Sunday, October 24, 2010

brainiac amour

I realized that what I want from JULIA & BUDDY is for the audience to have a brainiac amour.

I've mentioned here before that I think the goal of a theatre piece is to give the audience an emotional orgasm - as opposed to keeping everything at a cold intellectual level, or distancing through pure irony. I've never bought into Bertolt Brecht's alienation effect and I don't think he actually practiced it much himself in his dramatic work.

Anywho, just because I put an emphasis on an emotional affect it doesn't mean intellect is not a good thing too - emotion vs. intellect is a false dichotomy.

I'm inspired to a certain extent by the marathon telephone conversations I used to have with my boyfriend John - one lasted 10 hours. We would talk about anything and everything and sometimes get into arguments too, but debates really, not just bickering. That's what I missed most about that relationship - I've never come close to duplicating, with anybody else, the endless absorbing conversations we used to have.

Since JULIA & BUDDY is only about 90 minutes long, obviously they can't just be standing around gabbing the whole time. But I hope I've captured at least a little of the brainiac amour - a term I got from Patti Smith. There's no reason why the intellectual can't also have an emotional component.

I finally got a workable rough beginning of my variation on Clara Schumann's Romance in Eb minor Opus 11- 1. I transposed it to D minor for starters, since I'm too lazy to spend the effort to play something in almost all black keys, which is what Eb minor is - D minor is all white keys except for B-flat. I will probably throw a few E-flat accidentals in there too though. So this piece - or a more refined, worked out version if this piece - is what will be playing when Julia is listening to her iPod at one point in the play.