Taste it, taste it!

Guys, now eating roadkill is legal.

That's all.

Up close and personal

Found these pics of EXTREME CLOSE UPS OF HUMAN EYES on a friend's facebook page yesterday and it reminds me of the super-duper close up video footage we're using. Enjoy!

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2izasQ/www.photographyserved.com/Gallery/Your-beautiful-eyes/428809

Crazy awesome photographs by Suren Manvelyan

And in Sadder News...

the speech patterns of a local newscaster. (start 18 seconds in)

powerwalking!

heather this is for you

last Trevor/FBI man simultaneous dance 2

another video of the same dance.

last FBI man/trevor simultaneous dance

after NOT DEAD and before WHAT'S MISSING

we sense each other 2

the we sense each other dance again

the we sense each other dance

fametime2

slice him from the chin to the nuts

a little more randy getting violent and dancey.

crunk street fighting

fanmercial/crunk street fighting 2

Trevor driving/Sad Man Alone simultaneous interlude

After Trevor's second camera monologue

Randy "fan-mercial"/video game fight dancing

Fametime!

Roadkill: It's What's For Dinner.

"It can be hard to tell the health of an animal after it has died, so Slate advises to be wary of tularemia or "rabbit fever," a bacterial infection transmitted by inhalation, when taking rabbits from the roadside."

Koryu!

Philip Dawkins performing Randy's Kung Fu sequences in Roadkill Confidential:

First sequence

Second sequence

Addendum to the second sequence

Blocking Rehearsal & Production Meeting 4/2/11

Controversial Art

Ran across this tonight and thought I would share it. It's a list of 15 of the most controversial pieces of "art".


http://www.popcrunch.com/15-of-the-most-controversial-pieces-of-art/?utm_source=scribol&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=scribol

Krump Confidential

After tonight's dance battles, some video-turgy of krumping:

Basic krump - Crump in a dance studio setting. There's a very interesting self-hitting movement that's repeated in this video.

Rize Final Battle Clip - the quality isn't great, but otherwise this is an awesome montage of battle moments that really highlights the competitive aspect of this art form.

Rize montage - shows a variety of contexts for crumping.

"Krumping to dub" - this video juxtaposes crumping (including or maybe all shots from Rize?) against Dub music to fascinating effect.

Chris Brown (aka Rhianna's one-time boyfriend) is also quite the krumper and includes krumping in his concerts as well as in more off-the-cuff performances. NB: A google search for "crunk street fighting" didn't yield anything about street dancing, and the definitions for crunk seem to be a) crazy-drunk or b) a style of music--Southern hip-hop. It also provided this video: DW Street Fighter Remix

FAME TIME

Last night we spent the first half of rehearsal dancing—music blaring, limbs flailing, sweat flying.

Some discoveries:

Trevor and Randy both discovered a relationship to crouching—out of their movement they each found moments where they crumpled to the ground in a crouch that felt like a physical/visual manifestation of what Sheila was telling us yesterday about these non-naturalistic eruptions in which the baseline rumbling freaks out and then quickly recontains itself.

FBI Man’s dancing drew strongly on exercise/military training/martial arts—all the training he’s had, which led us to a discussion about the fact that FBI Man is a) probably drastically over-trained for his mission—he’s used to traversing hostile terrain, and he continues to use his skills in this assignment even though they’re a little over the top, just to keep himself in shape. Sorin also noted that if FBI Man learned to dance, he would learn superlatively and train with the same intensity he would apply to bootcamp or Koryu to be the most romantic, suavest ladykillerest dancer possible.

William had the most ethereal movement vocabulary/the least connection to the ground, and the most physically open. He and Randy had a strangely intimate duet that illuminated an underlying tenderness in their relationship that really opened it up. We continued to explore the idea of duets for Fame Time. Our Fame Time explorations found the giddiness of the initial burst of fame and as they moved into a darker, more dangerous place the movement became about pulling each other down instead of lifting each other (and especially Trevor) up. One idea we found involves possibly juxtaposing these two facets of fame simultaneously, with "happy fame" projected behind actors as they perform "brutal fame" live.

speaking of graphic photos...

...Rolling Stone just published a group of very disturbing images from an army unit in Afghanistan informally called "the kill team". From The New Yorker's coverage of the story:

The slide show of newly released “Kill Team” photographs on Rolling Stone’s Web site begins with an all-black slide with bold, white letters almost an inch high declaring, “WARNING,” and the message “The following photo gallery contains EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING IMAGES of violent deaths. Viewer discretion is advised.” No such warning precedes the accompanying piece, by Mark Boal, about the American soldiers on a mission to murder unarmed Afghanis.

Read the rest of The New Yorker's posthere. This post, along with Seymour Hersh's report on "The Kill Team" (which you can read here), are relevant to ROADKILL's investigation of the ways in which we can become desensitized to violence.

From Hersh's post:

Why photograph atrocities? And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units? How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost? No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question. As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare. In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary. In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy—the people trying to kill you—do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise. The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous. This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us.

Rolling Stone article here.
Rolling Stone slide show (VERY GRAPHIC) here.

Like Randy's Video Game?

