19E. Simultaneous Solos with Props

• Three people, choose a prop and go out onto the floor. You'll each improvise, alone with your prop, at the same time.

• Here's how it goes. Develop your own content, separate and different from the others. Create a formal link between yourselves. Share and co-create both the physical and the sound space. Be aware of what your partners are doing, how they are doing it, and how what you're doing formally relates to their activity. Your timing and movement through space, the spatial level you're on, the shapes you're making and the energy you're working with, all relate to your partners.

• Start simply. Only fill the space with the quantity of activity that you can hold in your collective awareness. Remember to keep your content separate from other peoples'. Don't draw from each others' images. Don't even look at each other directly. Use peripheral vision and hearing instead. Hold the entire event in your mind.

• At some point I'll say, "Two minutes." Within that time, end.

Students are collaborating on visual landscapes. They're focusing their exploration on the physical, energetic and temporal components of theater. Eliminating direct relationship from their interaction simplifies the exploration.

Merging Content

For some, it's not hard to maintain separate content while interacting formally. For others, it is. We're accustomed to merging content. I say, "Hello." You say, "Hello," back. I say, "How ya doin'?" You say, "Fine." We don't know how to be with someone and not be affected, or reactive, to their mental and emotional expressions.

Props help to break this habit. The performers' primary relationship is with their prop. They're aware of everyone else's activity, but they're not merging content with anyone else's. Their world is their prop. Somebody running around the room with a big red ball yelling, "Fire," would affect them, but the stories would remain independent and different.

The audience experiences these separate stories and images as a composite, a whole event. They find conceptual and physical connections between snippets of content and between the separate stories. It's to the performer's advantage to know what the audience knows, and see what the audience sees. After all, the performers are in charge. It's their show. Their intention is to communicate what they want. They may choose to allow chance happenings to go without a response, but there's no reason why they should miss out on enjoying (and responding to) them as much as the audience does.

John slams a ladder onto the ground. Without missing a beat, Gert starts to sing a be-bop kind of song.

It's as if the ladder, upon hitting the floor, caused a chain reaction of displaced molecules, setting in motion Gert's song. John and Gert fill the room with a dynamic interplay of actions and responses while remaining in separate worlds.

19F. Performance Score: People and Props

• Again, three people choose different props and go out onto the floor, together.

• You're in the same world sharing both content and forms. You're in a direct relationship with your partners. The props are integral aspects of your collaborative world.

• You're not limited to the prop you started with. All the props are fair game for everyone. They can change hands and change meaning.

• In a sense, there are six of you out there: three animate, three inanimate.

Props may be used as metaphors for internal states. For example, the way one carries a big red ball, lightly on the tips of fingers, or violently clutching the ball to the body, can indicate very different responses to the exclamation, "Fire!" Calmly sifting little mounds of dirt, or frantically wrapping oneself in plastic, while saying, "Fire," would indicate two very different subtexts. The subtleties of handling an object can speak beyond language, beyond sound and beyond free movement. The gestalt of how I speak and move creates a particular meaning at any given moment.

Three people plus three props equals six elements. The combina tion of the six create a unity of motion, image and energy. Unity always exists. Whatever's on the stage, or in the living room, is a whole, an entirety, consciously designed or not. The performer benefits from connecting with that wholeness, and experiencing themselves and their partners within it as well. They benefit by knowing their world.

In these prop exercises, ordinary objects are perceived as empty forms. They are defined beyond normal summarization, utility or function. To believe an object has only one meaning, is to believe from habit. The familiar, the shtick, restrains one s imagination. Habits need to be left behind here. The shtick disappears. As each improvisation proceeds, objects are named and renamed, acquiring new functions. Imagination rubs up against the senses, defining and redefining the material world.

Day Twenty

Dream On

20A. Walk/Sound, Solo/Ensemble

20B. Superscore

20C. Performance Score: Dreams

We've spent the last nineteen days developing skills of expression and expanding awareness. We've taken apart behavior, looked at its aspects and consciously reformed our actions. We've focused on detail. We've exercised and exercised and memorized a lot of rules and agreed on many conventions. In the end, after all the considerations, thoughts, insights and analysis, it's the body that does the job; if it's listened to and trusted, it will know what to do with surety.