Marc, Mary Frances, Galen, Molly, Carol Lee, Ginny, and Dale are in New York City for five days. For reports on what Dale and Ginny are seeing, see Dale’s blog.
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Design Ideas
This happens every so often. I am captivated by a design concept and I have to note it ASAP. This is just a verbal description, right now. I’ll try to get some visual work onto vyew eventually
What if any architectural elements of the Inn had a Georgian, Neo-Classical flavor? Part of Blake’s charm and power as an artist came from his use of academic, classical conventions (well near Greek) in the service of his own unique visionary conceptions. Something almost temple-like about the Inn.
A Palladian dome as a central feature of the interior. The dome could tilt to various angles and take projections of everything from architectural design details to constellated stars to angels swirling about to acrobats tossing the sun and moon. This dome could also descend and rest on the stage as a pleasant green English hill.
The interior of the Inn would be perpetually “under construction” and we would see scaffolding stacked in the space, Blake standing upon it and working on various relief freizes, or one vast one, carving the images of the beasts he’s tamed. The faces of tyger, rabbit, cat, cow, sun, moon, etc, could be removed from the reliefs as white masks. Children run with these white masks into the fireplace and re-enter with the masks vividly colored and perhaps attached to billowing cloth, now ready to be treated as animated creatures.
Such a concept could be abstacted to a flat, two dimensional approach if we chose with the dome becoming a disk, the reliefs becoming sectional screen panels, etc.
But I keep coming back to this notion of Blake as a labouring presence, a creative presence…
Opening image inspired by this approach. Chorus stands in a shadowy, semi-circle. In their midst are two angels rotating a giant drafting compass upon the floor. We hear the chiming. As the circle is inscribed the Inn’s floating dome begins to appear above: “this Inn belongs to William Blake…” “Many are the beasts he’s tamed…” we discern Blake working upon a relief and we see the carved images about the temple-Inn.
I think we could have fun juxtaposing a kind of mystic, austerity with a more cozy, domestic, eccentric atmosphere created among the various inhabitants.
Ideas over at Dale’s blog
As part of my 365 project, I posted about some images I found in a book which I thought could be instructive/useful for William Blake. You can read that here.
I also put them into our Vyew workspace (#067760), which is a great way for you to see what we’ve been doing and to add your own ideas. (You can also leave comments here, of course.)
Workshop (2/13/07)
Laura and I had a fun and productive meeting. Laura began by demonstrating some ideas for sunflower choreography and then sketched out a possible staging for “Two Sunflowers” involving an upstage raised area for young sunflowers, a middle area containing dancers, and the singers farther downstage. We played a bit with the presence of windows in the piece, sketching out, based on Laura’s suggestion, a vision of the singers looking out through windows toward the audience as they sing.
Laura’s interest in windows let me seize the opportunity to talk about preoccupations I’d been sketching out earlier that day. I know it’s a little conceptual at this point and has more to do with general staging than envisioning particular songs, but: two sources of light and two kinds of “portals” in our piece–hearths and windows. Two kinds of light, two kinds of energy, two frames for visions. I’ve played a bit with four-sided, rotating hearth and window units which could move freely about the stage. At one point I thought about animal masks hanging within the hearths, brought out by children when the time is right. Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Laura and I played with the idea of window and hearth frames rising and descending between the floor and a raised level. We both were struck by the notion of floating hearths.
Laura went back to an idea we had discussed last time and imagined one of the children placing an umbrella on the back of a turtle that was missing a shell. She suggested the children using other objects in similar substituting ways throughout.
We imagined all the “beasts” of the Inn being represented by large masks and a group of children dressed in colors evoking that beast. The children would move collectively to convey the bodies of the beasts, holding up the mask as the head. Laura also suggested a “Chinese Dragon” style of representing the creatures, with children moving beneath cloth which extends behind each mask. She also proposed a deliberate “international” style of theatre craft for our work, blending different kinds of puppetry and story-telling from around the world.
We used large sheets of paper and markers to make sketches of all the ideas we discussed and competed to see who could render the most wretched drawings. It was very liberating.
And we ended by touching upon the question: interior or exterior? Do we use our stage space in a more open fashion in which we incorporate a strong horizon line or do we consciously create an interior stage world? Or neither? Discuss?
It’s best to work with what I know: Work Forum
Let’s let this be a place where we can start to respond to the material.
