Notes from Session 6: Nov. 2

To go to the improvised blog-polylogue, click here.

What we are trying to do:
- Character, Context, Conceit to express our ideas as a play.

PLAY PROPOSALS:
Adam:
- world of two races (e.g. red and blue), no continental separation, used to be related but diverged later.
- World about to collapse from war, tension, etcetera
- All of the gods in a board room, discussing free will.
o What if we give one person the ability to see the future, then they would want peace.
- They create a Messiah, about 35 years old, (Red) by giving him an orb so that he can see the future in it.
o Starts simply with predicting weather, then builds up.
- There is a terrorist attack from the blues that he wants to prevent, preemptively.
o Both end up attacking preemptively at once.
- He realizes that he can’t do anything right, and everything escalates between the two races.
- Red messiah discovers that there is a blue messiah, which the gods created to be fair.
- Both messiahs have a misconception of peace. They viewed social progress as one-sided.
- The Gods go back to before they created the messiahs, saying “how can we fix this?” Give the orb this time to a 75-year old, which he spends preparing for retirement.
o He is old, cynical, and too established. The hope was that he would be wiser.
- The Gods go back again, and give the orb to a 4-year-old on a playground.
o Reds and Blues start off in a classroom, and don’t see any difference between eachother
o It turns out that the 4 year-old, with the least education and pre-established views, is able to make the most social progress.

Kelsey:
- Man is made in god’s image.
- God hides consciousness in the milky way.
- A god (creative, unusual) accidentally gives humans consciousness. The other gods task this god with responsibility over humans, as this was not supposed to happen.
- The archetypes are the four other gods
- Play ends with the god in charge of earth either falling in love, or screwing it all and starting over again.

Dustin:
- Colony space-ship. Goes out into deep, deep space.
- Completely self-sustaining, could choose to be alone or not.
- They are gods in power, but not yet in thought, they are just becoming conscious to this.
- Isolating, sustainable environment.

Shawn:
- broken telephone on a distillation column (used in Chem. Eng. for extracting chemical of different types at varying temperature as they rise up the column)
- People placed at each stage, physically.
- A way to show social progress.

Joanne:
- Images: oppression and triggers. E.g. the normally passive word like “banana” acts as a trigger, which is nonsensical.
- Lost character as an archetype, incapable or seeing the world.
- Image: trying to rewind history, but can’t go past a certain point.

Chris:
- Images: something that puts everything in motion.
- The play varies each night based on “ingredients”.
- Hypertext controls movement of the play.

Ned:
- Rule plays: never have the same play twice. There are certain rules to follow. The audience tries to figure out the rules.
- Civilized.

Grace:
- Real-life problem: always struggling to be on time.
- Dustin’s comment about different clock times as you are leaving your house.
- Character has several time-keeping devices around him, and he is not sure what is right.
- Rents out room to housemate doctor, who is on call all the time.
- Situation similar to “gaslighting”, doctor can’t figure it out.
- Doctor moves out to sanatorium.
- Another housemate moves in, sets all the clocks to the right time.

Ned:
- Isolated context, like a circle on the stage.
- Actors get to re-invent human history, get to re-decide what gets passed on as the “past”.
- Get to determine how we got here.
- Have different motivations: peaceful, prosperous, generous. Also try to convince people to join their side.

[NOTE: This is very similar to the end of Sphere, by Michael Crichton, where the people who are empowered by the sphere choose to re-write the plot so that the sphere never existed.]

Chris:
- divided possibilities, try to walk back to nexus point, through history, and then try to re-live and re-invent it.

Ned:
- Only one person gets to bring into new “round” what happened [and therefore the wisdom generated] in the previous round.
- Repeating chorus

Caitlin:
- Look at human beings through time e.g. ecological change from use of images.
- Trees, water, fuel, oil (which we are destroying) are built through time.
- Everything now smaller, doesn’t get to grow as much.
- Shrinking [environmentally] as we are progressing.

Common Themes in Proposals:
- Gods = WHAT IF?
o Gives us the do something and see what happens.
o As playwrights, we can do whatever we want to be possible or true.
- Ideas of isolation
- Plunked somewhere, or with some major change, and trying to figure out what is going on.
- Audience involvement: getting locked in the theatre, put ownness on the audience to dictate the show.
- Let the audience be part of it, the conflict. E.g. split audience up into male/female etc.

HOW CAN WE SHOW THE CHANGING OF CONSCIOUSNESS?
- One character gets to transcend consciousness while traveling through time, others are unaware.
- Who gets the consciousness [AKA memory], who gets to decide?
- What if Audience picks character to be more conscious
o Eventually tend toward perfection, create the perfect plot.
o Like Plato’s Theory of Forms: Being and Becoming
o Very difficult to script/improv.
- Triggers can induce the change of consciousness/psychomachia.
o Lines can be the same, but change character and point of view.
o Like re-experiencing your memory, from the “conscious” actor’s point of view.
- Language is arbitrary. The memory is not in the language, but in the point of view in the action.
- Consciousness is equivalent to “directing”


REPETITION OF THE PLAY
- One character remembers (is conscious) each repetition with variation. Restart.
- Each repetition of the play is more perfect
- Each repetition is the re-telling of a viewpoint according to the principal actor. E.g. family fights.
- Have lines be the same each time, with different blocking and action. Different director for each?
- Danger of the play getting repetitive, as the audience would soon know everything far too well.
- How much can people know/be conscious of from previous iterations?
- What if there are a first few initial lines which are repeated, and then they split into different plot threads at a certain point, the “nexus”, or the point past which you cannot rewind.
- Repetition is importance, it allows for resonance and recognition.
- “He who refuses to learn from history is doomed to repeat it.”

CONVERGENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS/CHARACTERS
- People in the isolated context have the ability/responsibility to create a new normal.
- Creation myth gone wrong?
- We are talking about creating a creation myth. Meta-creation.
- “You have 15 minutes to create god. Go.”
- Caroline debate Homecoming
- As the play as a whole progresses, do we become more conscious?
- What if the number of people, and consciousnesses, converges to one entity at the end of the play? This can be convergence of peoples, or societies.
- A monologue can be deconstructed into several different personalities – psychomachia.
- What about resolving into several, and then one, characters?
- Characters can “proxy” eachother their points of view, and then leave.
- Is the remaining person a consensus?
- Key words: Stubbornness, Orthodoxy, Dogma
Caroline’s test Debate: Topic: Homecoming
Rule: tap someone on the shoulder who you believe can incorporate your point of view.
- People all start yelling their viewpoints, narrowed down (with intervention) to Shawn alone, being very introspective.
Observations:
- there was no debate, people were steadfast in maintaining their own viewpoints in the screaming match.
- Adam: when I left the “argument”, and simply listened, I learned and agreed with a lot more people’s points of view.

CHARACTERS AND CONSCIOUSNESS
- Part of a particular viewpoint is telling a good story.
- What about keeping the same characters and interchanging lines?
- How do we choose to define characters?
- Writer versus Director debate:
o A play invites people into a connection of ideas, synthesis.


SUBJECTIVE TIME EXPERIENCE
- There are more accidents during daylight savings time changes
- Cults use sleep deprivation
- Study: someone put in a cave with no objective measurement of time, and stayed in for 2 hours. His days stretched out to about 60 hours, everything slowed down.
o Circadian rhythm about 26 hours.
- Ned: Clock broke at 3 minutes after 4, and didn’t think fever was as bad. Then realized, it had been that time for 8 hours.
- Time-deprivation as a torture, like gaslighting?
- Grace: coming to Canada for school feels like one long school day, and going back in the summer it like it is over.
- IDEA (Ned): Play with 5 characters, for each, the passage of time during the play is one minute, one hour, one day, one life, one millennium respectively.
- Quantum Leaps in consciousness over the course of the play, different rates of maturation.
- Some people are told “what losing time will do to them”.

THEATRICAL IDEAS:
- Distillation column as a physical arrangement.
- Hypertext
- Closing circle on the stage, maybe being wound by a clock. What if the audience was inside as well?
- People checking their watches and phones at the door, or being forced to change their watch to 12:00
- Clocks at different speeds for characters, and they progress and mature at different rates during the play.

“TIME PRISON” IDEA
- Very similar to social prison as an analogue: For ignoring and damaging society, you are removed from society, as a crime against society. For ignoring and thus damaging time, you are removed from time, as a crime against time.
- Henry David Thoreau: “You can’t hurt time without hurting eternity.”
- Prisoners are isolated from time. Could have clocks counting down the rest of the remaining sentence at different rates.
- “Time Crimes” (it Rhymes)
o Defying time, analogous to defying society.
o They have escaped time.
- Potential Prisoners: Blind person (doesn’t know when to sleep), musician, drug addict, artist, memory loss/Alzheimers, meditators, people who experience in the moment [hippies, improvisers?], educational establishment. Very “archetypal environment”.
- Central character in the prison: guard/warden/?/god/teacher/rehabilitator. Does this person know how to kill time?
- Are the characters not sure of what they know?
- Could prisoners take over the prison?
- Book: “Blindbess” – everyone goes blind, and it is contagious. The rest of society puts them in a mental asylum, and a hierarchy is built. By Jose Saramago, Portugese.

ARCHETYPES REVIEW
- We can take the understandable archetypes that have arisen, and take them out of context.
- Archetype sets that have arisen:
- Character Archetypes: Flawed Wise One, Tyrant, Promised One, Buddy, Seeker
- Behaviour Archetypes (Northrop Frye): Myth, Romance, Mimesis, Irony, Parody
- Prisoners: Blind, musician, drug addict, artist, memory loss, meditators, hippies
- Can these be integrated into one personality? We now have a five-part Psychomachic personality.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
- So what? – what is the moral/end/resolution?
- “Why do you think dynamite is the answer?” Tom Robbins (bomber): “Dynamite is the question, not the answer.”
- The play doesn’t need to have a “point”, necessarily.
- Theatre is Four Acts of a Five Act Drama.
- Is the end simply realizing that you are a Time Killer?

INTERESTING MOMENTS/IDEAS:
“The second/2nd we’re done classes.”

Caroline & Chris repeating line:
“I was going to say that”
“No, I said that.”

Kelsey: when does choice become fact?
Ned: Originality is an old idea left over from modernism. [Surely we can come up with a new idea, better than old originality.]

Ned: Canadian Mythology Creation Myth:
Dawson’s city is named after a famous British geologist who spent his life’s work doing surveys of the Yukon. Upon heading back to England, he was bringing back 2.5 tons of rock samples with him. When portaging, his unknowing assistants would dump out sample rocks at the beginning, and refill with more rocks at the other end. When he arrived in Eastern Canada, the rocks he had were far different from those he started with. This is the re-writing of history.

SUMMARY: MAIN IDEAS
- We want the audience to be able to take an active role. Is this role figuring out what is going on?
- Characters trapped in a time prison.
- Final point: there are so many ways we could tell the story of what we are creating, in different environments.

UPCOMING:
- Ned will use the blog to post scripts, and we can comment on them. The Play needs to be done the first week of January.