[Date Prev][Date Next]
[Chronological]
[Thread]
[Top]
RAT Re: rat rule
Proposed pattern or instrument for rat:
a) time and travel
b) transgression
c) trade
a) rat theater takes as its subject and method: challenges to the
conventional understanding of time and space. We hold that all events, past
and future, are simultaneous with the present; we re-set the clock on rising
action/catharsis; we confront the idea of a season = a year; we move our
shows whole and (importantly) in part - rats travel for society and labor.
b) rat art works across disciplines, struggling towards a new notation
system that makes a space for dance, music, and visual arts. rat is cunning,
insistent and finds a way; builds the new in the shell of the old.
c) First, rat looks to a direct exchange of goods and services unmediated by
money. In arguing contracts, make food, shelter, and trasportation... sets
and labor, primary elements of trade. Money is so deeply ingrained in our
culture that contracts can't always be written along these lines; the
language isn't up to speed. Then: take the money. Making a (money) living at
the theater is a very, very good; remarkable; potentially exemplary. But use
rigor in expanding the dialogue. The watchcry all along: don't let money be
the defining and supreme obstacle to voice.
Insofar as rat is anything, it is wrong about most things. This is in the
nature of identity: digression and error, a slip inside perfect emptiness.
Also: a vehicle for the great give away. rat's identity is an oportunity for
it to give itself away.
Notes on recent posts: Cat is right on the money (as it were) concerning
theater's place in the grander scheme. But the scheme isn't always so grand.
Weak as it is, theater, since it involves the making of small, mobile,
committed cells of empathic do-ers (for the time a show plays, during the
rehearsal process, through the life of a collective...) - is always
potentially revolutionary, even when lazy or self-dismissing. Theater, like
music, like dance, even wraith-like poetry, continues to change the fucking
world one hard-head at a time. By accident, almost, nowadays, but at root.
Everything is politics. Satuday Night Fever on Broadway is a political
choice; Foreman and Wellman are clearly political; that puppet show with
rags in a tank of water is political...
Separate issue: Northern California rats - even those of you who can't come
to Philly - want to get a pre-conference together? I think a lot of us
actually live not far from each other. We should get a list-serve going like
BCT in LA, but I'm dummy past the reach of all Dummy books on how to se such
things up. Get together at a coffee shop in SF? Friday June 1 at 2:00, Wild
awakenings, McAllister between Leavenworth and Hyde?
- e
---------------------------------------
To [un]subscribe to the rat-list, send an email to "majordomo@ratconference.com"
with [un]subscribe rat-list" in the body of the message.
For information on other functions send a message containing the word
"help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.
---------------------------------------
You may also [un]subscribe on the web at http://www.ratconference.com/cgi-bin/web_domo.pl?list=rat-list