some notes day 3 to 6

Realising that although we could decide that the idea of the sensory fix should be central to develop the content of the scenes, we still have very different interests in how that can be achieved, we decided to each focus on one element of the sensory fix idea.
Dona to develop a format that sets up a sensory fix for the performer, Gabi to create situations that give a sensory fix to an audience member (see score of 26th July). Both formats involve two different levels of involvement/interactivity which the audience member decides either before they go in, or when they are inside. Initially it was three - just observing as one option – but we decided that all scenes should encompass this anyway. The scenes in which an audience member receives the fix can be observed by another audience member. How we manage to avoid this being uncomfortable for the spectator (just changing terminology for the hell of it) that is more involved seems to be dependent on the set up of the scene and the way we give them information. Central to this is also the role of the usher that lets people into the performance room.

Two other thoughts (of many) that came up in conversation with martin throughout the last two days in terms of coherence:

The way in which the performers change between watching and doing, performing and being audience. This can be looked at in every scene.
Physical obstacles/objects that are brought into the space by the audience can add up, inform and change what we do/are able to do in the scenes.

Lenny & Keith (text)

scene from ‘strange days’

‘I want you to know what we are talking about here. This is not like TV only better, this is life. This is a piece of somebody’s life. It’s pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex.
You’re there, you’re doing it. You’re seeing it, you’re hearing it. You’re feeling it.
It’s whatever you want, whoever you want to be…
It’s about the stuff you can’t have right, the forbidden fruit. Like running into a liquor store, with a 357 magnum in your hand, feeling the adrenalin pumping through your venes…

Yeah I can make it happen, I can get you anything anything it’s true you just have to talk to me you have to trust me you have to trust me.

I am your priest. I am your shrink. I am your main connection to the switchboard of souls. I am the magic man, the Santa Claus of the subconscious. You say it, you think it, you can have it. You want a girl? You want two girls? I mean I don’t know what your thing is, what you are curious about. Want a guy? Want to BE a girl?

Before we talk about money I want you to try it. I’ve got a deck with me right here, step into my office…

some thoughts on spectatorship

"You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see." (Lacan)

I've been thinking about our conversations concerning the responsibility we have towards an audience and how we me negotiate the contract established between performer and viewer. I've been meaning to read Jacques Ranciere's "The Emancipated Spectator" (a lecture he delivered in Frankfurt in 2004) for a while and now seems the perfect occasion.

In thinking through the roles of an audience he starts from two commonly held conceptions:
"The first one is that theatre in general is a bad thing, that is the stage of illusion and passivity which has to be dismissed in favour of what it forbids: knowledge and action: the action of knowing and the action led by knowledge. This conclusion has been drawn long ago by Plato: the theatre is the place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack of knowledge. The “action “of theatre is nothing but the transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision which looks at shadows. Theatre is the transmission of the ignorance which makes people ill through the medium of ignorance which is optical illusion. ..The most usual conclusion runs as follows: theatre involves spectatorship and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore we need a new theatre, a theatre without spectatorship. We need a theatre where the optical relation- implied in the word theatron - is subjected to another relation, implied in the word drama. Drama means action. The theatre is a place where an action is actually performed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may have resigned their power. But this power is resumed in the performance of the former, in the intelligence that builds it, in the energy that it conveys. The true sense of the theatre must be predicated on that acting power. Theatre has to be brought back to its true essence which is the contrary of what is usually known as theatre. What has to be pursued is a theatre without spectators, a theatre where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers."

I think that certainly the second concept has surfaced in some of our discussions. . . I'm off now to watch some of the states Donna and Gabi have been working through but will post later.