Here are some things I have been writing in my journal about the piece. Working from filmic inspirations such as Alphaville and The Exterminating Angel, a Twilight Zone episode ("Five Characters in Search of an Exit"; first part is above, other two below) and After Dark by Haruki Murakami, I am imagining the following scenario:
So, how have these people come here?
It is as if they have been absorbed from the flow of time and brought into a paralyzed present. They have been sucked out of their living rooms and workplaces, and now they are held in this wasteland. They have their words, conditioned bodies and expressions, but in this place words have lost their meanings and meanings their words. They cannot name where they are or the state that they are in; they can only iterate and reiterate their vocabulary, and re-experience what it could mean, hoping to stumble upon resonance: true meaning. They are held captive by this static present. Not the kind of present that flicks by effortlessly, making each moment the amalgam of present and future, but they are in a time hold. The present remains terribly cordoned off from what has been and what will be.
The are only two bridges back to processional time. First: their physical vocabulary, a series of gestures that they do not understand the origin of. Their miserable physical uniqueness alludes to a past and a future, but the function of their self, though it will theoretically propel them from this purgatory of inertness, means nothing as of yet. 'Yet' itself seems unachievable. The other bridge is an array of points in the space; these points, tangible beneath their feet, but understated and obscured in significance, indicate the other, and the past. What one is to do to connect one's ingrained history to this space of ennui remains unclear.
Their bodies contain all. Everything is somehow accounted for and has been said through their bodies. They are capable of being birthed, dying, feeling sorrow, joy and terror, loving and hating. But they do not know in what order or why they would do such things. How can this timeless world make the time and placement of these events more than a constant reminder of the dolorous nature of their respective individualities? Are they doomed to become further agents of abstraction, mimicking the arbitrary array of points beneath them? Will they go mad, attaching sorrow and disappointment meaninglessly to the random points, reinforcing the paralyzing present through an unwarranted narrative? Or can they reintegrate themselves into the flow of time, and make this desolate, uncaring space have traction in the story of their lives?
________________________
This is about the stage. This profoundly inert, uninteresting place, with a voyeuristic bias. How do you justify arriving there and being there? And the challenge is to bring something meaningful. To you and for others. How can you avoid showing something more than what has been rehearsed into you (conditioned)? How do you get your shit on stage? I mean, that which composes your life (i.e., your shit) on stage? Being on stage is like being in purgatory. When you come on from stage right, you leave your past, and when you exit stage left you walk into your future. In the middle stands the present of indeterminate length. How do we connect the three and ask them to have validity to one another? And our relations onstage: they too should have traction and be more than touching for the voyeurs. We must consider what we do with our onstage partners.
Lately, I have felt that the product does not excuse the process. It is not okay to ask people to invest themselves in a miserable rehearsal period with the promise of onstage bliss. I want both: a happy, fulfilling process and a truly engaged, vibrant set of performances. They must relate to one another--especially when I am both director and performer.
I cannot say that when I treat my partner like shit onstage, it is not related to my life. It must be somehow woven into the fabric of "everything else". That's not to say that the stage is the same as "everything else" or we should only portray the world in which we aspire to live in, but that what we do onstage is integrated with our past, future, and selves, because it is literally a part of our being. The special things that happen there to have significance to what comes before and after.
Posted by
Jacob Peter Kovner on March 24, 2008 12:18 PM
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First Drop is a blogging project following a group of dancers and choreographers as they prepare for the SummerDANZ Festival at Dance Theater Workshop this coming July. The choreographers, dancers, videographers and photographers of First Drop are all affiliated with NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and will share their process from the studio to the stage.
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