I am approaching the halfway point here in Mexico’s Riviera Maya where I am breaking in a new monologue
There has been a great deal of destructive behavior. I’ve had to rewrite, re-test and revise again and again.
I was backstage last night waiting to come on and get into the “flow.”
Performing is concentration, it is awareness, above all it is meeting each new moment with something resembling continuity.
We can speed up, we can slow down, we can be dramatic, we can surprise, but inside of all those elements is this logic that suffuses the whole of the performance and it is this reliable flowing energy.
I want to take the show to someplace I’ve never been. Flow is part, but then there is the fuel and the spark.
What would that feel like? It will be made of flow, but it will also include a degree of greater amplified reactions. The audience might be shocked, laugh, surprised, applaud, shutter at the thought at some element that raises the overall experience.
If you look at the structure, examine pace, attend to flow, start hitting some of these moments with measurable intensity, and then compact the distance between these many moments that you are beginning to understand the nature of show’s abstracted design.
Counterintuitively, lush setups are allowed so long as they bring the audience and artist to a place where a more penetrating harvest of both laughter and insight reward the audience.
Taking individual pieces of material and then linking them into one flowing whole organism is what I rehearse daily and present six evenings per week.
You start with great material and then give it flow. I think painters who love the feel of paint on their brush as it moves across canvas know exactly what I mean to say here. You can see it when they paint and you can feel it when my material flows. It is the pleasure we find in the gestural spark. It is the continuity with the performers presence…
