20B. Superscore

• In trios. Find a place on the floor and stand neutral in relation to your partners.

• The Superscore is the master score, an open improvisation without a par ticular focus. Everything you've studied, explored, understood, tooled up, and gained insight into comes into play here. Here's a list of reminders:

• Move, sound or speak in any combination or separately.

• Shift, transform or develop your forms.

• Join each other or do something different.

• You and your partners are always in the same world, even if simultaneous scenes are going on.

• Relationships may be either direct or indirect or both.

• Partners relate in time, space, shape, and dynamics, all the time, and these are either contrasted or similar.

• Listen. Always know what your partners are doing. Pay attention to detail.

• Every action is a stone that is being laid down and may be retrieved and explored again.

• At some point, I'll give you a two-minute cue to end.

The Superscore list seems like a list of things to do. It's not. It's the way we remind ourselves of what's always going on.

Notes:

Let awareness direct you. Let it shift or transform. Your awareness will decide to stay with something for a long time, or talk, or make a sound. Awareness responds to you and your partner. Relax. Let awareness improvise.

If a voice or character feels false, experience that falseness, go with the sensations of what you call "falseness." Then the experience will no longer be false.

Techniques are tools for efficiency. The performer must transcend techniques in order to engage in the moment-to-moment sensations of experience.

Feelings aren't in any hurry. It's the ideas that rush along.

A person quietly resides inside changing phenomena. Occasionally, she notices the phenomena. Occasionally, she thinks she is the phenomena itself. But, sometimes she experiences herself pretending to be a person pretending to identify with the phenomena. From this curious detachment, she performs.

The final score of the twenty day training, Dreams, often invites personal material. The students have become a community. They've travelled through intimate and exposing experiences together. They've been seen and they've seen into each other. They've been privy to watching themselves with great perspective. They are less attached to their judgments, their personalities, and even to the events and circumstances which make up their lives. They've been willing to play with it all week after week. Now, they play very skillfully.

20C. Performance Score: Dreams

• Everyone leave the floor. We're going to make dreams. You will each get a turn being a central figure in a dream.

• Here's how we proceed:

• One of you will go onto the floor and begin a dream by doing something that feels right to you, at the moment. Anything. You're the dreamer, the primary focus, for this improvisation, even though it will become a collaboration between yourself and anyone who enters your dream.

• You'll have a few moments by yourself. Then, anyone in the audience can enter or exit your dream at any time. Everyone on the floor is collaborating on the flow of events. The dreamer is not the only one controlling, or responsible for, the events that happen. But, the dreamer is the only one who stays on the floor until the end.

• This is a Superscore with a designated central figure. So, you can remind yourself of our Superscore list.

• Since there's many of you participating in this event, we'll add a few more elements to our Superscore list of reminders:

• Have no more than three, at the most four, different things going on at any time.

• LISTEN so that everything works together.

• Join or bulk up each other's actions.

• As in our sleeping dreams, allow time and space to stretch and bend, and the images to be non-linear, oddly related and sequential, or overlapping. Content (scenes) can shift suddenly. Several time and place zones can exist simultaneously.

• Make your entrances and exits clear and direct.

• At any time, the person playing dreamer can end the dream by saying,"Stop."

• When you're not on the floor, you're an active audience member, ready to jump in. So, stay involved.

Entrances and Exits

The following are examples of clear entrances and exits:

• Enter or exit while doing a task.

• Enter directly to a particular location as if you belong there and exit as if it's time to go.

• Enter or exit in a hurry, or take your time, a lot of time.

• Whatever your choice, relate it to what's going on.

The entrance and exit tactic, built into this score, hones skills of observation. Students being the audience have an external vantage point from which to view the scene. Their function is to serve the scene rather than serve themselves. With this in mind, they determine whether their input is appropriate, depending on what they perceive from their audience position. They may choose to hold off or go forward, aggressively interrupt, or secretively slide into the current images and actions.

Exits demand an overview also, but from the inside of the improvisation. What effect does their departure have on the scene? Does it weaken or strengthen it? For some, who have a tendency to overstay their effectiveness, this is a good practice. Get the job done and leave.

Humor

Ann is improvising with Hugh and Stan. They each are carrying a chair. There's a loft in the studio. Holding onto their chairs, they're following each other in a line around the room. Stan's leading. When he passes the loft, he tosses his chair up onto it. Hugh follows and tosses his chair up onto the loft. Ann wants to do the same but doesn't have the strength. She gets confused, wavers, and finally throws her chair out of the room through a nearby door.

After the improvisation, we isolate this event to discuss humor. As it happened, it was not funny, yet it could have been. We felt Ann's awk wardness and self-consciousness. She got stuck, confused, lost awareness inside of her predicament.

For humor to occur, the performer must disengage from her predicaments. She must see all predicaments as the circumstances of the entity, not one's self, she's playing at the moment. Ann got lost because she identified herself too closely with the situation. She experienced her inability to toss the chair as a personal failure. She forgot she was "playing" an entity who was unable to toss the chair. If this had been her view, the situation could either be funny or tragic. That choice is up to her. If she experiences it as funny and expresses a detailed confession of herself perceiving herself inside of the predicament, then we too will experience humor with her.

Humor rides on timing. The performer feels each beat. No thoughts or distractions blur his vision. He is in the dance of expression, moment by moment. He expresses present awareness and if his awareness is humorous, he will be humorous. In Action Theater, we don't run after humor. Humor finds us.

The dreamer may say, "Stop" for one of two reasons: 1) he senses a conclusion or, 2) he feels uncomfortable. Sometimes these dreams become more like nightmares. If the dreamer is identifying with the material, he may reach overload and decide to call it quits. On the other hand, having the power to end the improvisation, in itself, elicits a certain degree of objectivity and freedom.

"Dream" is a useful word. We all do it. We all know what it means. We all know that dreams don't necessarily reflect our everyday world. They swirl up from a mix of embedded psychic material, beyond our control. Using the word "dream" puts people in a place of mystery. They're more willing to float into the nether world of the imagination, and build scenes that bend and mix social, spatial, chronological, and linguistic organization. The personality of the performer disappears, leaving a transparent and transforming energy that fills space with feeling and complete actions.

Dreams are chosen to be the final score of the training. Each member of the group becomes a central figure of a dream. The group has shared rich and provocative moments together. They've served each other during this process of collective and individual transformation. In offering themselves up as dreamers and by adding to each others dream, they act from gratitude.