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[redeyetheater]

July Retreat, Part Two (as recalled in November)

Okay, I am not going to dwell on the fact that I haven’t posted since August and it’s now November (see this post from May).

Instead, I’ll say: Things are ramping up! We’re doing another intensive workshop next week, toward finishing a first draft in early December. (And oh my goodness, we’re going to share a reading of said first draft with the public on Monday, December 14, 2015 - you’re invited! - 8pm, Red Eye). 

But looking back at the summer... I had started writing about our July retreat, but I only unpacked 1 of 3 days. I’m sure you’ve been waiting with baited breath to find out what we else we did! So here we go.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

We took Monday off, to let everything from Sunday simmer. I had grand plans of using the day to write, but wound up doing a lot more staring out windows and taking naps than actual writing. As Erik Ehn has been known to say, though - it’s all writing! Different parts of the process.

So then on Tuesday, we gathered back together with the same crew from Sunday and, this time, spent most of the workshop on our feet. The main objective for the day was exploring an exercise that Steve brought in, “Circle of my Life.” For this exercise, the performers walked in a circle on stage for a very long time while Steve gave them prompts to think about and, for periods of time, to process aloud. Specifically, he talked them through different stages of their lives, asking what they remembered and, in some cases, what had consumed them at each juncture. If he asked them to “remember” an age that they hadn’t experienced yet, they were supposed to project what they imagined it would be like. Even more than the content it brought up, he was curious about the duration and consuming nature of the exercise itself.

They spoke aloud, continuously and simultaneously, as they walked, sinking into a rhythm, almost a trance. Occasionally Steve would orchestrate, asking everyone except one person to stop talking so then that one person would monologue, or sometimes having two people drop out and the two others continue talking.

I watched them from different places in the room and wrote down wisps of what I heard:

Ages 0-8

television programming

fat kid

appropriate/inappropriate

Jasmine/Aladdin

tapioca pudding

crying in Target

walking to school

no better or worse, it felt different

very tiny

don’t remember any particular desire to do these things

fantasy world

a figure skater disappears

photo

made out of the rays of the sun, stalks of corn

what did I eat?

thinking a lot about school

all I wanted was a cockatiel

slow progression being less of a person

first grade incident

woman with wild hair

her sense of identity

later on, going to school

flights of stairs

during the day

kids were allowed to rank themselves

when I left home

competitions

she told me she saw

turned the corner

little secrets about someone who hurt my feelings

throwing them behind her

waiting for the bus

I remember bending down

an enormous deal, who got to sit in that seat

go find another place to be

Ages 9-14

Florida, Key West

paid a buck fifty

how could there be so many people out

glasses case

Central and South America

at a very early age, started to learn about

they were just always talking

trickled into middle school

cut deep enough to

his backyard

wanting to learn every single lyric to every single Broadway show

vests

beautiful white cars

picking that up as a language as well

how do you express yourself

a world to escape in and a world to live in

when we were young

a big presentation

damn

if I could articulate the way that they were structured

started to put words to feelings or impulses

but that’s when, that’s when I lived

doing whatever your brain is telling you to do

as if we were a gang

changing but I think that

Catholic school

very active when it came to

the things that make things scary

excused from school that day

Ages 15-21

safest place to be

dream about this last night

fitting into these social structures

more consumed with how we relax

homeroom was stupid

rules for how to be doing this

choreographer from, um – or who works at

little things like where everything had to go

understanding

relationship that changed over time

part of your job is to hide

external reaction

learning how to speak

lisp I had a lisp I had a lisp

they corrected my speech

correcting my speech takes a lot of breath

diagnosed all of these voice problems

it changes you

also external for me

insecure, almost

focusing on a position within it

when it’s worth saying "hi" to someone in the hall

"hi, how are you" conversations that you take for granted

what is the cost of all this?

escape my body

maybe that’s all that I am

really starting to see the walls of the system

yeah okay so you show me that and – yeah, so?

