Emotion ranges

Positive emotions

This is a great article that might be really helpful in generating positive memories:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kari-henley/what-are-the-top-10-posit_b_203797.html

Zombies

Interesting article in Psychology Today about zombies and why they fall in the uncanny valley realm (though he doesn't use that term).

Pattern Recognition. That guy is staggering, so perhaps he is drunk. But wait! That kid is also staggering, and kids don't get drunk. And that woman is staggering; when was the last time I saw three staggerers at the same time?  Things are not fitting into my usual patterns. I do not recognize this pattern, and I am therefore forced to switch off automatic and to perilously fly manually. Most of the time we're flying by instrument, but not now. Now, we need to look around.

...

And fear sprouts from the depths of your brain, your primitive cortex freaking the hell out and your frontal cortex madly searching the hippocampus for anything even remotely familiar. 

And this is where you experience horror.

Horror is the initially familiar becoming increasingly unfamiliar.  And the easier it is to question what you're seeing, the less familiar it is by definition, and the more familiar it was at first.

You can read the whole thing here.

Ursula, on time

… we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.  The book is all there, all at once, between its covers.  But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the fist page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers …

 It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to the present, or plan how his present might relate to his future.  He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time…

-Ursula K Le Guin, from "The Dispossessed" 

New ideas for Doubling

I have been thinking a lot about how we can break through to the other side with doubling on stage, particularly with the use of video projection or shadows. If we think more out of the box technically, embracing the possibilities of the proscenium stage, I think we could create some jaw-dropping doubling moments. Here are a couple of my ideas, but please comment on this post with your ideas.

1) I think we should experiment with projecting video or doing shadow puppetry onto volume media like smoke or fog. I'm imagining that if we had multiple angles projected from multiple projectors onto a column of smoke or layers of smoke, we could create a ghostly double. We could probably get a pretty good effect with just one projector on smoke. We could also interact and disturb the volume media while it's being projected on. There are some youtube videos of people playing with this and I think we could take it much further.





2) Use of multiple scrims or translucent plastic sheets to build hidden layers on stage. These could serve to let a second actor more effectively become a blurry or shadow double of someone. Also, we could project video or shadows onto the scrims from front or back to build deeply layered moving stage scenes filled with doubles, triples, quadruples ... you get it.



And I can't watch this at work, but from the description, it sounds cool.

3) Interaction with live video of yourself on stage using strange uncanny angles or uncanny projection surfaces. I've seen this effect used by Robert LePage though I can't find a video of it. I think we could break out of the mold with how the projection surface is created as well: imagine strips of translucent fabric that are blown up from the floor with air to create a sort of "fire" of fabric, or suspended from above, then project an image on that, maybe even a live image. What if we could create essentially a scrim strip projection that could be passed through by an actor. Imagine one of us seeing a fucked up projection of ourself live on such a surface, approaching it, then walking through ourself, like the Mirror Gate in The Neverending Story.

4) A less tech based idea is to use masks of strange uncanny versions of ourselves, or to blank out the face of a second actor, have them dressed the same as the first actor except faceless, an eerie body double.

5)Going further with replacing performers on stage with other similar looking performers. I like the idea, but I don't think we've really embraced it. What if we could really trick the audience, really replace someone on stage with such care (costumes, wigs, other identifiers) that the audience starts to question their own memory (a la Lost Highway).

Okay, that's all I have time for now. Time for the rest of you to comment on this!

Alternate universes

I think I had a breakthrough about UV tonight.

I was listening to Terry Gross interview a physicist about the real possibility of parallel universes. It's crazy, listen to it here.

Suddenly I had a thought – what if Uncanny Valley isn't based on sense memories from childhood – what if it's our sense memories from an alternate childhood? An alternate/parallel universe?

This is akin to the “H2M alternate history” idea. But I feel like it goes deeper – alternate history not just as a wacky other version of our past, but a version of what could have happened – and maybe is happening, alongside us. Suddenly the twin/aliens make sense to me – they aren't the embodiment of our past, they are alternate selves, existing alongside us, suddenly made visible.

Am I the only one who is super excited about this idea???? It brings the disparate ideas of UV together for me.

