Welcome to the third provocation from The PaperBoats Platform.
If you missed provocation number one or number two, I'd love you to check them out.
When people ask me,
"What is this PaperBoats thing you're doing?"
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my response goes something like ...
"It's a partnership platform for performance-makers, who are interested in new ways of connecting and creating."
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That can mean lots of things so by way of an example let me tell you about a show that's about to premiere in the Adelaide Festival of Arts.
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The Zephyr Quartet is an adventurous foursome of string players from Adelaide. Their latest venture, is a musical version of the surrealist drawing game, Exquisite Corpse.
12 composers across from Australia and the US, each in turn, composed a 4-7 minute piece for string quartet.
Each composer (apart from the first) received the final 16 bars of music from the previous composer as the starting point for their own contribution.
They each spent 2 weeks composing their piece. After a 9 months, the 64 minute piece was complete. Zephyr are busy rehearsing the new work and there's more!
It premieres on 7th and 8th March in the Space Theatre. Exciting!
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It's the sort of venture that is of interest to The PaperBoats, because it seeks to create a compelling new performance work by harnessing the power of collective creativity in distinctive ways.
The proposition in my last provocation was that "a germinating idea" is ever evolving. Week by week, The PaperBoats platform gets a deeper sense of itself as it engages with the world. As a germinating idea it's continually sprouting new ideas, new branches - a broader canopy.
So here's some of the back-story.
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Art versus Science
At Uni, I did a Science degree, with honours in Biochemistry. I was a whisker away from doing a doctorate and dedicating my life to investigating "the biosynthesis of the pyruvate carboxylase in sheep!”
I followed my heart and chose to be an artist instead.
But there remains in me a love of science and a brain that enjoys tinkering with ideas that try to make sense of the world.
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I wanted, through this new project, to develop my ideas about creativity and performance-making.
So I developed a set of 7 principles of performance making - my "take" on the things to keep in mind when devising a performance.
These principles would underpin the activities of the new project.
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"Begin at the beginning ..." said the King.
Once the principles were in place, I was struck by the fact that I would no longer sit within an organisation that had a mission statement, artistic vision and business plan.
What would be my purpose as a freelance artist? Who was I to be in this new non-Patch Theatre world?
I intuitively started to look for a name. I tried all sorts of things.
I kept coming back to “paperboats."
It was an image of something handcrafted and delicate that suggested "childhood" and "journeys of wonder."
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I could see in my minds-eye, Maurice Sendak’s image of Max in his boat sailing across the night, his bedroom walls collapsing into the ocean of his imaginings.
"An ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max. He sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks for almost over a year to Where the Wild Things Are."
The website domain “thepaperboats.com” was available so that sealed it.
My new artistic identity would be The PaperBoats.
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Over the years of making visual theatre works, I’ve become alive to the power of elemental forms like boxes, balls, circles, squares, water, paper, rope, light, and sound.
I started to think about a “line” as a simple elemental form. I love "elegant simplicity" and wanted to find some way of conveying that aesthetic in my new entity.
Could I make a "paperboats" image with a continuous line?
I tinkered inside an iPad drawing app called Zen Brush and eventually came up with the simple line image that was to become "the paperboats" logo.
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double click on the image to see the continuous line logo drawing
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The by-line that emerged from this was ...
lovingly hand-crafted, artful and beautiful performance-making vessels, venturing to unseen places,
which is a bit of a mouthful but I was happy with the image it conveyed.
Later it was simplified to:
The PaperBoats - venturing to unseen places.
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New ways of connecting and creating ...
The Moon’s a Balloon was my last project with Patch Theatre. It was a non—verbal, visual theatre work, which found expression for new forms of collaboration, co-creation and participation.
The Moon's a Balloon invites communities to participate in the performance event through three engagement intersects -
- a choir intersect
- a performer intersect
- an learning intersect
Communities are provided with the resources and training to prepare these intersects that take place when the show tours to their community.
