Prelude 10 - Day 1

Fun day all around.  I wish we had been able to take Kevin Doyle's suggestion though and take the mics with us to The Archive Bar the conversation of course really got going once we were all there. 

Thanks to the Round Table participants and audience and thanks to the Performers for such fantastic showings.  Lots of music last night.  Still trying to process the confluence of that within the context of communication/communitas.  I'm sure Grotowski had something to say about music/singing that would land us in our UR-humanity and explain why music is such an integral part of creating a sense of shared something.

The Live Writers have started up too. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001568541102 is probably the easiest place to engage or use the twitter hash tag #prelude.

Thanks also to the Chos - those with us in person and those in voice for a beautiful writing session.  I can't wait to read all the plays others wrote.

Here's the Play I wrote with the Chos.  If anyone else wants to share their plays please just send them to me (morgan@lostnotebook.org) or go ahead and post them in a comment on the Facebook Fan page for Prelude.



realism can only be an experimental project

>>>>--Dy++llllll

that is the real thing that I drew

that is the title of the play I am writing

la la la la la de da
"theater is a form of singing"
"energize the familiar"

get at the D - take out the lllllllls
add them through a form of miosis and then unravel the rings around them that begins reverberating through the space
into the flowers that are sitting on my bag slowly dying or quickly decaying or moving somehow along that >>>> access.


How do you stage live decaying flowers?  Is it a theater in which nothing happens - watch them for days slowly or quickly depending on how you measure the time.

And then the other character sitting here asks in the deep Richard Foreman Voice - is this true?

and I respond - no no no the question is - is this real?
and someone picks up a pencil and draws another drawing.
and the entire process comes to a halt with the music and begins again.

last night I was in the Hole.
bubble lights
curtains
the floor wasn't sticky, which is surprising
there were people with "real" jobs there being introduced to other people with "real" jobs
and to artists

there was video playing
it didn't smell like stale beer
the food spread replaced the other kind of spread that is sometimes there
the fruit was ripe and delicious
there was a little man about 2 feet tall in a seer-sucker suit - he was the smartest one in the room
he was thinking about being hungry and wanting that other little girl's wooden doggy
and how beer is much yummier than the juice his dad really wanted him to have
but that perhaps he shouldn't eat the sausage that the grown-ups were eating.

it was thinking oh man why does this little girl drag me around everywhere - it hurts my joints and my little ropes and it doesn't put to use the wheels I was built with so she could drag me behind her on the street
it was thinking I like being wood with white spots and floppy ears.

wood with spots and floppy ears
and a simple life
lugged around and loved
and tugged at by others who would want to love it too
and handed to mom when something more exciting is happening that would otherwise be hindered by the lugging of it
and put abandoned on a riser because what adult would want to lug it around
to lug a piece of wood with spots and floppy ears
that is absurd
especially one so large
adults don't lug around the absurd



pink fluffy bunnies some how arise in the brain now
pink fluffy bunnies
invisible, but you still know they are pink

"theater feeds the sick desires of the people who have forgotten god"

if the bunnies aren't visible are they real?
or are they the sick desires of someone who has never remembered god?

> interruption from my little brother> who has just realized that the supermarket is "one-stop shopping for all the crazy neo-con-lit"

and I got distracted from something about Meryl Streep (sp?) and a directive to remember a movie she was in and my three least favorite playwrights - I fail on both accounts.

watching the cursor blink and blink and blink
wishing there were more pink fluffy bunnies in the world

I haven't done anything with intention in a long time
or at least I can't remember doing anything with intention in a long time
so what does that mean for the pink fluffy bunnies?
or for god
or for writing plays
or for dying flowers
or decaying plant life
or for making live theater out of decaying plant life?
or for neo-con-literature cluttering up my grocery isles?

what happens when you have writers block in a session that is teaching you how to write?

silence
okay I can write about silence - the refusal to participate in being human, in the practice of being human, of making and sharing and breaking signs - the refusal to acknowledge other people's humanity
silence
the inhuman
inhumanity

Prelude 10 teaser for Next Wednesday...

 

Today's challenge from Martha's "Whole" Living site: "Today, be mindful of the change of season and spend some time outdoors. Reflect on the cyclic changes within yourself as well." My addendum: and in the arts sector because with the autumn leaves comes PRELUDE FESTIVAL NYC!!! every year like clockwork.

 Here's a batch of facebook posts aggregated here for anyone who missed them this morning and wants a little appetizer for 7 days from today! 

Thinking about next Wednesday when we will be learning from Joyce Cho HOW TO WRITE!

joyce cho is an infestation

joycecho.org

joyce cho playwrights amber reed sibyl kempson scott adkins rob erickson karinne keithley kelly copper

Or check out the latest buzz about Trajal in the New York Times in addition to the piece he is making for the Kitchen, he is Danspace's PLATFORM 2010 Guest Curator!

Choreographer’s Style: Mia Michael, Lili Chopra and Trajal Harrell

www.nytimes.com

What are we talking about when we talk about dance these days? Artists may say that labels don’t matter, but they do.

And the TEAM! 

the TEAM's MISSION DRIFT "Burning Down Las Vegas" composed by Heather Christian

www.youtube.com

‎"Burning Down Las Vegas" from TEAM's new work MISSION DRIFT as performed at the... TEAM's benefit at Joe's Pub, April 2010. Music composed by Heather Christian, with lyrics by Heather Christian and the TEAM. A work-in-progress of MISSION DRIFT will be presented at the Ohio Theatre's Ice Factory Augu...See More

 

And Hoi Polloi with S. Oswald!

What do the men see

www.youtube.com

A song from ZOETROPE -- a song cycle of an invented town, with music by Alec Duffy, text by Sally Oswald and design by Mimi Lien, premiering in 2011.

