to show the arm of the person who is holding it. In panel 1, we see only the pencil without any person holding it. In panel 2, we can now also intuit that the person is kneeling, making tally marks, making tally marks on the ground or floor, and that there is a light source above the person. Using McCloud’s transition types, we could categorize this as “Moment to moment,” because by one standpoint, there has been a very incremental change between panels.73 However, one could also describe this transition as “Action to action” if you consider the person the single subject. They are then in a clear, succinct, and active progression; they are marking time with tallies. If you consider the fact that the person is not present in the first panel, however, you may conclude that this is a “subject to subject” transition, since the viewer moves from one subject (pencil) to another subject (person) while staying within the same theme (demarcating time or waiting). What this example shows us is that categorical methods that use subjective language like “incremental” and “significant” are not much use in adaptational practice. Who is to say what counts as
72 Tan, Shaun. The Red Tree. Lost & Found. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2011. 73 McCloud’s 6 types of panel transitions, p 70-72. 43
“significant” without a basis of measurement? However, while subjective language and categorical terms do not help in the adaptation process, this exercise does expose the distributive nature of this comic. By trying to categorize the movement between panels 1-2, we can see how all parts of the panels are working together. No one unit can be identified as the most important; the system is anti-localizable.74 Trying to fit this scene into panel transition categories is not useful for adaptational purposes, but it useful to try and see what problems emerge. Instead of trying to pin down what to call the transitions in this scene, let us instead seek to understand how its system works, and how we can use that knowledge to craft an adaptation based in cognitive studies. If we look back to the conceptual blending framing principles from Fauconnier and Turner’s work in The Way We Think, we can more effectively analyze the frames in this scene. Borrowing from Fauconnier and Turner’s scholarship, we saw in the last chapter that the role of transitioning frames is transportational, comparative, and contextual.75 In our everyday lives, we cognitively frame ideas and concepts to understand them and to understand ourselves in relation to them. By using their framing principles, we can analyze how the frames in this scene work in relation to each other to build larger meaning. This framing continues in the transition between panels four and five:
74 This is again referencing Tribble’s use of “anti-localizable” parts of distributed systems, 68. 75 Fauconnier, Turner, 252. 44
Figure 2.3: The Red Tree, panels 3-476 In panel 4, as you can see in figure 2.3, we finally see the full figure of the person holding the pencil. We also learn a little more about their environment. They are in a large, empty space, the sky or ceiling is very dark, and there are quite a few tally marks behind them. They seem to be moving forward, marking the ground beneath them as they go. In panel 5, we see that it is not the horizon that is curved, but the object the person is on. In this panel, we begin to see that the person has been waiting for a very long time. The marks are regular, systematic, and numerous. If we used McCloud’s panel transition types, we wouldn’t have much information about this panel transition. However, if we think about these two panels as being filled with the same essential character in order to clarify the relationship between the frames, or panels, then we have a way forward.77 If we think of the panels as framing the reality, or situation, of this small lonely person, then what does the relationship between frames become? The relationship between the frames is movement. We move further away from the person, spatially. There is also movement through time. Panel 4 shows the person with 100 or so tallies. Panel 5 shows the person with thousands of tallies. Therefore, there is a temporal relationship between these frames
76 Tan, Shaun. The Red Tree. Lost & Found. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2011. 77 Fauconnier and Turner’s General Character Framing Principles 252-3. 45 as well. Lastly, the relationship between the frames indicates a shift in mood. As the viewer realizes the time that the person has waited, the mood shifts, and continues to shift throughout the entirety of the scene. So, we can see that the panels, or frames, communicate with each other. We can also see that it is fruitful to analyze comics in terms of the relationship of their parts to each other. To analyze the distributed system of this comic scene, we can look at: how its system communicates, what is encoded in the system, and how the different elements of the system work together. From the previous example, we know that this scene has a system that seeks to emulate feelings of isolation, longing, and depression. This is the goal of the system. To achieve that goal, the scene relies on the reader to understand movement in space, time, and mood. What is encoded in those elements is a reliance on our understanding of panel relationships. Again, these types of movement are working all together throughout the entirety of the scene, not one after the other. Let’s look at the last four panels to see how the system is working together to achieve its goal. In these last 4 panels, the scene switches from a realistic to an abstract notion of time. Before, we saw the small person kneeling on something, making a decipherable amount of tally marks, and so we understood that they were marking a comprehensible amount of time. But, as seen below in Figure 2.4, as the panels move further away from the person, the reader sees dots instead of tally marks. The tally marks that the person makes are so far away from view, that the shell almost appears to be shaded, or as if a large shadow is passing overhead. This movement away from the shell and the small person also reveals the atmosphere. There is tan, flat earth far reaching in all directions. The sky is a dark, midnight blue and yet the ground and the shell are fully lit from above. The shell and the person seem like there are in a liminal space, one where it is neither day nor night.
