Session 7: Big Decisions

Twelve strait hours of Experimental Theatre? Sounds awesome to us, and was. Yesterday my day began rolling out of bed just in time to keep on rolling down to the theatre for some rousing games of "catch the platform!" and "crawl under these risers and bang around some clamps." This year the set is much smaller than it has been in years past. Two clumps of platforms in diagonal corners with plenty of open floor space in the middle. Audience seating on the two outer sides of the square we made. Hopefully someone will scan a set layout and post it for the visually inclined. I love the intimate feel. Basically we're pulling everyone in close to the corner for story hour told from the top of a platform-jungle gym. This is all made better by MXTW's adoring fans who appeared in abundance to help us build and eat donuts and pizza.

At the session it was Decision Day! Which at MXTW means we chose our target story (a text with presence and impact on our culture that we will explore through the stylistic lenses of avant guard playwrights). This year's story is Aladdin by a landslide vote and we will work in the styles of Betsuyaku Minoru, Ntozake Shange and Harry Kondoleon. And I can tell you as an insider - it's going to be AMAZING.

Then the directors had an official gravy meeting - an MXTW tradition that is as delicious and artery-clogging as it is time-honored.

Session 6: And They Lived Ever After: Kondoleon or They Were Brutally Deconstructed: Schenkar

We began the readings today with The Brides by Harry Kondoleon. The Brides doesn’t just critique one fairytale, it critiques all fairytales. Kondoleon explores the dangers inherent in the idea of prince charming and true love. It is the story of The Bride who seems to speak from different parts of her experience, from young and innocent, to betrayed and baffled, to acceptance of the absence of the happily from her ever after. The Groom has his say too, but he seems equally deluded as to his situation. The only character in the piece that doesn’t seem to be operating from a state of delusion is the Devil who speaks plainly about the kind of alternative to true love he offers. The piece is written in titled scenes that mix narrative, monologue, and poetry. No stage directions are given and there is no indication of how the show is to be performed in terms of who says what lines, which makes it very open to the interpretation of any company mounting a production in both interpretation and performance style. The use of fairytale language to explore the devastation of real disillusionment is haunting and I have to admit that I get shivers every time I read this piece. 

It was then that sad time of the workshop when we read the last piece in the reader, luckily the last piece was so much fun it soothed the pain. We finished up with The Universal Wolf by Joan Schenkar. Joan Schenkar believes any true wit must be cruel and The Universal Wolf is full of extremely cruel wit. The story of Little Red Riding Hood is retold as a tale of primal hunger. There is so much going on in this play that I could not attempt to summarize it here, but a few highlights include a French Structuralist wolf with a Maurice Chevalier accent, a Little Red that starts the story off by killing a song bird so she can offer it to her grandmother for a pate, and Grandmere herself is a retired butcher with a penchant for wine and raw meat whose catch phrase is “or so we butchers always say.” As in:

Gmere: I’m thinking, Little Red.

LRed: You’re drinking, Grandmere.

Gmere: The one supports the other (glug glug). Or so we butchers always say.

And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the series of visual puns perpetrated by Structuralists and Post-Structuralists who appear to drop pearls of wisdom (or not) and fade away again. In the end Grandmere kills Little Red as a baffled Roland Barthes looks on from his laundry truck before he fades away as blood seeps across the stage. He he he. 

Today we did a lot of vocal work. We used the line “Of course, every pleasure has its penalties.” Penalties proved a tough word to master, but by the end of the session they were all pros. The whole group spread out across the stage and did their best to embody the abstract concepts I threw at them using their voices and those words. Then we tried some less abstract ideas, chainsaws, sweeping brooms, etc. I think my favorite was actually when we asked them to say it like they were a giant bell and then right afterwards like they were a tiny bell being run very quickly. The effect of the whole group doing this together was very interesting. Possible fodder for performance choices for sure! 

We also returned to some serious group shaping today. I reminded them that the idea was to make bold choices and commit to them and they all really rose to the challenge, it was some very impressive ensemble work and I think that they felt the excitement of working so boldly together. In the keeping with the ensemble building, we did the counting game, where everyone closes their eyes and tries to count to 20 with no number being said by more than one person. This is a game that requires a lot of focus. It took us a long time to reach that level of focus, but once we did we got it on the first try. Hello, Ensemble, nice to meet you! 

Now it’s on to the next phase of the workshop. Saturday is decision day! What target story will they choose? What small groups will be formed? I can’t wait to find out.

