Monthly Archives: December 2007

L'Internet

The Institute for Distributed Creativity

I just got an email inviting me to join the mailing list for the Institute for Distributed Creativity. The archives are here, and anyone can subscribe at this link.

We would like you on board because we believe that you would be a great addition to the wide range of new-media theorist practitioners, artists, urbanists, scientists, designers, educators, and activists currently on this list. Founded in 2004, the Institute for Distributed Creativity and its mailing list are an experiment. This list strives for concentrated debate on the shifting paradigms surrounding the Social Web. Our collaborative research works to integrate expert culture with public debate. When you post to the iDC list about 1600 subscribers will find your post in their inbox.

The landscape of list culture offers much-appreciated announcement lists that are completely unmoderated.
Trebor Scholz, however, moderates this list. It established a consistently high quality of posts where announcements or anonymous posts will not be published. Super brief posts as well as multiple; simultaneous posts by one author are discouraged. If you would like to share URLs with the list, please add a few sentences contextualizing the website.

Trebor is the co-author of the forthcoming The Art Of Free Cooperation.

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theaterblog

“56. All that I write is practice, even when it is deepest in theory.”

I just discovered a new theater blog – not new, but new to me – Superfluities Redux. George Hunka isn’t posting for the holidays, but until he is, his manifesto, 95 Sentences About Theatre, is provocative reading.

4. The tragic holds a place for a laughter that recognises the wonders of ecstasy and surprise.
5. The comic mode can’t contain, however, the wounded scream.

He also writes a Guardian theater blog. It seems pretty new, but he’s already writing interesting stuff about the difference between England and America in theater – critics, playwrights, productions, why the US doesn’t have a national theater, etc.

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Lydia

Lydia rehearsal, Week 2, Day 6

We finished our second pass through Act 1, ran Act 1, and went out to dinner at the Ninth Door to celebrate. Many of the actors are leaving town for the holidays. We resume rehearsal on the 26th at 4 pm. Till then, I am, as one of my favorite people says, off like a prom dress.

Talking at dinner about the relationship, if any, between comic books and theater, and the work at Vampire Cowboys in New York at synthesizing the two. VC is a theater company with a heavy emphasis on camp, genre, and fight choreography, and looking at their website makes me want to run to New York.

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Lydia, the audience

Lydia rehearsal, Week 2, Day 5

We continued our second pass through the play and are in good shape to have a run of Act 1 at the end of the day tomorrow, before everyone leaves for the holidays.

The director’s exercise this day had to do with walks and how you find them. She had the actors walk in a circle and asked them to walk on different parts of their feet:
– the outside
-the inside
-the ball first
– the heel first

then revert to neutral, but walk with different parts of the face leading it:
-chin
-forehead
-nose

all in the aim of finding different possibilities for character walks.

As usual with this kind of isolation work, I find the differences between the possibilities so illuminating, and so full of content.

I remember the day in the MOH&H workshops when Dave and Michele and others decided we needed to try to do improvs without narrative at all – pure abstract improvs – and we couldn’t, because the audience kept supplying content. Then we started talking about “the abstract-narrative continuum.” That’s what I think of with exercises like this. No matter how purely technical the motivation, like a voice outside saying, “Walk on the heel of your foot,” the watching eye and brain will always supply some kind of story behind it. That’s the gift of the audience.

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directing, film

The Golden Compass movie

is greatly condensed from the book: but it has one great shot of the hull of a boat going through water, from the point of view of the hull, with the water slapping at it.

I would like to be able to do that theatrically. To shift point of view to the eyes of an object, especially a moving object. It must be possible. Not just through language – to speak in the object’s voice – but also through some kind of movement arrangement.

I have been wanting to make a short film with chairs as the only characters for quite some time now – anthropomorphized stop-motion chairs. I think chairs are such social creatures. And they really like each other. It would be a love story gone wrong.

Lately, and more lazily, I was thinking it wouldn’t be stop motion at all, but would be more Muppetesque – humans manipulating the chairs like puppets. (My daemon is a folding chair.)

