Dramaturgy Notes 4/14 ... an alchemical 6th grade puppet/diorama on Greek religious themes

Theater: it's somewhere between storytelling and ritual, religious practice, invocation. Descended from harvest festival god supplications, the ancient Greek "theatron". To represent it physically I would need people, or representations of people. Some would be "spectators" watching, and the rest would comprise the "spectacle", that being watched. I mean, I personally have made the argument that you can have theatre without 1.) story, 2.) spectators, or 3.) actors; but in this semiotic reduction I hesitate to get that complicated. The space or container in which the "theater" was to happen would have to have a feeling of otherness, as if the space was only intended to be used for that purpose, or the act of having theater inside it set it apart as special, if only for the period of time that the theater was happening there.

I don't know why writing this reminds me of sixth grade and having to do a project on Greek mythology, and building a proscenium theater (with black curtain, no less) out of a shoe box and creating puppet cut-outs of god/characters to make my presentation. Showing was easier than explaining, and I remember the end result as a cross between a diorama and a puppet show. And that is a memory I didn't even know I had, by the way.

I struggle to define concisely what theater is without drawing a distinction with what it is not. I return to my interest in the relationship between theater (or substitute "live performance") and time. Once it is recorded it becomes something else; if written, literature, if filmed, film/video. The essence of theater is that it is a mutually experienced intangible, and how do you make a model of an intangible? I feel like I can measure and define some of its component parts, but not its whole.

I guess if I created a model there would be these two groups of people looking at each other in an empty space. The people's individual thought bubbles would be visible and would also feed into group thought bubbles. One group would move in a choreographed way, and there thought bubbles would remain relatively constant, at least at first. The other group would not move at first, but might move as individuals in response/reflection of what they were observing. Eventually through shifting individual thought bubbles the group thought bubbles would seem to form a kind of feedback loop, feeding off each other. Somehow it's this feedback, incredibly difficult to diagram or define because it is constantly in flux, that is really the theater part. The rest is just the preparation for making it happen, like an alchemical reaction.