Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Monday Night

Days off make Travis something something...


It also gives some space to think about what ArtSpark is and what ArtSpark could become.


ArtSpark now functions as a small, almost improvisational, incubator. The restrictions in place to make sure that you are starting your process in conjunction with the festival, and that you not use props or set in order to keep focused on the story and the telling of it are useful. The time restrictions add a sense of urgency. I think it's a very solid concept.

But what COULD it be in five years?

In his goodbye post Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas in the course of summing up his theatre manifesto states:
"That theatre is a local, not a national experience, and so there should be a difference between theatre in different parts of the country. Artists should be a part of the community in which they live, and create theatre that speaks to the people in their theatres, not some imagined "national audience."

I think this is exceptionally true (that's right - I'm ignoring truth's binary nature).

Too often in creating a work we deal in its imagined Greatest State. It's going to be produced in all the Regionals and get sent up to Broadway (or juuuust Off). We're afraid that in making something relevant to our smaller community we are limiting its Greatest State. Which is just silly. The Greatest State of most scripts is mailbox hopper, or workshop warrior. The percentage of scripts that make it so far as even a rigorous workshop is very low. So why begin the process by worrying about it's National Marketablility? I don't know.

Here's where something like ArtSpark (or its descendants) could readily step in. A Room of Ones' Own and a group of dedicated fellow travelers are a huge jump over the baby stumbling blocks that derail most fledgling writers (or even more advanced writers) - Separation from Real Life, and an outside sense of urgency to keep it moving. Writing for yourself in your spare time is one thing, writing for a group on a deadline (no matter what that deadline is) is a completely different kettle of fish.

It also means that you (the writer) have to rely on your voice, and your team's voice rather than trying to build a more synthetically complex intellectualized voice.

If you take a team of 6 from Austin and lock them in a room you are going to get an Austin play, with an Austin voice. Even with a team comprised of folks from New England, Australia, and South Dakota along with your Austin-ites, after all nothing is more Austin than an artistic leaning transplant. Extend the time limit to 6 months with a public workshop production at the halfway mark and you have a full fledged local talent incubator. Something that could ensure the focus on truth-in-process that is important to Mr. Zarate while hatching a polished product.

Friday, April 14, 2006

The ankle bone's connected to the....

So.

Here we are wrapping up the fourth week of the 2006 ArtSpark Festival.
I think that collectively the urgency level hasn't yet raised to a level of worry, and I can say definitively that it hasn't for Team Infinite Perspectives. We've spent the last week or so primarily back in the office trying to piece the show together from the pages Dewey has brought us.

Or as I told ArtSpark Staffer Matt last night: playing Tetris with pudding.

Any (successful) show has a basic logical form. Even a non-linear show has a workable logic. But they have logic because the pieces they have are solid. They are created, are 'real' and then you work out the logic and piece it together in the most effective way possible.

We have lots of pieces, but they're still a bit runny in the middle, and we have pieces yet to come that we have to plan for in the logic we have created for the show.

Something that Martin brought up when we were talking about things we liked in theatre (as we move on a more transparently useful conversation to have had) was a love of the "arbitrary, but not arbitrary for arbitrary's sake". He wanted shows to adhere to the logic they had created in their own world.

I can say without reservation that there are large swathes of arbitrary in this show. But we have created a framework, a logic, for the show that allows for it. Even encourages it.

So we have found a logic that allows us to include many of the things we like in theatre from that self-same early discussion . The political without abandoning the entire show to polemics, the arbitrary without annoying the audience, songs, slapstick, in retrospect I really think that we've created an insular modern Commedia Dell'Arte. We have our three characters (Clay, Illy and myself) who have a defined set of characteristics, and then we play with and against types in a variety of scenaria.

And those characters' details are being drawn in increasingly clearer lines. Which is always healthy for paranoid actors to see (hi Mom *waves*).

Last night, with Dewey unavailable, we took the opportunity to beat the hell out of a few of the shorter 'framing story' scenes.

Oh and we did.

We worked those scenes of a combined 3 pages for two hours.
We managed to strip away a lot of the traditional 'first rehearsals' overacting bloat and get to some meat. With very little space to move (our restrictions, not ArtSpark's) there is a lot of tension built physically which gets transferred nicely to a lot of the text.

It also allowed us to see that scenes which we had thought were going to need cutting instead can be flushed out with discussion of the ideas that we really want to talk about.

For example, in one of last night's scenes, the Cynic and the Romantic are discussing the need for and the benefits of change, even change for change's sake. The scene is playing quickly enough that we're going to be able to flush that out into a broader discussion between the two to the benefit of all, even those of us who chant through that entire scene.




I think on the whole things are progressing very well. The group is as committed as any you could ask for, unafraid of working hard, and turning out a decent product through that work. We are no longer ahead of pace, but we are on pace I think...and I think the pace we planned on is a touch aggressive, so all to the good.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Bambi Unleashed

There are little awkward spurts in every production process. Adolescent gangliness takes over for a night, or a week.

In a traditional process these are most evident in two places: the very first night on your feet in rehearsal, and the first night completely off book.

We reached the first of those milestones last night.

