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
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
