12D. Contenting Around

• Sit on the floor in trios and face one another. One of you begins a monologue. You are laying out the trunk. The next person has three choices: either repeat what was just said, add on to it continuing the same form and content, or shift to a new monologue, with different form and content, provid ing branches, roots, leaves, fruit or nuts. Take short turns. A few lines. If you shift, arrive at that shift by association. Remember the association comes from present experience. Not just an idea. You're filling out a single tree or planting a grove.

• Once this process begins, continue going round and round in sequence until I say stop. Then, begin another round with the next person starting the thing off. We'll do this three times so that you each can initiate a sequence.

The first person who speaks lays down the trunk. Everything that follows is developed in some relation out of it. The clearer the initial image, the more contained and cohesive the scene will be. A trunk usually has within it a larger idea, concept, image or feeling that has the potential to inspire subsidiary feelings and images.

Every trunk, branch, root, leaf, nut and fruit may be developed, filled out, and given body. As the participants go round and round, they may relate to anything that has come before them, drawing from their memory, feelings, and imagination.

The tree metaphor relates directly to laying down stones mentioned previously. In both models, the student walks backwards, seeing the item laid down before her, staying connected to the unfolding which, then, inspires her present action. Both attempt to organize what may be vastly overwhelming possibilities.

The structure of tree could include laying down stones but laying down stones doesn't necessarily presuppose tree. For in order to work with the tree, students must be able to listen and remember all that occurred in the scene (laying down stones). The difference between the two is that the tree leads to a cohesive scene, wherein every action and image share a common base. Laying down stones does not particularly lead to cohesiveness. The stones require only noticing and remembering what went before. The content, even though relational, may be a seemingly arbitrary string of associations.

In the exercise above, we're limiting ourselves to language. We can use the tree metaphor with movement or sound, too.

The following exercise brings movement, sound and language into the forest.

12E. Performance Score: Scene Travels

• Six or seven people stand at the far wall facing the audience. You're going to sound, language, and gesture a scene together. Your scene begins at the far wall and will end when you reach the front floor boards. You travel forward as a group.

• Imagine that, collectively, you are a giant organism. As each part of the organism moves forward, it extends out of the whole, but remains part of the whole. As you each travel forward, you either speak or sound. As you move forward, you're continually creating and re-creating a collective shape. You're building content either by repeating what has already been said, adding on to what has been said, or jumping off into a new direction that is relevant. More than one person can talk at a time if you're speaking roughly the same language and orchestrating your voices.

• Don't rush. Stay with sounds, phrases, counterpoints, mini-choruses as they arise. Join each other. You may interrupt each other. If you get interrupted, you must become silent and stop moving. If you're not travelling, hold your last shape, be silent and still. You all reach the front and finish more or less simultaneously.

As this event happens, students don't consciously work the tree. It would slow them down, interrupt the flow, and take them out of the scene. The tree is only useful as a model to help conceptualize a scene. What is the scene? How does it hang together? Once we get the idea of relatedness that the tree offers, we can forget the tree and just go about making scenes.

Every solution has a danger. Here, the danger is that the scenes may become too "worked." Everyone tries too hard to stay related. For example: the first person that leaves the wall may say something about birth. Thereafter, everyone clings to the concept of birth, and pretty soon, there's an assortment of clever and witty ideas about birth. Nothing new. No surprises.

Students must simultaneously experience and disengage from the unfolding content to give memory and imagination the room to pull the scene in unexpected directions. We don't listen only with our ears. Every cell is alert, sensing the collective heartbeat. Individuals unify, agree. Always. The event unfolds as a piece of music, as a movie moving.

Students relinquish their attachment to "I" and to "Is" ideas. They are feeling, thinking, remembering and imagining. They don't miss a beat. The music is continuous even when there's silence.

Day Thirteen

Action as Sign

13A. Pillows

13B. Image Making

13C. One Sound/One Move/One Speak

13D. Solo: Sepaiate Sound, Movement and Language

13E. Trios: Separate Sound, Movement and Language

13F. Performance Score: Separate Sound, Movement and Language

Three actors are on the stage. The play has begun. A woman stands in a sliver of light on the edge of the stage, separated from the play. Her job is to translate the text for the audience members who are hearing-impaired. Her actions are simple, precise. She means them, feels them, and for that moment, lives completely in the world from which they spring. Her hands, eyes, eyebrows, lips are alive with feeling. Musically, she depicts a symbology, a code, that is, to me, undecipherable and, at the same time, understandable.

I shut my ears to the voices of the actors and only watch her signs. Her actions are full of meaning and devoid of story.

Signs

Our actions, speech, sounds, and gestures are signs that point to meaning. They represent concepts, images, feelings, information—something different than what they are propelling, energy and vibrations through space. Depending on how we open or tighten our perceptive lens, we either see what's being represented or the representation itself. With every word we say, there is the physical experience of making the sound, what that physical experience evokes, the actual thing being talked about and what that evokes. Take the word "sister." I say, "Sister." I enunciate and intone "sister" this way or that. "Sister" is not the person, not the girl. It's a sign; a sound that comes out of my mouth. How I say "sister" gives some more signs about the concept of "sister," or something about me in relation to what "sister" means. Sign language is set, prescribed, taught and learned. Our language is prescribed, taught and learned, but we learn ways to vary it. In order not to fall into cliched language, we have to reinvent it as we go.