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.
I made a test foray yesterday and came up with the following working principles (They are not the last word, though. I’ve got to move through this from various directions.) So imagine a group doing improvisation using the following strategies (which they probably do not share with the audience at the outset):
1. Always start with nothing.
2. Choose at least one meaningless action.
3. If a sentence is involved in speaking or intention, it should be incomplete–missing parts of speech, faulty grammar, etc.
4. Choose things to be units and repeat them.
5. Frequently attempt to stimulate non-verbally.
One of the dissatisfying things about these steps is that they don’t get into the universe of meanings as much as I might like. What do I mean by that? As a way of answering I would ask: why do we like plays about families? Family matters bring us to a universe of meaning and chains of signification that we can all understand. And when the play “plays” with these formulas, it also is “playing” with the audience since the audience members, through the formulas and chains, are attached and implicated. Identifications have occured. So one of the challenges for me is to find formulas that allow performers to manipulate and re-arrange chains of meanings in a calculated way, and at a far simpler (more elemental?) level than you expect to encounter in a traditional play, and then ultimately to create a performance event which reveals new meanings at some level. Hmm.
Last note. I’m not a denying and defusing enemy of inspiration, talent, and miraculous creativity, bitterly driven by my awareness of lacking such things myself. I am in awe of people’s gifts and don’t want to de-mystify anything even if I somehow thought I could. I’m trying to find some new counter-intuitive avenues for doing things–roads even schleps like me could travel on, making an interesting contribution in the process.
You mean like a machine, which, when cranked, will produce meaning out of nothingness without risk from the performers? Because that’s what it sounds like.
I hope not. Which words in my post triggered your reaction? Aristotle differentiates between tuche and automaton: one-time-only contingent events and processes structured to assure repetition. Meaningful experiences are composed of both, we assume. Even improvisation works upon a certain number of mechanisms which guarantee certain meanings. In a Spolin exercise, if the object at play between the players is designated–let’s say it’s an onion–just the word “onion,” once deployed into the activity, is going to set certain determining mechanisms in motion. As a subject free to choose and act, I, if I am one of the improvisers, risk everything in relationship to the workings of the signifier “onion.” I choose to take “onion” into account; I risk taking “onion” into account and being caught between the layers of meaning which surround and compose the onion. (When I chose “onion” just now for my example, I took a risk. I was “lucky” in taking such a “risk” to find the onion-machine offering me its “layers” to use in improvising a response to your question.) To choose to encounter the object, even if only once (tuche), is to become entangled in a machine (automaton).
So to speak of formulas in improvisation, yes, I am speaking of deploying certain machines into the work…deliberately, and letting them do their work in order to help lead the improvisation to certain new, interesting and (I hope) reverberating areas. If anything, the risks involved are greater since the players might be carried by these mechanisms into new areas.
In what we’re trying to do, begin carried into new areas is not a risk, it is a goal. Or am I confused? Or overhopeful?
You are not confused. I mention the possibility of risk to assure you that the choices made by the performers are still the most important things even when exploring “formulas” or “structures.” I always want space opened up for X-the unknown to shine forth. “Risk,” too, means there is a possibility of failure, of things not working, so we are constantly in the position of evaluating the result. Which I like. A different challenge compared to plugging pleasant and entertaining people into a good-times-guaranteed script-machine and baby-sitting till plaudit time…
The thought of “risk” even makes me want to re-evaluate my stance with respect to the Wm. Blake’s Inn material. I was at West Ga. library yesterday and on the new books shelf was a book about current trends in installation art that revolve around memory and the need for memorialization. Just looking at some of the photographs in this book got me excited; there were some very provocative staged images. It simply reminded me that anything is possible, that exploration and the search for truly compelling or sublime statements is worth the “risk.” Sweet and knowable is fine if it is not pursued to be safe. But where might the mysteries lie as we examine the Blake material? What might we show? It’s exciting to think about…