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A remount/adaptation of The Moon's a Balloon with the Esplanade - Theatre's on the Bay saw Singaporean performers learn the complex physical score of the show using the existing musical score by Josh Bennett.
Then, two Singaporean gamelan composers created a completely new score using the performers’ physical score as their template.
The stage and lighting designs were also re-interpreted by local artists.
The result was a culturally distinctive, fresh "take" on the original work, which was presented as “Moon Balloon” for the Octoburst! Children's Festival at the Esplanade.
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These investigations into "new ways and connecting and creating" have strongly influenced the conception of The PaperBoats platform. Watch the youtube video below as it tells the story much better than any written description can.
It's 7 minutes so grab a coffee!
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double click in the image to access the video in a new window
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Connecting Digitally
There's no doubt that the digital age is making it easier and easier to find new ways of "connecting and creating".
Discovering hitRECord.com was another important moment in the conception of The PaperBoats.
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hitRECord.com is the online, collaborative production company founded and directed by actor and artist Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It an online community of over 300,000!
hitRECord develops artistic outcomes collaboratively via their website where anyone can:
- upload their their contributions,
- download and remix others artists’ contributions
- and work on projects together
hitRECord has published books, released records, gone on tour, made films and produced an Emmy Award, TV series. It's amazing!
HitRECord suggests to me that we're on the cusp of something new in performance-making, prompted by new technologies and the open-source, creative commons and co-creation movements.
The possibilities of co-creation in terms of theatre-making is still relatively unexplored territory and hitRECord.com provides a "working model" from which we can draw ideas and inspiration. I’m thinking boutique!
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The Tutu Shows PROJECT
Alongside the development the PaperBoats has been the evolution of the Tutu Shows PROJECT, a venture designed to pioneer the ideas of the platform. I’ll share how it was conceived in the next blog.
The Tutu Shows PROJECT will test the possibilities of The PaperBoats platform guided by the 7 performance-making principles.
Performance outcomes exploring "2" will be developed in a range of contexts across a number of communities.
Performance-making ensembles will:
- respond to the same germinating idea
- create their content in modular form
- make their performance segments available for sharing within the project
- be alive to new ways of connecting and creating
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2016 will see The Tutu Shows PROJECT develop across 2 cities in 2 countries.
- Dave Brown will work with a group of theatre-devising students at the Adelaide College of the Arts across an eight week theatre-making process, which will deliver the first "Tutu Shows” performance outcome to audiences of 4-6 year olds.
- Megan Alrutz will lead a group of devising students from the University of Texas, Dept of Theatre and Dance in a semester long process (with Dave Brown joining the group for a 4 week residency). The team will develop "Tutu Shows" content, in the form of performance modules, as a creative development process for a later performance outcome.
- Dave Brown will work with independent artists to create "Tutu Shows" performance content with a view to exploring the possibilities of connection, creation and partnership these may engender.
- The PaperBoats will commission a small number of artists to create content, generate design possibilities, develop partnerships or contribute ideas to support the development of The Tutu Shows project.
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Steve Jobs, suggested that "Creativity is all about having enough dots to connect.”
Albert Einstein said that "combinatory play" sits at the heart of idea generation.
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Maria Popova, the author of the extra-ordinary brainpickings.com, sums it up beautifully.
"Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of building blocks ~ knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration and other existing ideas ~ that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something new."
This continual process of combining, reconfiguring, filtering and unfurling to "synthesise something new" constitutes what I call the development of a project's "germinating idea".
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This blog has been an attempt to describe how the germinating idea for The PaperBoats has unfolded over the past year or so.
When I settle on a "verbal snapshot" of where a project is at - I call it an "animating statement." These are useful when garnering people's interest in the venture.
For The PaperBoats, the animating statement I keep returning to is:
"theatre-makers pioneering new ways of connecting and creating".
I'm hoping this blog gives a little more sense of what that statement means.
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... we'll look at how the germinating idea for The Tutu Shows PROJECT has unfurled to date.
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This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory group.
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