When I think about "alternate memories", for H2M or my own life, I find that what I brainstorm and speculate about spells out very clearly my fears and hopes and regrets and wishes. The moments I immediately think about are the times when my life could have gone one way or another – turning points, which maybe at the time didn't seem momentous, but do in retrospect.

Here are some examples from H2M and my life -- they aren't really sense memories, but I think we could easily do writing exercises to come up with sense memories from our alternate lives.

H2M in an alternate universe:
 
→ Jonathan founded Hand2Mouth Theatre in Poland in 1999, after spending a year interning with famed troupe Biuro Podrozy. Their first piece, created by Walters and Polish actors Ida Z, Magda D, and Patryk C, was an outdoor/visual spectacle mixing the life of American slave/revolutionary Nat Turner with the surreal writings of Polish poet Bruno Schulz.
 
→ In 2006, H2M created Catacombs which was an underground hit amongst the so called “creative class”. Hand2Mouth was hired by Wieden Kennedy to create a similar installation, and after portions of this performance were featured in a Nike ad, Hand2Mouth partnered with Nike and W K to create Rooftops, a performance/ installation that took place on Portland rooftops.
 
→ The company broke up after creating Everyone Who Looks Like You, a performance using material from their own families and personal lives that was by all accounts a catastrophic failure. After a showing in May 2009 in the Goldsmith Building in which Carol Wells called the show “a harmonic convergence of the bad,” Jonathan and Faith moved to New York, Julie moved to Chicago to attend graduate school, Liz created a solo performance about her relationship with her brother called My Heart is like a Closed Terrarium, Jerry started a performance festival called Life is a Party, and Erin disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness.
 
Some events in my alternate life:
 
→ I started playing guitar in 5th grade (and never took up the trumpet), and my senior year of high school I joined jazz band as a bass player.
 
→ I stayed in Lansing after graduating from college, and got a job working at Barnes & Noble while acting in plays at Riverwalk Theater and playing bass with Lansing jazz/funk band Steppin In It.
 
→ After I started dating Jonathan in 2001, I stopped working with Hand2Mouth, and became active in poetry circles instead. In 2008 I published a book of poems based on the German fairy tale Undine. 

A Case for Science Fiction...

Or, a thought on why we might consider how extremity of situation/imagination can bring us closer to the human element we are craving. From Yann Martel's Beatrice & Virgil.

..if I tell a story about a dentist from Bavaria or Saskatchewan, I have to deal with readers' notions about dentists and people from Bavaria or Saskatchewan, those preconceptions and stereotypes that lock people and stories into small boxes. But if it's a rhinoceros from Bavaria or Saskatchewan who is the dentist, then it's an entirely different matter. The reader pays closer attention, because he or she has no preconceptions about rhinoceros dentists -- from Bavaria or anywhere else. The reader's disbelief begins to lift, like a stage curtain. Now the story can unfold more easily. There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.

I think we can consider the possibility of one or two big, imaginary ideas and how we can establish ideas as given truths quickly and undoubtedly in the early moments of the play. We have such a great opportunity with theater: there is a (hopefully) captive audience who are ready to believe what we tell/show them. This is what makes me hate the theater and love it at the same time. None of this is to say that the belief we hope the audience has is based on a replication of a variety of reality, rather that the world or scenario we present is unlikely enough to lodge them firmly in their imaginations from where they will, as Martel writes, pay attention to what is happening. Here we can think of the audiences' attention/imagination as a veil or window through which they watch Uncanny Valley; they enter the space, see the scenario exists outside the world/physics they know and expect, engage their imaginations in an unexpected way, and are then surprised (perhaps doubly so) to find a deep emotional engagement and attachment to what is happening. I think this is why we cry when Bambi's mother is shot.

I think the much discussed idea of how much science fiction to use or not use can be considered a detail oriented and aesthetic question. Are there beeps and protocols for two scenarios or 12? My question, and my hope, is we find a way to use fiction, may of a scientific bent, to create a bigger space for the imagination. This fiction may exist in script/text, situation, movement, relationship and is a huge possibility. I think we've just started to touch on it. Excited to dig in for more and to consider and create fictions we have yet to conceive.