Headlong's "Explanatorium"

EXPLANATORIUM takes place in an abandoned Christian Science Church. Its a magnificent, beautiful space. I can't believe we get to use it. It has a huge 8-paned oculus at the center of a domed sanctuary. It has a massive pipe organ towering above the pulpit. Everything in this place is geometric and round. I feel surrounded by a heavy gorgeousness of rationality in this architecture which in turn is suffused by the light of the divine filtering in from above through the ornate and heavenly eye of the oculus. I love the curious mix of science and the sacred that pervades this space. Sometimes as I look around, I feel like I am inside the saucer of a space ship and I think, oh! science fiction is all about these twin yearnings of rationality and faith, the celestial palm of god navigated by the unstoppable mind of man.

I also feel like I am in a haunted house when I am in the Rotunda. Like me and my friends have just snuck into Boo Radley's place. Or some empty building somewhere, an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a field.... I want to share this feeling with the audience, that we are exploring some lost building with our best friends. Its spooky and thrilling and if we all make it out unscathed then we're going to be closer than we were before...

Andrew, Amy and I are co-directors of this piece, as in all of Headlong's work. We conceive, create, direct and perform together. This complex interplay of our visions, personalities and lives, hides beneath the attribution of our work that says simply: choreographed by Headlong Dance Theater. In collaborating with each other and all the amazing people we work with, we ask ourselves, how can we tap everyone's intelligence and passion to make the most visionary work possible. We believe every work of art needs to have a strong, singular point of view, not a recitation of thoughts by a committee.

In this project we are working with an amazing band of creator/performers: Nichole Canuso, Geoff Sobelle, and Niki Cousineau. The three of them each direct awesome companies of their own. We are very lucky to be working with them. Mark Lord is our dramaturg/ co-conspirator. He's recently become a 4th voice at the creative/ conceptual table of Headlong. His insights during rehearsals are brilliant, original and provocative. The three of us co-directors teeter on new ground with him in the mix. He's like a new-found sibling that our parents gave up for adoption before we were born.

I feel like I need to lay all this out at the top of this blog because so often people want to know who is really responsible for making our work and wonder how it gets made. We are so deeply a collaborative company - a community of individuals with strong personalities and even stronger ideas that are often at odds with each other. Rehearsals are a laboratory to find the idea that matters. We make work from scratch, without a script or a piece of music as a starting place. Ideas, conversations, and our experiments are our starting points and slowly we begin to grow a piece. There is a magic in how this works, an ineffable alchemy that transmutes our bodies and minds into a work of art that is greater than any one person could conceive. This blog will be a refraction of our process in these final days of putting EXPLANATORIUM together. I might be the main lens of this refraction, here in this blog. But I am not the author of EXPLANATORIUM, we all are.

If you want to know more about Headlong and our work you can always go to http://www.headlong.org.

David

People keep asking me if they really have to dress in blue when they come to the performance. That’s what our blurb in the Live Arts program says and they wonder if it’s a bit of a joke. The answer is, yes dress in blue. We have been warned that that’s setting a high bar for our audience: you’re going to keep people away! They’ll just decide to go to some other show that’s easier. But I disagree. I think plenty of people are hungry for meaningful experiences that involve very different kinds of consciousness and decisions from, say, watching television. There ought to be stakes in live performance. We come together with other people in real space and time. Wearing blue for the performance is our way of saying that we are going to deal squarely with the fact of us all being in a room together. Dress in blue, we’re ALL dressing in blue. Lets make this funny, surprising choice together and see what happens! And dressing in blue says that the experience of EXPLANATORIUM starts before entering the space and continues on after leaving the Rotunda. And of course the blue-dressed community becomes an important part of the piece: image, idea and experience all at once that is a crucial part of how EXPLANATORIUM works. I can’t wait to see it-- our capacity is 200 people per performance and I think its going to look beautiful-- a glittering, blue sea of people in variegated shades and patterns. Of course it might not work. People might not go along with wearing blue. But it’s an experiment and it’ll be fun to see what happens.
David

Here are some pictures we took in the studio as we were playing around with images for EXPLANATORIUM. I especially love Niki's chin man, the one where the bigness of her upside down smile equals the bigness of the little guys sorrow. I just can't get over the double image of it, how fully both things are sitting there together at exactly the same time: happiness and sorrow. It moves me! Why? How is it any different from the cheesy, happy/ sad drama masks? Let me know if you have a theory about why this picture is so damn affecting to me.
David