a historical text

consumed by a lack of being consumed by a nostalgia for childhood

Ages 22-28

green sugar cake

I moved to California

I was trying to simultaneously

yellow red green red blue

I guess the idea of it was how do I become

navigating

four days a week for five hours a day

very vivid

I willfully for whatever reason put myself in that situation

afraid of being consumed by somebody else

spray painting

spending most of your time thinking about

the ability to suddenly have

you need stakes but also no stakes

consumed by movies

winter boots

five bags of

zooming out, seeing the entire world

piles of snow

conditioned to identify pattern

geologic formation of the Earth

pattern beneath the pattern

have this understanding of myself

fancy jewelry

headdresses with beads

interesting characters, always ran into them

breaking through the wall of the space

obsessive about making art

thinking about what’s in everything

vocabularies and strategies

dumbbell, adjusting back in

maybe my body won’t work forever

building blocks are important

consumed by the attempt to out-think our behavior

I worked there something stupid, like seven days a week

working all the time so I can’t think about the other things I’m doing

slowly lost track of what I was doing

spiraled out of control

all these New Agey people doing herbal remedies and massage

lacuna of institutional boundaries

trying to articulate what the rules are

if I wanted something, deep paranoia of why I wanted that

what should I want?

wanting to out-think constructs of what it means to be a good person

units of time

knowing what’s inside

to monitor in a very paranoid way

programmed into me

it’s scary

right now I’m reading a book about the multiverse

state-based way

no that’s real, that’s real, because I can see it

vibrational things

the idea of finite/infinite

the gift of a person

I did that and it was extremely hard

Ages 29-38

it’s nighttime

all these coworkers

the other place is Griffith Observatory

the 300th anniversary of the United States

consumed by just letting time pass by

traveling

my father will start showing signs of Alzheimer’s

every day working on mental games

now it makes me feel at peace

updates about the minutia of their lives

sisters

how do I need to position myself

desire to geographically move

so many families – they’ve all grown up

ride rollerskates with them

they probably have kids

some of them getting married

all there finishing up a meal, so much food

along the river

he, she

never celebrated my birthday once

going to museums

find somebody

doctors are convinced

knowledge of knowing there’s something there physically

not helpful and what does that say

a month and a year

Ages 39-50

best years of my life

I’m writing – I was writing

planning to

the things that felt

wanting to be around family

wanting to travel

tension between

keep it simple

space between people

that is the place of

pinning down touchstone

(humming)

journals

what I remember before

what I see now

in space still exists

but it’s the same management, different wait staff

be a mother

personality is performance

something in the air

seeing younger people

the maternal, and this nurturing and compassion and sensuous sensitivity that I’m attracted to

embody and practice

also perhaps philosophical concept

seed of that inside of you

offspring child

spreading that to all other creatures

duality of male/female

having a visible lasting effect on a thing, a garden

seeing a change

air will still exist

a freedom that I haven’t experienced in this way

conceptual change is not satisfying

numbers representing dollars not real

my feet on the floor

connecting with people

when I started all the time

even to the point of destroying an object

connecting physically, that is very powerful

residue of behavior

therapists saying that

intimacy

Given time constraints, we stopped there and Steve led a conversation about what had happened. Did the performers find themselves addressing anyone in particular? (Yes, but the “who” was a little different for everyone.) Where did they focus? (Up during group listening, down when remembering, paying attention to posture, gravity, talking with hands, keeping up the pace and spacing of the circle.) What were the individual versus group dynamics? (This became a much longer discussion.)

Before breaking for lunch, we audio recorded Billy and Dolo singing a scene from Sunday’s compilation, a long list of native Minnesota flowers, for use in the afternoon. As they sang, I thought and jotted notes about the idea of being consumed by the natural world, that which we did not create (connecting back to David Graeber’s chapter on Primordial Debt Theory, a sense of being in debt to that which created us). But also, how the human creative process enters as we attempt to name each element in the natural world - our various and inevitably incomplete attempts at cataloging the world and our place in it over a lifetime, over many lifetimes.

