About Andromeda

I am currently developing a one-woman show about Andromeda (the character and the constellation), Vera Rubin, dark matter, and me. It will contain original material, some bits of clowning (perhaps) and a couple of puppets. This is a blog about my process as I use performance as a research practice.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Pierre's Parentheses


Pierre's Parentheses

Most days of the workshop included a parentheses in the mid-morning.  These activities were instructed by Pierre and consisted predominantly of tricks that we could put into our proverbial clown bags (hats?), to incorporate into our improvisations, our more rehearsed performances, and (presumably) our work beyond the workshop.

The tricks are standard.  Pierre emphasizes the importance of articulation of action.  He demonstrated this by breaking up the somersault into thirteen steps, but the extension of this articulation is to link the action to the (always flopping) task of the clown.  But, the first step of the baby clown is to simply articulate the steps, and so there is always time to practice these basic clown skills.  The same concept applies to our other parentheses of throwing an imaginary object in the air, double takes, delayed reactions, and an infinite number of hat tricks!

I was struck by how much clowning/performance and physics actually do have to do with one another.  OKOK.  I could have a one-track mind.  I could also have been misinterpreting Pierre's French.  But this is  not the first time that master teachers of physical theatre have made such connections.  I remember Daniel Stein at the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre reiterating to us, "If it's true in the physical world, it's probably also true in the metaphysical world, and vice versa."  And, to stretch my memory/imagination even further, I remember my high school physics teacher delivering a performance not unlike one of Pierre's parentheses this August.

It must be said that Pierre likes to talk.  His stories form the actual parentheses around the activity of the day.  And many of the parentheses have to do with the manipulation of space and time (which is, of course, what good theatre does anyway).  And physics is largely about the behavior of bodies in space and time.

I slipped on my own spacetime continuum, from Locarno in August 2012 to New Hampshire in 1996(? whenever it was that I would have been taking physics).  As Pierre threw his imaginary ball into the air and instructed us that it is the clown's purpose to facilitate the audience's imagination of that ball through space, I remembered an almost identical moment in which my high school physics teacher, Mr. Lorenz, also threw an imaginary ball in the air for our physics lecture on gravity.

Pierre threw his ball into the air and described the experience of a student's reverie, imagining the ball soaring through clouds as the student became a bird in flight in a a clown performance that expanded space and time through his commitment to the image.

Mr. Lorenz threw his (imaginary) ball into the air and became that student lost in reverie before our class.  The lecture was about gravity, and Mr. Lorenz committed to the imagination of a ball travelling through the universe without the gravity of Earth's atmosphere keeping it in place.  He threw the ball up and watched it travel past the moon, out of the solar system, through outer space, to the other side of the universe.

Pierre's parentheses was meant to tell us that it is our job, as clowns, to remind the audience of the things that we throw out and up in performance.  To keep all of our narrative, mimetic, and physical balls in the air and present in the mind of the audience.  I think Mr. Lorenz's ball is still in the air, in my imagination, even as I write this blog.

Today is Astronomy Day!

No, really, it is!

So, if you are interested in exploring the universe via photographs taken by the SLOOH Space Camera will be streaming photos of cool photographs taken by all kinds of telescopes all over the world all day long!

If you are interested in this kind of astronomical performance, you should check out:

http://events.slooh.com/


http://mercerisland.patch.com/articles/orionids-meteor-shower-2012-where-to-watch-around-mercer-island
Orionid Meteor Shower image

Work In Progress

Hello Pittsburgh!  And blogosphere!

Last night I shared a little bit of 'In the Still of the Night:  Andromeda's Dark Stuff' at the University of Pittsburgh's Women's Studies Program 40th Anniversary Celebration.http://www.wstudies.pitt.edu/events/womens-studies-program-40th-anniversary-celebration It was wonderful to perform in the company of other fabulous poets and performers!

This work-in-progress sharing was a great way for me to get the text of Vera/Andromeda up and in front of an audience.  It gave me an opportunity to start to try to put my money where my mouth is in terms of playing with some of the tools introduced in the Pierre Byland workshop this summer.  The blog entries that follow are an attempt at this synthesis.

For this performance, the text that had a lot of ideas for running around, pushing chalkboards all over the place, whooshing sugar shakers, and new constellations emerging on the stage floor, was distilled into props on a table and a fancy new bucket communication system.  It looked something like this:

Rehearsal at home

Of course, it was more exciting with me animating stuff, I hope.

SO.  The 45 pages of a play that I had before going to the Byland workshop is new getting chopped, literally, into tiny pieces as it transforms to text for a performance score as I continue to develop the piece.  That process looks something like this:

Cut and paste

It was nice to get a first ten minutes moving in front of an audience.  I am looking forward to the next steps!