Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Research Explanations


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.

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