Just follow the thread

So what’s up with lacunagroup at present? The group is all about it’s blog threads. Wherever they lead, that’s what we’re doing. As always, we are interested in an active and collaborative creative process. The real work of lacunagroup is as much in the thread as anywhere else. The work goes forward as the thread goes forward. Cryptic, isn’t it?

If you read through comments in the previous post, you’ll follow, in part, the beginnings of a film project. Take a look. The work will be carried forward on this blog as well as in cameras and editing. Please collaborate if you find it interesting. The blog exists for you to make of the work what you will.

Let me throw out another possibility for a project before I talk myself into seeing it as irrelevant. Consider it another start for some kind of collaborative exploration which could turn into something beyond the blog or not. lacunagroup, I hear tell, on occasion, tries to find its way toward working with performances.

A slight, practically inconsequential personal association to autumn. Too general and indistinct to be a memory. What is it, then? Images to accompany a feeling of warm containment. My brother taught me how to throw a spiral during the Thanksgiving holidays one year. Then I was inside watching one of those Hannah-Barbera animated versions of a classic book which always seemed to be on tv during Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Between those two sets of sensations fall all of autumn, for me. And all of Winter, too, actually.

So I may spend some of my time on the blog working with this bit of stuff (bit of fluff?). In what way? Who knows? And it is available for anyone else who might want to take it somewhere. My interest is in using the material for any and all manner of ways to step off into experimentation. Still cryptic? Remember, we may not necessarily know what we’re after at the outset. And once someone does know something, it becomes one aspect now maybe feeding or inspiring other gestures. Or not. My hope is that the form things begin to take may be new and challenging.

Why this bit of material as a starting place? Exactly. Good question. And so it begins. I want to investigate it because it’s always there, particularly as the weather changes. Something, too, about it being apolitical and unspecific. Achieving a spiral was like learning to carry out a magic act and transform physical laws. Male bonding, of course. Initiation. Being home. My brother called me “Flash,” and I remember always laughing uncontrollably. The containment of autumn related to the containment present before sleep. Preference for autumn and winter as depressive. Others are free to take it up in some way. Or I may get encouraged to set it aside as my interests drift into something else emerging on the thread.

what why where when

Re-reading our history through posts, I was embarrassed over how savagely I attempted to will something into being through nothing more than sentence after pretentious sentence. I can now admit to myself and to others: not the way to go. I honked a few rhetorical horns no better than the most untalented trained seal, thinking to build through impressive stunts. So, chagrined and wanting to make an end, here’s my last version of what I think lacunagroup could be. It doesn’t involve building or actually undertaking anything. Allow me to devote a few more pretentious sentences to this task; then that voice is done. Imagine: out in the middle of nowhere (let’s face it–we are) is this thread of thought that at times seems to give shape to notions of theatre and performance, art and engagement, creativity and ambivalence. (Why theatre? We start from our immersion in the history we have in common. I know I can’t drop an obsession overnight.) This thread unspools anonymously, perhaps, and reaches out to notions and places one is hard pressed to imagine being reached, especially in the middle of nowhere (let’s face it–we are). The thread might go from the discursive to the playful and on toward the outrageous, returning at times to the ruminative, here local, there global, staging a few abrasive associations, and never forgetting to engineer the occasional irony or equivocation. The thread is a kind of work, or (better) a working-through, spinning out as artful performance. My hope is that the actual thread will make its start by reacting against this post…