the battleground in the foreground of the underground [lair]
The double-decker extravaganza was for me an experiment in our faith of spontineity. Our group was very kind to one another, and I think we each recognized quickly how difficult it was to noticeably include five people's ideas into a very short show. (What oh What happened to our number five dude? WHERE ARE YOU NUMBER FIVE DUDE?!) Our collaboration seemed to depend on spontinoirity simply because we seemed unwilling to structure ourselves around any one person's vision, afraid that accepting one person's idea excludes the others. We worked it out much better the second day, taking the spirit of ideas offered on the first day, embracing them as ideas instead of identities, and rolled with it. We seemed to do our own things with a general awareness of other people, trying to "flow".
A thought that totally preoccupied my mind during this exercise was our automatic story writing. It seemed that in any show, any "event" translated (at least in my mind) into some sort of story. Characters with motivations sprung uncontrollably out of randomly torn pieces of paper and guttural utterances. Is it possible to have a "show" without a "story"? I recognize we started out with the intention to create a series of events, i.e. story, so that would explain our case. But I wonder if we watched a computer production of random shapes interact randomly on a screen, would we still automatically assume a story? Could we even comprehend a truly random and coincidental series of events?