Lacuna Group|blog

present: Jeff B, Dale, Marc (Barb was sick, Jeff A in performance)

Dale had brought an excerpt from a new play, Moustache Guys, by Michael Lew. (note: apparently it’s a one act, so we might want to check it out.) We read through it, and found it quite delightful in a Pythonesque way.

Dale had also printed out a screenshot of a bit of an English periodical, Notes and Queries, this one from April 1, 1905 [editor’s note: Heavens, what serendipity, and no one noticed!].

AUTHORS AND THEIR FIRST BOOKS, I am anxious to obtain particulars of the adventures and misadventures of authors with their first books, and the names of both. Many facts and much fiction surround the subject, and my object is to get at the truth. Any information will be received gratefully. If agreeable, please write direct to

S. J. ADAIR FITZ-GERALD

9, Brunswick Square, W.C.

Marc wanted to talk about the elephant in the room: the tension he felt between narrative and non-narrative structures as development issues. Dale said that it was a non-elephant, explaining with the performance chart that as far as he could envision, they would need both: nuggets of narrative bits (Old Man Wind, Origin of the Bear, Bear and Rabbit, etc.) afloat in a non-narrative stream.

Dale said the elephant in the room for him was trying to make the work nearly confessional in nature, that is, whenever the piece was dealing with the difficulties of creating, he wanted the results to be intensely personal revelations about those issues.

We began to work. (Dale threatened to repeat the nude performance piece if the work was not interesting.)

Dale wants Jeff B to teach at least one of the bear songs in Origin of the Bear. He promised to work on those. We talked about ritual and what that might mean for the piece. Dale suggested that at least one ritual was required to keep the giraffes out.

We began to define the Giraffe as Other, Judge, a threat, the teacher looking over your shoulder. Marc began writing in his journal, and Jeff became the Giraffe looking over shoulder. Marc began musing out loud about the problems with that, and Dale claimed it as an image: THE GIRAFFE WHO LOOKS OVER YOUR SHOULDER. We played with the image for a while.

The question of The Wall came up: what is the Wall? We began to define the different ways The Wall resonated in our own work. Those should become some of the non-narrative stream.

Work flagged. Dale removed his shirt. Marc began to read Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book,” interweaving it with the “Authors and Their First Books” plus some Edwardian textual claptrap from Notes and Queries. Dale and Jeff picked up an excerpt from Myth, Ritual, and Religion (from ForgottenBooks.org) and added that to the riff. We worked on that for an extended period.

Debriefing, we decided to play with the narrative bits next week and concentrate for a session on telling a story and all the staging that requires.

NEXT: APR 8, 6:30, NSOD

• TEXTS: bear pieces
• PATHS: Vocal Sequence; Contact Improv; Story Theatre; other
• HOMEWORK:
  • Look over Old Man Wind (doc), Origin of the Bear (pdf), and Bear & Rabbit (pdf)

This post probably won’t go up until Saturday, since I’m heading to Valdosta today (Thursday) and I left my notebook at home.

If we’d like to create the post in comments, feel free!

present: Barbara, Jeff B., Marc, Dale, Edward

We began with an intro to simple contact improv, i.e., hand-to-hand weight sharing. The idea is that the two people give and receive weight in a deliberate, fluid, and improvisatory manner.

Marc and Barbara gave a reading of Jeff’s adaptation of Chekhov’s one act, “The Bear.” This is the South Park version of the play: foul-mouthed, coarse, and very funny. It has a raucous energy that translates for the 21st century audience the tensions involved in the original. The updated social references were completely analogous and effective.

We discussed how we might include this in the performance piece. Barbara suggested we could break it up into bits and thread it through the evening. Dale was leaning more towards finding a way to do the thing whole.

We discussed our developing axis of Bear <—> Giraffe. Bear = totem, powerful, giving <—> Giraffe = unknown force outside, looking in, vaguely ominous, somehow wants to take. The absolute absurdity [technical term] of the alignment appealed to everyone.

Marc referenced an article (?) called “Becoming Animal,” which led into a discussion of Cherokee shapeshifting, shamanism, and ceremonies attached to those.

