Starving in the Belly of a Whale
I LOVE THIS RIGHT NOW.
A dream Tuesday, November 27, 2007
I’m in the lobby of the play we’re about to see. I’m being a really big ass to everyone for some reason. This guy keeps messing with my computer. I have so many thumbnails of pictures and files on my desktop that you can’t see the desktop photo. For some reason he keeps trying to put pictures into files so you can see it. I’m getting so angry! I keep hitting apple-Z every time he does something to undo it. He has really long arms, and he keeps reaching through my arms to move pictures. I’m getting really really mad but using my anger ineffectively. Finally I realize the play’s going to start, so I go inside. I bring my computer and something else – the two most important things I have. My computer beeps kind of strangely when I close it.
I walk through the door, even though I don’t have the card that acts as the ticket. The show has kind of already started, so I find a seat as quickly as possible. I’m in like the 12th row of an 18 row theatre. It’s mostly empty. Elizabeth B is up in the front, I can see her curly hair. I wish I had sat with her! Instead I’m back here, behind some other people. My parents are right behind me, but we’re not really talking. It’s awkward.
The show is people from the circus center. Alec is in it, and Kelli, and Paoli. They’re doing a pretty ridiculous tap-dance number that features more twine canes than there are actors. They throw the canes around, bounce them on the floor so they do flips in the air, and dance with them. Everyone is running around and singing their little hearts out! I don’t know why I’m not also up onstage. Paoli has a lot of energy and is running and jumping with everyone, even with her broken foot and two crutches. The canes are made of thick twine so they stand up on their own, but they’re still somehow kind of floppy. The whole cast is doing rolls around. There are so many people on the tiny little stage that somtimes they roll on top of each other! At one point a big group is rolling downstage right and Alec somehow ends up rolling direclty on top of a girl with a red unitard. I laugh at it.
Then later that girl is in the tree with toothpick flags stuck in her. It means she’s dead! There are quite a few people in the tree, and now the contortionist Ember is there too! She’s been shot near the hip but she continues to do contortion in a really macabre fashion. I’m still really impressed, but also grossed out. Her bullet wound keeps getting thrust forward as she curls her head back towards her own spine. She says “Compared to typical Mongolian Contortion, this isn’t pain.” Haha! She’s draped in the tree with toothpick flags, too.
I really like it… Monday, November 26, 2007
I really like it when people refer to testicles as “nuts”
Greg Allen’s 25 Rules for Creating Good Theatre Saturday, November 24, 2007
Rule #1: Don’t create good theater. You must intend to create GREAT theater. We don’t need any more perfectly good productions of perfectly good scripts. You are setting out to do something great or it’s not worth doing.
Rule #2: Set that thought aside. Don’t worry about the end product or whether anyone says how great or horrible your show is. Create the show you believe in. Become consumed with process, not product.
Rule #3: Create your own show. Whether you are writing, directing, and performing a wholly original piece, or working with an extant script, make it your own. Don’t bother with trying to hold true to an author’s intentions – you’ll never know them anyway. Make the show true to yourself and what you have to say now.
Rule #4: Know why you are creating this show. The piece you create must be the expression of something about which you feel very deeply. Setting out to make “good theater” is not enough. Take a strong stand – personal, political, social, artistic, – and challenge yourself to express it. Include your performers in this aim.
Rule #5: Make form fit function. Once you have identified why you are creating this show, find the perfect theatrical form to express your beliefs. Whether it be a puppet show, a dance piece, an environmental installation, street theater, sequential art, a guided tour, audience interactive, non-verbal, bare stage, site specific, proscenium, etc., don’t be restricted in your form. Mix and match for specific moments throughout the show.
Rule #6: Know your performance space and use it. Whether you are performing in a five hundred seat proscenium, a black box, a barn, or an alley, make the show intrinsically linked to the space in which it will be performed. All theater should acknowledge, utilize, and endow the space where it is performed.
