Headlong's "Explanatorium"

Tonight's the last time the mother ship leaves The Explanatorium. The final time the organ pipes resound in the voluminous sanctuary we've been calling home for the summer. The last chance for us to try to reverse the big bang. The last time (probably) we'll go home to comb snow out of our hair.

There are always reasons to be maudlin at the end of a run. So much of our selves is performed in this piece. And so much of the audience comes to us as we perform it. Although we've been collecting stories for months and months, they still seem fresh and new. And there are a world of possibilities we might try out...if only this wasn't the end.

If you've read this far, you should have figured out that tonight is your last chance too.

Good news to accompany this little burble of solemnity:

1. Headlong will be back. First Friday showings will start soon (check the website for details--www.headlong.org.)

2. If anyone has a giant, sanctuary-like domed structure with an oculus, we'd be happy to do The Explanatorium there (or even in a different type of space). Just be in touch.

3. If you are engaged by Headlong's work AND you're a college student (or know one), you should know that next fall (2008) Headlong is inaugurating a partnership with BRYN MAWR COLLEGE. The HEADLONG PERFORMANCE INSTUTUTE is a semester-away program for students interested in dance and theater performance & creation. It's 14 weeks and a full semester of courses, taught by some of Philadelphia's leading dance/theater artists. Go to HEADLONGPERFORMANCEINSTITUTE.ORG for info.

The Explanatorium functions, on one level, as a series of invitations to the audience. The piece asks you to step inside it, to explore some ideas with you...even to move around a bit to "change your point of view." Conventional performance attempts all this (when we're on our game) but Headlong has gotten interested in making these words manifest. This piece really puts its heart where its mouth is, by inviting the audience into it.

Although we rehearsed, explored, and experimented with our First Friday audience as we were creating the piece, there is simply no preparation for the performers that really prepares them for what it will feel like when they ask 150 people to do something...and they all simultaneously choose, pretty freely from my point of view, to do it. Something happens in the room where we realize that the piece is largely in the hands of the audience. And it feels as if a space ship is lifting off. As if the performance is or might go to a place that no performance has ever gone to before.

That, about the space ship, is a metaphor. Still. And, happily so (to me).

We DO explore the possibility of other worlds in The Explanatorium, and some people (including performers) may think of this as one of the central aspects of the piece. I, personally, am totally captivated by the possibilities of THIS world and, as I watch and participate in the piece each night, I'm mostly struck by the denseness of the sensual world. What brings me into the piece are the simple, but mostly overlooked, aspects of this world that it calls my attention to. Moving air, sound traveling, the height of a ceiling, the articulation of a dancer's gesture, all these things take me deeper into this world. Deep enough that, sometimes, as when I am on my back looking up at the ceiling, this world feels as mysterious and full of posibilities as another one.

Note to self: at cocktail parties, when people ask me what I do, respond I'm in analogue reality.

MARK LORD

Had a great dress rehearsal last night. One of my favorite parts was being outside where the audience is milling around before they go in. I ask people if they've ever had an "intense paranormal or supernatural experience." A surprising number of people have. Sometimes I have them write their story on an index card for our collection, sometimes I ask them if they'd agree to be interviewed later about their story, and sometimes people are willing to tell me, but don't want to share it any further than that (which is fine).
Last night's interview story was a doozy -- I just have to share it here. I asked my friend Kelly the question and she said: "Yes, I've been hagged."

She was sleeping in a dorm room in North Carolina, and she woke up to the sensation of someone or something sitting on her. She shut her eyes and waiting until the thing went away. The next day she called her boyfriend to tell him about it, and a friend of his explained: certain old-lady widow ghosts, or "hags", like to sit on people who are sleeping in the rooms they haunt. The remedy is to pee in a cup and put it under the bed, and the hag will go away. Kelly tried the remedy and it worked.

Oh, the gorgeous inexplicableness!
Amy

There's a moment before every dinner party and before every opening when suddenly you begin to have glimpses of how your guests/audience might see your choices. All along you've been planning to serve what you love, have shopped for the ingredients, have prepped everything and have set your table in ways that make sense to you. But suddenly (and always at the 11th hour, with the water boiling and your partner in the shower) you begin to question everything.

As we begin to prepare to share THE EXPLANATORIUM with you, we're excitedly rethinking our choices, fussing with the details, and generally behaving like anxious hosts. This is a familiar feeling to all of us who make performance. It's the feeling of our private expressions preparing to meet the public, our innerworld finding its way to the outerworld. For The Explanatorium, our excitement is perhaps greater because the audience is such an integral part of the piece. There are aspects of the work that we won't see until you do and we'll all find out together what's inside the delicate crust of our precious Baked Alaska.

MARK LORD

Last night we went to see FLAMINGO/WINEBAGO --which was swell, and I recommend it highly, but that's not why I brought it up. It was the first time I'd been to Old City since the surge of Live Arts/Fringe Artists has landed there. One of the great pleasures of making work in the Fringe is being a part of this larger-than-any-one-of-us friendly takeover of a neighborhood. On your way for coffee, or to the National, or to the hardware store (there was a time when Old City had actual hardware stores with actual hardware) you'd run into fellow travelers, other artists working through their own creative and practical problems. I felt a great sense of warmth in that and, when I could, I chose venues for my own work (ENDGAME, ACROSS, ZONE) that kept me close to the center of the fringe vibe.