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Figure 2.4: The Red Tree, panels 5-678 The reader is meant to understand in this transition that the dots represent the tally marks we have seen previously. Because this scene slowly asks the reader to perceive movement, the reader can decode the relationships between panels. As the panels progress, we see the largeness of the object the person is on, the diminishing words under the images, the desolation of the environment they are in, and the unimaginable amount of time that has passed for them. From frame to frame, we see larger amounts of physical distance being displayed for the reader, indicating the scale of the shell and the feelings it signifies. In the beginning of the scene, the reader was being moved maybe a few feet, a few more feet, then a few yards, then several yards, then miles, until the reader doesn’t know how far away they are meant to be. Scale has changed tremendously. As the spatial distancing increases pacing, one aspect of the system is accounted for. In the last frames, seen below in Figure 2.5, we can see how altering scale through spatial movement gives the reader a sense of solitude, creating a complete arc of emotional movement through the scene. As we dissect this relationship between changes in scale and emotional movement, we see how crucial this element is in the scene’s system. Comics have a relatively easy task of demonstrating such scale, where theatre sometimes struggles. Later in this
78 Tan, Shaun. The Red Tree. Lost & Found. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2011. 47 chapter and in the following chapter, I will discuss the choices and results of my adaptation’s attempt to portray scale.
Figure 2.5: The Red Tree, panels 7-879 In these same panels, we can see the altering of temporal movement as well. As previously mentioned, the abstraction of time through tally marks induces in the reader a feeling of never-ending desire for change. As we move from an amount of time we can count to an amount of time we cannot understand, the scenes lead us into the goal of this system- simulating longing, desperation, and disappointment. The movement of mood in this scene is amplified by typographic choices as well as textual meaning. As the words descend in size, the mood shrinks and indicates the different stages of waiting. Additionally, the further the reader is removed from the scene, the more they can see the wide, and desolate plane. There is a large spiral carved into the earth, indicating a long and tedious journey. The shell, which may or may not still be alive, has circled around this point for an un-knowable amount of time. The center of this spiral, which we see now, is nowhere. The shell has traveled all this time, just to arrive in the center of desolation. The typographic elements echo this intent, and the reader sees how the elements of the scene tie together to establish meaning.
79 Tan, Shaun. The Red Tree. Lost & Found. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2011. 48
None of these types of movement happen without the other, they are all working together to achieve the goal of the system. The relationship between panels, or frames, shows the reader how they are meant to move through this scene. This relationship also indicates to the reader that they are meant to observe these panels as different perspectives on the same scene. As one panel transitions to the next, the reader perceives movement away from the pencil point. This spatial movement leads the reader through a story arc; more of the scene is revealed with each panel transition and the magnitude of the situation is increasingly more overwhelming. While the reader is moving away from the pencil point, they are also registering the tally marks as an indication of time demarcation. As we spatially move away, the demarcation of time moves from understandable to abstract. The typography and written meaning in the scene also indicate a shift in mood and a diminishing of spirit in the small person. All elements of movement here tie together to give the reader an experience that emulates abstract feelings and what holds them together in their system are the transitions in between panels. We can look at the elements of the system, yes, but they must always remain anti-localizable. So, how we adapt something that replicates this distributed system and does not isolate its parts?
Adapting the Red Tree for the Stage The next step of this adaptational process was to bring the elements of the system together into a performance. After looking at the system of this scene and observing the different framing and movement techniques working together, I made notes about how I would integrate those techniques and cognitive tasks for the theatrical stage. Then, I made a script draft (included above) and approached actors and designers. The main adaptational categories that I considered were: adapting Shaun Tan’s framing techniques, adapting movement into sound, adapting movement into light, and adapting movement into puppetry. In each of these categories, I considered how theatrical systems could merge with comic systems to display the spatial, temporal, and emotional movement that I described earlier.
Adapting the Frame Although a key part of comics is the ability of the reader to move backwards and forwards through panels at any point, I chose to show the panels of this scene one at a time. First, I am only adapting one scene from the book. I am doing this to focus on how the movement
49 between comic panels works, and how we can adapt that movement to the stage. The important aspect of this scene’s system is that the audience member feel spatial, temporal, and emotional movement by means of slow, linear, contemplative thought. In order to adapt that movement, which is propelled by the space in between gutters, we must understand the frames that exist on either side of the gutter. Second, I am choosing to test the merging of comic character and reader in this adaptation. In the book, the small person’s main role is to reflect the reader. Seeing a person traverse abstract environments allows the readers to understand themselves in relation to the settings. I have chosen to remove the person in my adaptation, instead testing theatrical design elements’ ability to give the story the same intimate humanity. With the removal of the human image, I am also testing to what lengths I can go in altering the elements of the source material before the audience member dissociates. Because I am simulating the feeling of simultaneously being the observer and the subject, I have chosen to change the perspective of the shell. In the book, the reader views the scene from afar, but always sees the shell in relation to the small person. With the person gone in my adaptation, I chose to tilt the perspective of the largest shell piece. Instead of looking down at the shell, as the book does, my adaptation shows the shell as a rotating piece in front of the audience, indicating that they may be on the shell, as opposed to watching someone else. I explore the results of this choice later in Chapter 3. Third, the theme of this scene is the slow progression of time that passes when a person is waiting for change to occur, and the loneliness and depression that comes along with that waiting. With agency, the audience member may not feel as clearly the simulation of the slow passage of time. If they observe the piece as a seated audience member, I am more likely to successfully create the feeling of “a slow passage of time” through theatrical means. Further, by adopting a more traditional theatrical framing device, I can test the traditional comic framing of Shaun Tan’s 2-page sequence against the traditional framing of staged theatre. This allows me to talk about the adaptational process by more standard means. Adapting a comic into a walk- through theatrical experience, or a performance art piece, would require accounting for additional factors. Lastly, I had limited resources to work with a team of performers for this workshop. Through the manipulation of one panel at a time, I could do everything backstage myself and
50 eliminate a casting process.
