Category: ideas

New concept

Posted on by Dale

[This article is cross-posted from Dale’s blog.]

I continue reading A Perfect Mess, and now it’s actually proving useful.

[from A Perfect Mess, p. 168]

University of Milan researcher Mario Benassi refers to spin-up-friendly companies as “modular” companies, and espouses three basic principles for them: growing in pieces instead of holistically; being as quick to shrink or get rid of logy pieces of the company as to invest in the promising ones; and being prepared to reorient its efforts around any of the pieces.

Growing in pieces:

We’re already “growing in pieces,” I think: working on three songs from the entire work as a visual sample for our potentially “uneducated/unimaginative” audience. However, I think we can do more in this direction and have it benefit us.

For example, what if those of us who are working live in the workshop begin to come up with elements that we needed, say the Sun or Moon disks for Sun & Moon Circus, and then posted those needs on the webpage for those non-live participants to take over?

In other words, on Tuesday night we decide to go with a combination of Laura’s two-sided Sun/Moon disk which then splits apart into two separate 10-foot disks for the Circus portion. We post that on a William Blake webpage called Things We Need. Diana reads it on the webpage and decides that’s something she can do, so she emails us and lets us know. (Ignore the fact that we have no budget for the moment.)

Diana sketches out a couple of possibilities, posts them to the Vyew page [room ID 067760] or emails them to Dale and he posts them to the site. Soon we reach an agreement on the design, and Diana builds these items, following a schedule we’ve hashed out at the same time. Meanwhile, the live workshoppers are moving on with other ideas and items.

Of course, this only works if everyone out there is reading the blog and is committed to helping out in fairly concrete ways.

As quick to shrink as to grow:

As we begin actually build these three works, it’s going to be ultra important for us to be incredibly “messy,” in that we need to be able to step back and say, “Maybe this isn’t working.” We need to be able to abandon a puppet or costume or idea without regret, even if it’s perfectly lovely and took a lot of work (and worse, money, which we don’t have.)

Or perhaps we have two things going on in a piece as we work on it, and they conflict. We may decide to let one take over the whole piece rather than trying to reconcile or juxtapose that conflict.

We just don’t need to work with tunnel vision.

One way to keep us fresh, maybe, is to videotape something we think is fairly solid and use that to clarify our approach.

Reorient efforts around any piece:

As we continue to work towards the May performance, I’m sure we’ll do this anyway, swinging our focus from one of the three pieces to the next from week to week or even hour to hour. It should happen pretty naturally as we find ourselves grinding to a halt on one piece, fresh out of ideas or materials, and turning our attention to one of the others.

All in all, I think we’re probably a model modular company at heart, but it seemed useful to me to be able to use these three principles as a framework for what we’re doing in workshop. I’m counting on commentary to move this idea forward.

It’s best to work with what I know: Work Forum

Posted on by Marc Honea

Let’s let this be a place where we can start to respond to the material.

Having just begun to listen and read along, something I haven’t actually done with the material in a long time, I am gratefully reminded of the sad limits of conceptual thinking when set beside the magic of the verse (and the music, of course).

A few random observations. The task of the production with such material is to situate the audience’s attentiveness so that they can really listen to the words. The magic of the event is in hearing the verse, in the way the fanciful play of words conjures a larger realm. The stuff of the everyday is pulled into this transformative process. We want to hold a child’s attention and let the images, the play of thoughts and images and notions, blossom.

I can’t see the songs as ever being just background for something else. They are too rich, too dense. You can’t afford to miss anything. All stage craft and performance issues need to back up the songs. I don’t think we want the audience’s attention distracted with a question of “what just happened?”

The decision: do we create a presentation world with some kind of story frame, some reason for people to be gathered together doing the songs in some fashion; or a neutral container we fill with each song and we don’t assume a need to find framing movtivating impulses? Of course it doesn’t have to be either/or. That’s just one of the tensions we have to negotiate as we go.

From the titles of the songs on, I kept thinking about the songs as responses to a playful challenge, almost as if a child proposed each title and then expected the singers to rise to the challenge and invent. The songs as the result of a kind of high order imaginative game played by the children. Are the singing adults participants in the game or figures from some other realm conjured by the imaginative forces?

With this idea of each song being a deliberate challenge, I could see other elements (puppets, dance, scenic, etc) offering a kind of “musical” underscoring for each song, trying to tap into feelings and latent ideas. But I also thought, and I didn’t think I would find myself thinking this, all the stagecraft, all action, could attempt to quite literally meet the challenge of portraying the content of the songs. Two levels of playful challenge at work: the challenge of “composing” each song and then the challenge of rendering the imaginative improvisations in some kind of palpable form. I guess I’m thinking it’s more honest to imagine children attempting both things. Or children laying down the challenge to the “adult” of making something up (tell me a story) and then playfully taking the next step of trying to “make it real.”

