It's all over the news right now -- the FBI has figured out who stole the paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston 23 years ago. Ever since we started dreaming up our show on museum security guards, people have been bringing up this iconic museum heist to us. Then we explain that our interest lies in the liminal activity spent the majority of the time a museum guard works, not the exceptional once-in-a-lifetime honest-to-goodness art theft. Still and all, hearing about the discovery in the midst of making this show is kind of thrilling. It adds this extra layer of excitement. Not that the guards had much to do with it one way or the other, but because, as we have discovered time and again, no one champions the museum as much as the security guard. (Also no one complains about it as much. It's a complicated.)
Click and See
Is this too meta for you?
12:15am EST and I am finishing an email I'll schedule tonight to hit the Strange Attractor subscriber's in-box tomorrow. In the odd way the world works these days, you may actually see the email here on this picture of my screen on your screen on our blog before the image itself actually pops into your in-box. Squint hard and you' can read the whole thing. Or just wait until tomorrow morning, whichever. And of course if you're not on our mailing list, yada yada yada. File this one under the glamorous life of a self-producer!
Our virtual tour continues!
Seems we are now going to Puerto Rico! But, wait a minute... we want to go to Tenakee Springs, AK!!!
Help us!
One person's stupor is another person's reverie.
I don't remember exactly how I came across this idea - sometime while ruminating about enlightenment in a museum gallery and the long hours of alone-time guards must experience while working - but I thought it would be a great way to explore a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives about differences in dreams, hopes and satisfactions, or dissatisfactions, while passing the time on the clock!
Closer to getting to Alaska!
Thanks Alaska peeps for getting us well on our way back to Alaska! As you can see on the United States Artists Projects webpage, our campaign to get back up North and out of the real world has us somewhere around N. Dakota, I believe. Stay tuned for updates on our real and virtual touring!
Between Phases
It feels far from summer here in New England, and yet this little video makes a lot of sense.
The next great idea for a show
Revolving set where the audience and performers walk (or run) an endless journey in space. Space the endless frontier
Thanks Doubltree Inn!
It's Fundraising Time, Kids!
Enlightenment on E Floor North is raising money! $10,000 to be precise, which, when combined with all the other funds we've raised from the Rasmuson Foundation, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Maine Theater Fund, will bring our latest show on work and the museum security guard to Philadelphia, Southeast Alaska, back to New England, and beyond. If you have a few dollars to kick in, we'd so appreciate it. Plus, because we're raising the funds through USA Projects, we've been given matching funds from the Rasmuson Foundation and all of your donations are tax deductible!
NYC
In Hell's Kitchen.
When Your Company Lives Far Apart Your Exchange of Information Changes (Subtitled, D'uh)
We just had our first meeting since everybody left Providence. We've been emailing each other fairly non-stop, getting ready for a fundraising campaign, getting some grants together, putting the finishing touches on our plans for Philly, but tonight was the first time we made a date to meet on google hang-out to talk. Which is nice. Usually these end up being pretty long, but somehow this one. . . Well, maybe we'd just been spending so much time emailing there wasn't much to talk about. Or maybe we're still too in-the-middle of all the fundraising and finishing to actually stop and chat. Also, Aram forgot about it and was in NYC and so when you're one member down, it's never quite clear what you should and shouldn't talk about. . .
Anyway, my favorite part of the chat was that Roblin's son Arlo really really really wanted his dad to get back to playing Karate/Ninja games and so the background of our meeting was peppered with Arlo making loud Karate sounds. At one point Roblin asked him to be quiet and then Arlo paused. A few moments later these little whispered Karate sounds came through over the speakers. "heeeee-yaaaaaa." (whisper whisper)
I wish I'd recorded it for you or even taken a picture of this meeting, but alas, my mind was elsewhere. Instead, please enjoy this photo of a google hang out past.
Aw, Pawtucket
Here is the space in which we began the whole guardz process - the Pawtucket Armory. There seemed to be an armory above every river drainage in Rhode Island. Some good ol' American history set in stone. Anyhoo, it was a great space to both create ideas within and propose a blank E Floor North - that is the floor in the museum that we have been assigned to guard, if you were wondering. And also where a little or a lot of enlightenment will happen for anyone adventurous enough to discover that gallery of space - or perhaps just get lost and end up there. Doesn't really matter how you get there, just so long as you eventually find it.
And then there was BeerFest - in which we discreetly gathered some great audio of drunken bacchanalia:
Our friendly neighborhood guard
I had a nice cuppa and conversation with our new friend Guard Gary Jones (not a guard anymore!) about Phase I. We interviewed Gary at the beginning of our process of rehearsing Phase I and his generosity in sharing experiences (including the incredible "Polyester Guard-Dog Blues" he wrote while on duty) influenced our perspectives. Great guy, great ideas - worked in both Portland and Seattle for the art museums and now a colleague and neighbor with my bro, W. Scott. Thanks for the conversation, G!