Session 5: Dontcha Wanna Be Music, Like Shange? And We Get a Look Inside Foreman’s Head.

We began our readings by looking at “Boogie Woogie Landscapes” by Ntozake Shange. Shange called her works choreopoems and they are full of music, rhythm, and dance. The language is beautiful and poetic but the story revolves around a woman whose story is full of violent racism and the struggle to discover her own self worth. One perceptive participant said she felt it was intimidating. Another added that it might be because the hard to take events of the story are distilled down to such honest poetic expression. Ashley likened it to a light that burns so bright it is almost painful to look at, and I think it is is one of the best descriptions I have heard of the power of this piece.

Then it was on to “Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation” by Richard Foreman. This group seemed to take to Foreman right away, something that doesn’t always happen. The play is about Foreman writing the play and musing on how we acquire knowledge. It involves a lot of stream of consciousness musings and non sequitors. Foreman’s actors are like demonstrators creating a series of highly orchestrated images while the voice of Foreman himself, recorded on tape and played back by Foreman as he sits in the audience, provides most of the dialogue. Foreman is also interested in making the audience think about what they are seeing as a theatrical event, so he uses framing techniques and disruptions to constantly remind the audience of the theatrical context in which they are experiencing the performance, the result is disconcerting, but also very funny.

In the exercises today we did one of my favorites, Image Theater. In this exercise the participants work in groups and, without speaking, each person in the group uses themselves and the others in the group to form a static image of an idea. This year we returned to the steadfast ideas of school and then after we saw all their images of school we asked them to try again using the idea of knowledge (in honor of the Foreman reading). The images are always a great mix of abstract and real representations, and very telling, to say the least. Then the real magic happens when they return to their groups and work out transitions between the two groups of images, so we see each image of school transform in to an image of knowledge. This is a technique which is great for use later as the pieces are being staged. I am not sure I can remember a year where this technique was not used for staging the performance at some point.

Session Four: We Answer Grotowski’s Call to Witness and Betsuyaku Accuses Us of Forgetting What We Saw.

In session four we started the readings with two plays by prolific Japanese playwright Betsuyaku Minoru. Always exciting to get away from the old Western dudes the theater in this country is dominated by. We read some of The Little Match Girl and “The Corpse With Feet.” Both plays explore how cultural traditions and expectations can interfere with real connections among people and also how they can be so powerful they can help us cover up or confuse and forget traumatic events that affect our relationships. In the Little Match Girl an old couple’s comfortable teatime ritual is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman. The young woman tells the old couple of the hard life she has lived selling matches (and a whole lot more) to survive. She often queries the couple on how her life could have ended up this way and the couple replies politely that times are hard. She then reveals that she is their daughter. They reply that their daughter is dead. The rest of the play is the four of them, adhering to teatime ritual and the rules of polite conversation while discovering what their true relationship may, or may not, be. It is an achingly sad story, beautifully constructed by Betsuyaku. Just so that everyone didn’t think Betsuyaku was always such a downer we also read some of the short play “The Corpse With Feet.” In this piece a man and woman, strangers to each other, meet at a rail crossing. The woman has the body of the man she thought was her husband in a bag. The man interacts with the woman in the polite way in which it is expected you would interact with a stranger, which leads him to help her make all kinds of observations and decisions about how her husband’s death (upon her discovery that he had been lying to her for five years and was already married to another woman) was accidental, not murder or suicide, and how she must return his body to his real wife so the real wife will not be worried. In the end, she even convinces the man to carry the body over the tracks for her, with disastrous results. What? That doesn’t sound light and funny to you? Absurd to present such a story in such a dismissive way? Exactly the point Betsuyaku was making, I suspect.
 

Then we moved on to reading some of Ludwik Flaszen’s description of Jezy Grotowski’s production of Akropolis. It was a moment that made my heart proud when not only did one participant chime up, “but that’s what we do,” after I explained how Grotowski took texts that already had meaning for the audience and re-imagined them to mean some thing new, but also after I explained how Grotowski expected his actors to burn like a flame in front of the audience as the audience stood witness to the performance, chimed up again: “But that’s what we do too.” “I’m serious,” she added. Amen. After a fairly lively discussion of the description of Akropolis, we continued our exploration of Grotowski with an exercise designed to help the participants get a taste of the depths of emotion Grotowski expected his actors to reach. A brief exercise, but intense and hard to shake off. I am always impressed by the participants ability to just DO these things, just jump right in. Without that willingness and courage on their part the workshop could not work as it does.
 

