the timboucher experience

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 system how to short-circuit, not how to cycle smoothly through flowing inter-connected movements. Understanding this and applying it this summer is how I finally learned how to swim after twenty-nine years on dry land. It applies too in juggling, which I spent the afternoon attending to. Just haven’t had the time lately. But sometimes when you’re practicing, it’s better to work through the proper flow of the whole arc of a series of motions and actions, as opposed to being worried about getting every little nuance and articulation. That can come after, once you’ve built up the noospherically-linked space-time engrame framework to hang these smaller cue points from.

Haptic response is a component of robotics as well. It’s the system of sensors and feedback which tells a robot hand not to squeeze a glass so hard that it shatters, but makes certain it holds on tight enough so as not to drop it. Proprioception is connected somehow to this in the human body.

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 the set pieces we carpenters were tasked with the construction of by our scenic designer was that of the mythic instrument of death: the guillotine.

“Ol’ Red,” I’ll call her now, for the sake of anthropomorphizing this created object, this constructed actor in the parlance of Eileen Blumenthal’s spectacular puppetry book. For the guillotine itself was a character in the story. “Madame Guillotine” is exhorted in song by the revolutionary masses of the chorus. A spotlight illuminates her exalted presence onstage as her blade descends to sever head (Reason) from shoulders.

Ol’ Red was painted red by us after a photo found on the internet of a historically re-constructed guillotine somewhere else - in a museum I want to say. Red for obvious reasons, I should say. The blood you’d be spilling would stain your raw lumber anyway. So may as well paint it that color. In cases like this, excuse my pun, it can be best to go with the flow.

The machinery of the guillotine itself was completely functional. You could put your head into a stock made out of wood and have an angled blade rapidly descend towards your neck. Except we never had a real blade. We had a quarter-inch piece of luan with a sheet of siding cut along an angle to simulate the old theatrical French blades of the revolutionary market square. Ours couldn’t sever a head, assuredly, but it could inflict a nasty flesh wound.

So we carpenters built in fool-proof (or actor-proof, as is sometimes said in the biz) wooden stops to arrest the descent of the false blade several inches above the actor’s tender neck. It meant you did’t achieve the satisfying illusion of the blade coming all the way down for a nice chopping effect. But it’s theatre and sometimes fake ends up being more real. No one wants to have deal with an actor whose head has actually been chopped off onstage. Unless, that is, your stage is the world and you just threw down the aristocracy with mass theatrics. Then it might make sense.

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 is that each of these sorts of technical challenges is unique. You’ll apply a basic concept over and over, but its specific execution is always slightly (or vastly) different. Mostly this means you have to experiment. You might not necessarily know exactly what the best way to do something is until you actually attempt to do it and you get a sense for what succeeds and what fails spectacularly - in that way that only live theatrical accidents truly can.

The craft of technical theatre is an excellent place to learn and to apply mathematical and scientific concepts in an extremely practical manner. I wish that I had this sort of education as a child. I’ve heard the Montessori system is largely geared that way: lessons are geared around a student’s central guiding interest. Math and science applied to teach kids about dinosaurs for example, how big they were, what they would have eaten. I never considered technical theatre at all as a possible career before I just sort of fell into it. It’s harmonizing so many diverse things I’ve chased after or grown up alongside but which I never really saw how they all fit together.

Thanks to technical theatre, I now approach problems differently. I look at the required function and seek out the simplest #whatworks strategy to accomplish it in reality. The essence of science: experimenting with something until you get it the way you want it, instead of giving up or never making an attempt in the first place. In that way, science is a methodology of striving, an exercise of the will upon the field of reality.