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