After lunch, Dolo led a physical warmup that I’ve found myself revisiting in different contexts multiple times since (imagining a drop of warm oil in your hand, moving it around to seep into all your joints, starting with your hand and wrist then moving it gradually through your whole body). We then spent the rest of the afternoon on some movement improvisation to the Minnesota flower song, taking impulses from the text and sound (without being illustrative), with Steve setting various additional parameters and prompts (e.g. when a certain recurring part of the text is heard, change what you are doing; play with letting vocalization happen). We alternated between improvising and conversation, improvising and conversation.

A few (of the many sprawling) notes that came out of this session:

individual spheres moving into collective awareness

duration consuming, lost in movement state

Dolo: What are my physical powers of creation? Composition, formal structures, energetic places (passing on, picking up), story, tasks, abstract games, making sense

Celeste: Different ways to consume space. Open place vs. against something. Small thing consuming a large thing and vice versa. Space surprised me (the wall seemed infinite, but then ended).

Ki Seung: How I relate to creation - creation being the stage. Reacting to rhythm (awe, ignored). Knocking each other off balance.

Billy: Mostly responding to sound. Same intervals of tiring in vocal and in movement, tracking when change happened.

Miriam: Rhythm of what was being said. No response to words at all, making choices against the beat.

Dolo: Channel changing, disorientation, in and out of states, vocalizations became a crazy zoo, nonhuman social places

Celeste: Emotion ebbing and flowing with structure

Miriam: Interpretation, translating other people’s movement into something for me

Billy: Opposite of contemporaneous, feeling of surveillance, paranoia. Pushing against the vocabulary.

Miriam: Image of camera zooming into a mouth, down the esophagus

Images: 1 - Billy, Miriam, Celeste, Dolo, and Ki Seung doing “Circle of My Life” 2 - Minnesota prairie flowers (via Uniquely Minnesota)

ADDENDUM: I just shared this post with my supporters on Patreon and now feel compelled to share some of what I wrote to them, given the timing of this post going up the morning after the Paris attacks: I have been thinking a lot this morning about how strange it feels to carry on “business as usual” while Paris and Beirut and Syria and indeed people here in the USA are experiencing such profound chaos and pain. Yet it is also in these moments that I believe, more than ever, art is essential - as a space for reflecting and processing, for expanding awareness of our own bodies and beings, for exercising imaginations and making connections between divergent ideas, for coming together as communities in real time, for dreaming what is possible, for deepening our empathy and compassion. When I remember that, “business as usual” doesn't feel so strange after all.

In reading this blog, you are part of this process. Thank you for your presence.

[redeyetheater]

July Retreat, Part 1

Somehow, already, it’s August! Somehow, already, the days are growing shorter!

July was a big milestone for our development process. We haven’t miraculously Figured Out The Whole Piece, but we did have an incredibly lovely and productive retreat from July 12-15, which involved reading, writing, talking, and playing for two sweet days with a small cohort of performers, then bringing together a different group of community members for a discussion around the work’s themes.

Over the next few posts, I’ll recap what we did and give you a peek at my sprawling notes.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

The performers that we assembled for the first two workshop days were Celeste Busa, Dolo McComb, Billy Mullaney, Ki Seung Rhee, plus of course Miriam (also performing), Steve (directing), and myself (writing). The group deliberately represented an eclectic mix of artistic backgrounds, various lineages of theater, dance, and contemporary performance; we were excited to see how they would compliment each other in this exploratory context.

To kick off the retreat, I brought in 60 pages of text that I’d written in the preceding months. I was careful not to let myself or anyone else think of this text as a “script,” because really it was an unstructured collection of fragments that may or may not be related. As I shared with the group, it is possible some of these fragments could go together and will be expanded upon for the script; and it’s equally possible that none of those pages will be used in the script, but rather some tiny kernel of an idea from the collection will open up the whole world of the performance that is yet to be written.

That said, we spent Sunday morning in a circle of chairs, reading through the pages in the same way we might read through the first draft of a script. Given some sections were pretty dense, it took a full 90 minutes!

Coming out of this reading, we had a conversation; but before diving in, I asked all the performers to draw or write in response to a few prompts. They had 30 seconds for each prompt and were free to be as abstract or representational as they wanted.

