a theatre collaborative
Not exactly Lacuna Group material, but I had to park this somewhere. Thanks!
Back in the summer, I short-circuited the play-acting we were doing in The Art of Being Off-Task by claiming that I had found the answer to the problem.
I coyly held out on the group till I was back in town, but I still want to hold back, in a way. What I found was a Chicago performance troupe called the Neo-Futurists, the New York version of whose show Too Much Light (Makes the Baby Go Blind) Jobie had described to me. I ordered two books of their scripts and liked very much what I saw. In fact, my much-derided nude turn in Off-Task was a response to having read those scripts.
When the Honeas came to pick up Galen at GHP, I gave Marc the books of scripts for his perusal. If he’s willing, I’d like to diffuse (defuse) the Master thing and ask him to describe the Neo-Futurists’ work and whether he thinks it might be something we could explore.
I’m not trying to derail the progress of the scene breakdown. I was cleaning a room and got distracted. Maybe this is more appropriate for the Lichtenbergian site since it represents divided attention; I don’t know. It does touch on theatre art, however, so…
I wrote a speculative little thing a while ago in which I tried, yet again, to synthesize two of my interests: performance and psychoanalysis. Yes, I know; I’m pretty predictable, but don’t begin chanting the Te Dium just yet. And no pained sideways glances. Have a look at it and see what you make of it.
I’m not much interested in being asked questions beginning with What did you mean by…. or entertaining editorial observations; as exposition and improvisation, it is what it is. Rather,I think there are occasional passages I’m quite proud of because of the way they articulate some pretty arcane Lacan concepts in everyday language. Also, I want to inspire new thinking on performance issues. To my mind, nothing I’ve offered is shattering original, just another stirring up of the familiar into a slightly unfamiliar brew.
Useful for Coriolanus? Not a bad question. It’s not my agenda in encouraging you to read it, but if it inspires, why not. Too eccentric? We can only hope.
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…”
Let me try to lay out the structures for improvisation and then, afterwards, offer some variations and comments.
For two performers: A and B are the participants. B’s constant objective is to question A with some form of: What do you want of me? A has the opportunity to make any demands of B he or she wishes. B is to comply willingly. A decides when this first phase is complete. In the next phase, A’s objective is to ask of B: What do you want of me? B, then, has the opportunity to demand anything of A. B decides when this phase is complete.
That’s it. It is meant to be simple and lean. The intrigue lies in how the exercise is taken up by the participants and in the variations possible. Before exploring variations, have participants simply execute the exercise as it appears above. Discourage questions beforehand; the participants should be referred back to the instructions as an answer to all of their questions.
Continue reading “What do you want of me?: Improvisation Suggestions”
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?
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.
Here’s a place for comments and discussion. Sharing is caring.
I am not dramatically educated. As a matter of fact, I am practically the opposite. I spent seven of the best years of my life earning an undergraduate degree at Ma Tech. Just the same, I fornicating (can I say that) LOVE theater. I love attending it, I REALLY love DOING it.
All that said, how did I come by that love? Continue reading “Why we play…”