Discussion followed about structuring the evening, again. (Actually, several such discussions threaded throughout.) Jeff added childhood/adulthood/childhood to our layers of meaning on the chart. Marc had run the giraffe piece through the translator a couple of times. Dale discussed how we might establish our several texts at the beginning, then cycle back through the distorted versions.

Marc began to talk about the process of generating “images” (and our need to do so) that we could collect and then assemble as we see fit. Dale said he would create 5×8 cards with storyboard frames and text areas for us to record these images so we’d have handy access to them.

As an illustration, Marc placed the three poster printouts of part-2 [pdf] in a triangle on the floor and suggested that someone sitting in the triangle, puzzling over the text, while perhaps “We’re Queer” [pdf] or “We’re Frauds” is being performed elsewhere on the stage, would be an interesting image.

Jeff and Barbara departed, Edward arrived.

Dale jumped into a Vocal Sequence session with the line “Line of flight alerts you like all good past phrases do. But back” (from part-2). Out of his exploration, the same image stood out: drawing a line with a finger on “line of flight,” then returning to box in “good past phrases” with a series of three boxes, then running backwards on “But back.”

There was also a moment of humor when he turned “But back” into a simple “Butt. Back.” while indicating each in turn.

We discussed further use of the part-2 text. Marc stood in the center. Dale approached him and placed his hand on Marc’s chest with the line “Your hand resting on the vibrations.” He then moved around Marc, placing his hand on Marc’s back, sides, exploring lines like “Find North. Find South. Find East. Saying life is not always linear.”

Marc responded with “It was some bespectacled guy in a bow tie and a deep voice,” and then continued with “he said/she said” quotes from the text.

They both kept working, Marc remaining disengaged while Dale continued to seek. Dale played with lines pertaining to listening, the radio, father. Marc played with lines pertaining to father/”she.” It ended when Dale, who had been circling Marc, seeking the source of the sound/father, ended behind him; Marc repeated “Your hand resting on the vibrations,” and Dale reached over his shoulder and placed his hand on Marc’s chest. In this quasi-embrace, they stopped.

NEXT: MAR. 18, 6:30, NSOD

• TEXTS: giraffe piece, bear pieces
• PATHS: Vocal Sequence; Contact Improv
• HOMEWORK:
  • ???

present: Jeff B., Barbara, Dale, Marc, and eventually Edward

Dale brought and posted the Invocation he wrote a couple of years ago, imploring our patron saint, Edward D. Wood, to grant us delusion and/or success in our efforts.

Marc plunged right in with the giraffe piece: reading/reacting to the text, chanting it, memorizing it, working through some Vocal Sequence stuff.

Eventually Jeff joined in, taking the piece in the direction of an interrogation, or at least a questioning. Marc keeps intoning, responding.

Jeff asked about a note Dale had scribbled on a copy: “This needs to be a video.” Dale said he thinks that the original graphics could be used to create a creepy video to illustrate a soothing, yet creepy, voice reading the piece.

(Here are the original graphics:

Marc had moment where he was riffing on the two squares line where the word square turned into squeer, which would link nicely into the We’re Queer routine.

The line “Put your finger on…” became important. Marc obeyed the “Pause and assist” line and put Barbara’s and Dale’s fingers on their heads. Fingers became giraffe horns, numbers.

From “Guide the students in answering the seven questions,” Dale created an ad hoc list of seven questions:

1. Why wasn’t it there before?
2. When?
3. Are you naked there?
4. Is it gone?
5. What do you see?
6. How many giraffes are looking over the fence?
7. What have you done?

These became part of the texture of the performance.

Jeff and Marc entered into a mirror exercise while Barbara picked up the text. Dale continued making notes and occasionally throwing out one of the seven questions.

It then became a kind of fugal exercise with everyone overlapping questions, Projecting Atmosphere, making connections, finding none…

Jeff picked up Dale’s draft of We’re Frauds and somehow we exited the giraffe piece and looked over that text for a moment.

Then we debriefed:

• sense of threat; Dale saw a hooded figure strapped to a chair in a spotlight; the interrogation focusing on the giraffe questions; we dicussed that at some length
• Dale talked about the ominous quality he found in the original math worksheet, especially in the “Pause and assist” line.
• Marc liked the moment when near the end Dale stood and once more enumerated the seven questions; the audience should be anxious that we’re going to ask them these impossible questions
• Marc pointed out the “sound machine” we worked ourselves into at one point
• Dale liked the moment when Jeff and Barbara were “doing’ animals and the ambiguity of giraffe/elephant became part of the sense of unease at one point

At that point Edward Canada joined us. We began to fill him in on everything-he-needed-to-know. The nude performance piece came up. Despite Dale’s urging, Jeff refused to recap what he and Kevin had worked on previously. Dale performed the piece instead.

