A little less talk...

Don't worry, this ain't gonna be one of those "why doesn't everyone stop bitching and do something" posts -- it's a bit more self-centered (imagine that!).

My roommate and I, since I moved in back in April, have been having regular spontaneous late night talks about what we want to achieve and what we aren't getting artistically. It's been more or less our own little Rogers Park blogosphere between the two of us, except in person. And, of course, it's always ended with one of us telling the other to stop talking and actually get out and do something.

This weekend we may have finally breached that wall. My roommate, an actor/artist/photographer, brought his camera along to Iowa and we stopped along the way and took two rolls of film all themed around myself, an American flag, and miles and miles of cornfields, breaking a three-year lapse in his photography efforts. And they turned out fuckin' great. With the prints in hand, we got in to another of the same discussions last night as he expressed some dissatisfaction with another project he was working on. Except this time we ended with some basic plans on what to do, rather than a generic "do something". And it came around to me as well, and my desire to create theatre that flips expectation on its head. I'm sure it will take some mutual continuous urging between the two of us (and others, p.s.), but he's got kernels of exhibition ideas and I'm most definitely in the (early) planning stages of putting up theatre that I've been whining about not seeing for months now.

I'm a little reticent about going into too much detail about my plans, because of the nature of the work (it's hard to flip expectation on its head when everyone already knows what to expect), but it's an embrace of a new direction of theatre, which like it or not, is a topic that has been bandied about online a lot recently. I'll go into the greater ideas (the mission, Dan?) behind my ideas sometime when I don't have a pile of paperwork in front of me at my day job -- tonight or tomorrow, maybe -- but at the very core, we're talking about one weekend Event Theatre, a trust exercise in the avant-garde, as word of mouth will have to be immediate or between productions; and placing faith in society's willingness to be exposed to new ideas of theatre and theatre's ability to consistently reinvent those ideas.

P.Rekk
2007