Rule #7: Know your audience. Have some idea who you are creating the show for. Firstly it should be for yourself. But secondly it should have some target for who will be in the audience – children, teenagers, punks, the rich, the old, Liberals, grad students, women, gays, a specific ethnicity, etc.. Theater “for everyone” is bland theater.
Rule #8: Contradict those assumptions of the audience. Don’t cater to your audience and what you think they would like to see. Draw them to the theater with something that will attract them, but then, once they are in their seats, challenge them and make them think and feel. Never back-pat or condescend to your audience.
Rule #9: Cast good people above good actors. Someone you can work with will always be more effective than the greatest actor in the world who happens to be a prima donna asshole. Work with people you know and respect as people.
Rule #10: Use the performers for who they are. Let the performers express themselves and their lives and experiences in the show. Include them in the creation process. Give them the chance to speak from their heart.
Rule #11: Create true theater. A show should never fail to answer the question “Why is this theater?” Theater is live performers in front of a live audience. Never forget this. If your show can be put on television or turned into a movie without losing something, you have failed.
Rule #12: Do not suspend your audience’s disbelief. Involve the audience. Make sure you remind them that they are watching live theater. Q: Why do people go to the theater? A: To have a visceral connection with live performers. Take that ball and run with it. If you want to suspend the audience’s disbelief, make a movie. Movies accomplish this much more successfully.
Rule #13: Make sure no two performances are the same. Always include a section of the script where the performers respond to the immediate truth of the moment. Encourage them to keep this perspective throughout the show and accept that whatever happens, happens. Make sure the show is a live, unreproducable event – this is what people have come to see and what makes an evening in the theater life-changing.
Rule #14: Insure tonal variety. Never create a show that can easily be categorized. A piece that is primarily comedy should have deadly serious moments, and a tragedy should have elements of high comedy. And the audience should not be unified in this response. Collide the personal with the abstract, the intellectual with the philistine, the hysterical with the gut-wrenching. Keep the audience off balance and contradict their expectations.
Rule #523: Include a surprise. No one should be able to know what’s coming next, including the performers. Surprise keeps theater a live event. Multiple surprises make great theater.
Rule #16: Create a gift for the audience. The show should include a personal gift for each member of the audience – either material, emotional, or experiential. Make sure everyone in the audience has an individual experience of the show to take out of the theater and share and discuss afterwards.
Rule #17: Change the material world. A small part of the world should be somehow altered by each performance. Something should be destroyed, consumed, built, adorned, or the space itself should be newly endowed by the end of each night of the show. Leave the stage a mess.
Rule #18: Use the elements on stage. Every production should include the four natural elements, especially fire and water. There’s nothing cooler and more immediate than throwing water around or watching something burn on stage. It immediately invokes theater’s ritual origins. If the powers that be don’t let you do this, do it anyway.
Rule #19: Put the backstage on stage. Don’t hide the mechanics of the theater. Let the audience share in the actors’ challenge. For instance, always include a Hikinuki – an on-stage costume change – for at least one of the performers. It’s always great to share a transformation with the audience.
Rule #20: Play with size. It’s always great to incorporate a shift in audience perception of the world of the stage. Incorporate miniatures or enlargements of established stage reality. Nothing says great theater like the entrance of a fifty foot Hitler or a three inch doppelganger of the protagonist.
Rule #21: Include music. There’s nothing better for introducing new music to people than having it accompany stage action. Take the opportunity to re-contextualize known music through performance.
Rule #22: Get non-verbal. Words can be a crutch. Always include a non-verbal segment of the production. Conceive of it as a dance.
Rule #23: Establish ritual through repetition. Give the audience a ritual or repetitive pattern with which to identify. Create a shared history for the audience. Once a ritual is established, you can speak volumes through tiny variations on a theme. The art is in the details. There’s nothing better than feeling part of an inside joke.
