Macro Water Photography from www.frogview.com

Some images of water posted on www.digg.com --

No Surprises

I don't mean to pepper this blog with Radiohead videos (they are so like five years ago, ew!) but they seem to really apply in a lot of ways. This is a video from their album OK Computer.

early text

Text I initially created for the Ibsen festival can be found here:
http://www.sheilacallaghan.com/water_final.doc

Document of flood mythology:
http://www.sheilacallaghan.com/Floodmyths.doc

Notes I took from our reading at New Dramatists last year:

Lights up. Water everywhere. Clothes float in. Actors bring microphones in, place them near the clothes, and objects. The clothing sings. Then actors climb into the clothes, objects take on lifes. Certain objects have more than one life.

START PLAY WITH ARIA OF A FLOATING SHIRT
TWO MONOLOGUES START THE PLAY
INCORPORATE NOAH'S ARC AND FLOOD MYTHOLOGY
TRACK THE LIFE OF LOST OBJECTS THROUGHOUT THE PLAY
CHANGE THE GENDERS OF THE CHARACTERS

first thoughts

- the films you posted bill are great. it made me think of a couple of things - the first is the transformative nature of water. how do we show that? how it transforms the characters but it is constantly transforming - like time does. crazy idea but we could have a large block of ice on the stage that melts during the course of the show....or the opposite - we are watching water freeze during the show...can we suspend water mid-air? kindof like freezing time?

- i was also thinking about the whole idea of experimenting with water...the role that a "scientist" can play - taking water and objects (used in the piece) and seeing how they morph - or even disintegrate over time. maybe we have objects collected from audience members each night and keeping various vials of experiments going so that by the last show we have a whole wall of vials?

- ok- just watched the radiohead...it's amazing...it's absolutely fascinating. i love the way it captures the floating feeling of being deep underwater. i love the details on the dishes at the table (still scraps of food there) as if life was severed abruptly...i love the spotlight - and the idea that objects can be captured through light and how they tied that in to the sky at the end...

random chatter

NOTES FROM THE WAVERLY...

-swivel chairs
-body as body of water (70% of earth, of human)
-endless ocean, no beginning, no end
-locales: underwater aria, cloud aria
-grief: water as escape for survival
-flooding of the gorges in China, ancient underwater cities
-apathy from abroad... what can I do to help? nothing. shutting out tragedy, different perspectives on the same event, empathy vs. safety
-the contemporary vs. the historical, the quotidian vs. the epic
-playing with scale
-temporary distortion blog - http://temporarydistortion.blogspot.com/
-audience involvement-all drink water together; all hold breath together; different ticket prices; ways of approximating experience and involving an audience viscerally (event theatre), cell phone or computer usage during the show, audience determines how the show goes
-first memory of water (nearly drowning, learning to swim)
-fake news cast... is the world drowning while we all sit in a theatre? What is being buried, and why, and how will we deal with it when we open the doors and the water pours in?

Water in Zero Gravity

Look around you - Water

Radiohead

First Post

From Jason's blog:

"In the near term, however, the answer seems to be pursing a sort of event-driven theater that does what only theater can do, something akin to the crowds that have sprung up around Spring Awakening, Rent, The Blue Men, or Cirque du Soleil. The Denver Center did an amazingly effective job of this with 1001. The local papers were very kind to us, and an overwhelmingly large number of the older audience were very responsive, but reaching out to younger audiences via the local club scene and word of mouth made all the difference. The DCTC publicist told me that the cheap seats were sold out for much of the run, which is unusual for them - usually they're full for a week or two and that's it. This tells me that we need to take a page from hip-hop, punk rock, and the indie and rave scenes and reach past traditional media outlets, which are usually prohibitively expensive anyway, and we need to put something on stage that makes a difference in the lives of people our own age. I see too many plays by my peers that seem specifically intended to digestibly package the lives of twenty- and thirty-somethings for an older, wealthier crowd, one that might be liberal it its beliefs but is deeply conservative in its tastes and actions. Fuck that."

From my friend Deron's blog:

"Placebo Sunrise was a show that was so incredibly good that when I saw it I immediately regretted it was closing that weekend, because everyone who was important to me wouldn’t have a chance to see it. When I think about what the theatre experiences that have knocked me out have in common two thing comes to mind: 1)Their ability to wholly transport you to another world with its own unique rules and life and 2) Their robust theatricality. Placebo Sunrise had both of these attributes from the very moment you set foot in the theatre and walked down the long hallway to sit down in what appeared to be a mock up of a traditional vaudevillian theatre. A host named Louis greeted you and pulled off that rare feat of being utterly charming while still in character. He gave you a refreshing orange and vodka infused drink and immediately convinced you that you were staying at some weird and wonderful resort. When the show began the heroes, Garvey and Super Pants were hanging from their feet by bungee cord in front of a backdrop that was sketched on white butcher paper. Totally surprising, totally hilarious. They didn’t have to say anything at all before we were laughing and on the edge of our seats. But then the scene ended and the butcher paper backdrop was ripped down to reveal this huge two story set of a 1920’s hotel. It was amazing, it was magic, it was a totally minding blowing moment which is so incredibly difficult to pull of genuinely in theatre. I can’t really remember what exactly happened in the rest of the play except that it was little like a Marx Brothers movie directed by David Lynch and that’s the kind of show I had always wanted to see. The other moment that sticks with me is that this woman, maybe a mermaid even was pushed out on this giant turtle in the midst of this hotel farce and sang this gorgeous torch song. And the whole piece was hilarious, I think any art that really works for me is something that has a generous sense of humor. This show was MOMENTUOUS."