Here are the prompts and responses:

1. Make a drawing based on your thoughts and feelings coming out of reading the text.

2. Look at what you made. Now on a new piece of paper, recreate what you made, but now feel free to evolve it without the play text in mind - embellish, exaggerate, deviate, add, connect dots that make sense to you - toward making a picture that you like.

3. Look at what you made. Now distill one thing that you think is most important, or represents an overarching feeling or theme from your creation. Isolate it in a third drawing.

While I confess I often dislike participating in “rapid response” activities like this one (they can feel so superficial and incomplete, unrepresentative of what I’m really thinking or feeling), I love these drawings. They communicate something raw and nonverbal to me about how the fragments that we read were moving through the group, sitting with each person, in that moment. I know the responses are hasty and only the tip of the iceberg, but still, I find them valuable - cues of impulse.

In the time that followed, and for another good hour after lunch, we talked about reading and listening to the text. Per Steve and Miriam’s suggestion, we used a very loose feedback structure – starting with images that came up, then feelings, then associations, then impulses toward form (be it the “world” of the piece, the shape, or possible artistic approaches to different kinds of content), then finally questions and points of curiosity.

Here is a brief rundown of what came up. I share it out of context (almost certainly, you are reading this post without having read the 60 pages of text that I wrote), in part because I’m curious to know, dear blog reader - what does this collection, standing alone, conjure for you? What kind of world, if any, do you begin to see in your own imagination? And what kinds of questions do you have for that world? I’d love to read any thoughts you’re willing to share in the comments below.

IMAGES

A “whole” that becomes aware of itself, falls apart, keeps reacting

Flour, baking, a white and silver kitchen

Motivational/inspirational environments - business, TED talks, cheerleading

Little micro tape recorders

Maze, labyrinth (of language)

Birthing a debt and raising it

“Female” imagery – moon, eggs, birth

Light/dark – controlling it (“Turn on the light”), but also things being illuminated

Showing vs hiding

Scientific vs pedestrian

Army of scientists with their shoes

Gold light beings, thrown away

Folding – inside out, outside in

Celestial images – God, universe

Books – leather-bound, not paperback – tomes

Desk as a singularly concrete object. Made of stone or concrete, immobile (like an altar?), with a stone chair. Huge and formidable. A plant on it? – plants mark your place. Moss?

FEELINGS

Unsettling certainty: We know exactly what’s happening, but chaos = anxiety

Clinical transferring of information

The exactitude of certain transfers, but then other scenes that “human” it up

Baking instructions: straight information, but also teaching, which is human

Deliberate – people knew their own rules/logic, even if others didn’t understand them

Common vs scientific names of native plants, flowers; relief when voices aligned in unison

A sadness, to hear that list – things taken for granted, disappearing (climate change, mass extinction, along with certain professions) – huge amount of information lost, work/labor lost

Poetic language juxtaposed with science, interviews

In/out, micro/macro, zooming - Latin roots of words (felt like we were moving with it, not violent)

Power as she speaks everything into creation

ASSOCIATIONS

Watching TV, flipping through channels, futzing with the reception

Headlines

Name change scene – bureaucracy, institutional, naturalization, MNsure, also FAQs – the funny order of questions being asked, tech writers

Thinking about when information touches people, channels through people – how it has to change (from itself; straight up = considered cold) in order to be “human,” to connect

In bed, imagining running away – quite touching, most emotionally engaging – we’ve all had that fantasy. If we could take money out of the equation, what would my life be like? Distilled, relatable, familiar, recognizable as a response to the complex world

The story of the businessman who met a fisherman sitting on a beach and encouraged him to buy a fishing boat, so his business could grow, etc. and eventually he could go on vacations, toward sitting on the beach and doing nothing but relaxing, fishing, meeting people like himself…

Cycle – fantasy – the desire to be elsewhere

Snake eating its own tail

Lists – at the Academy Awards, list of everyone who has passed away; war vets, memorials; commemoration. Jobs, traditions, disappearing.

Tadpole to frog

Birth of anything

Seeds – what happens underground?