Adapting Movement into Sound As previously mentioned, the book uses typography in combination with spatial, temporal and emotional movement throughout the scene. Projections could have been used to display the words of the book, but I did not feel that this theatrical choice was the most in line with the system goals of the adapted piece. The typography in the book offers a visual representation of a ‘shrinking’ feeling. As the words change in size, the action of this scene changes and builds. To represent this movement of mood in theatre, we can lean into the aural design that theatre affords us. To this end, I chose to represent the text via a voice actor. The words were directed to carry the intended emotional impact that each frame represented. In this way, even though all the frames were not present in my adaptation, the important beats of the action were-- because of the voice over. To embrace theatrical devices, we can use vocal inflection and volume to achieve the same goals as the written words. I left beats in between the phrases, so as not to speed through the scene. I also added an extended moment of breathing in between scenes to call attention to both the presence of the voice, and to the transition moment. The pause asked the audience to live in the transition between panels for a few seconds. Moreover, sound allows us to create sensory tricks. The way we understand comics is dependent on our learned ability to make visual and cultural associations. For example, it’s not logistically possible to have a prop shell that is 100 or 1000 times the size of a person. But, I can trick the audience into thinking they are seeing something larger than they really are. With the sound effect of a heavy, scraping, turning boulder, the audience can intuit that they are seeing one edge of something large, and heavy. The stopping and starting of this sound effect was also intended to influence the ways in which the audience understood the movement through time, space, and mood in the piece. As the turning sound effect starts, the audience understands that something heavy is moving. When the sound effect is heard again while the medium shell is rotating, they know that they are looking at the same object, but from a distance. When the grinding slows to a halt in the dark, and the voiceover is heard breathing heavily, the audience knows that the passage of time has changed, as well as the progression of the character’s mood. Something has shifted for the character; they are unable to speak in this moment. They are
51 unable to progress forwards anymore in this moment. When the small shell appears again, we hear that “nothing ever happens.” The change that the character is looking for is nowhere to be found. At this point, when the stone grinding sound comes back, it is to indicate mood, and temporal movement. At the end of the scene, we know that the character has decided to continue moving forwards, marking time, and waiting. Not only can sound design give the audience an indication of scale, it can also become connective tissue for the emotional beats of the story. The last sound element that I employed in this adaptation was the choice to hear, rather than see the tally marks being written on the shells. By primarily hearing the tally marks, the theatrical adaptation of this scene can work towards the system goals of indicating temporal and emotional movement. The quality, volume, regularity, and absence of tally marks being made can work together with the other design elements to communicate the emotional arc of the story, as well as the length of time that is passing. Fast, hasty tally marks may show impatience. Slow, hard, lingering tally marks may show depression, frustration, or hopelessness. The varied sounds of tally marks being made can indicate to the audience not only that time is passing, but how time is passing, combining the system goals of temporal and emotional movement.
Adapting Movement into Light The theatrical use of light has three primary functions in this adaptation. First, it helps in establishing panel borders and transitions with focusing and blackouts. The presence and absence of light on the scenes can cut off or introduce action and image in much the same way that the panels of a comic strip introduce action and image. For example, in the opening sequence, the large piece of shell rotates in the square curtain frame. The square of the frame is partially made by the curtain, but the lighting fixtures are also focused to provide light only in that square. This added framing provided by the light creates the boundaries of the image. Further, the transition moments in between scenes are punctuated by lighting cues. Blackout cues in theatre signal transition to the audience. So, with every blackout in my adaptation, a signal is sent to the audience that they can expect a transition moment. Indeed, different versions of the shell appeared after each blackout moment in the adaptation. This use of light contributed to the system of movement in the adaptation. As the lights came up from blackout, the next “panel” became available to the audience, signaling physical movement away from the shell, but also
52 emotional movement. Because the audience members knew that the blackout signaled transition, they expected to move forward in the story when the lights came back up. Second, the lighting design worked together with the other elements to establish movement through time by creating patterns of moving shadows that emulate the passage of the sun and moon through the sky. In the final scene of the adaptation, cycles of light pass over the smallest, furthest away shell as it rotates. In this moment, the audience has already heard the voiceover say, “but nothing ever happens” and continued to hear the low, stone rolling sound effect. As the cycles of light pass over the distant shell in this moment, the audience should feel the movement of time in the world of the story. The emotional movement also comes to a rest in this moment. The cycling lights show us the end to the story—that sometimes, we wait, nothing happens, and the world keeps turning.