But this makes me think about a different film, from the point of view of the chairs. Now that would be a very sad movie.

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L'Internet, theater, Uncategorized

The Shakespeare In Performance database

is “a searchable database of performance materials from over 1000 film and stage productions related to Shakespeare’s works,” and I’m listed on it, as the AD for Romeo and Juliet this summer at OSF. It’s still pretty new. If I search for the director of R&J, for example, it lists that but not his production of Two Gents the year before. Still, a cool idea.

Like IBDB or IMDB.
Now if someone would just make an Internet theater searchable database – for all productions, historical and present – it’s so silly that IBDB is only Broadway – so I could search for Moliere, for example, and see all the productions he acted in as well as those he wrote…It would have to be a wiki, so the scholars could edit it back and forth at each other. And as long as they’re granting my wishes, maybe it could also include future productions, so I could know what my next show was going to be.

I bet that would be something that would take off. If some programmingly inclined person wants to help me and Amina hack a basic version of it onto Upstage, we might be able to get something started. Eh?

I made two wikis for the DCTC production I’m on now, by the way – both private, for production use only. It’s a very useful theater tool. I should write a post about how to make a wiki, but it’s so easy it seems silly. You just do what pbwiki.com tells you.

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directing, Lydia

Lydia rehearsal, Week 2, Day 4

Today, the cast visited a rehab clinic that treats patients suffering from traumatic brain injury, in order to accurately portray the character(s) in the play dealing with the same problem. I can’t say much about what we saw there, since we signed nondisclosure agreements, but I was very moved by the staff’s devotion to rehabilitation as a profession. We spent over two hours talking to them.

We then began working through the play again from the beginning, taking time with the fight choreographer to choreograph two short but painful moments:
– a father slapping a son
– a brother pulling his brain-damaged sister away from the man she loves

I do love fight choreography as a way of working. It’s such a vital way of getting actors fully engaged and precise in their bodies. I someday want to do an entire show (I suppose this is VAST WRECK…well, someday, I want to do another entire show…) that is all fight choreography.

The director also had one of the actors lead movement warmups and Suzuki exercises. Very effective. I remember how unwilling I was to cede leading the warmup to actors within the cast of MOH&H, because I thought it would take away from those actors’ abilities to enjoy and relax into the warmup. On the contrary – it helped the cast bond, and the leaders enjoyed the responsibility. Just another case of something I learned the hard way. Seeing this director so effortlessly make that transition really reinforced the point.

But I have to remember that there is no way but “the hard way” to learn anything about directing.

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Lydia

Lydia rehearsal, Week 2, Day 3

Well, I missed Lydia rehearsal, Week 2, days 1 and 2, because I was sick – but I did manage to set up a visit to a rehab clinic for patients with traumatic brain injury. We’re visiting them tomorrow.

And today we did finish blocking the entire play in the fourth day of doing it. The director stuck to her plan of moving through one small section at a time, letting the actors improv through, giving notes, then doing it again. And we now have a shape for the whole thing.

Today’s exercise was for the actors to tell the story of the play in their own words. It was a “homework” exercise, where the actors worked on it the night before. Some had outlines, some improvised. Some told the story of the play by referring to events exclusively outside of it. One told it as a fairy tale.

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Lydia

Lydia rehearsal, day 6 & 7

Yesterday, we saw the tableaus. After each actor did their individual shapes, the director had them come up and do tableaus in pairs, then groups of 3, and then with the whole family on stage. It was a very successful exercise. It was like they were finding out about the set without anyone having to say “Now you’re going to find out about the set.”

We blocked the first 26 pages of the play in rough sketch-mode: the director let them improvise through a scene once, then would give notes, then let them do it again. Finding vague shapes. We stayed right on the schedule she had made. This method of work made it seem like they were actually living in the set, in their own home. Very effective. We’re going to try to get through the whole play this way in 4 days.

And today was the day off – I took the 2 bus to Whole Foods, shopped, cooked with my headphones on, and babysat for Rosie of the Millans tonight. Feels like Oregon.

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