I keeping with Grotowski’s ideas about the actors not needing makeup, but creating masks with their own faces, we played the mask exchange game, where one person wears a dominating mask and one a submissive mask and you interact, then switch masks and give it another try. This game can be both extremely satisfying because of the high level of improvisational give and take some pairs reach and because the technical demands of keeping your face frozen in a mask are very satisfying to achieve, but also a little terrifying, as it forces you to be domineering of one of your fellow participants, whom you always want to treat with respect. I got to participate in this one and when I had on my submissive mask my partner made me crawl under a chair and then she sat on it. We had to hug afterwards. I didn’t see this first hand, but I hear one of the other participants chose to have a smile on her face as part of her domineering mask. What an observant and terrifying choice. Makes me proud.
 

We tried a new exercise inspired by Grotowski’s production of Akropolis, which I was lucky enough to get to see on video a couple of years ago. I was struck by the rhythmic quality of the show, which it is hard to get a feel for as Flaszen describes it in the text. There was always rhythm, sometimes cacophonous but then suddenly coalescing into a moment of strong single rhythm and then falling apart again and coalescing again into some thing new. We explored the space, and we had only our bodies and the room, walls, floor, stage platforms, etc, with which to make rhythm. I gave the instruction to first explore for yourself, find your own acoustic sweet spot, and then once you did to listen to what everyone else was doing and make what you were doing fit into what was happening in the room. This was not terribly successful. It is always fun to bang on things, but I had a hard time fitting in with what everyone else was doing. I decided the space was too big, so we limited ourselves to half of the space and this time I gave everyone the instruction to listen to each other form the beginning, to be interacting as you worked to find your own place and rhythm. This time it worked. Nothing like a percussive jam session to get the blood flowing. So we discovered that even if we want to create cacophony that we all have to be working together and tuned into what everyone else is doing. Can I get another amen?

Session Three: Do blogs require clever titles? If so, does Handke actually rhyme with Kennedy? And if so, can I use that somehow?

In session three we were were joined by some new participants. Joyous hooray! More minds and bodies makes for a better workshop all around.

We read "Prophecy" and "Self-Accusation" by Peter Handke. Handke has some pretty radical ideas about what theater should be. In his early Sprechstucke or speak-ins he took everything away from the theatrical experience except the live performers and the language. Handke wanted the language to be free of the constraints of dialogue and his early plays are presented in direct address to the audience. He plays with the form and structure of language as well as the sound of language and wants to highlight both the importance of language and the way on which this importance means we are trapped by our use of language. If you have never done so, you should see if you can find Handke’s “Rules for the Actors” which appears at the beginning of the published version of "Offending the Audience" (his first sprechstucke). It basically asks the actors to forget everything they know and go out and listen to things like chanting crowds at soccer matches, concrete mixers, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles and perform like what they hear. Our kinda guy, right? Hell yeah!

We also delved just a little ways in to the work of Adrienne Kennedy, one of the greatest playwrights of all time (in my humble opinion) with a selection of "A Rat's Mass." As anyone who has read any Kennedy knows, dipping your toe in the shallow end is just the beginning, this pool gets deep fast! Kennedy began writing for the theater in the 60’s and despite the fact that she had Edward Albee as a mentor she had trouble finding a place in the theater. Seems there was no place for a female African American experimental playwright. She was too female and African American for the established experimental theater community, and too experimental for the established African American theater community. But her works evoked such power that even without the support of any established community they were produced and continue to be produced and lauded today. On top of being African American and female, she was also raised Catholic, and spent summers on her white grandmother’s plantation being raised with her white cousins. Needless to say, she has some experience in oppression, guilt, and identity crisis. The plays we read all center around an event so horrific it cannot be reconciled or understood in any logical way by those who were involved. The result is a kind of surreal dream world where language and images are fractured and confused and characters struggle to express themselves. Her plays often involve religious imagery and references to classical Western culture (another of Kennedy’s obsessions), especially the story of Ceasar with its betrayal and bloody imagery.

During exercise time, in honor of Handke, we did a little word jazz. We used the line: “You can find me, if you want me, in the garden - unless it’s pouring down with rain.” The work was a little slow starting as always, but turned out very interesting in the end. How is it that we had a line with the words “if you want me” in it and it didn’t turn in to an innuendo fest? Refreshing respect for the technique work, or a missed opportunity? I leave it you to you to decide.

