Team Huddle

Good to hear form Agent Ava... our woman in India. New assignment contained herein- for everyone that is.

We are going to try to move ahead with projecting images on to people. The notion we discussed in workshop on Friday was to have individuals "embody" or "represent" different versions of, or apprehensions about, the big ending. I want to turn the question we're asking of our audience back on us and work out from there towards an image. This image will identify and embody our own apprehensions (or predictions, or premonitions) and will then be projected on to us during the opening sequence. If you made it to workshop Friday, you may have already generated some material useful for this(remember to blog it, also), otherwise, start by considering the following prompts. Also, Cara's dance/choreography exercise from two weeks ago, where we each imagined the end and expressed it in movement, could be very useful to think about. I've posted my answer to these questions below, so you can get a sense of what an answer might be (though obviously my answer won't be your answer):

Think of a fearful ending- what exactly in it is fearful.

Think of a earful recurrence- what moment in the fearful ending would be most disturbing if it returned.

Which is your clock? How far are you from midnight?

Out of all this try to generate an image or images and translate it into some language. Nao, our intrepid video artist, is going to create this image for projection onto our chests. If you have any images (as in digital images) you want to reference, you can point us towards those as well.

In the current state of our discussion, we're proceeding something like this. Abby's opening sequence, with the pedestrian movement, the pulsing hands, etc. is going to open both shows. From there, we are trying to build sequences which address or correspond to questions (as in the list of questions). Eventually, there may be ten or so sequences. For the Pilot and StreamFest showings, we're going to select some smaller set of sequences, like three or four, and stitch them together. To keep it interesting, we might choose a different set for StreamFest from the sequence we do for Pilot. In the meantime, we're going to continue building any and every bit of material that illuminates our problem, only narrowing down our focus when it's absolutely necessary.

Cara and Abby are after some more text or more starting points as they build more choreography, so what I wanted to do here is post a few aspects of the big problem I feel like we haven't addressed, or at least could use more thinking about, in the work so far, to see if we can get started thinking about them together. These would be:

Skepticism about the apocalypse- including the fact that it's been predicted many times and hasn't happened yet. Also the shady and chance nature of scientific prediction to begin with.

Rising water levels- if true, we're talking about up to 20 feet by the end of the century.

Environmental racism, or the fact that class and race (reading nationality and locality into this- i.e. Black residents of the 9th Ward somehow magically got the brunt of the damage to New Orleans) will have a huge impact on who is effected by these catastrophic changes first and hardest.

Other religious apocalyi besides the Rapture.

Nuclear war, militarism in general

That's all I can think of right now- will add more later.

Here's notes from Friday, followed by the image I feel like I'm arriving at.

as summer stretches over Fall months, creeks dry, then rivers dry, themn basins, shores of lakes inch up like skirts, as winter wanes, temperatures climb, tomatoes plumping in the grass in February in Vermont, as fish get up and walk to their graves on shore, on trees the signs of heat stroke, parched they dip into empty lakes until suddenly, torrentially, black and soot-grey rain seeps into cracked concrete, wells up in culverts, where, gangrenous the bodies rot, the survivors made sick by the water finally, filtering through broken city’s systems contracting

the recurrence of entropy, systems failing/falling apart, faster than we can rebuild them, and faster they we can adapt to their absence.

while water scarcity probably scares me in the most immediate way, my image is of this broader notion of entropy. As I see it, the Earth is a planet based solely on an intense energy: pulling it into its core, keeping it spinning in orbit, keeping its oceans from sloshing over into space, etc. Like every system, and I think it's fair to call the Earth a system, the energy keeping it together has to someday dissipate, and in both a real and metaphoric sense, break down. The image:

a spinning, spherical object which gradually gets more eccentric in its motion, like a dreidel running out of steam, until instead of spinning in on itself, it is spinning out of control, tossing off bits of itself like kids off a merry-go-round, until the increasing violence of this motion tears the entire thing apart.