Drunk with power from my new-found ability to post, I thought it might be fun to start another list. For this one, assume that Lacuna will meet on a recurring basis for two hours per “gathering”. Propose a topic that you think would be valuable and interesting for one or more of these gatherings. As long as we are speculating wildly, you may as well include who you believe should facilitate the topic. While volunteering yourself certainly increases the likelyhood that the event will actually transpire, it is by no means necessary.
Farce
I’m opening a space in which I want us to think about Farce. Part of this is my attempt to pick brains as I prepare for this summer. I want to offer something to the GHP Theatre minors called Farce Factory, an opportunity to write and produce short (and why not as short as five minutes) farces. My wager is that the students will have an appreciation of farce as a structure, and will “know it when they see it,” but they will lack an understaning of how difficult it is to construct. I could, in fact, propose that the ability to construct farce is on its way out as an imaginative capacity. If this is true, can it be resurrected? Or am I just going through the middle-aged pining for some non-existent golden age? Am I just focusing on my own agalma by recognizing something in my own appreciation for farce? Continue reading “Farce”
Marc’s Repry
I’m reposting this from the email because I don’t want it to get lost in email history. It bears consideration and discussion here on the blog.
Marc says:
Noel knows I don’t know what I’m saying half the time, myself. And yet, I go on (Beckett). I cannot keep counsel (Shakespeare). Noel, you complete me (Cruise). You find the meaning I lack.
So one way for me to begin working on an idea is to propose an image which prompts a question. So these are questions prompted quite a while ago by local places and other such things. So listen, everybody, new work can grow out of seeing images and asking questions:
Why would an architecture student insist on designing nothing but impossible playgrounds? Continue reading “Marc’s Repry”
The original e-mail, once more…
Below is the first idle e-mail I sent to Dale and requested he distribute when I finally realized I had a crush on the Auntie Mame cast. I want to put it on the blog because it contains a very sober and simple expression of desires. It’s what’s real for me. Please remember the first e-mail as we go off on our tangents and to our extremes. For me it’s all sharing and it’s all performance and it’s all attempts to go to the extremes of thought and gesture to see what’s there. It’s how I play. But the seed of the group idea is in the text of the e-mail. That’s very real and realizable and doesn’t contradict anyone’s convictions (I hope). So I wrote this:
Dale knows I have a propensity for writing manic e-mails during my morning witching hour–you know: that period of caffeine fueled euphoria during which we believe our own press and that all things are possible; so I sent this to him first for comment and judicious distribution.
And now, if you are not put off by self-consciously baroque syntax, please continue and read the pitch. Continue reading “The original e-mail, once more…”
Marc’s handbook
In some other comment, Marc has mentioned the handbook he put together for his GHP students. I’ve been reading through it, it’s more like a textbook!, and beginning to work with him to edit it into a web-based document for our use. The more I read, the more excited I get about our potential as a theatre collaborative. Continue reading “Marc’s handbook”
Don’t dream it, be-e it…some short performances around the question of how to stage the Rocky Horror (Picture) Show
You can do the script (which I’ve never read) and let it inspire your decisions. But how can you be free from the film version? How could you be free from the film if you decided to do The Sound of Music?
RHPS is an interesting case since the fans tend to know every frame of the movie. And part of being a fan is being able to stage perfect lip-syncable facsimiles which run in tandem with the screen action. Any fan, therefore, could direct a great production if reproducing the film is the goal. And as a goal, why not?
Can you do an updated version? Continue reading “Don’t dream it, be-e it…some short performances around the question of how to stage the Rocky Horror (Picture) Show”
An example of what I hope to get out of Lacuna
I’ve been asked to share an ensemble experience I had as it relates to Lacuna. In 1997, we were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was the second time I had directed this play, and I wanted to try something very different. I had brainstormed with Marc some ideas about the play that I had, and had settled on doing it in a kind of environmental setting. In fact, we moved the audience around: they started in nice, neat rows for the Athens scenes, but when we moved to the wild and woolly woods, we asked members of the audience to move their chairs out into the woods with us: they could chose where to put their seats anywhere in the oval-shaped playing area.
Before we began working on the script itself, we spent a couple of weeks with Marc trying to teach us some of his weird stuff, some of which sunk in and we were able to use. I taught ways to approach and play Shakespearean text. Everybody participated. We had a large cast, ages nine to 40+, and everyone learned what was being taught, weird or not. Continue reading “An example of what I hope to get out of Lacuna”
There’s this script, see…
Go to the comments and list plays you think Lacuna could/should do. (See the post below for kinds of theatre events you’d like to see us do.)
So what we’re going to do is…
What are we going to perform? What kinds of things would it be possible to offer audiences? Go to the comments and list to your heart’s content. Make this list kinds of performances. See the post above for specific scripts you’d like to tackle.
Show, Recollect, Recapitulate
In an effort to clog the arteries with even more pretentious pablum, I thought I’d suggest a way to think about both this blog and our meetings. I want to tempt you to think of them both as sites for creative play and performance. At Governor’s Honors we have developed a rehearsal process for creating original work which reflects, in part, my experiences working with experimental groups in Washington, DC, eons ago. And those experiences and methods, to embed footnotes in the text, were inspired by my intellectual mentor Herbert Blau, who simply asserted–and I risk a triteness by encapsulating–the notion of thought and performance being the same thing.
So at GHP we rehearse by both performing what we are thinking and thinking about what we are performing (by then performing it as we are continuing to think it). And those of you familiar with Gödel, Escher, and Bach will detect a use of recursive and imbedded loops leading, we can only hope, to the possibility of beauty and something which smacks of mind and art. And so the thought continues to perform in the turning over and over (and the lacuna is the widening gyre?–sure, why not).
At GHP we meet and we show one another what we want to
- show (as I hope we will do at our meetings and on this blog),–and showing may just mean telling in many cases–then we take some time to
- recollect what happened during that span of time while we were showing (after a meeting, in our case, or after reading something in a blog), and then we
- recapitulate what we remember, to share it and offer it as possible material for future work (rather than one person taking “minutes” or documenting what happens at a meeting, everyone could create accounts of what happened, emphasing what struck them as interesting or important and post those accounts on the blog). This may be a way for the “cross pollinating” to occur without us risking the spread of anything which could compromise our health.