- GOB SQUAD *Focus on collaborative creation
- ● Starting point of a piece can from anywhere
- ● Find an idea that can be summed up in a sentence – details and moments come later
Reading Notes by Megan Lane
- ● Initial idea generation:
- ○ bounce ideas around the room and come back to it together
- ○ Daily input/inspirations are important to idea generation
- ● Conceptual ideas often come from playing/working within a framework/form
- ● Ideas will continually develop and change – go with it.
- ● “Ideas have to be activated through doing, then theorising and then doing again.”
○ Don’t talk yourself into a corner. Find out what works through doing. “You can’t imagine everything at once.”
- ● Rehearsals
- ○ Be in collaboration with people who can help see the bigger picture/the elements you are not so familiar with – outside and inside eyes are equally valuable
- ○ Improvisation is important
- ● Try-Outs
○ Sharing your work while it’s still in process can be fruitful for the end product
● Structure/Dramaturgy/Running Order
○ Work with a balance between choreographed moments, elements of
improvisation, and the unforeseeable ● After first performance:
○ Allow piece to continue to develop and grow from performance to performance
Scratching
Scratching is an essential part of creativity. It is when you dig for ideas within your environment—where creativity begins.
“When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it” – Freud Scratching for a small idea will help you obtain the big idea.
Ways to scratch for ideas:
Reading – for when you have an empty head: “if I stopped reading, I’d stop thinking.” Everyday conversation – listening and generating responses
Enjoying other’s art
Mentors and heroes – influencers
Nature – movement of nature; “to spark an idea”
However, scratching doesn’t stop with one idea; one cannot start without 2 workable ideas.
Rules:
Be in Shape – mind and body
Scratch in the Best Places – take inspiration from the best
Never Scratch the Same Place Twice – do not gain anymore information by doing so Maintain the White Hot Pitch – use anger as a spark
Idea (scratch)
Ideas “turns the verb into a noun” (Paint into a painting) “How do you get [an idea]?” instead of “where”
Good ideas vs Bad ideas
Good ideas come from smaller ideas, “scratches”
Tharp states that “you don’t scratch for big ideas” as they are found only when there is an ulterior motive (e.g. money, fame). Big ideas need commitment and time—they are meaningless since they shrivel up quickly and die. “That is why you scratch for little ideas. Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.”
Improvisation
Tharp states that one must go about improvisation with a free state of mind—”no responsibilities and no consequences”
June Hsu CA285
One downside to dance improvisation in the 1960s was that there was no way of capturing the steps, no way of looking back. Tharp trained herself to remember her improvised steps, which she called “capture mode”. But, since improvisation was a result from “no responsibilities and no consequences”, she found herself unable to improvise. “Retaining defeated the purpose of scratching”
Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn:
4 steps:
1) Generate-frommemoryorexperience 2) Retain-holditinyourmind,donotloseit 3) Inspect-studyit;makeinferences
4) Transform-alteritforhigherpurposes
- GOB SQUAD *Focus on collaborative creation
- ● Starting point of a piece can from anywhere
- ● Find an idea that can be summed up in a sentence – details and moments come later
Reading Notes by Megan Lane
- ● Initial idea generation:
- ○ bounce ideas around the room and come back to it together
- ○ Daily input/inspirations are important to idea generation
- ● Conceptual ideas often come from playing/working within a framework/form
- ● Ideas will continually develop and change – go with it.
- ● “Ideas have to be activated through doing, then theorising and then doing again.”
○ Don’t talk yourself into a corner. Find out what works through doing. “You can’t imagine everything at once.”
- ● Rehearsals
- ○ Be in collaboration with people who can help see the bigger picture/the elements you are not so familiar with – outside and inside eyes are equally valuable
- ○ Improvisation is important
- ● Try-Outs
○ Sharing your work while it’s still in process can be fruitful for the end product
● Structure/Dramaturgy/Running Order
○ Work with a balance between choreographed moments, elements of
improvisation, and the unforeseeable ● After first performance:
○ Allow piece to continue to develop and grow from performance to performance
Reading Notes by: Tanha Binte Azam
Tharp Chapter 6: Scratching
Page 1
Scratching
First step of a creative act can be random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness and with no apparent or definable end in sight.
Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s primal and very private.
Ideas are everywhere, it already resides with us in our experience, memories, taste, judgement, critical demeanor, humanity, purpose, and humour.
Page 2
What types of ideas?
Good ideas generate more ideas and you keep on improving, while a bad idea shuts all the possibilities rather than opening them.
- ● The more useful comparison involves good ideas and bad ideas.
- ● You don’t scratch for big ideas.
- ● Big ideas are self contained and self-defining projects.
- ● Without little ideas there are no big ideas Page 3 Inspiration comes in molecules of movement, sometimes in nanoseconds
Page 4
You are giving yourself permission to daydream during working hours
Stephen Kosslyn’s (Harvard psychologist) 4 steps for ideas:
1. Generate 2. Retain
3. Inspect
4. Transform
Page 5
How you generate ideas:
- ● reading
- ● everyday conversation
- ● other people’s handiwork
- ● from mentors and heroes
- ● Nature Page 6 You cannot stop with one idea. In an empty room you are trying to connect the dots from A to B and from B to c and eventually you will end up in H, which turns out to be a new idea. Page 7 Rules for scratching:
- Be in shape- Scratching takes longer when you are rusty
- Scratch in the best places- Scratch among the best and you will automatically raise the quality of the ideas you uncover.
- Never scratch the same place twice- If you scratch the same way all the time, you will end up in the same place with the same old ideas.
4. Maintain the White Hot Pitch- Anger is a cheap adrenaline rush, but when you are going nowhere and can’t stand, it will do.
Page 9
Exercises:
- ● Chaos and Coins- Gathering Chaos into a satisfying order is a daunting challenge, You have to train for this struggle.
- ● Read Archaeologically- When the writer is reading archeologically, she is not reading for pleasure. She reads the way she scratches for an idea, digging down deep so she can get something out of it and use it in his work.
- ● A Dozen Eggs- Egg will take you to places you ‘ve never been. Make it part of your routine.
- ● Give yourself a little Challenge- Giving yourself a handicap to come over will force you to think in a new and slightly different way, which is the prime goal for scratching.
- ● Take a field trip- Have a goal. Turn it into a field trip by imbuing the walk with a steely determination to come back and with something in hand.
Gob Squad
ON PROCESS
Points of departure-
It starts off with writing a concept. So it goes by making time for each member to write their own part, one after the other.
First Idea-
Core Idea is often a constructed social situation, site specific or a relationship between public and performers.
Ideas Overtake Themselves-
It sometimes takes too much time to get the funding which makes the ideas not interesting anymore, at that point of time.
Rehearsals-
Ideas have to be activated through doing, then theorising and then doing again. You also have to work on the improvisations.
Try-outs-
We need to try out ideas in order to make it work, and for that we need more audience.
Structure, Dramaturgy, Running Order-
Structures that combine visual choreographed moments, elements of improvisation and the unforeseeable.
After the first performance-
There is not a closed working process, rather the works are being improvised time to time, and changed from performance to performance.
About both the readings:
Between the readings, both of them talk about how to form ideas and what is the process of improvising. However, Tharp’s reading talks more into the details of how to generate the idea, and God’s reading talks more about how to execute the idea and how to improvise it. Tharp’s reading also focuses on an individual thought process whereas the Gob’s reading talks more of a group performance.