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.

Gabis score 26th July

score for scene phrase/table –

Sensory fix for one audience member

Setup with props:
One chair stage right facing front
One table stage left by the wall
Two portable headphones hung up at the back wall

Audience instruction: please enter and sit on the chair. When the door opens, you will be asked to leave again. There are two sets of headphones on the wall. One of them gives information, one gives options/instructions of interaction. If you want to, choose one of them only.

Situation: before audience walks in, the three performers are in the headlock (dead end conflict situation). This is projected into the watching room. As the door opens and the audience member interrupts, they break out of this and go to their starting positions for the scene:

Dona: against stage right wall, behind chair, waiting

Gabi: against stage right wall, in front of chair, waiting

As audience sits on the chair, light changes, performers walk slowly towards person on chair, then past to start phrase.

Focus: observing audience but not aggressive, as if they are entering our territory as a superior species, there is an atmosphere between the two performers that suggests competition and a post-conflict situation. However they remain in unison until the phrase break into slide and rest (&look).

Option 1: they pick up the headphone with information. They get the text from strange days, it develops, gets more intense and persistent.

Our phrase expands to be bigger than the room, ignoring the walls as a stopping point

Option 2: they are being asked to substitute a missing performer. They need to go to the table, and drag it to the other side of the room, through the performers. The noise it makes is the sound needed for this scene.

We find a way for this sound to influence the sequence (maybe stop and go, or cues such as a long drag means something, a few short ones mean another thing)

Sensory Fix

We have been speaking a lot about the notion of a sensory fix, coming out of Strange Days, and I did a quick search for essays around this idea. There's a really engaging article 'Merge Invisible Layers' by John Beckmann at www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=112 - I'm going to read through it to see if it has resonance with what we've spoken about. I know that we are not literally exploring virtual reality but I like his challenge to the boundaries between the visceral/virtual and the cyborg poetics mixed with techno-control.

day one - July Potsdam 07

cleaning up day (video material, notes,blog creation, selecting whats relevant and gathering info)

decisions we made:
rather than on the waiting room, we will use these two weeks here in Potsdam to focus on the performance room. the way the audience enters and the interaction inside. this we decided because of the time limits and the technical limits we have here. and because it is the core of the idea so it shoudl be the situation from which we build. why and how are they entering, and how are they inside, and how are we inside, with them and with each other.

we have a lot of material already, going back to the footage even more so. it can serve the format, especially the material coming from the states and status play is intimate, vulnerable, voyeristic. it is relevant. that seems reason enough to keep it in the piece for now.

things to do as a result:
find tasks, frames, context for this material from the research we do and the references we have talked about.
experiment with scores, rules for the audience and for ourselves to set up these scenes, the before during after.

Notes from July 07 GDA

Dears
I think it is a good idea to share with you what I have selected from the notes I have taken at gda as main elements we should focus on.
Central idea for the piece:
Watching and being watched
From this the related themes of:
· Intimacy- at which level it can still exist if you have been watched and also the people substitution of their on intimacy with someone else s intimacy on a TV screen.
· Performance and it s limits
· When does the audience stop watching and decide to enter and take part? and why?
· The decision of the audience to enter the room and interact generates encounters.
· The negotiation between us as collaborators and a parallel negotiation with the audience.
The format
Two rooms: A performing room and A waiting room which I personally wouldn’t call waiting room anymore.
From this main aspect of the form the related thoughts of:
· Having a TV screen in the W. Room
· The W. Room is a more collective space, they can share a collective experience
· On the screen images of what is really happening in the P. Room but also fake ones.
· The P. Room is connected to the W. Room with life link.
· The P. Room is not a place for collective experience but it s a space for individual experience
· The P. Room is a place for interaction and intimacy.
· The audience can activate, through gaze, touch or action, what actually happens in the performance.
· In the P. Room there is a sort of transparency of the rules we use to interact.
I think is important to keep Martin s question in mind:
Are we mimicking a sinister surveillance culture or are we offering an antidote to it?
I personally think we are doing both.
In my notes I also found other question I think we should try to answer at different stages of this process:
What is this world?
What is it set up for?
Is it a world that has been invaded?
Is it a sensory fix world?
Ok. That’s all. I have tried to select as much as I could because we are full of notes and videos and it s very difficult to move inside this huge sea of information.
Love
Dona