Jeff and Barbara made their exit; Dale and Marc continued to feed Edward information. Edward make a couple of salient suggestions for the graph: the role of alcohol (ritual/music/entheogenic substances) in releasing the artist from “the box” and into the flow of creativity; sex as a prime motivator.

Marc suggested that next week we play again, but then deliberately stop and create one-minute mini-performances based on what we’ve played with.

NEXT: MAR. 11, 6:30, NSOD

• TEXTS: giraffe piece, new bear piece
• PATHS: Vocal Sequence; Contact Improv
• HOMEWORK:
  • (Neo-Futurist scripts, always)
  • material based on The List (from the 2/11 work session)
  • Montage assignment based on Structuring Drama Work

present: Dale, Jeff B., Barbara, Kevin

After some afternoon scrambling to meet some other day, some other time, we ended back at our usual time and place.

We warmed up with the Vocal Sequence, using phrases from Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to her book.” [doc]

Then we explained what we were up to to Kevin, who has been unavailable on Wednesday nights. After some general discussion, Dale zipped home to print out the Bear & Rabbit tale that Jeff had posted in comments for last week’s session, and to bring the roll of white butcher paper.

Dale then shared an idea he had about “The Boy who was afraid of nothing.” He filled the floor with stretches of the white paper, then drew a boy/puppet on a piece. Nice beginning. He needed a middle, something with the idea of the boy wanting to learn to be afraid, perhaps a signpost figure who offers to teach him, ending up in his bed waiting for the promised vision. Perhaps a bear, a wolf, appear, and then… “There arose from beneath his bed a white, terrifying figure: a single white sheet. ‘What are you?’ stammered the boy, frightened to his core. ‘I am a blank sheet of paper,’ said the figure. ‘Fill me with something worthy.’ Scream. Blackout.”

Everyone else, in trying to understand what Dale was up to, played with paper, creating characters. Dale suggested that this story could be used near the opening as part of our Fear factor.

We then played with the Bear & Rabbit tale [pdf]. Jeff began to narrate and the rest of us jumped in Story Theatre style. We played it in a fairly cartoonish manner, until we got to the line where Buzzard takes the wounded Rabbit into a closed room. At the line “But soon the Rabbit is heard screaming in agony,” Dale (playing Rabbit) gave it his best shot, actually screaming in agony. The rest of the story continued in its cheery manner, right up until the final reveal.

We liked the direction it took. We discussed having the Buzzard twist remnants of the white paper into bones and fur for the reveal.

As a piece, it would fit into our material about self-delusion/hubris. Dale asked for everyone to write down a quick statement about something they were defeated by, or were afraid to attempt for fear of being “destroyed” by it, to be used in a quick montage to follow the Bear & Rabbit tale.

At that point it was time to quit.

NEXT: FEB. 25, 6:30, NSOD

• TEXTS: Old Man Wind [doc]; Bear & Rabbit [pdf]; new Bear material; Dale’s giraffe piece, nude performance piece
• PATHS: Vocal Sequence; Montage exercise; Contact Improv
• HOMEWORK:
  • (Neo-Futurist scripts, always)
  • material based on The List
  • keep bringing in text, either randomly selected from one’s own library, or some online library like Forgotten Books; multiple sources OK; we’re dumping these in our box for use… somehow
  • Montage assignment based on Structuring Drama Work

present: Marc, Jeff B, Barbara, Dale

We spent almost the entire evening looking over Dale’s graphic display of material [pdf] and discussing it and adding to it.

Across the top is a five-minute increment timeline. That’s for later use.

Under that is a line across the width of the poster. It is labeled with the steps of the Hero’s Journey:

1. Separation
2. Initiation
3. Return

…along with a small box with all the steps outlined by Campbell.