Adapting Movement with Object Manipulation Perhaps the largest difference between comics and theatre is the possibility of embodied physical movement. Comics use icons, conceptual blends, and effects to replicate physical movement on the page. In this adaptation, I used the physical movement that theatre affords adaptors in service of the themes and goals of an illustrated scene that represents little physical movement. For this adaptation, I created a series of three shells in varying sizes to adapt depth and spatial distancing inherent in The Red Tree. This could have meant that I created a shell for each panel; however, instead of creating eight shells, I narrowed it down to the three most important perspectives of the shell- zoomed in, zoomed out, and far away. An important aspect of the scene is not to show many shells, but to show different perspectives on one shell. One reason for my choice was to allow for more contemplative time for the audience. To switch shells for each panel transition would mean that the audience would have minimal time taking in the image. In the opening moment of my adaptation, I chose to have the largest shell moving slightly, and filling the frame made of curtains for several lines. As I mentioned before, this was partially in an attempt to show the scale of the shell. This moment also had the intended effect of placing the audience member in the role of the red-haired person. In the book, the reader sees a few close-up shots of the shell. However, the reader can always see the shell in relation to the person. In retrospect, I believe this element adds to the book’s ability to convey scale to the reader. Without
53 a person to place in reference to the shell, it is hard to tell how large the shell is meant to be. However, the large shell piece at the top of the show was adapted with audience perception in mind. With the shell rotating slowly and facing the audience, the audience members should have felt as if they were the ones sitting on the shell, marking time. I will go into detail about the effectiveness of this choice in the next chapter. Because the goal of Tan’s system is to show perspective on the same object, I chose to manipulate the objects over the course of the performance instead of showing multiple static shells. This choice would have literally replicated the story without considering the strengths and assets of live performance, and the other goals of the distributive system. With each shell spinning, the audience members were able to take their time observing the shells from different angles. As the shells spun, the tallies were exposed and the audience members were given time to process the sounds of the tallies, the shifting perspective of the shells, the sound of the grinding stone, and the dialogue. Rotating the shells also helped in indicating the beats of the story. When the shell stopped rotating, the character has stopped moving forward, and has lost their resolve to wait.
Description of the Workshop Performance In order to provide context for the performance I created, I will first describe what my live performance looked like and what was expected of the participants. Approximately 20 people attended an invited workshop of my adaptation. They were asked to read the story beforehand, and I placed five copies of the book on reserve at the university’s library. Alternatively, the participants had the chance to read the book in the performance space before or after the performance. Music stands with six copies of the book were placed in a semi-circle facing the curtain and playing space. Pre-show lighting was designed to create an inviting, but relatively neutral atmosphere. Two rows of seating were arranged in a semi-circle to match the curve of the music stands behind them. Along with the ambient lighting was a low score of outdoor ambient sound. The doors to the performance space were opened one hour prior to the start of the performance. After the performance, the participants were invited to take a short survey, which I will discuss and describe in the next chapter. The seated audience members observed an open square of space amidst black curtains. The opening was three square feet, and it was four feet above the ground and two feet from the
54 top of the curtains. The script below is provided to give context for the workshop performance. Then, I will discuss my process for adapting each of the elements of the show. The performance proceeded as follows:
Lights up-- the square is filled with a large curved piece of shell. It’s still, it’s marked with large tally marks.
You hear-- the pre-recorded sound of pencil slow-medium speed making marks. 5 strokes. Pre-recorded voice, confident. “Sometimes you wait” Then, the curved piece starts to slowly rotate, showing more tally marks, which get smaller and more numerous. The slowly rotating piece makes the piece appear as if we are seeing a glimpse of something much larger. A low stone rolling sound effect begins.
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You hear-- pencil making more tally marks. Tally mark sounds get slightly slower over the course of the piece, indicating the slow passage of time. Pre-recorded voice, frustrated “And wait…” You hear-- a few more tally marks, they are growing faster, erratic. Pre-recorded voice, pleading “And wait…” You hear- more tally marks, they are slowing -Blackout- Pre-recorded voice, desperate “And wait…” You hear- tally marks are hard and slow in the black out. Lights up-- piece of shell is replaced with medium sized shell, floating in the middle of the black square. We are moving away from it, revealing how many markings are on it.
Pre-recorded voice, sad “And wait…” The medium sized shell spins slowly, revealing more tally marks. Pencil scratching is heard throughout, they are rhythmic Pre-recorded voice, smaller
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“And wait…” You hear-- the tally marks are faltering, struggling to keep up the pace. They are losing count. -Blackout - In blackout, pencil is still heard for a few strokes. Strokes stop. Pre-recorded voice, very small, quiet “And wait...” Stone rolling sound comes to a stop. The voice takes a moment in the silence. Then, you hear them take a long breath in, and out. This happens three times, the breathing more difficult for them each time. Lights up. Small shell is seen in the black square, no scratching is heard. It is not moving.
Pre-recorded voice, still small, quiet. “But nothing ever happens.” Small shell begins to rotate. The stone rolling sound comes back. Scratching is heard again, at the pace of the pencil at the top of the show. The lighting indicates a slow passage of time.
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Lights fade out. End.
