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Last week I did lights for a show. Here’s how it all works.
We put on a big show on the weekend, at the Enmore Theatre, the Australian Theatresports 2005 National Championships. The stars of the show, were two carefully groomed red prop boxes. This is their story. (Apologies for the large 60MB file, but they demanded high quality for their 7 minutes of glory)
Update: I’ve changed the enclosure to a 36MB file instead.
Impro for Computer Human Interaction and experience prototyping.
A walker is a person who continuously and randomly walks about a theatre stage, particularly the various locations which will contain an actor throughout the show, while the lighting people adjust and program all the lighting. Yesterday it took Amanda and me about an hour of walking and pausing on the Enmore stage, to get the lighting right for the Cranston Cup Grand Final.
I’ve been wondering how much I should be writing up new learning experiences. I’m one of those always busy people, who has a lot of different hobbies and interests. Thus I’m always learning, and at various stages of knowledge in various domains.
But in 1, 10, 50 or 100 years, do I really want people to read about the day that I learnt what a theatre “walker” was? Will it affect my job prospects later in life? What if I became a big time theatre producer (not my intent, by the way), clients found my blog in archive.org, and realised I only just learned this stuff in 2004? Or will I be embarassed by it? Conforming to social standards we’ve been conditioned to since birth, and selfishly feeling inadequate because I only just learned something.
Perhaps in years to come, blogs will be the key to reversing these ingrained evils? Blogs are what will keep us honest as the years go by. The Internet is our personal archive, an ever changing permanent record of us and our interactions, recorded for all eternity. A million years from now, the universe will still have a digital (physical) record of the life of Richard BF, his opinions and much of his presence, with scholars pouring over our lives, like modern day archeologists dissecting an Egyptian mummy. Scary.
So here I was considering whether to write about my recent experiences in theatre, when I came across this quote, by Martha Graham:
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. It is your business to keep the channel open.
While I’ve taken it out of context, I think it’s a great metaphor for life, and for some, blogging in general.
So in a few days, I’ll probably write a little about “walkers”, and the experience of being involved with a production bigger than just a few hundred punters.
I hate email. I’ve been (ab)using it since 1984, and it still doesn’t communicate the way I do. In fact, the last few days, I’ve had two communication breakdowns involving email.
The first was an email from an acquaintance asking for feedback on a project proposal. So I sent them my feedback. The problem was that I sent way too much detail, because unknown to them, it was an area in which I tend to specialise, user interaction/interface design. This then made me look like a bit of a smart arse and a trouble maker. Imagine asking an NRMA safety officer which bull bar to buy for your 4WD, or asking the tax office which loop hole you should be using this year.
There’s a decision to be made here about whether to give them the full detail, which is ultimately the best way to help them out, or on the other hand to give them just a smattering of feedback, enough to make me look helpful, yet not enough to show that I know very much about the subject.
I could of course ask them how much feedback they want, but then I’ve already started down the slippery slope of being a smart arse.
Which bull bar should I buy for my 4WD?
How much detail would you like?
The second breakdown was one of those split email threads, where an initial email splits into two completely different arguments, multiplexed over a single thread. In most cases, the thread becomes two people trying to explain that what they said, wasn’t actually what they said, and it escalates from there, with each person concentrating more and more on the actual words, not the meaning of each email, and the two perceived arguments getting further and further apart.
But you had a comma between them, which means you don’t agree, else you should have used a semicolon, especially when followed by a verb. No wonder you misunderstood me! And anyway, who said I was being pedantic, I was just pointing out the inconsistency of your logic when used to arbitrarily compare two different technically correct yet contextually incorrect statements.
There’s a decision to be made here as well, at which point to pick up the phone, or if you can’t, at which point to resign from the thread, knowing full well that the other person will think that they’ve won an argument, even though it never existed. Ahh, the human condition, never wanting to lose, especially when there’s nothing to lose, but the winner perceives that there is. 🙂
Both of these communication breakdowns probably wouldn’t have occurred if we were talking to each other in person, or even on the phone. The risk of argument is higher, because you’re in a live conversation, with limited opportunity to think about what to say, yet communication tends
to be more successful. With email, you have a lot of time to sculpt the perfect reply, which in most cases is then completely misunderstood.
This is why I believe anyone can play improv. We do it everyday when we communicate with people, reading visual and audible cues, planning our responses, navigating our way through the miscommunication minefield.
Improv isn’t about learning to improvise, it is about removing the boundaries which growing up has placed around our natural ingrained ability to improvise. The world gives us our inputs, and we adapt or improvise accordingly. That’s life. Breaking these boundaries can be difficult for some, but is always possible.
Recently I’ve been increasing the number of blog posts which talk about impro, not intentionally, but in response to the number of Google referals I’ve been getting recently now that Scared Scriptless (web site design still pending) is back up and running at the Clarence Hotel in Sydney. I’ve also been a bit shy about posting in public about it, why I’m not too sure, but an increasing number of players are telling me they bumped into my site, so I’m guessing it aint too bad, and it is safe to come out of hiding so to speak.
Anyway, today I had another one of those classic Theatresports degrees of separation moments. Last weekend I went to a non-impro wedding interstate, where I met a Science Communicator who was a nose bogey giving guided nostril tours at the Edinburgh Science Festival. Amusing, and a nice claim to fame, she outa do impro. Then another non-impro person mentioned a Science Communicator friend of theirs who was currently doing a Theatresports course. Nice coincidence, and I left it at that.
So tonight I’m at the show buying a drink at the bar, and this guy says he liked my gibberish endowments scene. A short exchange later and I find out he’s doing an impro course, and is a muso as well, and as we’re always looking for talented musos, he gives me his business card. Hmm… the first name sounds familiar. Bam! It’s the Science Communicator guy mentioned at the wedding, he knew about the wedding, knows where I used to work, and had already heard second hand the story about the nose bogey girl, yet didn’t know about me or who I was. No connection, but amazing coincidence.
Freaky coincidences like this seem to haunt my life, and at times it makes me question whether there’s more to it than just coincidence. But then I remember that so much of our lives is not coincidence, that perhaps the significant thing is that on average we should actually have more coincidences in life than we do. What a strange thing is existence and the human condition.
Apparently this photo of me after directing the Scriptless final a few weeks ago is funny. Yeah, amusing, but you should have seen what Rob and Amanda were doing!