This article from Jezebel is titled "Video Game Lets Players Slap Women"

An upcoming video game will allow users to "capture" and slap a woman as part of gameplay. And the game's manufacturer is totally unapologetic about the simulated abuse.

According to PC Gamer, Duke Nukem Forever, which comes out in May, includes a mode wherein players kidnap a woman and drag her away. If she "freaks out," they can then slap her on the ass. Randy Pitchford, CEO of Duke Nukem manufacturer Gearbox, says his company's goal is to "get right up to that edge and then relax enough so people don't reject it." And via Twitter, he clarified, "Get it right, folks! In the DNF MP game, "Capture the Babe", Duke can give the girl a love smack on the booty - not face!"

Read more

thoughts from sheila

hi guys--

here are my notes from our conversation with sheila yesterday. (hope it makes sense--i was taking notes for myself, at first, so syntax is fragmented)

• he doesn't realize she has power over him until he's face to face with her; we understand that he's in her thrall before she does.
• where it comes from--she used to go searching for really gory pictures--saw guy getting decapitated by a helicopter blade, it was a beautifully composed picture--sky bright blue--with a guy with no head. same period of time googling pictures of dead iraqis & american soldiers. trying to get close to it in a way that we're distanced from it as a culture. not politically motivated--wanted a visceral experience of it.
• steven kurtz in critical ensemble, part of art group called critical ensemble. find ways to critique govt. they accused govt of spending a lot of money on needless experiments. set out to prove he could do the same experiments in his kitchen with no money, calculate how much money was lost. went away. while he was away, his wife had a heart attack and died in their house. when they found her body, the came accross his experiments, he was accused of being a biological terrorist. heightened paranoia about regular citizens
• Noir part--came out of--artists colony at muletta colony in upstate new york. edna st. vincent millay's old property. one of the spaces ppl can write & live in is an old barn. unrenovated. freezing. the dead bugs--she saw that. mounds & mounds of dead & dying bugs. no lights on road to colony--lots of roadkill.
• timelines of relationships:
• when do william & melanie start sleeping together? FBI Man delivering melanie to trevor is a bit of a chivalrous gesture.
• real bond between trevor & william. may have understanding they can have dalliances--they're supposed to have primacy in each other's life. melanie violates that because she's on the home turf, she's not worthy of him.
• William and Trevor have a lot of love, compassion, mutual understanding. They need to have that in order for us to understand why their relationship survives what it survives.
• an artist he admires using his wife's death to create an important piece of art is a way to honor her--religious for her.
• Trevor/William rejection--Harry & the Henderson's moment.
• ellipses--keeps us in a non-naturalist world. text fighting with subtext. comes when people are lacking words. (the opposite of an opera aria)
• a coiled spring in everybody. an awkwardness rather than a pause and shift in a more pinterian vein. people waiting for the other person to communicate, but they don't. everything in this play feels like a bad first date
• trevor doesn't put her work up in a gallery, she makes her studio the gallery
• violations/invasion of personal space throughout play. idea of surveillance & voyeurism.
• her art is about reappropriating images and RE-sensitizing people to the pain of them.
• needs to break through screen. remove distance of the screen. diarama now telling story. screen ceases to become powerful. we've broken through--destroyed the power of the screen.
• RESEARCH ANDY WARHOL'S CAR CRASH PICTURES--after his experiments with pop art.
• new installation makes you contextualize the work yourself rather than having her contextualize it for you. it's more successful in that way.
• "noir-ish"--"ish" comes from flights of fancy. too much absurdity to make it totally noir.
• trevor--she has a lot of compassion. love for randy--is weird, and real.

is this the helicopter photo? (don't worry--just a link)

The gore is blurred on this one, but the composition seems to be what Sheila is describing. (I found some others that are, um, really disgusting, but don't exhibit the aesthetic refinement Sheila talked about.)

Click at your own risk--it's still disturbing

A Block of Clay-Shaped Clay

Hello! Welcome to the blog for Dog & Pony's production of Roadkill Confidential, a forum to post questions, musings, dramaturgical research and record our rehearsal process.

To get the blog rolling I wanted to post a metaphor that came up in rehearsal last week--as we've been spending a lot of time this first week trying to parse out the nature of beauty and unpack its manifold manifestations in addition to our text and relationship based tablework. Devon shared an anecdote about one of her students who has a visual art background who described how in painting, placing two contrasting colors (such as violet and yellow) is considered beautiful. In theatre, by extension, our relationship to beauty lies in creating conflict. Instead of harmonious colors/characters, we create something beautiful by clashing characters and objectives against each other.

We've also been exploring the rules of Trevor and William's marriage, her role in parenting Randy, and what Trevor's been doing during the past eight years. Additionally, we've been looking at the possible parallel between William's marriage to his first wife with FBI man's failed relationship with his lady friend. A few other questions that have been floating around the rehearsal room (an incomplete list):

Does the FBI man hang out around his room in his American flag boxers and bloody eye? Or does he always wear his suit and eyepatch?

When did Melanie and William's affair begin? Before or after Trevor started her current project? Before or after she comes over for dinner?

What is FBI man's relationship to the audience/storytelling in general? Why is he talking to us (and why now)?