17G. Performance Score: Collaborative Monologue

• Two people sit out on the floor, side by side, facing the audience. You both will talk simultaneously and build a monologue together. One of you starts talking, about anything. The other immediately joins in. Listen to each other as you talk so that you can incorporate each others words into your language. You're talking about the same thing at the same time and in the same tone of voice. Your rhythms, inflections, and intonations are the same. Even your body posturing and energy is the same, but you're not mirroring. You're moving too quickly for that, continually talking forward in the monologue while drawing from each other. Don't wait for the other to catch up. You're both talking and retrieving each others' material concurrently. Each of you adds and follows material equally. Maintain a balance between the two. One monologue comes from two mouths.

This simple and small performance score symbolizes the whole training. In order for it to work, the performers must relinquish all judgments, needs, and preferences. They must not plan anything. They must stay open and receptive to their and their partners realities equally. They must stay connected to feeling. They're in their bodies. Their energy focus must be free to shift, transform or develop depending on the progression of the improvisation. They must accept and respond immediately with utmost conviction, and without a milliseconds delay, to whatever their partner introduces into the scheme of things.

Merging

From the outside, it looks as if the two performers have merged into one entity even though they're not saying the exact same thing at the exact same time. What's really happening to one is really happening to the other. As individuals, they no longer seem to exist.

Merging often carries with it a negative significance: the individual has become lost, uprooted from her or his centeredness or autonomy, weak and disoriented. But imagine merging two centers, two strengths. When we take two primary colors, yellow and blue, and put them together, we have green. Yellow and blue didn't go anywhere. They spread their molecules out to let each other in. The experience inside of Collaborative Monologue is just like that: permeability to the experience of the partner without loss of one's integrity.

Merging isn't agreeing. Agreement implies separation, an "I" and a "you." The "I" must agree with the "you" and the "you" with the "I." We don't even assume agreement with merging. We're free from the constraints and loneliness of that concept altogether.

It's odd to call this Action Theater process a training, or even a practice, since we're not learning anything we don't already know. Actually, we're not learning anything we already aren't. We're remembering and unlearning what stopped us before.

Day Eighteen

Stalk

18A. Four Forms

18B. Elastic Ensemble

18C. Five Feet Around

18D. Levels

18E. Deconstruct Movement, Sound and Language

18F. Performance Score: Collaborative Deconstruction

18G. Performance Score: Threaded Solos

A friend and I were travelling around the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. One day, we met a man who described a grotto, a cave that held within it several pools of water. The grotto was deep in the jungle about SO km. south of where we were staying. He told us a local farmer guides visitors into the cave. All of the information was very vague, but, early one morning, we prepared for the adventure. First, we covered ourselves up from head to toe with long pants, long sleeve shirts, hiking boots, neck scarves, rain wear, hats, cotton gloves and sun screen. Then, we packed a compass, a flashlight, extra water, a snakebite kit, antihistamines, and lip balm. This was the tropics and we were going into the jungle; we were explorers, protected from bites, scratches, poisons, too much heat, too much sun, getting lost or thirsty. Intent on beating the heat of midday, we bundled into the car and took off. Fortunately, there aren't a whole lot of roads in the Yucatan, so we didn't have too many choices. After frequent stops for advice, we came to what we thought was the likely area. Two little children were playing in afield. We asked them where we might find a guide to lead us to the caves. They went to get their father, who was working in a nearby field, and brought him back to us. He told us he was too busy preparing for planting to take us, but that the children could. We must have looked dismayed because before he went back to work, he assured us that they were quite capable. The girl was six and her little brother, four. They were barefoot. She was wearing a little cotton dress and he, nothing but shorts. She had his little hand in hers. Feeling unsure, but not wanting to be insulting, we followed the children across a yard littered with tires, cars and other rusted debris, then behind into the dense foliage that encircled their small house. We followed an overgrown, narrow path, the children skipping along ahead of us, talking, singing, laughing. After a while, we descended a steep hill that dropped right to the portal of the cave. It teas a small opening amidst thickly growing vines. Without the children, we never would have noticed it. They led us in. The passageway was dark, a dank, winding tunnel that descended deeper and deeper into the earth. Every so often, the children instructed us to crawl on our bellies to avoid bats hanging overhead. Even then, we sometimes felt them brushing along our backs. A bit further on, following some casual hand signals from the little girl, we skirted around "Pipo," an enormous tarantula, who guarded his little corner of darkness. The children were quite familiar with his idiosyncrasies and even seemed happy to see him. Eventually, we came to the black pools we'd been searchingfor. Two silent pools, bottomless, clear, rested side by side in a large and dimly lit chamber. We took off our cloths and dove into surprisingly warm and silky water.

Our guides, the little girl and boy, felt as comfortable in the cave as we would feel in our living rooms. They were stalkers, their eyes and ears alerted to any signs of danger, of newness, or change. Their awareness protected them. The jungle, which was so ominous to us, seemed to extend, harmoniously, from their very beings.

To improvise is to stalk. We stalk the objects of awareness, the limit-lessness phenomena of sensation, memory and imagination. We dissect this phenomena into details and, through these details, witness our continual experience. At times, these experiences are perilous and, at other times, enlightening. Whatever they are, we greet them open-handedly. Sometimes, this means we have to crawl on our bellies, sliding along, pressed along a wall, even, momentarily disappear. We walk softly, crash into, or fly, whatever helps us greet ourselves.

Unlimited, we'll extract and explore four possibilities from a vast range.