Home coming... and a little workout.
Hey Juneauites. Soon I will be back in our warm home. Mmmmm. Here is how I am preparing for the next phase of rehearsal for Enlightenment on E Floor North - commitment to security guard training drills! Guard Training Video
Can you find me? - Roblin
Satisfaction and Teasers
All weekend I have been working on a fundraising video that we are about to launch on United States Artists. It's proven to be a very fun project to work on -- more than the other three kickstarter videos we've made. I can only imagine this is true because this was the first time that we were all together to shoot the video and also because this project is proving to be much easier to talk about in general that our other projects. Fantastical environmental dream play based on an Ibsen text no one's ever heard of vs. museum security guards. There is a value to clarity. Watch this space for the video. In the meantime, please enjoy this tiny bit of us singing in our first showing.
Touring in the Eye of a Blizzard
In the grand tradition of amazing timing, we planned to bring our developing show Enlightenment on E Floor North to SPACE Gallery in Portland, ME. It was six months ago we devised this plan. At that time we had no way of knowing that the weekend we were planning, Feb 9 and 10, would be the worst blizzard in ten years in New England, the major path of the storm being everything between Providence, RI and Portland, ME. We left a night earlier than planned, thinking that that would be the worst of it. Little did we know that getting there wouldn't be the only problem. When you drive into the heart of a blizzard in order to perform a showing and teach a workshop, it turns out that people don't always feel safe about continuing with their scheduled programming. At this point the workshop is rescheduled to tomorrow morning, and we're not sure about tonight's showing. In any rate, we're warm in a pretty nice hotel, waiting to hear if we'll be able to do anything we'd planned on, doing our best to look at the bright side, and feeling dumb for not bringing swimsuits (because yes, there is an indoor hotel pool).
Here's us when we arrived Friday morning:
Look! A poster!
Beautiful lighting at the SPACE Gallery!
Our suits are hung!
The sign looks so good in SPACE's party lights!
Yeah!
Our lovely, fearless stage manager Becky, working out her sign moves.
And of course, here was us in the summer when we couldn't even imagine a blizzard.
Road Trip!
OK, AK fans, check this out! Makes me feel like home. *Blizzard Warning in Rhode Island. A potential historic winter storm and Blizzard is expected to drop around 2 feet of snow Friday into Saturday.*
In preparation for our upcoming Alaska Tour 2013 (details to be announced soonish), we are daring to drive through blizzard conditions from our smallest friend RI up to Portland, ME to bring our first phase of Enlightenment on E Floor North to the Space Gallery.
(Don't worry - we are actually leaving before the storm to be there for the great blizzard).
How to Make a Play
As we sit on the night between one showing and another, I just wanted to share a visual cataloging of how we made Enlightenment on E Floor North so far. . . First we made this free-form open-jam list of what we wanted to be in our show:
Then as we actually improvised those phrases/words/ideas as images in the space over a couple weeks, we wrote notes about what we'd learned about the ideas:
After weeks of that, we started to accept that an audience was coming and so we needed to turn these explorations into something with an order and a little more structure; more concrete. We turned what we still liked into a list, using a shorthand to name the pieces that has organically occurred as we've continued to work on them (ie, "mess on a shiny surface" had been written on the first open jam piece of paper, we'd explored it as an image in the space, and now it becomes the name of a scene):
And then we put each of these "scenes" onto a notecard. We arranged and rearranged notecards into sequences that seemed like they could work -- never because of plot so much as rhythm, mood, feeling, and logistics. Then we tried those sequences and rearranged the cards into new sequences as needed, eventually landing on one long line of cards that essentially acts as a script:
Got Enlightenment?
As we move closer (3 days!) to our first public showing, it's easy to sometimes feel odd. We've been living with the idea of the material for over a year, generating seeds of material for a month, and now are actually starting to meet what the show is. . . or could actually concretely be. Seeing the imperfections in your partner as you get to know each other better can be shocking. "Oh. Is this what you're like?" In any rate, I was walking to work yesterday feeling all these uncomfortable feelings when I saw this bumper sticker. I thought, "I don't now, but I think I will eventually." At least in terms of the title of our show.
One Week Away. . . Baby Guards Being Born
It's wild to create something from nothing and then pretend you actually have something, when if you were being really honest you'd show people your pile of notes on napkins instead of taking reservations and setting up chairs and all. I feel that way, but then, you know, the people come and sit in their chairs and we muddle through what we have so far, defending it real hard. . . And we learn a ton about where to go next and (hopefully) even managed to entertain some folks a bit. Anyway, this time we are spending a lot of time learning about the people we are creating: Our individual security guards. Here's who's playing so far (ALL SUBJECT TO CHANGE):
Dylan
Turner
Mike
Kamili had to leave before we could name him and find out more about his guard. . . But we'll get there.