Conclusions: In order to adapt the distributed system of Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree, I had to account for the goals of the system, as well as the book’s methods for achieving those goals. In this adapted performance, my goal was to integrate theatrical distributed systems with the distributed system of the source material. When audience members view a performance, their understanding of the piece before them is stretched across the many design elements surrounding them. I wanted to take full advantage of this system, not to “enhance” the original comic, but to make a new sensory experience that complemented the source material. To do this, I considered how the pieces of the source material worked together to communicate the themes of the book- longing, depression, and loneliness. I knew the performance excerpt should have the same themes and system goal, but that media deliver that system differently. As I described in the previous sections of this chapter, I focused on the three types of movement that I have found to be inherent in comics as the basis for my systems-based approach to adaptation. Because the source material ties these elements together so carefully, I knew that I had to replicate the same system goal in my adaptation. For example, as I showed in my frame- by-frame analysis in this chapter, the spatial distancing of the reader away from the shell is
58 necessarily tied to the temporal and emotional movement of the scene. The reader is moved further away from the scene, and the images reveal the amount and speed of time that has passed and will continue to pass. As the reader decodes this information, they attach the information to emotion and feel the desolation and longing that the scene conveys. In order to adapt this system network, me and my team of designers made decisions together, talking through the implications of the sound, light, and object combinations. In this way, our production process was more devised than traditional. It allowed the system of the adaptation to evolve naturally and in response to the source material. Some of the goals of the book as a whole may have been different than the scene that I selected. In a full-length adaptation of this story, some of my theatrical design decisions may change. As I’ve mentioned, the most important element of this approach to adaptation is to view the components of the distributed systems simultaneously. In order to test this, I had to view my excerpt as a complete system of parts. In the next chapter, I will analyze the survey results collected from the workshop performance of my adaptation. Analysis of these results will illuminate the strengths and flaws of my methodology.
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CHAPTER 3 ANALYZING SURVEY RESULTS AND DATA After viewing the performance, participants were asked to take a 10-question survey. The survey was designed to first assess participants’ familiarity with comics and theatre- the format of the source and adaptation respectively, and then to measure participants perception of adaptational choices. Since the participants were able to read the book immediately before the performance, the source and the adaptation would both be fresh in their minds. Next, the survey tested the removal of the red-haired person in my adaptation. In Chapter 2, I wanted to know if the human representation in the book was a key component to the emotional movement of the story. Often, adaptations of comics get distracted by adapting stylized 2-D illustrated characters. I wondered how important the physical realization of the cartooned figure was in adaptation, or if in some cases like The Red Tree, if the human image could be deleted without effecting the story’s distributed system. Lastly, I assessed the merging of distributed systems to determine if the theatrical choices my team and I made still represented the goals of the book’s system. Through this survey, I found that while audience members with higher visual language literacy did feel that the adaptation depicted movement and meaning differently than the comic, many participants felt that the theatrical choices changed the way they understood the story in a positive way. Additionally, in my staged adaptation, more participants felt that the red-haired person was not the main character, instead linking the emotional movement either to themselves or to the voice over. In the case of the voice over, participants were very receptive to its execution and felt that it impacted them in a positive way. Therefore, in general, it seems that participants still understood the emotional movement of the piece without the physical representation of the red-haired person. This suggests that accounting for source and host materials’ distributed systems rather than opting for literal adaptation can offer adaptations that effectively merge media. It also suggests that adapting the humanity of the red-haired person into a dis-embodied voice gave the audience members the human representation they needed in order to access the humanity of the piece without restricting the representation to one skin-tone or gender. The survey begins by assessing the participants’ level of comfort with the media in question: comics and live theatre. The first question asked: “Do you have any prior experience with reading comics or graphic novels?” and the second question was: “Do you have any prior
60 experience attending live theatre?”80 Both questions had four multiple choice options to choose from and a write-in explanation option. The multiple-choice options were: A lot of experience; some experience; not much experience; no experience. Assessing these experience levels allowed me to gain insight into my participant pool without risking any personally identifying information. As you can see in the graphs below, questions one and two showed me the experience composition of my participant pool. It also allowed me to look at the following questions through different lenses and address my claims that visual language competency affects comprehension of the distributed system. Because I was able to filter the responses by experience level, I was able to determine if adaptational choices I made were more accessible or effective to participants with higher visual language literacy. This is important to test, because if a majority of a theatre audience was not familiar with a base level of visual literacy, the merging of distributed systems may not be as effective. However, if adaptors can assume that most audience members have at least a moderate level of experience with visual literacy, the merging of distributed systems will likely be more successful on more occasions. Overall, everyone attending had at least some experience with comics, with 25% identifying as having “A lot of experience” and about 80% identifying as either “some” or “a lot of experience.” However, 80% of participants also identified as having “a lot” of experience with live performance.
Figure 3.1: Survey Response to Question 181
80 Feeman, Kelley. “Cognitive Approaches to Adaptation- The Red Tree.” Survey. 3 March 2019. 81 Feeman. 61
From this data, we can conclude that the prominent percentage of attendees were theatre goers and/or makers. We can also see that while less people in the group identified as having “a lot” of comics experience, most people in the audience were familiar with both comics and theatre. This is useful to note for two reasons. First, most of the responses to my survey were from people who felt comfortable thinking about my source material as well as my host material. Second, I will be able to compare differing response trends between those very comfortable with theatre (80%) and those very comfortable with comics (25%).
