the timboucher experience

Any two things I tend to focus on eventually become fused together in my mind. Like chess and theatre, for example – two things I’ve immersed myself in completely this summer. Days spent working in the shop, evenings spent running shows backstage, late nights spent drinking and playing chess in the dining hall of Bridgefield Hall on Chapoquoit Road in West Falmouth, Massachusetts. What was once a fairly fancy beach resort became the summer quarters of the College Light Opera Company sometime in the 1970’s. The tech crew lives in one of several outlying cabins on the campus, within view of the main house, which contains also a full costume shop, large rehearsal space and perhaps forty beds for actors and business staff. Nights spent in the dining hall almost invariably involve alcohol. One of the visiting directors this summer remarked at the height of the summer that it resembled some sweaty dark saloon out of an old Western, where the locals drown themselves and a gunfight was always on the verge of breaking out. Except our gunfights, I guess, are chess games, or else people trying to catch a wireless internet signal to communicate with the outside world via Facebook, Skype or email.

Chess, I’ve read, was extraordinarily popular at the height of the Italian renaissance in court life. I imagine, actually, that late medieval court life was maybe not so different from life with an acting troupe. Though we don’t grow our own food, or subjugate serfs exactly, we do live on a manor of sorts. There exists also a rigid class system of labor distribution according to one’s function here. But it’s not so bad once you get used to your place and what’s expected of you. The load becomes much lighter, the functioning of the whole, smoother.

Chess is an arena in which one can master oneself through careful observation and manipulation of one’s decision-making process. You can move instinctually, immediately or you can patiently consider all of your options so as not to fall into traps laid by one’s opponent. Which leads me to the topic at hand: the revealed attack.

The revealed attack I learned from a good friend here whom I would consider a fellow troubadour, a sometimes juggler and a seeker after wisdom. The revealed attack means you move a more or less innocuous piece forward, maybe a pawn. If your opponent isn’t paying close enough attention to the full implications of your actions upon the greater scheme of the board, they may assume that they are safe since the piece which has been moved cannot touch them. But in the revealed attack, the innocuous piece is moved forward so that a piece behind it now has an open lane of attack. The attacking piece doesn’t need to be moved into position, it simply is. The innocuous covering piece acts, in this case, like a wall or curtain suddenly moved out of the way.

This same phenomenon, I realized last night during the opening of our sixth show, occurs onstage in many ways, but most noticeably and directly with light. Say you have your main rag closed. Nothing is visible on-stage, but the main rag is illuminated by lights angled from down-house. The light, in this analogy, is like the attacking piece, blocked by an impediment from illuminating its target. As soon as the impediment is removed and the main rag is opened, the light instantly is able to reach its destination through no effort on the part of the light.

• Gnostic Revelation
• Infallibility of the Bible
• answeringsword
• Gen. Clark’s views on the space-time continuum
• Arrow of Light