11D. Performance Score: Back to Front

• Five people: go out on the floor and stand side by side with your backs toward us. The rest of us are an audience. In random sequence, each of you turn to face the audience. Begin a monologue and continue with it until you get interrupted. As soon as you get interrupted, turn back around.

• Have all the monologues contrast with one another. Each time you begin a monologue, it should be very different from the other ones you have heard and the ones you have started—different in the content of the language, the timing and quality of the voice, different energy. Interrupt each other erratically. You are playing together, the interruptions, timing, and quality of your voices are all part of a musical event. Don't bridge content—each other's words, or style of voice—in any way. After five minutes or so, all of you face front, talk simultaneously and orchestrate your voices until you find an ending.

This score is about music and dancing. The five partners dance together with their voices and their back-to-front turns. The interruptions, pauses, accelerations, highs and lows, fasts and slows, crescendos and retards, are manifestations of energy translated into sound. The energy flows out of, and into, itself. The participants release into that flow. The content serves the flow, too. Listening arouses feeling, feeling elicits image, and then, collectively, listening, feeling and image choose the sound quality.

When you think too much, you can't hear anything other than your thinking. You can't hear the music that's outside of your head, which is there all the time. Don't think. Just listen. Then, let the spaces be filled when you hear the need. Fill the spaces with a voice that pleases you, and content that arrives when you open the doors of silence.

For example:

Juanita is listening. The last two voices have been light, sing-song; one describing a journey in the desert and the other looking in the mirror at its nakedness. She interrupts with a loud, commanding monologue of instructions for assembling an outdoor barbeque. After only a few words, Joe interrupts with a return to the soft sing-song texture recounting an accident at summer camp. Shortly, Phil interrupts with, again, a harsh and abrupt style describing an encounter with a malfunctioning parking meter. Juanita interrupts with a sweet, silly description of a glad-iola as it blooms. Phil interrupts with a sneering laugh describing a threatening prison experience.

Each of the situations described above could have been delivered with different voices, attitudes, coloring, timing and texture. But because of what the participants heard they chose the feelings and voices to follow the music, playing with similarity, contrast, rapid interruptions, sometimes settling into longer monologues. The content served the music and the music served the content.

Students are encouraged to develop content that means something to them, stimulates feeling, and resonates with their being. In Back to Front, they're listening and jumping into holes. They don't know what they're jumping in with exactly. They don't know what they're going to say, or how long they get to say it. A sound, or a short word, is enough. A "So," or "They," or "Do." As they listen to themselves, they build their text, voice, image and feeling, word by word.

Usually, when we interact with others through language, we listen for the conceptual and psychological content. Here, as in earlier exer cises, we're listening to the pure sounds as well, the sounds devoid of meaning.

The interruptions are an integral part of the collective music. There's no question of competition, or control. When interrupted, whatever material is being pursued immediately gets dropped. No attachments to story, emotion, or completion. The intent is on listening and music making.

Action is, in fact, a response. . That's all.

To act is to respond to the material of one's awareness: information from the senses, imagination, memory.

To act is to enact the current experience of awareness as it awares.

Day Twelve

A Scene

12A. 30 Minutes, Eyes Closed

12B. Non-Stop Talk/Walk

12C. Talking Circle

One Word

Two Words

Few Words and Gesture

12D. Contenting Around

12E. Performance Score: Scene Travels

Our Vocabulary:

Sensation: What we see, hear, smell, taste, touch and kineti-cally experience.

Feeling: States of mind and body that can't be named but are familiar.

Thought: Analytical, judgmental, conceptual, reasoning, reflective, or planning mental activity.

Emotion: Thought inspired, identifiable states of mind.

Memory: Images, thoughts, feelings retained from past "real" life experience.

Imagination: The forming of mental or physical images of what is not present. Creating new images from the combination of any of the above.

Action: Behavior.

Experience arises from the interaction of any or all of the above. Sensation, feeling, thought, memory, imagination and action. As long as we continue to notice information coming in and from within, without lingering, without preference to outcome, we call our experience, "Present."

Every week we close our eyes, each week for a longer period. The experience is always different, for we feel safer and safer in the darkness. Each time we are more comfortable with ourselves from the inside.