Group Meeting
I don’t want to promote a culture of conversation in a theatre class. But today, I really would like to move into work. We will split into groups and see what is happening. I got your emails and will be reading your responses and ways of opening yourselves into these texts and the possibility of the work. Of course, you will be exploring the possibility with your work and with your brain. Hopefully my emails will help guide and direct you. Nothing to read or write for next time. It’s time to really get on your feet and try to work so the combination of your physical engagement with what is starting to happen.
Directors’ fables again, with a week of work invested into thinking and working. The possibilities are so numerous. There are so many possibilities in heading, in taking a step, in dwelling in one aspect all the way.
CANDACE: The Stranger Consumed by the God
Slam poetry style reading and then a song. Forgive me if I fuck up.
Fear not the movement from the heaven above or the earth below, because the change is what we are.
[Instability.] Change is in the heavens. We are these changes.
Life will have its way. Change will come.
what do you know: Puscifier
[Change as stasis, the stillness inside of movement that is always still-moving and stillmoving and still moving. Continual movement that pretends to be still and pretends to let us be stable.]
Focus on Dionysus today, next week Pentheus.
RESPONSES: it was pretty gangster. Mix of old and new, contemporary and ancient, revival-esque, religious, melody and rhythm, A light coming forward, five directions, eight winters. I like the urgency – this needed to be said right here, right now. Sometimes with classical texts, we lose the urgency and the danger. Rise about the riddle of the unprepared. Get yourself ready for the evolution. Reminded me of a “happening.”
KRIS: A totally different Candace that speaks today. Reveals interest in a play in a different way. Fable becomes a form. In a form, in the rhythm, in the manipulation of sound, you articulate your desire and your interest in the play. Greek stuff was very musical – first Broadway. The form itself and the chorus – the serious money invested in the chorus, training the chorus, a huge training investment put on these young men who were dancing and singing. A lot of the playing that we only have on the text is in the quality of the performance, in the rhythm, in the movement. Maybe that’s how we really want to approach the Greeks – not through conceptual digestion of the concept of God or the question of “what the fuck,” and you can agonize on it intellectually and will not discover the magic of their theatre. Needs rhythmic condensation of formal possibilities. Think about the complicated word God. There is no harder difference (harder meaning most obvious, irreconcilable) than our concept and their concept of God. NO rationality, why, reason, guessing, no way that a human being can understand the motivation of Dionysus or take a moral lesson from that story. It’s not a Biblical story to teach you a lesson. It’s a sight of once wondering what the concept of God is.
Made “Hallelujah” sound unfamiliar; in that invocation lies already (the word made into form) is maybe the direction in which that concept of God becomes deconstructed and becomes unfamiliar and mysterious and impenetrable and we cannot stop having the desire to get there and see it closely – theatre as a place of focusing your wondering through the form itself. It’s a little condensation of multiple possibilities of theatre. It’s the seed of the word. Your second attempt immediately becomes working material.
CANDACE: for me as a director, telling a fable from memory, doesn’t work that way, so this is a way for me to find things. Playing with sounds and the sounds of different gods. It’s interesting to break it down.
KRIS: By the way, next time, move on and bring another version of the fable. There is an interesting piece of information that I will try to recover. There was no bigger scare for Christianity at one point in its development than the musical – the possibility of music – in liturgy. For the Pope, for the whole Church. In the way music and the Arabs/Greeks/tribes – the way music was wild and untamed and crazy was threatening to the very core of liturgy itself and of the way the Church wanted to see and promote the vision of Christ and order and harmony and the opposite visions of the world: Apollonian and Dionysian. Tamed order and organization versus wildness. In that historical incident and the church’s prohibition lies the rejection of the Dionysian aspect in the church and singing. It’s kind of connected to the concept of God and to the idea of religion as a restrictive and formative force (competing with dark demonic force), rather than the Greeks’ understanding of those forces as represented by the supernatural. The way the “amen” was sung in the Middle Ages before prohibited and the monks created music – before that change of aesthetic, that “amen” was a long phrase that unleashed a different voice of complex expression. The only comparison is the Qawwali music in
Aulos (two-horned instruments) were used in tragedy – perhaps two in a quarter-tone difference.
ANNE: Shapes taking shape, shaping up. Lights and shadows, a positive and negative jumble. Slowly he became aware of a sound. [The monster, the creature, the creation waking up – understanding itself as a body, as a thing separate and separated. Difference and sameness. Distance.]
