Group Meeting 29 March 2010

There seems to be more hysteria than usual in the room. But we are settling. And, it begins.

Ashley Collins’ birthday! They are so cute. They are so excited. Zac goes directly into his poem. I still love this poem. Bitter, hungry, vengeful. THE THEATRE OF BLOOD. Jessica’s poem – I am not able to move from this place. Selfish bastard, bastard. I do not want to be an organism anymore. I don’t constitute a being on my own. Jen, Chelsea, and Ashley – Red lipstick like a target. It’s like an orgasm in reverse.

A taste of what’s there in the poems. And it’s really beautiful powerful stuff. The tipping around is over – a lot of eroticism and violence in the poems because of the work and the dramatic situations, and because of all of the meaning we create. It is important that we start sharing these things and move forward. They’ll be developing into more performance-based projects. Next time I’ll dare some more of you to do it so it can become an event – it’s always an event, a provocation – even if I provoke specifically. A little as we can: we have to devote most of the class to rehearsals, because this is the moment when the projects are really evolving. Projects are still evolving horizontally – somehow the nature of our stuff is about the growing momentum in which your imagination/creative powers are being mobilized – you are doing more and more. I believe that as we propose these new scenes, they do not lose the depth. You’ve been developing these poems and I want to see if you want to unleash them as they unleash themselves.

Good to think of this as a project of unleashing your creative and acting potential. Can I jump over my own hoop and become the next possibility in my work. When it happens, it’s a phenomenon. When someone has a breakthrough, that’s the moment no one will forget in that classroom. Not just the person who has it, but all the witnesses. That’s how powerful this work can be.

ANNE FABLE:

Where did he go? I see you in my mind, I know you are near – no, I hope you are near. Where did you go? Come to me! Please! Come to me!

COMMENTS: Example of how the fable evolves, using the soundtrack. Chelsea Whitehead says it was really helpful – are you surprised? It made perfect sense to the people in the project. Since we had the doctor come in and talk to us about the text, we realized how fused Frankenstein is with Mary Shelley and Percy. We’ve decided to put Mary and Percy in our Shortcut, and I understand how Mary thinks, but now I feel things in my stomach. I’ve never thought about the idea that Mary might have felt abandoned by her own creation – she wrote this thing and it poured out of her and Percy retooled it, and she felt betrayed, he died, and he was her entire life – maybe looks at the work as a betrayal of herself. I think that fills a lot of the action in our response. Feeling abandoned and abandoning. Directed at Percy and at Victor. From my POV – it’s all the characters – Elizabeth, the Creation, Mary, Victor – all of them are looking. Every character is Mary? Really liked the sound – harkens imagery of the opening of the novel. Everything is so counter to the sound, it infused the violence and the cold of the scenario into the human elements. Really cool choice. I got a journey and searching, not just from the text, but from the sound as well. When the sound hit me, I was already in the bottom deck of an old ship and I felt like I had been there for a long time. Just to see Frankenstein, the whole story, characters, and author – just simplifying to searching and a journey that is never completed and never fulfilled. Never got imagery of a boat – thought about rocking chair. I felt like something searching for – the idea of motion without getting anywhere. In pursuit of something that will never be encountered unless it comes to you.

Does everyone know the story of Percy and Mary? Percy died in a boating accident in Italy. He was Mary’s husband – he was already married when they met, and they left each other’s families to be together – she was with him when she wrote Frankenstein (some believe he wrote it because she couldn’t), then she started revising around the time he died in this boating accident. The story is they pulled his body onto the beach and set it on fire, except his heart – which made it back to Mary and is pressed in a book. Mary devoted the rest of her life to his work and editing her work with him in mind. Victor has a creation and Mary Shelley’s novel is a creation – a monster creation. And she is producing. And that is somewhere to get you there, in the level of literature. And there’s a real story behind it, and the connection to it is discovering these levels of telling. The fable that Anne told is not the fable of the novel but it is a gesture towards the characters from the novel reaching out to the dead poet and the real person. I also loved the idea of the rich concept that does not end on the level of concept, but goes into the meaning of the work of art – related to a very concrete situation. Somebody’s life is taken and delivered into that work of art. Somebody’s life is there, taken into it. Not just a product of imagination but anchored in reality and sacrifice and true feelings. That’s an unexpected turn that you took. In the past week or so, I came back around to thinking of my original attraction to Frankenstein, and it’s the scene where Victor is asked to create a companion for the Creation – that’s the moment I have always loved. There’s a thread that runs throughout all of this. Sometimes even an obsessive desire for another – a lover, friend, companion, creation – always a strong desire for someone else who is a counterpart.

Here’s where we are with our projects. All three fables have gone from the original storytelling and now we talk about very concrete things happening to our senses. All of them are now focused on almost a single event – or a particular idea of juxtaposition, etc. They are become really more completely refined – a very concrete set of parameters. That reduces and focuses your creativity, which now becomes framed and your creative impulse can function more vividly in a smaller space. NO methods to work – you might discover your best ideas then. You have to discover your own way of working. I would like to stress that if there’s anything you should be learning: there is no ONE way of doing theatre, even though the school is trying to tell you that there is. No – it is never really prescribed and it always needs to be discovered. The pivotal points that change theatre historically come from the negation of the process found by a big director/playwright/actor. I don’t belong/believe/buy. I have to create my own kind of work. Not only in theatre but in every genre of art. Why am I doing it and how can I do it? Is there a way that I am not able to express myself? If so, I have to find my own way of working.

Zac – went to dance concerts. One ended and I sat in my car and cried. Passion in dance. I was upset because I’ve felt connection in music and theatre, but never with dance – associated dance as part of something and not as its own passion. Beautiful to see someone connected to something. The dance department is producing cutting-edge work. Reminded me of wonderfully creative things. I was seeing relations to everything we are working on. A lot of what you said about getting to that place and working and doing this tiny thing that’s so passionate. These two danced together for the last time and it had operatic gospel music and the way they were desperate and connected – you could see in their faces and bodies, they were crying and dancing at the same time – an overflow because you have repeated it so many times that you can go somewhere else with it. A humongous explosion of emotion and love. It seems to me that with the division into separate buildings and connections, it’s not like the Greeks – it used to be poetry unloaded through music and dance as theatre. That’s why the chorus was the most expensive part. Theatre once was all these things. Dance-theatre. Musical-theatre that wants to become more music oriented that falls into its own monstrous problems. And we admire all these possibilities and should be collecting all these branches of arts and putting them all together instead of dividing them. One performing art event.

It makes sense when things start with your body. You see dancers do everything just with their movement. Trying to communicate every thought in my head through movement is so hard. And you could see it all in this dancer. It blew my mind. I have been working so hard and trying to do it, and she just does it. Almost like working backwards – what’s most human is moving physically, speech you have to be introduced to. Speech becomes a replacement for movement.

Butoh dance from Japan and it’s recent. Primitive instincts. Every time he did a performance, he looked totally different. They would do all these different things to make these primitive instincts and feelings – all revolved around emotion and what carries you to create. Related to the ground and beats – really intense – put their bodies through so much. A lot of naked butoh out there.

SITES: http://www.butoh.net/butoh/Home.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butoh

Let’s work.