Prelude 10 is here....(in web version at least - in person version coming Sept 29th!)

Go check it out!
PRELUDE 10 IS LIVE!


My Curatorial Statement starts like this...

Techniques for Live Stimulation...

Back in the days of VHS, when video first began to find its way cheaply and easily into the black boxes of theater, scholars killed many trees debating the merits of and limits to what constituted “live” art. The question here, “Why does live matter?”, is not why does analog performance matter?, or why should audiences leave their TVs at home and come sit in the dark of a theater? Everything we do as human beings is inherently live; whether or not the experience is mediated by technology is irrelevant because all experience is mediated by some technology - biological, synthetic or otherwise. Instead, for us, what is at stake in “live” is a matter of perspective. Are you engaging in the experience from a position of commodified estrangement or from a position of unfettered conscious inquiry and social collaboration?

In this particular context Prelude 10’s question ‘Why does live matter?” becomes: “Why does performance that asks us to be inquisitive and socially engaged human beings matter?”

Keep reading on the Prelude site 

Contemporary Performance

If you don't know about it already:
go here

http://contemporaryperformance.org/

they are doing god's work

Prelude 10 coming soon....

So - it awakens the beast.
finally
after more than a year dormant.
Prelude 10 is coming
and she's pissed
no not really, she's just hungry.
and she wants you all out there to come, see some phenomenal artists do their thing, make new things with some amazing artists leading activity sessions, listen to some opinionated artists argue out the most important things in life, and post about it all online to make everyone who can't be there jealous that they aren't there.
soon we'll reveal it all.
soon

Prelude 10: FESTIVAL CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Techniques for Live Stimulation...

Back in the days of VHS, when video first began to find its way cheaply and easily into the black boxes of theater, scholars killed many trees debating the merits of and limits to what constituted “live” art. The question here, “Why does live matter?”, is not why does analog performance matter?, or why should audiences leave their TVs at home and come sit in the dark of a theater? Everything we do as human beings is inherently live; whether or not the experience is mediated by technology is irrelevant because all experience is mediated by some technology - biological, synthetic or otherwise. Instead, for us, what is at stake in “live” is a matter of perspective. Are you engaging in the experience from a position of commodified estrangement or from a position of unfettered conscious inquiry and social collaboration?

In this particular context Prelude 10’s question ‘Why does live matter?” becomes: “Why does performance that asks us to be inquisitive and socially engaged human beings matter?”

And perhaps more specifically, what techniques are the artists showcased in Prelude 10 using to stimulate us back to “live”, to help us experience the present nowness of the non-collectible ephemeral, to bring us into this community in its full diversity, to set our beliefs off kilter, to provoke us to change our world, to create fissures in our grasp on reality, and to give us the tools to - as the “Godfather” of the avant-garde Richard Foreman once phrased it - Wake up?

The first day, Communication: where exchange becomes communitas, starts from the magical ability performance has to break us out of our isolation, to teach us to interrogate shared language and beliefs, and to bring us together, if only temporarily, into a communal spirit. Interrogating the various aspects of performance as communication - i.e. exchange, communitas, community etc, seemed like a logical place to begin this year’s festival. We’ve invited the Prelude Live Writers to create a virtual space for curated and audience response. Joyce Cho are going teach us how to write in ways we’ve never considered before. Robert Quillen Camp, Hoi Polloi, Trajal Harrall and the TEAM are going to share excerpts from their latest projects. “Community theater” might not be a term used to describe any of these artists, however their work often does trigger throughts about how we relate to each other as humans, how we speak to each other, how we treat each other, and how we process events in our collective experience, and therefore also the entire cloud of issues at stake in our broader notion here of Communication.

Prelude 10’s second day, Provocation: attempts to activate overstimulated city dwellers, focuses our attention to the potential in live art for creating work that generates immediate or post facto participatory movement in its witnesses. Someone once said somewhere “the role of performance is to reflect back the world to us so that we can better understand our place in it.” However, in our post-avant-garde world, live performance has proven it is truly powerful when makes us want to change our place in it. There is a long history of activism in performance, but it seems that much contemporary work achieves its provocation, not by being overtly political in its message, but rather by subtly transgressing lines we hold collectively sacrosanct. These transgressions reveal not just overt Red state vs Blue state divisions in our society, but more often metaphysical, ontological, or visceral habits we don’t even realize are part of our everyday. The artists joining us on day 2 - the Field and their ERPA artists, HERE, Aaron Landsman, Julie Atlas Muz, Jim Findlay, Penny Arcade, and Ishmael Houston-Jones - demonstrate the diversity of provocation techniques at play in contemporary performance. Their works provoke some kind of shift in our sensibilities and encourage us in directions that are perhaps are a little more sustainable and a little more humane.

Our third day, Simulation: living the simulacra, opens up the shifting definition of “human” to explore performance in the context of the proliferation of digital prosthetics. From midi to video to social media, live has become something we put through digital processing machines as we live it. Human fully embedded in the machinery of language, machinery of reproduction, machinery of war, and increasingly machinery of life. The performances and activity sessions curated for this 3rd day are made by artists who have a knack for breaking machines, rules and our expectations in order to achieve something most of us can’t even begin to imagine. Joe Silovsky, Kimon Keramidas, Reid Farrington, Andrew Schneider, Reggie Watts and DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, like magicians and their backstage engineers - these artists use technology of all kinds to bend the boundaries between simulation and reality, to create worlds for us that trigger visceral fissures in our perceptive appartuses and teach us new ways of seeing, hearing, and engaging each other and our world.

Three days of live performance,
three techniques for live stimulation,
three different calls to Wake Up.
Enjoy the ride.

Morgan von Prelle Pecelli

Festival Co-Curator
@lostnotebook