Having just begun to listen and read along, something I haven’t actually done with the material in a long time, I am gratefully reminded of the sad limits of conceptual thinking when set beside the magic of the verse (and the music, of course).
A few random observations. The task of the production with such material is to situate the audience’s attentiveness so that they can really listen to the words. The magic of the event is in hearing the verse, in the way the fanciful play of words conjures a larger realm. The stuff of the everyday is pulled into this transformative process. We want to hold a child’s attention and let the images, the play of thoughts and images and notions, blossom.
I can’t see the songs as ever being just background for something else. They are too rich, too dense. You can’t afford to miss anything. All stage craft and performance issues need to back up the songs. I don’t think we want the audience’s attention distracted with a question of “what just happened?”
The decision: do we create a presentation world with some kind of story frame, some reason for people to be gathered together doing the songs in some fashion; or a neutral container we fill with each song and we don’t assume a need to find framing movtivating impulses? Of course it doesn’t have to be either/or. That’s just one of the tensions we have to negotiate as we go.
From the titles of the songs on, I kept thinking about the songs as responses to a playful challenge, almost as if a child proposed each title and then expected the singers to rise to the challenge and invent. The songs as the result of a kind of high order imaginative game played by the children. Are the singing adults participants in the game or figures from some other realm conjured by the imaginative forces?
With this idea of each song being a deliberate challenge, I could see other elements (puppets, dance, scenic, etc) offering a kind of “musical” underscoring for each song, trying to tap into feelings and latent ideas. But I also thought, and I didn’t think I would find myself thinking this, all the stagecraft, all action, could attempt to quite literally meet the challenge of portraying the content of the songs. Two levels of playful challenge at work: the challenge of “composing” each song and then the challenge of rendering the imaginative improvisations in some kind of palpable form. I guess I’m thinking it’s more honest to imagine children attempting both things. Or children laying down the challenge to the “adult” of making something up (tell me a story) and then playfully taking the next step of trying to “make it real.”
But I don’t want to clog things up with too much conceptualizing…
I do think, however, that it might be inspirational to look into forms of late 18th century domestic children’s amusements. I wonder if the industrial clouds Blake saw on the horizon could be found reflected in a change in the kinds of toys and distractions available to children. But I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing. Just wondering about what kind of “stuff to play with” might have existed. How did children and adults gather for amusement? The notion of “the poet” as a kind of convention for imaginative elaboration, a familiar narrative frame. “Father, could we go to Wm. Blake’s Inn this afternoon while Uncle Tim is visiting?” “Perhaps, child.” “I would like Mr. Blake to bake something in the kitchen?” “What?” “William Blake bakes a thundercloud pudding.” “Ah, hurumph, a thundercloud pudding, eh…alright, let’s see…hmmm…wait, don’t start clapping yet, I need to think…” “Come on, Uncle Tim, a thundercloud pudding, a thundercloud pudding, William Blake bakes a thundercloud pudding!” And so poor Uncle Tim would extemporize to the clapping rhythms of the children a rhyming verse fantasy in which the magical poet, Mr. Blake, would bake a thundercloud pudding, while the other children would playful respond to his words with the stuff around them, often successfully finding a way to portray it, and often collagpsing in laughter over the impossibility of “stoking the stove with stars plucked from Mars…”
Conceptual Maneuvers in the Dark
I sent a couple of mailings to Dale a while back regarding Wm. Blake’s Inn. For the record, here’s the gist:
One was a photo which evoked a Blakean world for me, a background awash in a characteristic watercolor and a colorful costume choice, both from a design firm’s ad in Dance Magazine of all things. I can’t do the HTML magic to make the picture appear in this post, however….(Dale? Help? Dale, too, has been collecting images at his website.)
What do you want of me?: Improvisation Suggestions
Let me try to lay out the structures for improvisation and then, afterwards, offer some variations and comments.
For two performers: A and B are the participants. B’s constant objective is to question A with some form of: What do you want of me? A has the opportunity to make any demands of B he or she wishes. B is to comply willingly. A decides when this first phase is complete. In the next phase, A’s objective is to ask of B: What do you want of me? B, then, has the opportunity to demand anything of A. B decides when this phase is complete.
That’s it. It is meant to be simple and lean. The intrigue lies in how the exercise is taken up by the participants and in the variations possible. Before exploring variations, have participants simply execute the exercise as it appears above. Discourage questions beforehand; the participants should be referred back to the instructions as an answer to all of their questions.