At the bottom of the poster is another line, this one with the steps of the creative process, as pulled together by Dale from various frameworks:

1. Conception (having the idea)
2. Ideation (generating connecting ideas/material)
3. Incubation (mulling it over, backing off the problem, letting ideas germinate)
4. Parturition (creating the work from the results)
5. Verification (performance, publication, evaluation, etc.)

Dale had already put several boxes on there. He explained that they were not tied to the timeline in any way, they were just there to remind us that we had generated the material, and that we could then connect the bits any way we saw fit.

The Montage was there, with other boxes linked to it labeled “minimonologs,” which represent the paragraph-like musings we all seemed to generate last week when we first tried the Montage gesture.

There were the three versions of Old Man Wind as we discussed them last week.

In the center was the big label FEAR, with a box about Grizzly Man/self-delusion. That led to the identification of bears as an image we might want to have recur throughout. In Grizzly Man’s case, the bears represent the treachery of our material, our creative efforts, if we allow our self-delusions to ever disregard their dangerous nature. They will devour us.

Jeff was going to look in his Big Myth to pull out further material with bears. (2/12: he has done so.)

We talked then about the creative process and brainstormed some ideas we thought could be included as we generate work:

• use William Blake’s Inn as a throughline of the Hero’s Journey, since it’s a major completed work and Dale has been through the entire process with it; possible performance of selections; the Return in this case being the Rejection of the Gift
• Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book,” which Dale then extrapolated with Barbara’s fear that she’s the “non-creative” one in the group: if Barb (or whoever) were to write a letter to her unwritten, unplanned, unconceived novel…
• a bystander who sat over to the side during the performance and who, while we nattered on about the creative process, actually wrote something
• image of self as a creative person [Marc worrying about creating/sustaining that image]; the impostor syndrome; technology-enabled creative personae [?might need explanation]
• the more mediums the better: the polymath in all of us
• creativity conference/seminar as framework for the evening
• accolades from the spouses
• our work on a “spectacle” for the Centre/Park event
• linked from FEAR in the center:
  • uninteresting
  • acceptance?
  • authority?
• Dale as Creativity Guru/Shadow [shadow?]
• “What are we avoiding?”
• “Other people need to fail if I am to succeed…”
• Reactions (linked to Verification in the creative process line)
• “What were you expecting?”
• FRAUD
• loose connection to reality
• “abortive attempts”
• The Grand Delusion–Bliss
• self-flagellation
• rolls of paper
• “Where’s the present?” as in “we talk about how to wrap the present, how big a box to put it in, when to give it…” but…
• “it’s not me”
• audience indifference
• spite

We forgot to include, but I will here:

• successive approximation

So. Now.

We use this beginning of a list (I’ll mark it up on the graphic and reprint it) and start to generate material. Then we can start figuring out how to combine it, line it up, stage it, etc., etc., etc.

NEXT: FEB. 18, 6:30, NSOD

• TEXTS: Old Man Wind [doc]; new Bear material; Dale’s giraffe piece, nude performance piece
• PATHS: Vocal Sequence; Montage exercise; Contact Improv
• HOMEWORK:
  • (Neo-Futurist scripts, always)
  • material based on The List
  • keep bringing in text, either randomly selected from one’s own library, or some online library like Forgotten Books; multiple sources OK; we’re dumping these in our box for use… somehow
  • Montage assignment based on Structuring Drama Work

present: Dale, Marc, Jeff B, Barbara

We warmed up with the Vocal Sequence, all independently. As agreed upon, we faded out and Marc took the center, beginning a Quick Pass exercise. After several passes, the action was back to Marc, and Dale joined him in the center, where they paired up to continue the Vocal Sequence, with a little Contact Improv thrown in.

After a few minutes of that, Marc called a halt so we could debrief what he and Dale had done. [comments in the comments, please!] Marc also read out a list of interventions or responses for that kind of work from a handout he had developed for his classes at GHP. You can download a copy of that handout here: vocal-sequence-response-interventions [pdf].

Then Dale asked us to work on the Montage exercise. Everyone took a few minutes to write down five items of some creative effort of theirs, either a finished piece, or something they’ve been working on, or something they’d like to work on. Then we read them out loud around the circle.

There was actually some reticence, if not resistance, to this basic idea. We talked about the anxiety of “confessing” that we’re creative, of unashamedly claiming to be creative. What if we’re self-deluded? is the worry. However, as Dale pointed out, if we’re doing a piece on being a creative person in a noncreative place, then that paranoia is part of the process we need to explicate.

