Please note: if you want to find my GHP Theatre articles, you can scroll down to the “Pages” menu at the bottom and avoid all the silly, aimless bloggery.

It finally dawns on me to sally forth with the opening volley or to spade the first earth or plant the first stake or some such thing.

This Potlatch is a place for anyone with an interest in lacunagroup’s doings, my various papers, or in starting your own performance group, or in maintaining an existing one. It’s an opportunity to engage in rants and discussions.

As I’ve said in other places, my private cause is to encourage eager and creative performers to explore the possibilities of group collaboration and the development of new work. Feel free to use this site to inspire one another and share news of your efforts.

I realize I’m being a little bit of a Little Mary Sunshine or (worse) a Pollyanna with this invitation to connect and exchange ideas. Part of the mystique of a group lies in its insularity and separateness from the rest of the world. It’s not necessarily the best thing to do to get chatty about your processes and personal dynamics and philosophy if you want to engage in truly original work. Yes, sharing is caring, but I should add that this invitation to chat is more an encouragement forstudentswith questions, visions, and a need to connect with the like-minded. For the more jaded among us (definitely myself included), let’s consider this a place to share working ideas at an appropriate level of cool abstraction or a place to discuss matters of business and management if we so choose.

After this introduction you can scroll through variouslacunagroupposts I’ve written over the past months which seem to touch on our theme of collaborative development. The Performance Group Papers, assembled from my teaching materials (and including a tutorial for KRAKEN’sVocal Sequence) and other speculations, are listed over on the right side of this page.

For those reading “Work in Progress: New Performance Methods:” It is just that, a work in progress. I keep adding to it when I can find the time to engage in more improvisatory thinking-through. Eventually, I will (I promise) get to more concrete performance matters. Bear with me. I’m trying to get myself and my readers situated theoretically. Then I have to stumble upon the brilliant practical implementations. If the theoretical stuff I’m laying out inspires you to work out your own implementations, go for it and then let us know…

(Note on 5/11/07:I did finally finish the thing, and its ultimate impact is going to rely on the brilliant practical implementations of curious readers. Still stays too much in theory, I think, and lacks the abundance of concrete illustrations I was hoping would emerge, which means I’ve left avenues open for myself to get even more “nuts and bolts” as I elaborate in the future. Please, try to apply something and see what you can make of it.)

As to the posts that follow this intro, you may find trying to read all of them in order does not really work best. The first two posts (The Art of Being Off-Task and my GHP Journal 2007) stand fine on their own, but the next post after those is a sampling of some exchangeslacunagroupmembers made after working with a structure called “the Art of Telling the Truth,” and it’s quite a confusing scatter of observation and reflection. You might want to come back to it after reading a description of the exercise (see page on the right entitled “The Clearing House”) or looking at other less particular posts with fewer comments. You will also find posts reflecting on our development of “A Visit to Wm. Blake’s Inn,” and those are very much reflections on a work-in-progress and, perhaps, a touch disorienting. You might even go ahead and scroll to the bottom of the page and go to “earlier entries” (or is it “older entries”?) to find things which stand more on their own.

If you are a student of group theatrical creation and development, I encourage you to take a look at early entries inlacunagroup’sblog and follow the evolution of our work onA Visit to William Blake’s Inn. We were striving toward a unique theatrical realization of a song cycle. Dale Lyles’ treatment of Nancy Willard’s collection of poems was inspiring material, and we went a long way to imagining a possible theatrical event illuminated by the songs. Our blog posts attempt to document the progress of our workin detail. We tried to put our belief in collective creation into practice.

Drop a comment anywhere on the Potlatch or on thelacunagroup blog or e-mail me at fourhoneas@mac.com. Yes, I assure you I will give all job offers fair consideration.