Session Two: Cocteau / Artaud Day! Has a Better Day Ever Existed?

First we read The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower by Jean Cocteau. In this spectacle Coceau was trying to reveal mundane life as absurd. Basically, a wedding party has lunch on the Eiffel Tower, but they are interrupted by hunters hunting ostriches, pompous guests giving speeches and telling tales of their times in Africa, mirages of lions and bathing beauties, and their future offspring, who arrives and massacres the wedding party. Sounds totally mundane, right? Actually, it is hilarious, mostly because of the style of presentation. The story is narrated by two phonographs (people playing phonographs) who say all of the dialogue and explain all of the action in broad declaritory style like carnival barkers or sports casters and the action is presented separately in dance and acrobatic style movement.

After the hilarious romp that is Cocteau, we turned our attention to “Spurt of Blood” by Antonin Artaud. Artaud was also about revealing the absurdity of the lies we tell ourselves, but he went about it in a different way, mostly cause he was crazy as a loon. Artaud could never reconcile his intellectual existence with his physical existence and this struggle is present in everything he wrote. He believed that if he ever truly was able to reconcile his mental state with his physical state he would cease to exist. Artaud also began working during and after WWII and he believed society was ill and theater could be used as a tool to cut out the illnesses of society. He believed that to confront our “illnesses” we had to confront them in our most primitive selves, so his theatrical experiments were designed to force the audience into a state of primitive revelation. This is the idea behind the Theater of Cruelty, that the comfortable space between action on stage and the audience experience of that action had to be ripped away so the audience was forced into introspective confrontation. Spurt of Blood is the archetypal coming of age story. Boy meets girl, boy goes out into world to make his fortune so he can return to girl and live happily ever after. But the boy and the girl’s romance is nothing but a series of shrill repetitions, the boy is met out in the world by a series of bafoonish characters too selfish to give him good advice, and when the hand of God is ready to step in and change things it is rejected by a jaded bawd who condemns it for being absent heretofore. The girl of the boy’s initial desire ends up dead and the world ends in an apocalypse of falling architecture, body parts and scorpions. Ya know, the usual boy meets girl kinda thing. Then we read “Description of A Physical State” one of Artaud’s experiments with automatic writing. It is a dense chunk of text describing the physical sensation of having a body at a moment in time. We would say it is a bad moment, as the description is one of horrifying sensations and pain, but for Artuad, this may have just been another day in the life.

In the physical exercises following the readings we played what we lovingly refer to as the domination game (perhaps Boal gave it this name, I cannot remember now, but it seems like the kind of thing he would do). This is the one where one person leads another person around with the palm of their hand because the follower’s task is to keep their nose four inches from the palm of the leader’s hand. The five person domination machine was beautiful and resulted in the group playing looking alternately like a rapturous cult of hand and foot worshippers, a pack of wolves devouring a victim, and a sea anemone floating gently in rotating currents. I’m not kidding, same exercise, same group of people, all those cool images. These are the moments we live for!

Session One: Who's Your Dada? and Madame Rachilde Wears the Pants.

Day one started out with the usual stuff, stretching, breathing, exploring the space, shaping and moving, discussions of the work we’re about to embark on and the respect for each other and for the work needed among the group to be successful.

We read “The Transparent Doll” by Madame Rachilde. Rachilde was a member of the Symbolist movement in Paris around the turn of the century. The Symbolists were reacting to the theatrical trend of extreme realism and thought that theater should be used to explore the exact opposite, the uncanny things we all experience, but can’t explain. Rachilde was a scandalous figure whose works were considered pornographic at the time, although she always insisted her works were more cerebral than sensual, and by today’s standards this is definitely true. While male playwrights of the Symbolist movement were obsessed with death, Rachilde was obsessed with power and sexuality. Most of her plays have one character that seems to be in touch with “the other,” as the the symbolists referred to it, which slowly infects the other characters around them with horror. Most of Rachilde’s plays are available in beautiful translations by Kiki Gounaridou and Frazer Lively in a book called Madame la Mort and Other Plays. I highly recommend you check it out. Rachilde’s techniques may seem subtle compared to some of the other authors we read but more and more I find myself identifying ways in which they become useful in other theatrical work I do. Very cool.

