BALLOON here – our first few days in the CUBE have flown by and ideas are exploding out of our minds and bodies like popping candy! We drove straight down from Boston to VA in one day and restarted the process of landing in a new place. I use the term ‘landing’ Because we are a team of 5, and we travel from place to place to meet up with each other. The process of landing involves not only arriving at the physical location, it includes listening to Ryan’s sounds, interacting with the texture of Kat;s designs, navigating the computational systems and jiggering around with the pozyx. Once we’ve engaged with each part separately, we begin building the bridge between sounds and interactions. The glue that holds all this together is our social dynamics as a group. This residency time is key to developing a safe working space, something we all hold highly and is one of our seven expectations for this and future rounds of Acouscous. There are not many rule sets in the CUBE because it’s not a ‘traditional’ art space so to speak like a movie theatre or a proscenium stage. When you walk in you’re not sure what to expect. It’s up to us to build the rules of process and performance and this is both exciting and frustrating. We are building our own path, cooking up our own rague to share with an audience through a series of trial and error, combining ingredients to measure taste and effect, growing ingredients even from the soil up! One of my physical theatre teachers once told me ‘la plancher est ton amie’ ‘the ground is your friend’ – this was in the context of learning how to do a handstand and overcoming the fear of falling. Here, the ground is each other and our individual expertise, growing ingredients that cross pollinate as we meld them together into recipes. Monday/Tuesday have seen us brainstorming up recipe sketches usually in 1 of 2 ways, from pozyx interaction ideas or from listening to work that Ryan has made. Once we’ve sketched our a recipe as a team, our processes often run in parallel to prepare a test of that recipe. Sometimes the temperature will be too hot, or the cooking time to long, or the ingredient not right…there is a lot of tweaking and creating in the moment. Patience and communication is key and it’s quite an organic process. Often, technical tools such as sound or the coding of interactive technology is done in isolation and then theatre or other artists are invited to use those tools. We’ve challenged ourselves to be creating in dialogue from the beginning, to find the story potential of our combined expertise together. And when we trust the ground that is each other, we can make a masterpiece of flavour.
Stay tuned for a final recap of our time in VA and…how the first sharing went?!!