Re: RAT Re: Betty Jane's Kitchen

[NOMADMONAD@aol.com]

I learned how to cook not from some applied rigor, but from the intrinsic joy 
of the activity.  And it's not that I can't admire or learn from those fine 
international chefs.  It's just that I find my preferred cuisine of the 
All-American BarBQ or Chili Cook Off demands a different set of disciplines 
than the others. 

RatSass Beer is the drug of choice at this BarBQ.  The endless conversation, 
not the beer, causes the buzz that keeps us all late night in private and 
collective alchemy.  Any acts of theatre I may commit can be seen as 
extensions of these gathering of peers.  They are the first and truest 
audience.

RatSass is more than just the social club that stands in opposition to the 
Spectacle, although that would be enough.   But here's the place to hone 
those "fighting words" because Theater is both: Words, the Speaker and Deeds, 
the Doer.

--nick

At 08:20 AM 8/6/00 -0700, erik ehn wrote:
>I've been thinking a lot lately about rigor and identity (latter via
>Mitchell's question, former via Odin Theater) - about who Rat is and about
>what new American theater is saying as a movement. Spongy rigor is no rigor
>at all and I get worried that that's what I'm imposing on audiences - high
>demands with little precision (a militaristic brutality); in terms of
>structures, am I complaining that the food's no good and that the portions
>are too small? Then, also, are we precisely and purposively something all
>together? Hopeful avenues for development.
>
>Then the Betty Jane thread pops up out of the toaster, and I get out of my
>head and into my more urgent appetite. We're not likely to get where we're
>going through rational argument and mental adventurism. Rat will become what
>it is through the experience of hospitality. We will become something new,
>distinct from immediately available models, when our polity centers on the
>exact action of breaking bread.
>
>Heard this morning:
>
>"Every celeb-
>rat-
>ion
>
>contains a
>RAT...
>
>Radience
>And
>Transfiguration"
>
>- e