Final Rehearsals: injecting freewill

We were in Mannheim for a few days getting used to the 'Kubus', the space where we will first present the performance and are now back in Dusseldorf. It is only now that we are at the point of putting it all together and balancing the competing demands of the performance. It proved quite revealing. The performance has been gaining complexity and rules to the point that it becomes difficult to follow as a wholly logical game and instead starts to approximate a more organic system. This is quite a relief as for quite some time it made robots out of Katja and I. It was only after we came to the realisation that we had created a kind of deterministic prison that we were able to look for ways, using the system that we had created, to create escape paths out of it, ways in which we as the performers could make it work for us instead of us work solely for it.

Today we completed two runs. A new element that was introduced was that Katja and I would have a 'secret intention' that would guide us through the performance. This can be best described as using the performance as a vehicle to allow something else to happen. For example, I decided to use the performance as a time in which to think about a decision I am making. This colours my actions and gives me something internally to do when I find myself in front of the spectator. This secret intention is something that we make afresh for each performance so that it is not used as a way to stabilise and give a consistent emotional tone to the performance but on the contrary, a way to allow freewill to creep into the moment by moment actions of the performance. I was also pleasantly surprised that when using a deeper dilemma that I face as my secret intention, the tone of the performance did not necessarily grow overly negative.

A further way in which we have injected greater freewill into the system is by allowing ourselves to choose whether or not to follow the agreed upon sequence of events. If we choose not to we get different sorts of error signals which in turn we must register and decide how to react to accordingly. Overall this has shifted the balance further towards having us as thinking individuals in front of the public rather than as performers illustrating a series of decisions in as precise a way as possible. As someone with an appetite for chaos this feels more like home territory. The effect should be that the line between improvisation and set actions should appear blurred, as indeed it is in life.