Figure 3.2: Survey Response to Question 282 While my participant group may have been more comfortable analyzing theatre, this data does point to a widely common familiarity with comics. In this sample, not many people would identify as being highly experienced with comics, but almost everyone felt moderately familiar with them. Because of this, an adaptor of comics for the stage can fairly safely assume that the audience will not require a high degree of handholding and that some visual literacy can be expected. While questions one and two concerned audience composition, questions three and four addressed the function of the main character in each version of The Red Tree. Assessing the participants’ understanding of how the main character functions helped me to pinpoint what elements of the source material’s system are necessary for conveying emotional movement. Question three asked: “In The Red Tree (book) who or what did you feel was the main character?”83 The response options were formatted as a drop-down menu with the options: “the
82 Feeman. 83 Feeman. 62 small red-haired person; you, the reader; whoever or whatever was offering the dialogue; there was no main ‘character’; other, please specify.” I chose to label the human character of the book as a person because I felt it was presumptuous to call the character a girl. Additionally, I did not want to influence any participant’s answer by indicating a gender that they may not have perceived. For example, if the participant identified as a man, and saw the main character as a small boy, I considered the possibility that their answer may change upon seeing the claim that the main character was “meant” to be a small girl. I considered formatting this question as write- in responses only so as not to influence the responses. However, ultimately I decided that respondents may need some framework in order to answer the question effectively. Further, with this question, I aimed to test whether the comprehension of character development would be altered should the image of the red-haired person be removed. To assess this, I needed responses which directly answered who the main character was. To assess the difference between the book and the performance, question four asks: “In the performed excerpt of The Red Tree who or what did you feel was the main character?”84 The question includes the same drop-down menu of response choices as before, in the same order. 62% of participants felt that the small, red-haired person was the main character of the book, while responses were varied for the performance. About 43% of people felt that the pre-recorded voice was the main character. Very few people still felt that the small, red-haired person was the main character in the staged adaptation. This is likely due to the removal of the red-haired person’s image from my adaptation. However, removing the red-haired person from the adaptation did cause participants to be more likely to question if the main character had to be the human likeness they saw. 43% of participants still listed the pre-recorded voice as the main character. But, over half of participants then reported that in the live performance, their perspective had been changed and they felt that there was no main character, or that they (the audience) were meant to be the main character. This data shows that without the image of the red-haired person, most participants were able to interrogate their own involvement with the material. But, the scattered responses may also show that participants were unsure how to respond to the performance, which would indicate a lack of clarity in the system of my adaptation. Write-in responses for question 3 were: “I think there is no real main character, but a “character” of sort forms in the voice between the communicator and the reader” and “A duality
84 Feeman. 63 of both myself and the red-haired girl.”85 These responses suggest that for the book, participants already felt that there was an intended connection between the red-haired person and themselves. Questions five and six shifted focus away from the participants’ understanding of character in order to compare their experiences with the distributed systems at play in each version of The Red Tree. By asking the participants to apply numerical value to their experience, I turned subjective response into quantifiable data. Question five asked: “On a scale of 1-100 (1 being ‘not at all’ and 100 being ‘identical’), can you rate how similarly the book and the performance represented the passage of time?”86 The responses were recorded by a sliding scale from 1-100. Above the far-left side of the scale, the slide indicated “not at all. Above the midpoint of the scale, the slide indicated “somewhat similar” and above the far-right side of the scale, the slide indicated, “identical.” Question six asked: “On a scale of 1-100 (1 being ‘not at all’ and 100 being ‘identical’), can you rate how similarly the book and performance represented movement away from the shell?”87 The responses were recorded by the same type of sliding scale from question five. Collecting numerical data on these questions allowed me to assess the participants’ experience of the system goals in each medium. The movement of space and time are two goals of The Red Tree’s system in both the book and the adaptation. Allowing responses to be given out of 100 also makes it easier for the participant to think of the number as a percentage. For example, on a scale from 1-10, the difference between 8 and 9 is both significant and hard for a survey respondent to distinguish between. However, a person who rates the passage of time as “75/100” can think of their score as being equivalent to “75% similar.” The data for questions five and six show that respondents with comics experience were more attuned to the differences between the versions of The Red Tree. When asked to compare the representation of the passage of time in both versions of the story, the average response was: 61% similar. When asked to compare the representation of spatial movement, the average response was: 59% similar. However, for participants who identified themselves as having a lot of familiarity with comics, the average percentage drops. With regards to both the representation of the passage of time and spatial movement, these participants on average reported that the experiences were 49% similar. Even though participants on average felt that these
85 Feeman. 86 Feeman. 87 Feeman. 64 representations were “somewhat similar,” the data does show that participants with a higher visual literacy with comics felt that the experiences were not as similar. Questions seven through ten asked participants about one design element at a time, allowing me to identify which adaptational choices I made supported the distributed system of the source material and which choices detracted from the intent of the source material. These questions were more subjective than the other questions, and therefore generated more write-in responses. Question seven asked: “Did you feel that the theatrical lighting choices of this performance changed the way you understood The Red Tree?”88 Participants then had the multiple-choice options: “Yes, in a positive way; Yes, in a negative way; No, my responses to the book and performance were similar; Other (please specify).” Question eight asked: “Did you feel that the theatrical sound effect choices of this performance changed the way you understood The Red Tree?”, question nine asked: “Did you feel that the theatrical prop/puppetry choices of this performance changed the way you understood The Red Tree?” and lastly, question ten asked: “Did you feel that theatrical voice acting choices of this performance changed the way you understood The Red Tree?”89 These questions were intended to isolate the different elements of my systems-based approach to adaptation. I chose the phrasing “changed the way you understood” to guide participants into interrogating how and why they understood the story in its various forms. I did not require only write-in responses here because they seem daunting to many audience members. Interestingly, though participants who identified as having a lot of experience with comics overall rated experience similarity lower than the group average, they did primarily mark the theatrical elements of the show as having a positive impact on their understanding of the story. In general, for the participant group, most people felt that the theatrical design choices affected their understanding of the story in a positive way. The most positively received design element of the adaptation was the voice acting, which 75% of respondents marked as positively affecting their experience of the story. The only design element that nobody felt negatively impacted their experience of the story were the prop/ puppetry elements. However, only 37% of participants felt that the choices impacted their experience positively, and 37% felt that the choices impacted them neither positively nor negatively.
