What a weekend

We had an extremely productive weekend!

Sam and his girlfriend Heili came in on Thursday evening of last week, staying with us until Monday morning for what was our best weekend yet. We also had surprise guests from Toledo with my brother Markus Beck and Meri Mullins sharing in the festivities.

On Friday of last week we hosted a sort of brainstorming, writing charrette to get some "narrative clarity" (as Owen puts it). We collected 50 random objects from around the house and from local thrift stores, building a collection of things ranging from an antique perfume bottle to an old baseball glove.

The idea behind the objects, and the narrative theme we are working with is the idea of "memories being tied to objects; the objects acting as relics of past experiences." 

At the event we hosted on Friday night, we displayed the 50 objects in our foyer, along with a piece of paper. Guests were asked to choose an object, pick up a piece of paper and writing utensil, and move in to the kitchen. 

Each piece of paper had a set of loose instructions:

"describe your object; your object is a memory; your object is the threshold of a story; describe your memory"

The guests responded to these directions in the kitchen and wrote approximately 5 sentences each about each object.

We curated the event by hanging a grid of strings, with clothespins attached at the end, from the ceilings of our kitchen and living room. The writings were held at about head-height in both rooms for people to read and discuss the various writings, which created an awesome atmosphere.

Saturday morning we read through and discussed the writings everyone had done. Moving forward, the various responses will serve as a starting point for Sam, the playwright, to respond to in creating the 50 scenes we will have for the production. 

Here is what we have established so far:

The narrative will focus around a singular actor/actress

The audience members will enter the theater space, and through a series of ritualistic stages, will be given an object, which they will carry with them through the space, finally exchanging the object for a 2 min, one-on-one interaction with the actor/actress within an intimate space that we are referring to as the "memory box." 

The different objects will each act as cues to their respective scenes, 50 objects/scenes in total. Each object will reference a different scene, keeping each audience member's experience unique to any others. 

The hope is that upon exiting the "experience," the audience members will mingle and share their experiences with one another, forming a loose narrative of the character's life

We were also able to take Sam into the warehouse space we will be using to host the event, and were able to make a ton of progress and now have a strong sense of the general layout of the space for the production.

We developed the floor plan of the spaces, taping it out in the warehouse last night.

The taping-out was really good, with the design/build process working for us, evolving and problem solving in the space in real time!

The rest of this week we will be acquiring wood and fabric materials for the construction, so that we are able to test and experiment with the actual materials in the actual space.

Here are some photos from Friday for your viewing pleasure!  Also if any of you out there in blog land have photos of the event, please email them to us!