Rule #24: Make theater economically affordable to all. There should be no financial limitations on who can be in the audience. People should be able to see your production for the cost of a movie and popcorn. Cheap theater with a diverse audience is much better than expensive theater for a narrow swath of the elite.
Rule #25: Unify the audience. Give the audience shared experiences which create faith and trust in each other. Create an event that brings disparate people to identify with each other through their mutual, but individual, experience of the show.
Rule #26: Break the rules. Don’t do what anybody tells you. Make your own theater. Find your own way. Create your own art.
Except Saturday, November 24, 2007
Except that there’s obviously something I need to learn. About myself. Or others. Or my interactions with others.
But what the hell? If I live my life the way I want to, I hope to NEVER run out of things to learn. So taking time “to figure something out” seems like a brilliant way to simply avoid taking risks in life.
Not that I think that every answer has to be at the fingertips in an instant. But there’s a difference between realizing you need to learn something and trying hard to learn it, and just being afraid to take the leap into that next step of life.
You know what I hate Saturday, November 24, 2007
I hate my intuition. I hate that feeling in my gut that tells me that something I really want isn’t a good thing for me to have. I hate having my best self-interest in mind, or caring about how my choices will affect the lives of others.
I hate compassion. I hate empathy.
Fuck it!
Why does my brain think it knows anything, anyway? Except it’s not even my brain, it’s my lower g.i. What the hell, intestines. Why do you keep trying to tell my mind and my heart things.
WHY CAN’T I JUST let myself have what I want most
“Dude” 24 different ways Friday, November 23, 2007
Although they’re almost all some form of annoyance / irritation / disapproval.
Viral Videos – the secret strategy Friday, November 23, 2007
The Secret Strategies behind many viral videos.
From techcrunch.com. I found this fascinating, and also it made me relieved. At least *some* of the ridiculous flamers on youtube are staged.
Bouncy Ball ad – Sony feat. Jose Gonzalez Friday, November 23, 2007
Filmed in San Francisco! The making of is really cool. All of those balls are a lot less peaceful in real time than they are in slow motion with Jose Gonzalez playing in the background.
Long version:
Short version:
Making of:
If Jesus had a marketing team. Thursday, November 22, 2007
Marketing director: “Christ, while you may prefer the gentle slopes of the concentric circles, we feel that the phallic cross shape creates a stronger emotional response, it being the instrument of your ultimate death. Besides, we’re not sure having a target as your symbol creates the right message. Are you trying to get people to aim for some higher, lofty goal? No, no, I feel the cross serves your larger purpose much more effectively: encouraging guilt.”
Let’s play “That Makes Me Think Of”:
This picture makes me think of “Which one of these is not like the other?”, the game on Sesame Street where you had to pick out which one of the objects shown was unlike the others in some way. You can play this game with the disciples pictured in Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” for even more fun! (Hint: there’s more than one answer!)
That makes me think of how Blue’s Clues is a more effective version of Sesame Street, due to research into the way kids learn and how to most effectively teach them. They changed a lot of the style of the kid’s show when they designed Blue’s Clues. For instance, when the host Steve asks the viewers a question, he pauses for about 15 seconds before giving the answer, or even expecting a response. This means the show is no longer fun for adults to watch, because the long delay in response time is maddening to our adult brains!
In some ways, this seems like a good thing because the show is a better teaching tool for kids, which is a major goal of such a show in the first place. But in another way, it’s a bad thing. Since adults no longer enjoy the show, watching it ceases to be a family activity. Parents no longer get to sit down and laugh at the humor targeted specifically towards them.
This takes me back to Christianity. Even though the shape of the cross is an effective marketing tool, the change from equal-limbed cross to long-stemmed cross changed the type of people attracted to the religion. The equal-limbed cross used before had its roots in Pagan culture, and used to symbolize equality between feminine and masculine culture. The new cross maintained the same basic shape (so as to not completely alienated the original Pagans), but became more a symbol of suffering and perhaps, on some levels, masculinity:
