Sat Apr 07, 2012
This is the text generated by the audience members and me during the Low Concept performance on Saturday. This is available for anyone to use for any purpose, in part or whole, as long as it's noncommercial and you share alike: "Low Concept performance text by No Attribution Needed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://www.mobius.org/blog/david-miller." You don't have to attribute it, but do let me know about it.
One difference from the Friday night text is that, on Saturday, I asked questions of the audience by typing them so they displayed on the screen. Friday's questions were posed verbally, and are not part of the text. But as on Friday, "I" refers to different people at different times.
Performance text, Saturday, March 31, 2012
Saturday night text
We’re doing introductions. Meeting each other again after a long more or less pause, hiatus, however you want to express it, I guess. I am glad to see you all in the same room. I don’t think that’s really happened many times, even considering the time that has gone by. So, so, next thought. Straight against the keyboard, Fingertips. Sound of keys, sound of cameras, sound of breathing, my own heart, actually. Actually what? What follows actually? Not entirely sure. I was about to finish that sentence with something definite and affirmative, and in fact there’s probably something there but I don’t any longer know what it is. Especially as I get farther away from the sentence itself. Wilful self-distraction.
I will ask you a question or two during the course of the performance. I hope you will feel comfortable answering this question, these questions. No assumptions though.
A string of lights in the window in the house opposite. White strings of holiday lights, probably suspended across the glass of the window, but perhaps actually suspended in the room itself? Not that plausible, I guess, not impossible either.
Save file. Oh and yes, this isn’t a Mac. But I don’t get religious about it.
Question: when you were young (any young age counts), something happened to you that - say - opened your mind to the rest of what your life might be. Surely this happened to you. I can say this because I am fortunate to know all of you in the room.
So -- would someone like to mention something to us along this line - and may I enter it here?
I wrote my first poem when I was 10 and my teacher asked me if I had plagiarized it. I asked, what does that mean?
My teacher said, did your parents help you write it? My answer was no.
When I was 19, I was cast as Sonya in Uncle Vanya by Chekhov and that probably answers the question.
One more?
When I was in the third grade I wrote a book report on flying saucers. One of my sources was my coach, who had been in the air force. He was pursuing flyers saucers and found he could not match the subtlety of their movement. It changed his life and hearing about this changed my life.
Thanks.
Another question: what do you have nostalgia for?
The present. (And how is the present an object of nostalgia? No really.)
Because I miss everything even as it’s happening.
Yes, I get that.
The Sixties. No, really, too. I was listening to the Rutles album Archaeology just this afternoon.
Another?
My son when he was just a small child.
Thanks.
Scraping, rubbing, tearing. Last summer we visited the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Several of us from Mobius and me. Performing a piece by John Cage called Variations VIII. The idea - go to a place you do not know and have never been to before. Make a performance based only on what you find there. Bring nothing. So we did, six of us. Jane Wang, Jed Speare, Margaret Bellafiore, me, Larry Johnson, and Bob Raymond. My part of the performance ended with Bob and I working together. The building was set at the bottom of a kind of kettlebowl. The rim of the kettlebowl was lined with large boulders. Bob and I took scrapers from the fresco studio in the same building and a remote microphone and walked from boulder to boulder, scraping and sounding as the sound came out from inside the building and the audience came out of the building and sat on the grass under the stars. Which then is where we had Q and A afterwards.
One more question.
What were you just thinking about now?
His uncle who just passed away yesterday. I am very sorry to hear this, Andrew.
That I miss Bob.
Another?
Or you can bring it in later.
Same question, maybe? What is on your mind just now? Or, ow.
The answer to your question was on my mind.
And do I assume correctly that this was it?
Yes.
Yes I said yes I will yes.
