Rain City Projects

[You can order this book at Amazon.com]

What’s the Story? Mourning Glory.

Where’s it coming from?
How does it fit?
How can we foray forward without this sick dread?
In re: not theater but plays and then theater
Play = the flesh computer

The trade’s (trade being basic barter in the art mart) utopian (utopian/dystopian two sides of the same wooden nickel in a world we’ve created where wooden nickels buy you something). We create societies with and in our plays and rehearsals. With greater ambition we create worlds. We create worlds in order to fit everything in them. Then we are so busy creating our worlds that we forget the other planets, spin off into space, lose atmosphere and choke. We retrieve strength when we look at the one big world/one big union; if not one world then one sun or system, a convergent idea. The cultural coin, the idea of theater is weak now and weakness is always a good time, evolutionarily speaking. The shogun’s court or Athens or Broadway are not the gravitational forces they were – they don’t gather us to center. But here we are with ground under our feet and air for our mouths to make words with (atmosphere of discourse not spun or burned away) so there must be some central purpose convening us.

Making a guess I’d say the universal glue is an epoxy of hegemonic decay (and the trust that requires), simultaneous availability of resources and broadcast ownership. Nowadays we push information (all of it) to wide availability; viral attacks push at consolidation of information distribution systems (a utopian impulse doesn’t have to be effective to be perfect; never is either wholly effective or nearly perfect, but it is jazz, man, it goes). We each want everything. I want my own thing, and I want your thing and your thing and your thing. Then I also want to stay alive, which means interdependent. The request seems to be a world of six billion worlds. This begs an absolutely unprecedented level of trust and cooperation.
In dramaturgical terms, we’re looking for narratives whose several parts are available simultaneously – we can shift back and forth at (private) will across a range of possible interpretations. In terms of distribution, we need the Black Rock Rangers – environments, sites, districts – ON A GLOBAL SCALE; the trans-global freak, World Social Forum, motion-motion-motion so you can find stillness at any point in your process on the globe. Theater converts the world to the flesh computer – one large, integrated, SIMULTANEOUS drive. Per the Brit sitcom: unanimous with itself.
Plays are files – means of bundling and distributing affinities of information. Playwrights grind code.

-Erik Ehn

Order this book on Amazon.com