Today was tough. There are big disagreements about what needs to happen now. We have 3 rehearsals left before tech. The differences are submerged. Andrew, Amy and I float suggestions as if they are small things that need to be tweaked. But these mild suggestions are masking deep disagreements about the aesthetics and tone of the piece. And ultimately an idea of how the thing is going to work, what the audience walks away with. How would I frame the disagreement? I think that Amy’s concerns have to do with theatricality and formality. She might say that we need to weave the sections together more tightly so that parts are clearly referring to each other, are clearly linked to each other. She wants repetition and reinforcement of main themes and ideas on a structural level and a theatrical persona that is clear for everyone inside and outside the piece. Amy is a formalist. What does Andrew want? He wants the dance to work on a deep level of relevance and still be playful. Not heavy or clever or neatly tied up for its own sake. He wants it to live up to his dearest hopes for a work of art – that we the performers and the audience play together being as awake as we can be. He wants the vehicle for that play to have no false notes because everyone can smell a false note and won’t trust or risk if the deep sense isn’t there. And me? I don’t know. Amy and Andrew might say that I err on the side of inscrutability. Idiosyncratic preferences. But I just know when something is working. I have filters that are hard to explain. But I know when the poetry of something is coming across-- when things are impossible to define and yet full of music and meaning. It’s hard to make arguments about exactly what will and what won’t work from my point of view. How do you collaborate with someone whose point of view is, I know it when I see it? I sympathize with them having to work with me! Really. Funny thing is—and this is why we’ve worked together for 15 years -- we would all agree with the importance of all the points of view I just laid out. It’s a disagreement over emphasis. And what a particular emphasis ends up meaning.

We’ve all tried putting the material together in different versions so far. All have been interesting and problematic. I’ve been charged with this last phase of pulling it together. I have the authority to take decisive action. Of course it is understood that I will be conscientious about understanding everyone’s concerns. In other words, I’m in the hot seat. But I think I know what we need now. I don’t know what it looks like, but I know what we need.

We’re just missing a layer, maybe a moment, of tenderness and vulnerability. The piece is amazing and complicated and very big in an odd, funny way. The space is enormous, beautiful and grand. The Explanatorium is full of ideas and haunting stories, and the audience circles around, 200 people at a time, all dressed in blue which makes it even bigger and more full. And what the piece needs is something small and very human to ground it. And that soulfulness is there, we’ve worked on it. We’ve worked from that place – the place of knowing that we can feel so small and fragile in this world that we can’t always explain: a world that we yearn to explain, and yearn also not to know too well, to instead feel mystery and magic. I think we just have to put that small, vulnerable thing back in this magnificent space full of big ideas. And there we will tether this big balloon to our shaky, terrene world.
David

One of the things I keep thinking about as we work on Explanatorium is the general lack of spiritual practice among the people I know. Being in the Rotunda everyday, I often imagine the Christian Science congregation coming together decades ago to sing hymns and hear sermons and create community. So much contemporary American culture is about Materialism and Consumerism, and the Christianity I encounter often feels crass and unspiritual. As artists, we create communities of deep caring and fellowship -- our "chosen families" of fellow artists. But most of us don't engage in any kind of disciplined spiritual practice. Doing Hatha Yoga doesn't count. Are we unconcerned with our spiritual selves, put off by the available choices, or just too busy to fit it in?

As these things often go, I've been inundated lately with coincidental messages from the Guru, as it were. When I was growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my dad and stepmom were followers of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. I got into it, too. Besides being a typical pot-smoking, punk rock, jazz-dancing teenager, I also woke up every morning at 6:00 to drink chai and chant the Guru Gita. I went to the ashram in South Fallsburg, New York and received shaktipat (the ritual bopping with the peacock feathers) and got sandalwood paste put on my third eye. My boyfriend at the time was into it too, and after we broke up he moved to India and changed his name to Prashanti. Various internal goings-on in the Organization put us off and we stopped practicing. Also, I went away to college, and its pretty hard to meditate and chant in your dorm room. I just sort of drifted away, and frankly didn't think about it too much until this summer.

Weird coincidence #1: In June, Andrew and his wife were visiting friends in California, and he ran into Prashanti, whom I haven't seen in about 10 years. Weird coincidence #2: I finally read "Eat, Pray, Love", the spirituality memoir, in which the author goes to Gurumayi's ashram in India for 4 months. All the practices and characters were so familiar. Weird coincidence #3: I do tax preparation for artists as a side gig, and a few days ago I found out that one of my tax clients is a follower of Gurumayi. We talked for a long time about the Guru and how hard it is to have a spiritual practice in this life...

Lying on the floor in the Rotunda, looking up at the sky through the Occulus, pondering the great mysteries and chanting "EYES" (more on this later), is the closest I've gotten in years to a sense of spirituality. Maybe Explanatorium (and the weird coincidences this summer) will inspire me to return to the Guru, or more likely some other kind of spiritual practice. Or maybe I'll just keep living my life, trying to See God in Each Other as much as I can.

Amy

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

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.