present: Jeff B, Marc, Dale
After a slow start, Dale read a spam email he had received, a lonely-hearts letter from a young Russian woman. It didn’t produce any sparks.
Indeed, we really resisted working at all for a long time. Jeff read Dale’s “341 poem” while Marc perused some of Jeff’s Native American myth poem. Then Jeff asked Dale to read the text.
Dale performed page 14 from Jeff’s work, the Chipmunk monolog, by grabbing a scarf from the tub in the corner and turning his hand into a puppet. This Muppetesque approach to a severely potty-mouthed rodent was very amusing.
Finally, Marc, who had been reading and marking Old Man Wind, read the whole section out loud.
Then he went back and marked the actual speaking parts (plus other phrases) and read those out loud.
These two readings immediately sparked discussion and ideas. Dale suggested that it would be interesting to hear the piece twice (in a putative performance), once in full, and then again in “flash” mode, with just flashes of words and a barrage of images/props/projections that hit the audience with the story but in such a skeletal format that they’re not sure they got it all. (Dale in fact suggested that we might do the skeletal one first, and only later give the audience the full treatment.)
In fact, the discussion continued, the piece actually had a lot to contribute to the putative performance’s putative theme of “creative people in a non-creative milieu.” We never got around to working through the montage experiment that Dale had structured, but he suggested that an audience would be intrigued to see a repeat of such a montage overlaid the end of the Old Man Wind section when he’s remaking the four boys into new forms.
Marc suggested (and these are barebones notes, to be filled out in comments):
- ritualized movement (Grotowski) which accompanies narrative, but does not necessarily elaborate or underline it
- (here’s the movement he described as an example:
- “unhinging one’s mind”: becoming a vessel for the text
- “fighting against the narrative”
- coming up with a “framework” for the evening’s work, like the YouTube above of Akropolis, in which a Romantic Polish poem involving encounters with Old Testament heroes is set within a concentration camp; not necessary for a successful evening, but something to be considered; a metaphor
Jeff talked about the underlying Native American concerns of the myth, the West as a darkening land=Death; the IronMan = the white man with his technological gifts; the self-sufficiency of Old Man Wind, who refuses IronMan’s offerings and relies instead on his own cultural artifacts; the children, unsalvageable after contact with IronMan, return to Earth.
We discussed an evening which could encompass a lot of the material we’ve generated so far and ways that might play out.
We resolved to keep playing and generating all kinds of material. Shape and show must come later.
NEXT: FEB. 4, 6:30, NSOD
- TEXTS: Old Man Wind [doc]
- PATHS: Vocal Sequence; Montage episode
- HOMEWORK:
- (Neo-Futurist scripts, always)
- keep bringing in text, either randomly selected from one’s own library, or some online library like Forgotten Books; multiple sources OK; we’re dumping these in our box for use… somehow
- Montage assignment based on Structuring Drama Work