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by Betty Gabrielli
| 1. | The title, The Scream of the Butterfly | |
| 2. | Class Reading on Topics Relating to Copeland's Film | |
| 3. | Biographical Sketch |
MAY 8 , 2002--"After September 11, how can we go back to a blank sheet of paper and just make things up?"
This question, by Nobel prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, is the foundation for a new spring-semester class at Oberlin titled "Art and The Imagination of Disaster," and a video that explores the same theme.
The class was developed by Roger Copeland, professor of theater, and a renowned theater and dance critic, who says the idea came to him while he watched the wreckage of the Twin Towers broadcast on television.
"I saw how much the gnarled remains of the steel frame looked like Bruegel's image of the tower of Babel--probably the earliest image in Western mythology of what today we'd call a skyscraper."
The concept evolved into a winter term project and then into the new class, in which Copeland and his students are exploring what art can add to "the barrage of non-fictional commentary that an event of this magnitude inspires."
Using US, an innovative theater piece about the Vietnam War as a model, Copeland and his students researched terrorism, globalization, and religious fundamentalism to create an art work for digital video about the way Americans are living in the aftermath of 9/11.
The 90-minute work, written and directed by Copeland, is not a documentary about the globalization of terrorism, but "a mythic/poetic meditation on images that have become numbingly familiar from round-the-clock television coverage of 'America’s New War.'"
Copeland recruited a diverse group of individuals from his class and from the community to help with the film as researchers, scenic and costume designers, editors, sound technicians, and performers.
Under the working title The Scream of the Butterfly, the film interweaves three separate dramas and vivid imagery into a surrealistic narrative infused with the Jim Morrison lyric: "Before I sink into the big sleep, I want to hear, I want to hear, the scream of the butterfly."
"The title also alludes to 'the butterfly effect' in chaos theory," Copeland says. "The butterfly effect is the idea that a butterfly can flap its wings in Brazil and help to generate a tornado in Kansas, a pretty potent metaphor for global interconnectedness."
Copeland intends the film to explore the "effect of terror on the average mind, the way a state of heightened alertness or anxiety or paranoia can cause the average person to make the sort of imaginative connections that are normally only made by artists or conspiracy theorists."
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