88 Feeman. 89 Feeman. 65
Figure 3.3: Survey Response to Question 990
As you can see in the graph above, the responses are almost evenly distributed. This is the lowest percentage for a positive response. Props/ puppetry also received the highest number of write-in responses. Some write-in response feedback included: “…a frame size that didn’t change affected my perception of the story,” “…the book felt more foreboding because of the emended scale,” “I hadn’t thought about the significance of the shell shape and the passage of time. Time became an object,” and “I felt like it would have been more powerful to somehow have the smaller shell on the bigger one like in the book.”91 This feedback is interesting because it reflects the non-write in data very accurately. Some of the write-in responses felt like the theatrical indication of scale failed to recreate the same feeling as the book, while others felt that the objectification of time caused them to think differently about the book. This data may indicate that participants felt that the prop/puppetry designs mostly replicated their experience with the source material, and that they did not feel especially effected by the designs in one way or another. Most write-in responses felt that either the choice for a single frame, or the designs of the objects did not convey the sense of scale that the source material did. This is an interesting issue. As I mentioned before, one crucial element of Shaun Tan’s story is that the reader sense immense scale from one panel to the next. The transition from one panel to the next conveys spatial, temporal, and emotional movement primarily through the
90 Feeman. 91 Feeman. 66 reader’s understanding of the red-haired person’s relation to the shell. As the frames show the scene from further spatial distances, the emotional arc progresses, and the reader understands that the red-haired character has spent a large amount of time waiting. If the prop and puppetry designs do not effectively create illusions of scale, then some of the source material’s system is lost. Overall, however, the responses do indicate that the adapted performance was thought- provoking. Participants were not negatively affected by the performance, their expectations were met, or they were positively impacted by my choices. In general, the participants of my study registered that the theatrical choices of my adaptation were not visually or aurally identical to the source material. However, they also felt that overall, the theatrical choices positively changed the way they understood The Red Tree. Prop and puppetry design may have influenced the perception of scale for the participants, and is a point of consideration for a future, full length production of this book. The data from this survey has helped to support my claim that while visual language literacy does impact comprehension and reading experience, a certain level of familiarity with comics can be assumed of most audiences. This means that the adaptor can proceed in their adaptation knowing that audience members will be able to innately understand the distributed systems at play in comics. Additionally, adaptational practice based in an understanding of distributed systems can yield theatrical productions that need not look or sound identically like the source material. Instead, we can forge a new adaptational path which creates adaptations that merge comics and theatre to create something new and blended as opposed to transplanted.
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CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS
Much of visual art revolves around a common denominator—the frame. Whether it is a narrative framing choice in a book, a literal proscenium arch on stage, a picture frame around a painting, or a pen and ink box around a comic strip, artists frame the way we interact with their visuals. They guide us through the process of the encounter, and they manipulate the perception of their content. Because of this, adaptational methods based in cognitive approaches can offer adaptors falsifiable methodology. More than this, understanding the distributed systems of source materials and host media provides the basis for creative performance that incites new imaginative possibilities for the performing arts. One strength of comics as a medium is their method of replicating and creating movement from panel to panel for the reader. The visual language employed in each panel combined with the gutter space in between them asks the reader to fill in the blanks, and imagine spatial, temporal, and emotional movement. Live theatre similarly marries text and image to create an imaginative event for audience members. The actors rely on the audience to provide imagination and energy, which informs and pushes the performance forward. Therefore, to adapt comics to the stage, we can craft new adaptational theory based on the movement between panels. To adapt from comics to live theatre, we should first consider all media as distributed systems. If a comic is a distributed system, we can assume that readers understand what they see in and between panels by stretching their cognition, as described in the Kermit the Frog example in Chapter 1. If we believe this, we can move on to step two: understand the system. If comics are a distributed system, then the adaptor must understand how the system works, what its goals are, and what anti-localizable parts are in the system. In comics, we saw that one crucial piece of the comics reading experience is the reader agency that comes with panel transitions. The moments from image to image allow the reader the space to understand the three types of movements I mentioned earlier: spatial, temporal, and emotional. By isolating this effect of movement, we have begun to consider both the goal of the system, and its parts. The goal of the system is to convey movement to the reader. The parts of the system that communicate that
68 movement are visual cues, cultural cues, and grammatical structures of visual language. We saw examples of this in the Krazy Kat example in Chapter 1. After isolating the goal of the system, and the parts of the system, the adaptor can begin to consider the transfer of one medium into another. Because the idea of anti-localizable parts is crucial for a distributed system, adaptation may not be a straightforward process. For example, the adaptor must consider the comic system’s goal and means of achieving that goal. To adapt an effect, the adaptor must consider all parts of the whole at the same time, and not one at a time. It cannot be a one-for-one transfer. Rather, the adaptor is considering the cognitive task of the comics reader and the theatre audience member simultaneously. They are analyzing the cognitive stimulus and system of the comic while they are considering how the theatrical system is different, and the same. Moreover, they are considering how the merging of these two cognitive tasks, comics and theatre, can create one new hybrid system that highlights the unique engagement of each. My case study adapting Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree showed that audiences are influenced by their levels of visual language literacy. However, the results of the survey also showed that adaptation based in distributed cognition can yield