Entry #1

This begins our new "Wake up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!" blog. The first posting consists of pages of notes I've written to myself during the months in which I was planning the production, which will feature material filmed in Portugal last Spring that will be projected throughout the performance and against which the play with live actors will be staged.

A new entry will be made four times a week-- sometimes my own comments on the rehearsals or answering questions posed by our interns about the process and relevant background material-- but there will also be contributions consisting of ideas and impressions of those now working on the play in rehearsal, as well as anecdotes and reminiscences posted by many who have worked on my Ontological-Hysteric productions in past years.

Hopefully, the blog will evolve in directions not yet known-- let's find out!

Richard Foreman


NOTES

(MR SLEEPY):
What I do is really quite straight-forward.

Most theater depicts people navigating the currents of every-day life. I admit I find this suffocating and non-revelatory.

Instead, I am passionately interested in what throbs behind normal “social” life— a hypnotic yet inaccessible influence from levels both above and below that common life within which the impulsive twitches of the conditioned mind and body dance their every-day dance.

For me, the true JOY in art is to display such behavioral lurching in counterpoint against a more formal, non-human backdrop that is both literal (projected film tableaux) and symbolic (a relatively abstract grid of words and sounds) which combine to create contrapuntal complex patterns into which the human mind inevitably projects visions of the transcendence that haunts all non-human “empty space”-- that void that exists between everything from atomic particles, to mental concepts, to human beings, or individual moments of pulsating consciousness.

What I do in my theater is simply to layer different self contained ‘realms of being’ (image, sound, idea, or movement) over one another in ways that allow such overlapping layers to bleed through each other and create thereby, maps of new mental territory in which heightened sensibility re-energizes the internal mechanism we all share in common.

So—nothing to be afraid of or to anticipate as “hard to understand” in my plays, because one should not try to laboriously translate them into what they are not. They are NOT pictures of the “outer” world. They are NOT even pictures of the “inner” world. They simply use left over pieces of both inner and outer worlds to build a PARADISE where the mind and feelings dance as if the world were in fact—total music. (And perhaps it secretly is!)

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NOTE:

True-- there is no real story, but there is always a ‘theme”—sometimes from the beginning of the play’s conception, and other times only emerging in the weeks of rehearsal.

But! -- my task as an artist is always to fold that ‘theme’
into many other levels of meaning and materials. Mixed and dispersed so that the energetic twitchings of the ‘whole world at once’ transforming any central and therefore one dimensional theme into the network of “all meanings at once”-- reflecting and feeding off all other meanings”.

This, I do find, EXHILARATING!

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4 KEYS I OFFER:
WHICH OPEN DOORS I HOPE TO OPEN

1) The universe of the penetrating look. Frightened by the look. When you are LOOKED at, with intensity, does the level of ‘personality’ become befuddled, and the deep self—stripped naked, wake up at last?


2) The frozen image. When the presented image suggests neither intention nor “involving action”, then the field of the image starts to tremble with intimations of “elsewhere”

3) Each on stage item as provocation. Provoke, like the mysterious seductive one who withdraws into silence, and beckons-- like a door to another world. . .

4) Language as the impenetrable mystery. Statements that turn upon themselves, Ouroborus -like (the snake eating its own tail)—and by emptying out normal, every-day ‘meanings’-- knock down the walls of the everyday
behavioral prison, opening (Zen-like) to new levels of mental organization

I.E. “MENTAL SHOCKS”. Tiny MENTAL SHOCKS to reprogram the nervous system so the mind can start dancing a new kind of brain dance!

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I suggest there are two kinds of theater.

One kind ‘talks about’ things and suggests at least a possible ‘resolution’ to the issues raised.

The second kind EMBODIES in its style and structure the often agitated ebb and flow that consciousness experiences in its collisions with life-- understanding that nothing is ever ‘resolved’, but rather that all things change into other things before there is any possible ‘resolution’.

So this second—which is my theater, of course—is about “nothing” that can be discussed, but deeply about the
moment to moment experience of the flux of the real—i.e. impulse giving way to new impulse giving way to new impulse.

To read part one of the full notes click here