I don’t know a lot about or watch spectator sports all that much. But given the nature of my research - into traveling performance traditions - I can’t help but collide with the topic.
I didn’t really grow up with sports as a social bonding ritual in my family. So I never have really been [...]
Category Archives: Radar Blips
Special Monkey Times
November 17, 2009 – 4:27 pm
Haptic Response In Performance
November 16, 2009 – 3:55 pm
With physical performance skills, I’ve been noticing that you simply can’t learn how to do a particular action or move unless you actually engage through the full-motion of that move. That is, you can’t go right up to the edge, the beginning of that action and stop it short. You’ll only be teaching your nervous [...]
Universe as Rube-Goldberg Device
November 16, 2009 – 3:54 pm
Maybe that’s all the universe is. Cosmos, the clockwork universe, things are what they are and they are only trying to simulate themselves - survival, reproduction, the Great-Chain-of-Being.
Connected closely, no doubt, to the Rota Fortuna and the Cosmic Machine, I’ve seen with eyes closed. It governs repeatable patterns, processes and functions, especially those which recur [...]
Constructing a guillotine for the stage
November 16, 2009 – 3:53 pm
During the first season of my unofficial apprenticeship in the theatre, the summerstock company I worked for performed a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel a not very good rock-ish musical re-telling of the older story of aristocratic espionage - essentially yet another excuse to dress up in costumes and get paid for it.
One of [...]
Quick-change acts as sleight-of-hand
November 16, 2009 – 3:51 pm
Quoted from Everett Quinton, as interviewed by dramaturg Naomi Greenberg-Slovin in Everyman Theatre’s program for The Mystery of Irma Vep:
Charles [Ludlam] wanted to do a quick-change act and Irma Vep is a quick-change act. Charles was a magician as well. He was into magic and into the Magicians’ Society and not into giving away how [...]
Science, Experimentation and Simple Machines in Technical Theatre
November 16, 2009 – 3:49 pm
Have been really impressed and inspired lately by what a co-worker referred to as the “old-time theatre tricks” we’re using in our current production. Without giving any of them away, I’ve developed a new-found appreciation for what you can accomplish with only a few pulleys, ropes and pieces of wood.
The best part of it [...]
