Process: I have been spending time reading,
watching things online, talking to everyone I know about emergence and the
“meaning” of art. I have one regularly scheduled Skype meeting with Mark each
week. I have a regularly scheduled studio time each week. I go into my garage
and sit and walk around it and think. But I am feeling incredibly isolated, not
having a trusted group of players to figure things out with. So, instead of
lamenting, I am just going with that reality. My performance partner Nancy and
I will get together several times during the last week of March and first week
of April. Then the four performances in the garage in April will be the actual creation
process. This will be the playtime with a group to work things out. And this
kind of fast track process – just teach performers the structure and the rules
- is what I will do for SWARM with Troika Ranch so it is perfect practice. For
this stage I have to remind myself that it’s ok to be this much in process in
front of an audience. I have to be bold with myself, unafraid.
Research topics: improvisation/scores, non-traditional
performance space, audience participation, swarm and emergent behavior,
intervention from an outside entity, visual scores (one image/object=one
performer response), how to develop a structured improvisation over time to
create a “weird-logic-drama” that feels wholly complete, releasing control of
composition – process reveals meaning, no singular meaning but instead multiple
interpretations from within a certain realm, audience as part of composition
and interaction, use of “media personality” as creative inspiration
(intervention) to explicitly translate what I think is happening to space, time
and body in and from the digitally dominant world.
Here are
some prominent inspirations:
Forced
Entertainment – It
is their overarching approach to what I would call rigorous play that feels
connected to where I am right now. They do what I would call
artistic-archeology meaning they don’t know what they are looking for but they
know how to find it (to quote Jerome Robbins). They also believe that the
“story” of a work is in what is happening now right here in front of you, it’s
the audience’s job to their own. And they are interested in presenting “real”
rather than “pretend”, true exhaustion of a player or true discomfort, etc. I
am also searching for a way to confidently connect with humor in my work. And I
know I need to push my garage stuff way further out. It’s too safe and easy
right now.
Susan
Rethorst – There
are so many aspects of Susan’s thinking about dance, her general philosophy,
that I have already been thinking about but are coming into my work in a more
prominent way now; namely that embedding meaning into a work in unnecessary. And
that place has an affect/effect on people, related to my choosing the garage as
site. Her defense of the “body’s mind” is inspiring to me. She believes that we
don’t need language to “explain” dance. It is itself. We feel it but don’t need
to describe it to understand it. Making a dance that is not about something but
that is something! Susan has me thinking about how my life has been created in
relation to my work. It’s only now that I feel a kind of membrane between my
“regular” life and my “artist” life right now. But that the membrane is a boundary
but also a conduit, a filter, where each life can be discreet but the membrane lets there be seepage from one into the other.
Signa – Seven Tales of Misery (2006) is a
piece I saw using audience interaction that had great impact on me. Re-examining
my experience with this piece is research into keeping an interactive audience
engaged and flowing through a dramatic experience. It also reminds me of the
mystery of being an audience member. Asking yourself how to get in, how to let
it in.
The piece of
saw of Signa’s was the result of a group of actors spending a month together
living in the many stories, many roomed house where the performance happened.
During that month they developed the story and the characters for the
performance. There was no script but instead each performer knew their own
story and how they related to every other character in the performance and
could improvise conversation with other performers and with the audience who
was free to simply roam around the environment and join in any activities they
happened upon. There was a short ritual when we came in telling us how to behave
and giving a little back-story.
SWARM - a jumping off point for reading
about swarm behavior: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behaviour
Emergent
Behavior – general
inspiration on how to set up these systems: http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/emergent-behavior, http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL82C5FC07758915B0,
Swarming and emergent
behavior are the principles by which Troika Ranch is constructing its next
major work. For the work I am doing now, I am looking at crowd behavior in a
really basic way. What happens when you put people in a confined space, that
they know is a “performance” and give them simple rules or tasks to follow? It
is the behavior of the audience, how they act while following or not following
the rules that will determine the organization of the materials in the piece.
Garage
Series – the
process of me trying to work these things out in real time and real space. Each
event will be documented and analyzed.
