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Making decisions

January 16, 2004
When we first started develloping the previous Verdensteatret performance Tsalal I was frustrated about how ideas that were working well were still being reinvestigated deconstructed and reconstructed over and over again. Little by little I’ve come to appreciate that we’re not necsessarily jumping on the first idea that pops up. It’s a way of challenging your current way of thinking and working getting a deeper understanding of the material and pushing forward in directions you didn’t think of beforehand. On the other side I also fear that we keep working on (the first?) ten minuites of the performance for too long and don’t get the time to put as much attention into the rest of the performance.

A completely different approach would be to make a poor and rough scetch of the whole performance and then work more and more into the details. It proberbly wouldn’t work in the case of Verdensteatret though. Something about what we’re doing reminds me of writing Palestrina excercises during the composition studies: If you do a change locally in one bar the consequences are global affecting the whole of the excersise.

Working with Frode Thorsen was the opposite extreme: We had limited time for devellopment and Frode was really good at forcing us to make decissions and structures based on the limited number of improvisations we did.

" I only had a few days – and the effect of this is to focus attention. Less exploration of all the possible journeys you could make more determination to take one journey (even if the choice of it is initially rather arbitrary) and make it take you somewhere."

It’s interesting that Eno seems to believe that this approach gives more surprising results:

" Working with greater leisure my ideas become much more "reasonable&quot and surprise me less."

(Quotes from Brian Eno: A Year with Swollen Appendices January 12th)