Despite my better judgment I watched the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards show on CBS last night. The band Little Big Town performed their “Your Side of the Bed” song with interesting theatrics.
The song is a slow-moving traditional ballad with predictable lyrics. Not very interesting however, a bed stood on end with a couple suspended with cables kept my attention throughout the performance. I was reminded of the Richards and David’s reading Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web. On page 36 they state”…,a decorative element serving as such a locus can be used intentionally to help generate or restrict eye movement.”(p36). The suspended couple feigning sleep with occasional movements was the locus of the performance. The director or choreographer for this performance kept the attention of me, a casual fan of the country genre, by drawing my eye to the decorative element. Perhaps it was done to keep viewers like me attentive?
During other performances in the awards program big screens with mashed up videos splashed behind performers and occasionally the traditional smoke and fireworks were set off much like many concerts. But none were as interesting as this performance. A mundane ballad was made interesting by employing a visual rhetoric technique of restricting the “roving eye” (36). Richards and David’s article in the 2005 Technical Communication Quarterly addressed the world wide web however, their contention that a designer can control a viewers eye movements applies in this case of a live performance.
Cited
Richards, Anne R., David C.; Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web, 2005 Technical Communication Quarterly, 14(1), 31-48, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,Inc.
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In class, we discussed Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," which is really the seminal work in well, understanding comics.  McCloud discusses just about every, and any aspect of comics that can be conceived, and our discussion on 'gutters' was interesting, as I hadn't read "Understanding Comics" in some ten years.

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