Jeff Glassman is a genius. I love this little article. Read it and let us know where you would apply his insights.

He’s a professor at the School for Designing a Society

http://www.designingasociety.net

Counter-Intuitive Behavior for Theatre Composition

Jeff Glassman, 2007

It is to be expected that new social organization, new culture and new political and economic structures will be accompanied by new behavior on even so minute a level as the way one person gestures to another during conversation.  If this is at all a reasonable expectation, then a kind of reverse archeology can be practiced.  In this game, we can postulate observably new behavior found in a future society, extract some sample of it, and bring it home to the present.  We can even put it on a stage, and let it show us something we haven’t seen before.  It may introduce us to the context from which it hypothetically emerged, and that context might be the context of a society in which all forms of violence are relics of an abandoned past.  Or it may introduce us to a context of a society in which the meeting of basic needs has been fully and continuously accomplished, and in which people are passionately engaged in problems of finer living. In any event, these behavioral artifacts found through an archaeology of a future can be a source of new techniques for theatre artists at present.

 A future, to be a future, carries a continuity from a past, and also is not limited to the accumulated fact of that past.  If we consider, for purposes of theatre making, the sufficient continuity from the past to be people – the uninterrupted presence of  humans, of actors – then we need only to construct an item manifesting a clear and significant departure from that past, to claim for that item the status of an artifact of a future. We can find such an artifact by answering questions such as “what has never been done?” or “what is considered impossible in human behavior?” Answers are not difficult to come by.  Simply analyze present day observable behavior into a small number of distinguishable components, mix them up, and proceeds to synthesize those components into a new behavioral whole that has all the component features of the original, only now in a significantly different configuration.  It’s wrong, as any glimpse of a future ought to look when viewed in the present.  If the components we distinguish are things like gesture patterns, vocal phrasings, and spoken texts, and if the mixed up reconnection involves monstrosities such as gesture, voice and text each keeping to the rhythms, contours and meanings of three different conversations, even though they emanate simultaneously from one and the same person, then we have grounds to claim that we have an artifact of behavior from a future (an artifact that can not be found performed by any living being till now).  Such behavior is counter-intuitive and can not be performed by any person unless they become aware of, learn and perfect that performance. 

For its performance, counter-intuitive behavior requires the ability to maintain at least two distinct speech rhythms at the same time – one rhythm in the actor’s visible presence during continuous moving (including all the minute body rhythms and the visible gestures of the mouth during speech) and another in the actor’s audible presence (the audible voice) as if engaged in  conversation with twopartners in two different localities at exactly the same time (one conversation we can only see and another we can only hear). The acquisition of the skills necessary to simulate such behavior – the split emotional investment of the actor in twocontinuous domains – brings a new set of techniques into play in the creation of theatre, theatre being the place where such research rightfully belongs. Those who wish for fundamental, beneficial social change, might be curious as to what theatre could emerge based on the utilization of techniques excavated in this way from an imagined, yet to be made, future.

 If the techniques derived in this game can be applied to an ensemble of actors, they would be capable of performing orchestrated plays in which actors, characters, voices, texts, movement, gesture, action, interaction,emotional expression, dialogue and all the established components of theatre would be redistributed and recombined in complex patterns unfamiliar in the present context of theatre.  The theatre maker could compose the features of theatre as much like a composer of music as like a playwright.  Distributions can be made in which components of behavior that would ordinarily be identified as properties of a single person, or character, would be spread over several actors, and orchestrated by the composer of theatre to take advantage of new freedoms.  No longer would there have to be a strict identification of an actor with a particular character.  Instead, a character could be the outcome of a logic of composed patterning rather than an illusionary natural human.  The concept of a ‘person’ might not any longer fit neatly matched with a particular human body. Characters of this sort might appear to the audience as if they were visitors from an excavated future unknown society, who live in a way we might want to know more about for our own purposes.  At least, the artifacts of their behavior would provide us with material for research.