The Imago Blog

In my last two productions APIS, or The Taste of Honey and The Cuban Missile Tango I kept my cast in the dark for several weeks and then revealed to them the narrative structure of the play. For example in APIS I worked on movement and character development before I revealed to the cast that their prison was a beehive - those inside were honey bees and those outside were bee keepers. In my next play Tick Tack Type (TTT) there is nothing to reveal to the cast. TTT began as an abstraction and will end that way.

In TTT, I have a hierarchal structure and there is narrative. There is a typing instructor (ruler) and typists (who serve the ruler.) There is action, for example a typist performers badly and is punished. Yet despite the presence of a narrative the work remains an abstraction. I intentionally worked to insure that no symbolism or didactic context was present or at least I tried to subdue those directions. I tried to dismantle meaning when TTT started to lean in ‘meaningful’ directions.

Where am I heading or what it is, is not as important to me as to what qualities or situations arise. I think it was Godard that said that a film must have a first, second and third act but not necessarily in that order. Tick Tack Type must have dramatic builds, releases, peaks, valleys, scenes, acts and resolutions – but it needn’t have clear precise meaning.

Theatre can create a world that defies a tangible lucid reality. If I have create a completely cognitive world then I have missed the ‘other stuff.’ That ‘other stuff’ is when our explanations don’t meet and we see something else. Can I create a convincing universe that exists on its own merit? A world that does not fit our common understanding of reality then perhaps I have created a new world, one in which I have not visited.