But I don’t want to clog things up with too much conceptualizing…

I do think, however, that it might be inspirational to look into forms of late 18th century domestic children’s amusements. I wonder if the industrial clouds Blake saw on the horizon could be found reflected in a change in the kinds of toys and distractions available to children. But I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing. Just wondering about what kind of “stuff to play with” might have existed. How did children and adults gather for amusement? The notion of “the poet” as a kind of convention for imaginative elaboration, a familiar narrative frame. “Father, could we go to Wm. Blake’s Inn this afternoon while Uncle Tim is visiting?” “Perhaps, child.” “I would like Mr. Blake to bake something in the kitchen?” “What?” “William Blake bakes a thundercloud pudding.” “Ah, hurumph, a thundercloud pudding, eh…alright, let’s see…hmmm…wait, don’t start clapping yet, I need to think…” “Come on, Uncle Tim, a thundercloud pudding, a thundercloud pudding, William Blake bakes a thundercloud pudding!” And so poor Uncle Tim would extemporize to the clapping rhythms of the children a rhyming verse fantasy in which the magical poet, Mr. Blake, would bake a thundercloud pudding, while the other children would playful respond to his words with the stuff around them, often successfully finding a way to portray it, and often collagpsing in laughter over the impossibility of “stoking the stove with stars plucked from Mars…”

Please Attach to Previous Post

Posted on by Marc Honea

Dear Reader, I know these posts take as much of a toll on you as they do on me. I need to be cleaning house, but composing the previous post got me to thinking and now I have to post a note if for no other reason than to scratch a sign that new thoughts have entered the picture.

First point. A quick bit of retrospection has led me to confirm that pretty much all of my thinking and writing about theatre matters is an attempt to translate my psychoanalytic study into theatrical enthusiasms. One past feeding a deeper past as I keep dragging everything into an indifferent present. I nuture a comic book fantasy engendered by, no surprise, a play. Don DeLillo’s play The Day Room is in part about a mythical theatre company led by an enigmatic impresario named Arno Klein. The tales and legends spun out about the effect of the company’s work are quite fantastical and legendary. And infective if you are a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind set and already taken with the work of KRAKEN and other groups. Guilty as charged. All of my efforts over the past few years nurture a silly little notion of a company doing radically new work because influenced in part by radical psychoanalytic principles. So I write out my ideas for this imaginary company. I’m at peace with that.

Second point. In my previous post I neglected an element which will become crucial. I am not paying enough attention to the Imaginary Dyad as I sputter on about systems of meaning and signifying chains and formulas. It’s as if I want to deny the basic necessity for the Imaginary Dyad in theatrical matters instead of granting its priviledged place at every level. There is a fundamental “two-ness” in performance which you can’t escape and which shapes all meaning. It’s called Imaginary because it builds on the image of what is out there and our relationship to it. Pretty basic in theatrical issues: me-you, he-she, actor-audience, the observer-the observed, agent-object, “who am I to you and who are you to me?”, etc. It’s an interesting structure because it is so easily reversible: actor can become audience and audience can become actor through one fundamental flip (theoretically). And what occured to me was that members of a group trying to improvise in some radical psychoanalytic way need to understand the Audience as deeply as they understand themselves. In the Imaginary Dyad, performer can be audience and audience performer. You have to find ways to understand what the audience “wants” by understanding what you, the performer, want, and visa versa. So as I continue to think about putting together formulas, I’m also thinking about exercises and strategies which address the Imaginary dimension of the actor-audience relationship. And now my question is: how kinky is too kinky?

Dubious Undertakings

Posted on by Marc Honea

Here I am letting the site know what I’m up to. Thinking about a couple of pages. One will be a page on using and creating text (a script) in creative group collaboration. The other will be yet another quest for formulas to use in improvisation processes. I am a bit obsessed with this, I’m afraid. If I examine my motives for this interest, it strikes me on one level as an elaborate way to wrestle with a permanent creative block, to muscle my way through to something in spite of knowing full well there is nothing. Be that as it may. My current goal is to imagine a group wanting to create a signature style of improvisation focused on the idea of revealing the New Event. What simple formulas could be useful? I’m trying to figure out what New means with respect to creating signification in performance. Yes, that word signification smells of jargon. You can translate to the meaningful. How do you improvise and create new meanings for an audience? I’m fiddling with my hermetic Lacanian equations and formulations, trying to distill, and then I want to translate my conclusions into some kind of everyday language that doesn’t rely on jargon or theory or clinical notions.

Continue reading “Dubious Undertakings”

Fording a New Stream: To ape, he or she aped, I’m aping

Posted on by Marc Honea

I’ve found a new stream and invite any and all to play in it.

Yesterday, I was remembering a conversation I had with a teacher a number of years ago and thinking about using it as the basis of a possible article or essay entitled something like Ideology, Theory, and Creative Intuition. Juicy title, eh? I will withold for the present the subject of this conversation (wait and read the article; means I have to really write it), but I can say that as I was recollecting it and rehearsing it and trying to mine it for its usefulness in helping me compose the essay, I had the thought: this conversation was truly one of the defining moments in my career as an intellectual and artistic ape. And this observation (more like a confession, really) began to feel as pertinent to the topic I was contemplating as the remembered conversation itself because I was thinking about ideology, theory, and creative intuition not in any general sense, but as they operate in the theatre.

Continue reading “Fording a New Stream: To ape, he or she aped, I’m aping”

GHP Theatre Journal, begun on:

Posted on by Marc Honea

June 10

I’ll be involved in creating a theatre piece using collective creation methods, so I thought I would try and keep a log for the curious.

I fear my manner of expression will be sparse, but I will try to give useful information.

What you should know going in. We always start from scratch. Usually we begin with one simple idea which will have the power, we hope, to prompt the kids into explorations and investigations. The material of our piece grows out of what the kids bring in based on this first “lead.” This year it’s the word grace. Continue reading “GHP Theatre Journal, begun on:”