FoPA Winter Performance Project #3

Friends, colleagues and members of the Winter 2003 Foundations of Performing Arts society with a small “s”;

Form groups and choose one of the following forms (A)(B)(C)(D) or (E) for your piece.

Meg, Arun and Jeff invite you to form groups of 4, on average, and choose one of the following forms as a structuring device for your creative originality. These are meant to save you time by giving you distance from habit, and to move your creation into a setting in which to operate, right from the start, that is not the everyday world.

Theme and Variations (A), The Rondo (B), and Sonata(C) are meant to set before you the challenge and experience of working in and around several of the major forms of western classical music, now lifted by you into other domains and other media. You may choose one of these forms for your piece. Would one of these forms serve as an obstacle, which, as you work to overcome its limitations, lands your idea at a farther place than you would have reached otherwise (like a stairway)? Do you bounce off the walls of a form and wish to be elsewhere? Do you only seem to follow a formal outline, while working on the outside and using the chosen form as a marker to show how far away you are?

In western classical music, there are three forms that have frequently been used over the past 200 years:

(A)Theme and Variations:
Theme -> Variation1 -> Var2 -> Var3 -> ....

(B)Rondo:
Theme -> Section A -> Theme -> Section B -> Theme ->
Section D -> Theme

(C)Sonata:
Introduction
Theme 1
Transition
Theme 2
Closing Theme

Development

Theme 1 (shorter)
Transition
Theme 2 (shorter)
Closing Theme
Coda

(D)Create ONE story in which TWO individuals (or groups)
interact with each other, with one group (or individual) following one of the forms above, and the 2nd group (or individual) following a different form above.

(E)The Cycle Experiment: How to be social and idiosyncratic at the same time (a newly coined form)

A cycle is a repeated sequence of steps:

1 2 3 4 5 --- 1 2 3 4 5 --- (etc.)

2 4 6 3 5 1 --- 2 4 6 3 5 1 --- (etc.)

In a group of 4--5 people, create individual cycles of behavior. Make sure that each cycle has a distinct number of steps.

Your first performance is to:

Perform all the cycles simultaneously, without trying to coordinate the members: Person A does his cycle, while Person B does hers, while C does his, (etc.).

Having done this, now notice points in your performance where things can be coordinated. Let these points of coordination lead you to a second performance, where each person's cycles are changed by the presence of the others' cycles. Answer the question: How much can a person's cycle change in the presence of others, while maintaining its integrity?

Perform the 1st and 2nd version of the cycles.