For those of us on the margins of society (and I think almost all artists, no matter how much they earn, feel themselves located here) an occasion to meet one another in the context of the making of our work is a real boon. Creating works of performance is hard work. We're simultaneously wrestling with our own deep dark inner visions, AND trying to articulate those often unsettling visions to our collaborators in language, AND trying hard to hear what's going on inside them, AND working through the kinds of problems that attend making a performance (it's too long, the theme won't come clear, the performer can't do what I want, a costume is too ridiculous) compounded by the fact that we're mostly working in makeshift venues (the roof leaks, L & I came, what do you mean it won't ever get dark). In making work for the Fringe/Live Arts Festival, we are all really pushing ourselves towards our limits. And running into someone who's traveling a similar road can be really sublime. A gentle but crucial reminder that, even as we try to bring our deepest darkest doubts or our most out-there imaginings to the stage, there are others doing the same, in other basements and alleys and theaters and bars, all through the neighborhood.

Working on The Explanatorium in West Philly, I've been apart from that vibe this time--until I saw Thaddeus' show last night. And I was glad to feel the warmth of the vibe coming back, as we ran into friends, colleagues, former students (it was great to see you Scott!), other artists AND...people we don't know. People who we recognize as fellow travelers by their presence here. I recognize a bond between me and the other people clutching their 3-D glasses, wishing there was AC in the Bride but keeping their attention, our collective focus, on the perpetual inventions of the Lucidity Suitcase team.

As I think about it, our piece is really a way of trying to make The Vibe a little more present, so that we and our audience can feel it and work it and think about it. We made the decision to ask the audience to wear blue to the show in an intuitive way, but now I'm thinking that it's asking people to put on their sense of belonging and of wanting to belong. To dress in your desire to be a part of the creation of something, something that gets made out of simple materials, right before your eyes, something that you can be a part of.

There is a generation of us who have come to our maturity as artists in this Vibe, in the gentleness, the warmth, the frenzy, and in the simpatico juices of our mutual endeavors. The Explanatorium is, on one level (and it has more than one), a welcoming place for the artists and the audience who thrive in this.

Mark Lord, dramaturg

Last time I wrote, I said we needed to find the tender, vulnerable heart in this piece, find a way to share this delicate thing in this grand space. Well I think we found it yesterday. And it was hard, but I really think the new material works. I am so relieved! Mark Lord, our dramaturg wrote this following note about tenderness to help us all orient our characters and remember what it is we're doing here:

Think about how to articulate the entire piece: the meeting structure.

Who we are is a group of people who come together from all over the place, mostly from the bottom end of the stick that stirs society. We are the subprime sublime. And we gather in this abandoned shell of a beautiful truth beneath a peeling plaster sky. Because we have faith in some mystery that stirs in us and which we see stir in one another. Hamlet says I have that within which passeth show. And we see that in ourselves, each other. It’s like a handshake so secret we don’t know the grip—only the memory of the feeling of solidarity it might bring.

So. We gather here.

We open ourselves to ourselves. We raise our doubts. We risk humiliation. We incarnate propositions and play them. We could all be leaving this earth tonight—we don’t know…and we seek to revel in our awareness of not being sure. In our sure moments, we incarnate certainty—but we never take it for granted and when it rests on us (horndance) we feel its glory, and its fleeting.

We open ourselves to one another. We tell our horrors and trust our vocabularies are not too…whatever. We hope to be understood.

We open the whole process to the audience. We accept that they may well reject it. They may not want to join, to walk, to stand, to share, to be honest. But our only encouragement for them is our own nakedness, our own good humor. Our willingness to fail. Our strong desire to be together in the light of the setting sun, in the failing light, in the dusk and, eventually, in the snow in the dark.

We should approach each part of the piece as if this coming together, this opening, are never far from us.

This is Mark Lord, the dramaturg for Headlong. I've been working with the company for the better part of a year on The Explanatorium. In this entry, I just wanted to give you a little bit of a sense of how we've been using our time.

The piece began with some fascinations with things that are inexplicable (to us, or rather, to some of us.) And, as I remember it, we started talking about things that could begin with the sentence, "Now here's something I can't explain." This led to explorations of some out-there stuff (crop circles, UFO sightings, alien abductions) and some discussions of perception, the limits of language and the ways that we like to perceive/experience performances.

In addition to sharing these ideas and research, we started to collect stories from people we knew or met about things they couldn't explain. And we began to play games and to explore improvisational dance structures that allowed us to explore these ideas. We showed much of this work at Headlong's monthly First Friday series (check out the web site, www.headlong.org--it's the cheapest date/best place to introduce your kids to culture/best respite from the Maddening Crowd on First Friday--end plug). These showings gave us a chance to test ideas in front of an audience. And, as our ideas have developed, being able to develop a sophisticated, authentic relationship to the audience has proved to be a Big Deal.

Each of the performers brings the wealth of her/his experience to this work. That means we can draw on all kinds of theater/dance vocabularies. And, between them, the performers are this incredibly funny, relentlessly inventive, smart gaggle of movers. I feel so delighted to come to work everyday to watch them interact.

And having this great big deserted sanctuary space to inhabit has given the piece its own playground and sense of itself. Perhaps I'll blog later about the rotunda. Here, I'll just say that it's an awesome place to work--it inspires us.

As we finish shaping the piece, I'm happy to be able to see where all of the ideas came from and how they've threaded themselves into the piece. I'm excited to see that games that began as wholly innocent explorations have settled into the structure of the piece to be mature and dense ruminations--without ever losing their charm and their distinctly Headlong sense of smarts and cleverness. And ideas that seemed too cerebral for the piece to address are easily and confidently wrapped up into our work now.

Each aspect of the piece has been made by indirection, by experiment, and by conversation. Our ideas found movement presence that way. Our presences have found their ways into games and structures and stories. And those, now, have been woven together into an experience that we are excited to be shaping and preparing to share with an audience.

MARK LORD, dramaturg