Deep into the development process, we thought you might like to know a bit about what we are doing up at Winthrop these days. The ensemble of nineteen 7th, 8th, and 9th graders were given notebooks and asked to keep dream journals recording their dreams in words, pictures, images, etc. They were also asked to start bringing in to share photos, songs, poems, text, ideas, clippings, artwork, and anything that they associate around the dream theme. They have posted along the back wall of the theater a collage of inspiration for our piece.
Along with dream imagery and narrative, we’ve been exploring myth and its relationship to dreams, both inner and outward dreams. Through discussion and sharing, we are finding common threads and perhaps a hero’s journey that we will incorporate into our material.
Along with collecting material for our dream production, we’ve been working toward composition using less conventional forms of improvisation based on movement, rhythm, space, and kinesthetic response. Working this way develops ensemble and aids in letting something occur onstage rather than making it occur. This also leads to greater awareness which leads to greater choice and growth. Always interested in opening students’ minds to the endless possibilities of theatrical convention, this process challenges and stretches their sense of self, intellects, and skills. This approach to original material can rock students’ previous expectations of developing original work and initially inhibit their impulses and contributions, but ultimately has the potential to open their eyes to the powerful medium theater can be.
The production culminates in an abundance of material which we will gently structure as we collaborate with each other and our technical director to create the images and journey we’ve chosen onstage.
Below is an excerpt from director Anne Bogart’s book that I have shared with the students and find useful in explaining a bit what we are trying to accomplish Enjoy!
EXCERPTS FROM ANNE BOGART’S THE VIEWPOINTS BOOK
Making original work offers the opportunity to create a universe from scratch. You can, in fact, create a universe with its own laws of time, space, and logic. It is certainly possible to do this by studying and replicating an actual time and place if that is what the piece requires, but you also have the ability to say: “Anything is possible. So what should happen?” or “Why should objects fall to the ground as opposed to float upward?” With a healthy sense of adventure and facing a blank page, you set off into the unknown. Dive into any endeavor with strength, fortitude, and intention, but at the same time be willing to adjust. Know what you want, and be completely unattached to getting it. Without an intuitive leap of faith, work remains academic. Have the courage to make choices you cannot justify at the time. These choices constitute a leap.
Composition is a form of writing, but it is writing on your feet in space and time using the language of theater. just as there are literary devices in fiction and poetry, there are useful theatrical devices in making Compositions. Think of small stage moments-a gesture, a turn, a light cue- as words. In combining these words, you begin to create sentences. And in stringing these sentences together, you begin to build a paragraph, and so on, into chapters, etc. all with a combination of movement, light, sound, etc.
In literature we are familiar with devices such as allusion and onomatopoeia. These are tools that allow for a greater range of expression. Here we introduce a useful theatrical equivalent, which we call the same, only different. Repetition is a basic building block in our work. The writer Gertrude Stein taught us that with a small vocabulary of words, much an be expressed. When something is repeated, it is never really the same and contains within it the memory of the last time it was seen or heard. We call this the same, only different. This concept is useful and can be found in music, architecture, painting, etc. setting up a pattern of repetition, we can draw attention the what breaks the pattern and is therefore different, or what changes.
For example, if you want a group of people to appear to the audience as unique individuals onstage, you can highlight their differences by having them all do the same thing. If they all do something different, you will only see what they do. If they all do the same thing, you will see the differences between them- you will see who they are.
A complete theater moment is comprised of separate tracks. Just as a film there there s a sound track and a visual track, in the theater there is a movement track, a text track, a lighting track, a sound track, and so on. The meaning of the piece emerges through the interrelationship of these various tracks. Do they agree or disagree? Do they complement each other or contradict each other?
The Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt insisted that the theater begins with a disagreement between what one sees and what one hears. “If I go to the theater,” he wrote, “and I close my eyes, and I understand what I am hearing, then it is not theater, it is a lecture. If I go to the theater and close my ears, and I understand what I am seeing, then it is not theater, it is a slide show. The theater begins with a disagreement between what you see and what you hear.”
How many times have you gone to the theater and watched people rotate around a couch for two hours, illustrating what they say with what they do? Compare this behavior with that of real life where people rarely do what they say. It is a rare moment when one person faces another and says: “I love you.” Usually the words are uttered as someone is leaving the room looking at his watch. This difference between what is seen and what is heard expresses a basic truth about the relationship portrayed. If all the tracks do the same thing, they cancel each other out.
Robert Wilson often uses the image of a candelabra atop a grand piano. Because both these objects seemingly belong together, come from the same world, we look at them with a sense of ease and familiarity. The relatedness of the objects doesn’t challenge us to perceive what is distinct about each one. Wilson suggests that if you remove the candelabra and put in its place a Coke bottle, the contrast of the objects and what they evoke wake the image up. The image becomes a strange attractor.
In the film Platoon, the director Oliver Stone chose to represent his famous battle sequence not with the expected accompanying sounds of violence and warfare, bombs going off and cries of anguish, but against Samuel Barber’s excruciatingly beautiful and meditative, “Adagio for Strings.” In addition to setting violence against serene music, he worked with an extreme contrast of duration by juxtaposing the sustained musical arc with shorter edited shots. As the music climbed higher and higher, the imagery sank deeper and deeper into the mud. This disjunction between what was seen and what was heard accelerated during the course of the scene. Stone’s capacity to express both horror and beauty in the same moment is what distinguishes his vision and makes the sequence remarkable.
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what is next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows, we guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. – Agnes De Mille