RESPONSES: Like his own. He can’t find anyone. Tension – a pinch from throat to groin. The image of the metal table in an operating room – a smooth image and then the sound going away and coming back, the manipulation of a table. Taking the idea of breathing and trying to control it, any kind of transportive strong emotion – you forget how to breathe. Focus on the person you’re with and learn how to breathe again. The first logical thought of a creature who doesn’t know how to breathe yet would be how do I sound like someone else. Mimetic ability is one of the first things people do before they know how to think. It’s how they learn the world. The creature discovering textures and differentiating, an idea of becoming aware – the way you said it sounds like the way it feels to become aware. What does this trigger in you? How do you become responsive? A way of awakening your own imagination. I thought of the connection between body and sound, from when you’re small and you can use your sound to draw another body in. Beats making us want to move. Sound as physically affective. Before we communicate with words we communicate with sounds. NO articulation of meaning other than an emotional expression. Sounds are not necessarily words. Likeness in sounds in a way to communicate harmony with another person. Penetration from one to another – soul penetration, the travel of the spirit. Through mimicking in the sound. There is a whole science behind it. The way of possession – if you can speak like someone, you were possessed by that spirit already (Greeks). Imagery of an equilibrium of some kind regulated through sound – a switch in a finger – fingers pinching that rations out an intensity of moods – it’s unexplainable. Some kind of force, a mechanistic force, that makes things either at homeostasis or intense or less intense. Something mechanical – the words – a heart monitor. Self-discovery of one’s own body and hearing the heartbeat, toddlers discovering their tongue, a sense of discovering your own body as the same, sometimes tragically when its different. Imagine hearing your own heartbeat – how quiet and aware you would have to be. We don’t know what quiet is. When it is quiet, you can hear the blood in your veins. Afraid your heart will betray you to the predator. I got very scared – felt my heart starting to race because put myself in a position waking up as an adult in a hospital room and – just waking up and trying to figure things out. It’s very scary and nerve-wracking and if you had to do that – I would just imagine that if you survived, you would probably be able to tell someone exactly what happened to you every single second until you calmed down. As a kid you’re not supposed to know – waking up as an adult and having that humongous shock and having to remember the moment we’re born, for good reason – but what if you had to have that moment and had to remember it? A discovery process – an essential fear that the discovery process will take place but there isn’t much to go from, places you could go to. She pointed out in the now – plucking objects in space. We immediately interconnect objects with a story and create a narrative immediately – spooky, heavy, disturbing. When you reject verbs and even adjectives – you basically are not telling a story but giving the elements on which the story can be provided. It’s a very interesting. There is something very evocative about not giving the rest of the words that would make this world alive. The moment verbs come in, they move things. The connection between things is life itself – anytime you provide a verb, it articulates life, moves from stasis to action. IF it’s just a thing and there’s no connection to it – that scares you. Once the verbs come in, you can read action and life and it makes the world more comfortable and warmer. This world was cold that Anne created. But when verbs happen – you are creating warmth. Amazing about the imagery of birth and being able to remember is not the struggle to figure it out – there is nothing and then there is everything – texture, shape, and light – the visceral is all that he can process. Amazing pandora’s box. We can never feel that way – go to extremes in order to eradicate our need to explain things. Getting to a straight visceral place is exciting. Terrified of the creature – you’ve done something so unnatural and created a life – nothing like a new baby – you don’t know what capacity it can have. No idea how it will respond to logic, reality, reason. So many emotional responses. Suspense writing.
JOEL: The story of Tamora. The story from the Goths. No longer a queen, only a desperate mother trying to save her son. Connections – families – how do connections make meaning when they are treated so callously? Destined to remain a queen. Lavinia as a tool to destroy the name of Andronicus. Lavinia as a kind and generous gift. [Return, return, return – revolution as return – a wheel that cannot stop moving, much like the way god goes to man to god to man to death to life to death in the worlds of the Greek gods and Christianity – an unstoppable journey that cannot be quenched, removed, changed, shattered or fractured – can we remove this, can we stop this unstoppable force as it moves across the earth demanding sacrifice from each of us and giving only the illusion of life in its place. Should we stop it? Is stopping an illusion?]
RESPONSES: reading only names and active verbs. [So many verbs of travel – of supposed movement that is not movement, as there is no escape, no change, no way to remove oneself or stop the cycle.]
Silences required to do this process are meaningful, too. There is already a pace, an evolution, a form of this play that wants to be presented in this way of reading it. I liked the verbs – how it makes me feel. On a trivial level, the play is an enormous active movement with not much sense. Something in language and Shakespeare is all about words – when you have silences, you see that what’s driving the piece is the movement of verbs, of actions, of what people do to each other – the why isn’t as interesting. Actions without motivations. If you remove or don’t care about the logic and just observe the world by its acts, imagine that you close in an aquarium and you don’t know why they do stuff but they do things. Once things are happening – head back into the story. Why isn’t necessarily important. The story is never going to make sense and it’s still going to be an awful play. I agreed that motivation is lost – then the action doesn’t make sense. Titus is a man of action and no remorse – how do you find the motivation – we can’t connect with the internal. Things escaping – set things in motion and foresee consequences that are reaching past what they thought could happen. IT moves itself – fate. Dominoes. You lsoe the logic but you know it’s going to go. Imagery of the machine that keeps everything going. Even peace throws a wrench into the machine. Give take give take and then big spaces for victims of the machine. The power of having a name and an identity to stick something to – Tamora sees Titus as responsible – the idea of identification. Titus was there and visible – drew some of her hatred. Sharks – so old. Practically descendants of dinosaurs – they are dinosaurs now – if blood in the water and shark, the shark will attack – person or dead thing – another animal – inevitability – leave and come back – no remorse or emotion – just a drive to hunt and feed and kill. Pure adrenaline. The play is dehumanized – the unveiling of a mechanism that shows us that. Looking for excuses to act on animal impulses. Reciprocity of violence. Exploring just actions of adrenaline – not contextualizing – just exposing actions for what they are. Need to see Titus outside of context of Shakespeare. What does this play do if this is the only play? Can we think about this play this way? What does this PLAY want to do? [Revel in its viscerality – expose and delight in the way conquering and blood makes us feel.] The problem with Titus is trying to find motivation. And we spend so much time in our textual analysis that maybe the text is flawed and a good guide is to follow the actions and not try to follow the motivations. There are holes in the script – they sacrifice their own children and how do you motivate it – maybe there’s something to that. The concept of psychological realism is limiting. We cannot undo it but the function of the character is not about psychology, it’s about delivering the plot. It’s like the horror movies where the killer just kills. We psychologize the killer as pure evil.
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