18F. Performance Score: Collaborative Deconstruction

• Four people get up and stand, side by side, in front of the audience. Four others go up and, each of you, give a language phrase accompanied with a gesture to a different one of them, and return to join the audience. Keep the gestures and language short and simple.

• The four performers begin by repeating the entire phrase and gesture, one or two times, in relation to what you sense from each other. Then, begin to deconstruct your action.

• The four of you will improvise together and collaborate, playing with your deconstructions. Don't look at each other. You're facing the audience. Listen to each other. Sense each other, stay connected. Blend, weave, interlace, chorus, punctuate, back-up, be similar, contrast, feel your music together.

• After some time, I'll give you a two-minute cue. Within that time, find an ending.

Remember the braids mentioned earlier? Action Theater training braids themes, each time drawing out more details. We braid themes such as relaxing, listening, feeling, timing, music, shape, space, and dynamics. We weave them into tighter and tidier relationships.

Collaborative Deconstruction calls for precise imprints of movements and sounds, fierce listening and unhesitant responses, eyes on all sides of the head, one collective ear, a unified dance from a four-fold body, and a unified chorus from a four-fold voice. Through content-less grunts, whinnies, groans, twitches, thrusts and snaps, four humans expe­rience themselves as one animal.

So far, every exercise on this day has been tightly programmed, with narrow limits set in place before the improvisations began. Now, we open the windows and doors, breathe, and, without constraints, follow our hunches.

18G. Performance Score: Threaded Solos

• It's time for solos. Sitting in a line, we'll start at one end and move on down from one person to the next. You can choose to improvise for 1, 2, or 3 minutes. We'll pass a watch and you'll be timed by the person that precedes you. When your time is up, they'll call out, "Time," loud and clear.

• Thread your solo to the one before it. Take something, some aspect, and use it as a base from which you take off. It may be a sound, movement, phrase, feeling, association, whatever comes to mind.

• Someone from the audience, give the first person an action to start them off.

• We won't stop and discuss these works. We'll just move from one to the next, making a continuous chain of related matter.

Pulling a thread from the preceding solo stops the watching performers from planning their improvisation ahead of time. They can relax, forget themselves, and simply be with one another.

Watching each other perform is not too different from watching one's self. As is frequently the case, a person who is highly judgmental and always analyzing others' actions with a critical perspective, turns the same process onto herself. She analyzes, evaluates, and judges, withholding herself from participating in her own experience. Being part of an audience, is an opportunity to relax, accept, and empathize.

Sitting in the audience also mirrors performing. It mirrors sitting on a bus. Each experience is an opportunity to relax and receive, by sensing what's happening.

Greta sees Pola struggling within her solo. Greta's mind takes over. Pola should do this or that, thinks Greta. Pola should confess her struggle. Pola should use third person. Pola should relax her arms. Pola should listen to herself. Pola should just pause for a minute and collect herself. Pola should breathe. Where's Greta?

If Greta were struggling within her own solo, she would most likely go through the same process. Instead of going into the struggle, she'd involve herself with distracting and correcting devices all the time, running further and further away from herself.

Suppose, as Greta watched Pola, she became the experience she was watching and felt it from inside herself. After the improvisation ended, Greta could describe her experience while watching Pola, without the risk of personal projection, or agenda, interfering with her evaluation.

Stalking may be seen as tracking, following, pursuing, going after something we don't have. We need not limit our concept of stalking to this vein. Stalking is relaxing, slowing down, noticing, being alert. Stalking is experiencing phenomena directly, no separation between the stalker and what is being stalked. To stalk is to be. Diffused of emotion, it is no more or no less than heightened awareness.

Day Nineteen

People and Props

19A. No Pillows

19B. Body Parts/Shifts

19C. Beginnings

19D. Props

19E. Simultaneous Solos with Props

19F. Performance Score: People and Props

Schtick

The Yiddish word shtick originally referred to a comedy bit or a particular talent. Now the word is used as a derogatory comment referring to patterned or habitual behavior that exhibits itself over and over again.

It's likely that most shticks originated as spontaneous actions. Subsequently, because of positive reinforcement, they became set as permanent fixtures of behavior. As long as the audience isn 't familiar with the performer, the shtick works. Then again, because some audiences crave the familiar, many performers have built careers of shticks.

We're improvising. That means we're proceeding through experience in a moment-to-moment way. But, shticks do come up and when they do, our job is to investigate and follow their details. We can only do that if we recognize the shtick as an empty action of habit, devoid of any value right now. If we can do that, we're already past the shtick, outside, beyond and through it. Our shtick becomes a memory.

To truly improvise, one must be willing to fall or fly off the psycho/physical edge that separates familiar experience from the unpredictable. One must be willing to go where the terrain is fresh, unusual, and even strange.

In these moment-to-moment explorations, there's no shtick. There's no familiar or unfamiliar. There are no edges between things. Instead we experience unrelenting change of energy, rhythm, sound, shape, motion, language, and feeling.

We'll begin as an ensemble.