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.