Research, Process, Thoughts

what am I interested in? What do I want to pursue? What won't grow dull or onerous? Well...hm.

I like developing props. Not just arranging flowers or picking toy guns out of a drawer, but developing articulated, multi-purpose contraptions and artworks that can come to life in some way. Perhaps I should work with some puppeteers. I like hinged objects that can be flipped around to become new things. I like doors, and secret compartments, and telescoping legs and spring-loaded surprises. I like Rube Goldberg machines. (or Heath Robinson machines, if you're British.) I like umbrellas and bicycles. I like rope and pulleys and winch-driven machines. I like marble-runs and Lego.

I like building sturdy things that performers and audience members can interact with. I like making strong rigs and flying people and things in interesting ways. I like welding.

I rarely if ever come up with anything without an inspiration, either from literature or someone else's vague notion. Gimme a story, gimme a thought, and I'll run away with it. But precious little bursts forth as though spurred by the divine from my lips or mind.

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Last week the Scenography course leader suggested that my partner and I take into consideration how the audience should view our project--a smallish box with a projection inside that attempted to blend a corner of a Victorian garden with a corner of a city bus. It was strung with vines and dotted with flowers and had a hole cut into one side shaped like broken masonry through which one could peer and watch the video. I hadn't thought about how to encourage people to experience it in the slightest, but it was such a little thing with so many nooks and crannies that I knew he was right in saying it called for more intimate observation. So we put it up at face-height and hid it from immediate sight--you quite literally had to approach it, get in close, stick your nose into it to see it at all. But what did that mean?

Later, as a class, we played with soundscapes, and studied theatrical silence--how do you make silence in a theater without losing the attention of your audience? If things linger too long with nothing to hear--without an aural placeholder, like a ticking clock or crickets--the ears wander outwards and begin to focus on shuffling feet and neighboring coughs and tics. But how do you fill in the silence--to remind the ears that it's silent--while avoiding the clichéd noise of Hollywood bullfrogs?

Further play invited us to think about audience-centric performance and how they interact and react--not just on average, but as individuals. How do they react to seeing each other? How do you encourage them to believe, or at least play along? What can you put into place to encourage their complicity, or at least keep their attention dynamic?

We hung the box in a tight corner and hid it from view with stage blacks. As we played with bottom-lighting through the box's translucent, floral bus-seat floor I noticed that, accented by a low-level par can, my partner's face was strikingly highlighted across the space. We adjusted the intensity of the light until it gave both of us a gentle, natural glow, and entertained, for a moment, the idea that audience members might look through the object and enjoy seeing whoever was on the opposite side. Might they share a smile? Look hastily away? Pretend they do not see one another? Comment on what they see? Will they realize it's intentional? We played with shadows too, to imply depth, and the angle from which observers might view the projection of the bus. Will they try and speak over the mundane noises of london transit? Will they try to make sense of the scene, or expect a story to unfold? Will they lose themselves in their own thoughts while riding, as we did? Will they write their own stories?

I tried to stop focusing on meaning but instead creating a warm, safe little world in which people could make their own experience. At the last minute I crushed a sprig of lavender and tucked it into a pocket of the box--a smell that always encourages my mind to wander toward warm spring days. I hope a few observers, at least, lost themselves in their own thoughts, and that they were pleasant.