In the Form of a Question

And that question is: "Sorry, um, WHAT exactly are you talking about with the flour?" (If you haven't been here for a while, you'll see the pictures in the next post.)

And the answer is: Remember when I talked about devised theatre? Well, that's what the flour thing is. My group decided to work on a piece (i.e., someday performance) based on "memory" - retelling of stories, recall, absence (loss of memory), things that are kept, things that are left behind, traces and patterns, etc... Somebody in the group had the bright idea that we should bring in flour and spread it on the floor and walk around in it to see what kinds of patterns we could make (I seem to remember contributing to that conversation) and what we found was that it was much more fun to roll around in it and bury people in it and just generally get it all over the place. That's where the pictures came from. Well, a week before our first performance of the piece we had developed (so far) our group's "set designer" decided that we WOULD be bringing back the flour, and it WOULD be (relatively) deep, and it WOULD cover the entire stage/performance space. The rest of the people on the course loved the flour, naturally, it being so artistic and meaningful and connective as a performance material (yes. I know) and so we did it AGAIN for the second performance that happened today.

We're getting really good at cleaning up several dozen pounds of flour from the floor.

Final performance (Flour 3 - again, see next [previous - either way, down the page] post for reference) - we went from this:

To this:

(Those are empty flour bags on the left... the hole in the middle was filled in with flour we saved from the last performance, stored in four black garbage bags. This ends up at least an inch deep.)

And finally, to this:

We actually had the masks in case someone had a gluten allergy and couldn't breathe with the flour in the air (see it?) and at this point in the cleanup I decided we probably ought to save whatever percentage of our lungs we had left. Plus, they look funny.

Next question: "And they really give you a DEGREE for this?!?"



(P.S. I did make SOME contribution to the project... outside, in the "lobby", was the lobby display I designed based on our process documentation - i.e., memories.)

The strings are connections, "traces", between ideas and images, while the laptops are playing videos (sped-up into time-lapse sequences, or in one case, slowed waaaay down) of our rehearsals. I know, a little heavy-handed... but hey - I'm just a student!