After a short presentation on 'selling yourself' by Mr. Matt Walton. Team Infinite Perspectives hit the rehearsal space for the very first time.

The floor was taped out in our proposed VERY SMALL triangular configuration, and we began.

Martin led us in some basic sun salutations as a warm up and we began improvising with the three basic character shells we've been talking about for the last ten days or so.

Wow it felt good to be on our feet.

The minutiae of creating a world, and exploring a style for your universe is fun, but how can that compare to living in it? It can't. Of course it being the awkward newborn fawn level of performance it was like living in a complex universe as a toddler, but it was living.

Martin has a deep and abiding (and justified) love of opposites. Both in writing and in performance. So we played with that quite a bit as he guided us through the improvisation, asking lots of questions of our still very timid characters.

We mixed and matched characters, swapping in and out of genders, much to Martin's chagrin. He had been very upfront with his feeling that things weren't quite so locked down as that, but there we were anyway, treating our brainstorming as gospel, and assigning our preconceptions to these thin soap bubbles.

Immediately after Illy cracked me up with me with some bastardized monkish aphorism, we broke up the improvisation as Dewey had slipped into the room with some pages.
Real honest to goodness pages... with lines on them!

We immediately moved on to playing with the framework we'd been handed, still swapping in and out of characters and with Martin pushing us to try opposites wherever possible to find the layers of this world.

It's only a step of course, and not even that large a step from where we were on Monday all things considered.
But it felt very much like a state change, as we moved from solid to liquid.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Soldiering on:

The second week of ArtSpark ended for Team Infinite Perspectives with a few interesting realizations.

We are learning quickly (and well) how to create together.
I think that we have a pretty good feel for group strengths and weaknesses and, despite the new-ness of this group as an entity, a reasonable creative dynamic.
But two things stand out:


  1. Due to conflicts and vacations et al, prior to last night the group had never been in the same room together. Ever. So we don't have a GROUP dynamic, we have a multiplicity of INTERPERSONAL dynamics depending on the configuration that is in the room on any given night.

  2. We respect each other, and have no problem building on one another's ideas and thought processes. There has been a surprising amount of group synthesis given our lack of history, but we have no idea how to disagree with one another.



It's amazing how such a seemingly simple thing can be so difficult.
But none of us have ever been involved in something quite like this.
There is quite a bit of distance between the ArtSpark process and the normal state of creation of a production.

In a 'normal' production the writer is well out of the way by the time an actor shows up. They've done their creation in the Cave, done some workshopping, and may pop in to move some scenes around or make some cuts. But they're home.

A director then pops in and takes the writer's vision and synthesizes it with their own.

Which is the vision that is presented to the designers when they are brought on board to add their spice to the stew.

The last piece is the performers, who generally get very little say in the overall themes of the piece, and instead become the medium through which the 'creative team' communicates their vision.

But not in ArtSpark, nosiree Fred.

Here we're all in The Room (of our own). So roles change, and they're not roles that we're used to.
So the positive encouragement is there as we try not to crush any beneficial impulse, but how to say no to a group you're not used to working with is trickier.

Saying no to a close friend in the creative process can be tricky, saying no to a stranger? Without defined roles?
Super tricky.

So we have successfully laid out a wide array of conceptual paints to slap around our canvas.
But the tricky part has arrived as we have to begin telling one another no.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Off to a rolling jog

You've done 'team building exercises'. I know you have.

Well then reminisce with me:
There's a team building exercise that is a bit more convoluted than it seems at first glance.
Your team is tethered together and then instructed to complete an obstacle course.
Should be easy of course, but simple things like finding enough room to make all you limbs move properly are made more difficult by having to negotiate that space with someone who is tied to you.

ArtSpark is very much like that.
And on Friday night it felt very much like we negotiated that creative space and set off on a jog in a direction we all liked.

Friday night was a 10:30 meeting and the five of six who were available were all pretty tired. Ileana (who does in fact exist!) was coming from a show, and Dewey from work.

But it was a consolidation day.

It was the type of meeting where the ideas flow and you're pointing to another member of the group because the idea you're elucidating speaks to something they had been saying at some point in these last two weeks.

Dewey hadn't been able to make the Wednesday meeting (which featured a very nice homemade kahlua from Clay) and so began by going over the fifteen longhand pages he had accumulated since venting. There was a lot of synchronicity thematically with what we had been discussing at the Wednesday meeting. A lot of mistaken identity, misdirection and rejected personal narrative.

We bantered quite a bit in that hour and a half about ways to to manipulate the audience. Manipulate emotionally. Manipulate physically. Manipulate by any means necessary. We talked about what we wanted the form of the show to take.

We talked about crafting atmospheric music, an atmospheric radio show for preshow.
We talked about radically scaling down the acting space and making it VERY intimate... to manipulate the audience...


And let it be said that this was the meeting during which we agreed to add Aram Chaos to the team.
Who is Aram Chaos?

Aram Chaos is our seventh son of the seventh son.
Or daughter.
Mother, Father
Rock N' Roll Revolutionary
On Mars, or in your backyard, or at The Backyard.

Wanted. Hunted.

He Started the Revolution and now no one can find him.

Never mind the bollocks
here is Aram Chaos.