the timboucher experience

Working in theatre makes me finally understand all the loose ends left over by my incomplete art school experience. Where to shelve the typically pointless and shitty “installation pieces” of those days? Set design. Performance art? Well, onstage its just performance. And performance seems like all it is is making something happen (what works), and perfecting it (best possible). Technical theatre, working as a stagehand (and what little experience I have recently gained acting) points towards paths of motion. Paths of motion that, if followed, allow whoever is acting a certain capacity to accomplish a specific end. Programming reality. Such and such is going to happen when this person shouts, sings or raises their hand. This light is gonna go off, or this set piece will get dragged out to its spike marks.

Speaking of, our show received an overwhelmingly favorable review from the Baltimore Sun (for whatever that’s worth), which is pretty neat - even if I am playing a relatively small part in it. More info about our show here if you’re in town anytime between now and the end of April.

Yesterday I pulled hexagram 56 of the I Ching. I had no idea this one existed, “The Wanderer.” Fits perfectly into the writing series I’m continuing to work on in the background, amidst my real life research: the one about itinerant performance traditions around the world. Have been gaining a whole lot of fodder for that lately in the work I’ve been doing. Learning so much that I feel like most of what I’ve already written will be superseded in short order when I sit down to re-sculpt everything and take the corpus in a new direction. But I’m enjoying myself now, not worrying about it and letting the text unfold through my life.

The I Ching itself depicts dramatic transitions; changing lines point to what might happen next, which direction this thing is headed. I wonder if anyone’s used the I Ching to plot out dramatic arcs of plays, character transformations from each viewpoint, and all that. I know Philip K. Dick relied on it heavily in writing The Man In The High Castle. I can see why. It invades your whole way of interacting with other moving bodies in the world of forms. The Tarot, obviously, is a dramatic script chopped up into re-arrangeable characters and situations. With divination, with theatre and with all storytelling, we enter into that script and feel it from the inside out. We have no choice; our brains our wired that way. Mirror neurons and all that. It means that, scientifically, the same parts of your brain light up (though intensity drops) when performing an action oneself and when watching someone else perform that same action. We’re all always bouncing off one another, feeling what each other is feeling whether we mean to or not. That, so far, is really the synthesis of what I’ve learned about acting: that its mostly reacting. Or that’s how I’ve been thinking about it up until now. Already getting more comfortable on stage with expressing character and moment, however small it is.

Speaking of the moment and its passing, I’ve been listening to a Y2K-readiness book-on-tape. A gift from a friend. The store was still selling it new. The power of Y2K was purely as a mythic narrative, a great stage play enacted upon an unsuspecting world. You set up a conflict which naturally seeks its own resolution. Energy spikes and drops back down, patterns of change, I Ching. Roland Barthes talked about the “proaeretic code” in narrative: “those plot events that simply lead to yet other actions. For example, a gunslinger draws his gun on an adversary and we wonder what the resolution of this action will be. We wait to see if he kills his opponent or is wounded himself. Suspense is thus created by action rather than by a reader’s or a viewer’s wish to have mysteries explained.” Or maybe that better describes 9/11. A chain of things that happened. Y2K maybe was more hermeneutic (been puzzling over Barthes’ codes for years). It was this thing that you as the writer/director/performer could hold over the audience’s head: something that was repeated so much as part of the running storyline that people start to take it for granted. They accept it as a given, something unchangeable within the system. Actions usually follow more or less automatically from assumptions. And the end goal was met: lots of people went out and bought things. Lots of people were hired to fix things. I sense we’re at a similar moment in history. Been detecting some similar patterns of change, of vast groups of people (audiences/consumers) being blindly pushed down certain paths of action and patterns of behavior. I just hope people realize we’re all on stage and if we want and if we decide we need to, we can change the story or play it different than how we did last time. Worth a try!

Also see: the Millenium card at my old Pop Culture Tarot site.

• 8 Circuit Catastrophes
• Y2K Bug as Psychopomp
• Celebrity Tarot - The Millennium
• Religion as narrative
• Four-Legged Duckling Drowns