Continue reading “What do you want of me?: Improvisation Suggestions”
Four Film Monuments
More time spent reading Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars. The book devotes many pages to surveying filmed Shakespeare. There is a Great Debate (surprise, surprise) in the contentious worlds of Shakespeare scholarship and criticism over the value of committing Shakespeare to film. Rosenbaum spends some time advancing his own view that seeing one or two legendary talents working in a Shakespeare film (actors and directors) is far more satisfiying than seeing a string of mediocre and misguided stage productions which, in his mind, exist in abundance at any given moment. From that position he suggests four film examples. I just want to second his suggestions: Olivier’s Richard III (which features the three 20th-Century “Lions” of the English Stage, Lawrence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson); Richard Burton’s Hamlet with Gielgud directing, an early television treatment available now on DVD; Peter Brook’s King Lear with Paul Scofield and Irene Worth; and Orson Welles’s Falstaff saga Chimes at Midnight. Good luck finding the Welles; I ordered a Brazillian import (don’t tell my wife; kind of pricey) because I have heard about the film for far too long and Rosenbaum’s words convinced me to stop waiting for some Criterion Collection edition which may never appear. Happy Viewing!
Please Attach to Previous Post
Dear Reader, I know these posts take as much of a toll on you as they do on me. I need to be cleaning house, but composing the previous post got me to thinking and now I have to post a note if for no other reason than to scratch a sign that new thoughts have entered the picture.
First point. A quick bit of retrospection has led me to confirm that pretty much all of my thinking and writing about theatre matters is an attempt to translate my psychoanalytic study into theatrical enthusiasms. One past feeding a deeper past as I keep dragging everything into an indifferent present. I nuture a comic book fantasy engendered by, no surprise, a play. Don DeLillo’s play The Day Room is in part about a mythical theatre company led by an enigmatic impresario named Arno Klein. The tales and legends spun out about the effect of the company’s work are quite fantastical and legendary. And infective if you are a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind set and already taken with the work of KRAKEN and other groups. Guilty as charged. All of my efforts over the past few years nurture a silly little notion of a company doing radically new work because influenced in part by radical psychoanalytic principles. So I write out my ideas for this imaginary company. I’m at peace with that.
Second point. In my previous post I neglected an element which will become crucial. I am not paying enough attention to the Imaginary Dyad as I sputter on about systems of meaning and signifying chains and formulas. It’s as if I want to deny the basic necessity for the Imaginary Dyad in theatrical matters instead of granting its priviledged place at every level. There is a fundamental “two-ness” in performance which you can’t escape and which shapes all meaning. It’s called Imaginary because it builds on the image of what is out there and our relationship to it. Pretty basic in theatrical issues: me-you, he-she, actor-audience, the observer-the observed, agent-object, “who am I to you and who are you to me?”, etc. It’s an interesting structure because it is so easily reversible: actor can become audience and audience can become actor through one fundamental flip (theoretically). And what occured to me was that members of a group trying to improvise in some radical psychoanalytic way need to understand the Audience as deeply as they understand themselves. In the Imaginary Dyad, performer can be audience and audience performer. You have to find ways to understand what the audience “wants” by understanding what you, the performer, want, and visa versa. So as I continue to think about putting together formulas, I’m also thinking about exercises and strategies which address the Imaginary dimension of the actor-audience relationship. And now my question is: how kinky is too kinky?
Dubious Undertakings
Here I am letting the site know what I’m up to. Thinking about a couple of pages. One will be a page on using and creating text (a script) in creative group collaboration. The other will be yet another quest for formulas to use in improvisation processes. I am a bit obsessed with this, I’m afraid. If I examine my motives for this interest, it strikes me on one level as an elaborate way to wrestle with a permanent creative block, to muscle my way through to something in spite of knowing full well there is nothing. Be that as it may. My current goal is to imagine a group wanting to create a signature style of improvisation focused on the idea of revealing the New Event. What simple formulas could be useful? I’m trying to figure out what New means with respect to creating signification in performance. Yes, that word signification smells of jargon. You can translate to the meaningful. How do you improvise and create new meanings for an audience? I’m fiddling with my hermetic Lacanian equations and formulations, trying to distill, and then I want to translate my conclusions into some kind of everyday language that doesn’t rely on jargon or theory or clinical notions.