performances that do not look exactly like the source material yet offer new and positive insight into the source material. In the future, this scene could benefit from further interrogation of the exclusion of the red-haired person in the source material and of the methods for demonstrating the scale of the shell in the story. To continue this theoretical work, more extensive case studies would need to be executed, testing larger populations of people to determine the extent of visual language literacy’s impact on audience members. Likewise, more research and data from audience members, as well as performers participating in performances adapted from comics could provide more conclusive evidence of merged distributed systems. Adapting a full-length production of this or other comics/ graphic novels would also aid in procuring conclusive results concerning distributed systems in adaptation. Further research into the elements of distributed cognition in live performance and comics would enable a more replicable adaptation system to be created. This research would not only create a more stream-lined system for the adaptation of comics for the stage, it would also show what elements of distributed systems are common across media. If these commonalities were recorded and analyzed, eventually an adaptation system could be crafted that works for any
69 intermedial adaptation. If the final adaptational strategy shows adaptors how to locate and process the distributed systems of source material, it should work for any adaptational project. With this system, adaptational projects would be more likely to respect both media in the adaptation process without necessitating mastery over the medium of the source material. Additionally, basing adaptational practice in the cognitive systems at play in source materials and host mediums offers a means of building inclusivity into our productions. By considering the cognitive role of the red-haired person in The Red Tree, I was able to consider alternative methods of adapting their presence in my adaptation. Choosing alternative methods of representing humanity in this instance meant that I could choose a non-binary voice actor and it meant that there was a higher potential for audience members to “see” themselves in the production. The adaptational, systems-based process of comics into theatre also allows for creative solutions for differently abled and neuro-atypical audience members. For example, comics are a visual medium, rendering their stories inaccessible to members of our community who cannot see. But, if comics adaptors consider the effects and joys of comic systems, live theatrical experiences can be crafted that turn shells into sounds, and little red-haired people into voice overs. Too often, adaptation is seen as a marketing strategy, a way to prolong the success of a book, comic, or movie. In these situations, adaptation becomes a one-for-one trade, with adaptors trying to literally replicate the elements of the source material and disregarding the strengths and limits of the host medium. In other adaptational situations, production teams seem to approach the process as if the source material would be “better” in their chosen medium. Such assumptions and adaptational methods only diminish the quality of the final product and put artistic media at odds with each other. Instead, cognitive approaches to adaptation offer the tools to delve into the strengths and mechanics of both the source material and the host medium. It can deconstruct hierarchies between media and combine methods of inciting imagination in viewers.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Laurie Schneider. The Methodologies of Art: An Introduction. London: Westview Press, 1996. Badman, Derik A. “Talking, Thinking, and Seeing in Pictures: Narration, Focalisation, and Ocularisation in Comics Narratives.” International Journal of Comic Art, 12.2/3, 2010,91-111. Ball, David. Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Internet resource. Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward An Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Material Feminisms, ed. By Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 2008, pp. 120–154. Barnette, Jane. Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation. Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. Barnette, Jane. “Staging the Numinous,” Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 4. 2009, 415-17. “Bein’ Green.” The Muppet Show, created by Jim Henson, season 1, episode 12, The Jim Henson Company and Syndication, 1976. Bell, John (Ed.). Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2000. Bennett, S. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, London: Routledge. 1990. Berger, Glen. Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Bleeker, Maaike. “Movement as Lived Abstraction: The Logic of the Cut.” Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, edited by Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou. New York, Routledge, 2015, 35-52. Cardullo, Bert (ed.) Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916-2000: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
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APPENDIX I: PROCESS MATERIALS
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Voice Actor Audition Sheet with Indications
“Sometimes you wait” This read should sound: voice is confident.
“And wait” This read should sound: voice is becoming frustrated
“And wait” This read should sound: Voice is pleading, impatient
“And wait” (happening in a black out) This read should sound: voice is desperate, heightened
“And wait” This read should sound: voice is sad. Realizing that things are not changing
“And wait” This read should sound: voice is getting smaller; the voice is beginning to give up.
“And wait” This read should sound: very small, defeated, quiet. Slow.
In silence and blackout-- some labored breathing. Breath is catching. A few beats
“But nothing ever happens” This read should sound: the voice takes its time, still very small, defeated, quiet.
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The Red Tree Final Storyboard
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APPENDIX II: SURVEY DATA Survey Results Without Filters or Comparisons:
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Survey Results Comparing Participants with “A Lot of Experience with Theatre”
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Survey Results Comparing Participants with “A Lot of Experience with Comics”
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APPENDIX III: PRODUCTION PHOTOS
Setting up the performance space with copies of The Red Tree
Performance space set up with house lights on
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Large shell in show conditions
Large shell in show conditions, rotating to show tally marks
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Large shell in show conditions, rotating to show tally marks
Medium shell in show conditions, rotating
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Small shell in show conditions, rotating
Small shell in show conditions, rotating
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Close-up of small shell
Close-up of medium shell
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