Next we read “The First Celestial Adventures of Mr. Antipyrene, Fire Extinguisher.” Ah, Dada. Most people are familiar with the concept of Dada from the continuing influence of the Dada visual artists, but Dada infiltrated the theater too. In the 1920s the Dadaists, confronted with the unprecedented violence, suffering, and destruction of WWII, decided that logic had deserted the world. They felt that everything that they had known from the old artistic institutions had deserted the world and so those institutions needed to be challenged and destroyed. They decided that old ideas about what art could be were false and that art could be anything. Their performance styles often involved simultaneous improvised action and their relationship to the audience was antagonistic. After reading the piece we tried to make some Dada performances of our own. In pairs the participants took a chunk of text from the piece we had just read and used that to come up with a Dada moment. In true Dada style, as a surprise to the performers, we also had one of the directors accompany each performance with a drum. We had three performances and all three turned out completely differently. One involved a sort of dance and call and response of the nonsense words. One group had a speaker that kicked around a mover, and the third group took the drum away from the director and one person held it while the other person beat on it whenever their movements brought them close enough together to do so. In this last piece the director was forced to find a new way to accompany the performance with sounds, so she used her chair, knocking it over, dragging it along the floor and banging it on the ground. All three pieces we nothing short of Dada brilliance.

In the exercises we continued in the dada style with a mover/sounder style game where one person makes sounds and their partner moves in any way they want prompted by the sounds the sounder is making. The mover can stop moving and sound at any time and then the person who was sounding becomes the mover. This game is actually a lot harder than it sounds. There was a wonderful moment in the whole group version of this game where we had a sounder who was doing some lovely Disney’s Little Mermaid type singing and got interrupted by one of the movers who took over as sounder with a series of giant snorting noises. This, of course, caused a drastic change in all the movers who did a great job of keeping their focus on the game at this surprising turn of events. Hard core!

We also did some move on the exhale. This is an exercise where you establish a breath cadence together and then you can only move on the exhale, on the inhale you must be absolutely still. This exercise is great for a number of reasons. First off, the shared breath causes an almost automatic deep focus and concentration. Secondly, it very quickly gets you working on stopping and starting (the most important skill for a performer, according to JoAnne Akalaitis). And thirdly (if that is a word) once you get the hang of the rhythm it it really gets you out of your head and into a natural flow of movement that does not need to be planned in advance, so your logical planning brain gets a rest and you just m o v e. The real magic though, happened when we had them start interacting. The whole group came together and the feeling that they were creating one thing out of their many bodies that were completely tuned in to each other was immediately evident, even palpable, in the room. This was one of those moments that makes the workshop what it is.

Day one, fantastic!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It's hot and humid outside, I've been burning rubber several times a week on interstate 70 between Lawrence and Manhattan, and all kinds of muscles I forgot existed for the last 46 weeks are insisting, not only that they really do exist, but also that I have been abusing them.

All these signs together can mean only one thing, it's Experimental Theater Workshop time.

The most wonderful time of the year!

This year we have decided to try out this blog business, see if people are interested in following along on our workshopping progress. I have a feeling there might be a few people out there who would like to vicariously re-live their own workshop experiences, so the directing team and myself will do our best to add to this blog as the process continues. If you are unfamiliar with what we do, check out our web page at www.mxtw.org

Speaking of the directing team, this year the workshop is being directed by, myself, Gwethalyn, and I am being assisted by some wonderful workshop alums, Megan, Ashley, Josh, and Amanda and we have Libby as our lead tech. Go team MXTW!

Disclaimers: Does every blogger feel the need to do this? I do. (Wow, I never thought I would have to identify myself as a blogger, you see what ends I am willing to go to in order to promote the awesomeness of the workshop?) In the workshop we have half an hour to “teach” each author. Our main goal is for the participants to get a feel for the techniques of each author in the pieces we read, so they know how they would be expected to write and perform if they choose to work in the style of that author in their small group. We use the styles and techniques of these authors as ends to a mean. We do not pretend to give anyone a full education about any of these authors or movements, so the notes on authors we read in this blog highlight only some of the things we stress to the participants in that half hour and should not be seen as an attempt to summarize the whole of any authors work or ideas. If something sparks your interest go out and read some of their work and make your own opinions. All of these authors are brilliant and worthy of further study by anyone interested in theater, art, or life. Regarding the discussion of particular exercises, we have borrowed exercises heavily from Augusto Boal, Ruth Zaporah, and JoAnne Akalaitis, and found a few other sources as well. We do not pretend these exercises are unique to us, although we have certainly modified some of them for our purposes.