Liminal space of the shopping cart: haven’t bought it yet, but feel ownership

IMPULSES TOWARD FORM

Making croissants – Groove Tube – 4th of July Freedom Rolls, ‘60s/’70s instructional video that gets weirder and weirder. Underlying perversity, seduction.

Ina Garten, Barefoot Contessa – character of Connecticut homemaker on five different bodies, similar physical manner, moving slowly

Cynosure’s cheer – Guy on a multiple city speaking tour, only remembers specific things, reduced to repetitive phrases.

Creating a debt – woman looking through scrapbook, childhood

Cynosure as a seed (in interview scene) – doesn’t want to crack open

Flowers and scientific names – curious about “Let’s keep going for a very long time…” – is it to the audience? to each other? to selves? Must pay attention, must name things.

Mascot Speech – Tom Cruise in Magnolia, spectacle

Invention – we don’t invent by following instructions, we invent by pursuing things not pursued before. Where does failure fit in? Living our lives, making croissants – what are the interruptions?

Instruction manual of self-help, lists of how to improve life on the internet, Buzzfeed – past 25 years of “you” focused self-help – Oprah as icon of this movement. “Manifest” with the power of your mind, vision boards, materialistic consumption, relationship to capitalism (via Billy, see here and here)

“Meta talk” – “I hate to tell you this, but…” (I don’t actually hate it) behavior

Books – recipe book, Book of the Dead – correlative

Things starting to web – crescent moon, croissant, Icarus story, two halves of eggs…

Folding

Beach, ocean, waves – many different kinds of waves – sound, energy, vibration, shock…

Debt – absence, lack, God withdrawing (Simone Weil) New Testament – list of the begats (names of plants), revelation (things destroyed)

Lists as framing device? A feeling that it’s happening around us, whether we pay attention or not, another layer of reality knocking…

Civilization (humans) reflecting on the rest of creation, over which we don’t have control

QUESTIONS / CURIOSITIES

Egyptian Book of the Dead – curious to know more. Different from other kinds of text, seems fascinating but didn’t understand. Is that scene about the Book? Or attempting to separate something out from the Book? Scrambling for it, but it’s elusive?

What is the portal into this world? What is the doorway that we walk through?

Drive Theory – homeostasis versus increasing over time?

Croissant instructions – all for real? Enjoyed when I thought it started to get far out, more made up.

Other applications of that idea. Are there ways to take these procedures for our lives, insert things we don’t expect?

Line between being creator and being overtaken. What is the moment, when do you know you’ve crossed that line?

When is it good to be consumed? When is it positive?

2 languages happening – poetic (“I am life,” lots of M’s text, slow consumption) and clinical (can be violent) – latter conjures manufacturing. Mascot cheer – oppressive positivity. Changing names – bureaucracy of dead ends, instead of serving as guides.

Wall Street text (“headlines”) – glitches interrupting/interfering with message. How do they function and why?

Who creates in this play? Nobody? Creation referenced, we deal with it, but don’t necessarily see it

What is the risk?

Loved lists of trees, flowers – something operatic about subject matter, felt appropriate, EMOTION. Reminds of Wagner at opening of Syberberg – we don’t question the music, as we would a linear narrative, why? What weighs us down, keeps us from being successful, creating?

Desk – strong image, one of the only things described, manmade, person defined by it but also leaves it.  What is its significance? Does it grow bigger (unnerving)? Higher and higher stacks of paper? Desk made to control body, define amount of space you need in order to do work. How does size vary in different contexts? You shrink to it. Draftsman, big desk. Finding optimal situation – standing, best functionality. How people relate over/across desk = civilization. Making things linear (violent) vs. messiness of real world (See Erik Ehn: genocide needs linear narrative)

After this very rich conversation, we only had a little bit of time left in our day; so we did one final “rapid response” exercise, this time on our feet. The performers (sans Miriam, who sat out on this one to watch) paired up and created short physical responses to the text. Again, fast and inchoate, yet revealing as broad strokes. Here are the two responses layered together:

Images: 1 - Dolo and Billy singing a list of native Minnesotan flowers (via Miriam Must) 2 through 16 - Performer response drawings