Also, to some extent we as artists must delude ourselves into thinking that what we’re working on it worthwhile, that it is “good” in some meaningful way. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have the courage to continue. That delusion is also worth examining. Jeff and Marc referred to the Lichtenbergian airing of Grizzly Man, with the delusion of that character ending with his being destroyed by those delusions. An idea worth exploring.

The idea behind the Montage exercise was that we could then take these items and turn them into a choral montage of creative bits, a barrage of ideas that the audience could then sort through as we began to reference some of them in other bits in the performance piece. We tried it once, but then we ran out of time. Dale went over to the other studio to help spot a ballet lift, and by the time he got back, we were done.

We did not get to two new texts that Dale had written, one he called the “giraffe piece,” and the infamous “nude performance” piece.

NEXT: FEB. 11 6:30, NSOD

• TEXTS: Old Man Wind [doc]; Dale’s giraffe piece, nude performance piece
• PATHS: Vocal Sequence; Montage exercise; Contact Improv
• HOMEWORK:
  • (Neo-Futurist scripts, always)
  • keep bringing in text, either randomly selected from one’s own library, or some online library like Forgotten Books; multiple sources OK; we’re dumping these in our box for use… somehow
  • Montage assignment based on Structuring Drama Work

present: Jeff B, Marc, Dale

After a slow start, Dale read a spam email he had received, a lonely-hearts letter from a young Russian woman. It didn’t produce any sparks.

Indeed, we really resisted working at all for a long time. Jeff read Dale’s “341 poem” while Marc perused some of Jeff’s Native American myth poem. Then Jeff asked Dale to read the text.

Dale performed page 14 from Jeff’s work, the Chipmunk monolog, by grabbing a scarf from the tub in the corner and turning his hand into a puppet. This Muppetesque approach to a severely potty-mouthed rodent was very amusing.

Finally, Marc, who had been reading and marking Old Man Wind, read the whole section out loud.

Then he went back and marked the actual speaking parts (plus other phrases) and read those out loud.

These two readings immediately sparked discussion and ideas. Dale suggested that it would be interesting to hear the piece twice (in a putative performance), once in full, and then again in “flash” mode, with just flashes of words and a barrage of images/props/projections that hit the audience with the story but in such a skeletal format that they’re not sure they got it all. (Dale in fact suggested that we might do the skeletal one first, and only later give the audience the full treatment.)

In fact, the discussion continued, the piece actually had a lot to contribute to the putative performance’s putative theme of “creative people in a non-creative milieu.” We never got around to working through the montage experiment that Dale had structured, but he suggested that an audience would be intrigued to see a repeat of such a montage overlaid the end of the Old Man Wind section when he’s remaking the four boys into new forms.

Marc suggested (and these are barebones notes, to be filled out in comments):

• ritualized movement (Grotowski) which accompanies narrative, but does not necessarily elaborate or underline it
• (here’s the movement he described as an example:
• “unhinging one’s mind”: becoming a vessel for the text
• “fighting against the narrative”
• coming up with a “framework” for the evening’s work, like the YouTube above of Akropolis, in which a Romantic Polish poem involving encounters with Old Testament heroes is set within a concentration camp; not necessary for a successful evening, but something to be considered; a metaphor

Jeff talked about the underlying Native American concerns of the myth, the West as a darkening land=Death; the IronMan = the white man with his technological gifts; the self-sufficiency of Old Man Wind, who refuses IronMan’s offerings and relies instead on his own cultural artifacts; the children, unsalvageable after contact with IronMan, return to Earth.

We discussed an evening which could encompass a lot of the material we’ve generated so far and ways that might play out.

We resolved to keep playing and generating all kinds of material. Shape and show must come later.

NEXT: FEB. 4, 6:30, NSOD

• TEXTS: Old Man Wind [doc]
• PATHS: Vocal Sequence; Montage episode
• HOMEWORK:
  • (Neo-Futurist scripts, always)
  • keep bringing in text, either randomly selected from one’s own library, or some online library like Forgotten Books; multiple sources OK; we’re dumping these in our box for use… somehow
  • Montage assignment based on Structuring Drama Work