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