Beckett

"Beckett’s plays are studies in absence; from the moment when Victor Krapp turns his back on the audience, through Godot’s non-arrival, through the unprovided conclusions of Endgame, Happy Days, and Play, the unacknowledged past in Krapp’s Last Tape, the missing rings in Come and Go, the plays have always relied for their theatrical effectiveness on the audience’s awareness of gaping holes in the dramatic timespace as explored in performance.... dramatic timespace equals performance timespace. All that we can be sure of in the lives of these characters, and in the lives of these plays, is what we see in front of us in performance. Similarly, the characters do not find their selfhood in a coherent past or in a planned-out future: they exist only as they act. In the later plays, even that certainty has gone." Space, Time, and the Self in Beckett’s Late Theatre
DAVID PATTIE
http://www.utpjournals.com/product/md/433/space4.html taken 15/3/7

Holliger remarked "Beckett would have undoubtedly hated Come and Go because I used his play as a pretext, and in the end I destroyed it."

Comicbook Stickies and Drawing

RE: Helen said "maybe we could use humpty dumpty for something else - it could be interesting to experiment with a few short kids' things - we had talked of possibly having a kids' section in the festival, & we have "the rabbits" that louise & i can do. it could be fun to experiment with a few, perhaps using drawing?"

yes, I was thinking along these lines, but not necessarily for children. More like comic book or line drawings for adults. So we could use all those basic little stickies I made for World X, against a white background - and then, as in the story 'henry and the purple crayon' - the sticky world can be drawn into being.

I'd really like an adult drawing cartoon. Give it a strong storyline - even based on a nursery rhym

Come and Go

RE: Vicki "come and go worked best for me was with the witches [nothing else] it was tight and magic"
I agree, I love those Witch Avatars, they seem to fit the text perfectly well.

RE: Vicki "i think the pace and text leave so much room for imagination i like the formality and the space the text gives "
Ditto. My initial research into rights suggest that if Beckett's nephew approves the use, he will allow it - regardless of how big or small the company is - as long as it stays true to the text. If we are going to try and get permission to perform Come & Go, I'd be very happy to just stage it but it would be hard to stay 'true to the text' if that means restrictions on our use of avatars etc., which it probably does.

Overall a bit disheartened because it might be that we cannot do this play. In which case, the sooner we move on to one we can do the better. We have 3 months left, give or take committments and holidays, enough time to use what we have learned for another text. What do you think?

things to note and an admonition

well you are basically printing money with tourism [especially with the environments that aotearoa/new zealand provides]

but how do you 'encounter' landscape - that's a thread in ian wedde's book 'the viewing platform' and its playing through the work we are progressing with presently

ed and helen may provide some answers there [and create currency at the same time...]

i'm interested to hear how the progression of the work is received

we will have both an online audience member and possibly one onsite - the former who was there from the scheduled start and the later who experienced the show as part of the media event at the great hall [at first remixed sound and visuals in a massive hall, then discovered on small screens and as part of an installation

this time we will be able to start the piece at the same point for both audiences and as always in this clean green place we will admonish them to

'take only photographs, leave only footprints'

multiple audiences

"Familiar Features" is our first experiment with addressing both the online and on-site audience (we have presented other work both online and offline, but this is the first time that we've specifically set out to make a show that is just as good for either audience).

Questions:
- can we make a work that satisfies both audiences?
- what aspects will both audiences experience, and what will be separate experiences?
- will the two audiences engage with each other, and if so, how?

Another question is: Why? My answer to that is because people want it. Every time we do a show that is happening in a particular physical place, people ask how they can watch it online. We have to say, you can't. We're not in the business of webcasting. We use multiple applications, we have specific screenography (the arrangement of application windows on the screen) and there is interaction between the on-stage performer and the remote performers on the screen that would be difficult to convey via a web cast.

So why not make a show that communicates to both these audiences simultaneously - or at least have a go and see what happens. The difficult part is that until we are actually presenting it to an audience, we can't be sure that it works. The first presentation of "Familiar Features" (at Intimacy & Inyerface was well-received. Things have moved on quite a bit since then and now we are building up to the next experiment ...

one step at a time ...

creative processes are pretty fascinating. as a group, we have developed a way of devising collaboratively, and each show takes a unique path within that process.

with our current work-in-progress, familiar features, we have had a couple of weeks of struggling, going off on tangents and around in circles, until last night when the introduction of a new idea (just as we were agreeing that we had to stop exploring new ideas and focus on the essence of the work) led to everything falling into place.

all the time we spent on tangents, false starts, going down dead ends and wrestling with conflicting ideas - is it time wasted, or is it a vital part of the process? i believe it ultimately enriches the work. every possibility that we explore answers some of our questions about what we are trying to do. an intriguing path may not end up being the final way, but we learn a lot by exploring it - and that feeds into the layers within the work, even if it's so buried that the audience may never know it's there. it's like painters who build up layers and layers of paint in order to achieve a particular effect.

the new idea last night gives us a practical framework, which supports all the essential ideas we want to talk about in this piece as well as giving a clear start and end. it's important that we have a strong structure as we're dealing with both online and offline audience, & need to think about how the experience will be for both audiences.

imaginary space

An MA student at WSA, writes about how Nation States with heavily defined, regulated and guarded borders have strict criteria about who can be a citizen of their country. Whereas people, who migrate around the world for variety of reasons including persecution, make look back/across their 'own' country, perceiving that country as home, when the country does not/longer recognises that individual as citizen or 'belonging' to the national state.

This is of couese why the space of the internet is so precious and so important to remain unregularised, uncompartmentalised - free space as it were. With that in mind, I'd think every effort should be made to stop Ed & Helen colonisation any inch of cyberspace.

Can you own cyberspace? Access is controlled and limited, but ownership is illusory, fading like vapour trails from planes that 'write' messages in the sky. Or like the Etch-a-Sketch drawings that get shaken away.

If you can't own but can only occupy imaginary terriotiory of cyberspace for a while, what need for immigration?

Could we be thinking of using our space in a less terrestial way?

I like the notion of boundaries forming and dissolving.
Dissolve is strong action