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by Tara King

One King to Rule Them All: My experiments continue

Last time on the MKT Files, we sent in a bunch of photographs.  

Normally we bring images to rehearsal verbally, aka we describe them to each other while eating snacks. This time it was actually, you know, visual images you see with your eyes (so weird, why would you do that?)  Seeing the images this way was unexpectedly familiar-and-strange. Familiar because it wasn’t too surprising. Strange because they weren’t related to a central theme. Familiar because I could imagine Theresa or Monica explaining why they chose this image. Strange because I was just making that shit up and not actually hearing them do it–it left a bit of mystery in the process that we often don’t allow ourselves.

(Seriously, I have never been in a formal cross examination process but when you bring an idea to MKT rehearsal, you best be prepared to defend your fledging little creation to the death. BUT WHY ICE CREAM?! WHY NOT SORBET?! I HATE ICE CREAM I THINK WE SHOULD DO PORK CHOPS. And so on.)

Which brings us to the next assignment:

From the set of pictures from all 3 of us, take 2 images from each person and arrange in a harmonious way (can be a collage, can be a series/slideshow, can be whatever). Then write for 1 minute about the arrangement you made. Don’t fret over it. I have no idea how long it will take but I am guessing the actual execution should be like 30 mins or less.

Here are the results, with some variance in how the instructions were interpreted:

What I learned from this experiment:
1) There are limits to the usefulness of a bite-sized assignment. Eating a crumb is not the same as eating a bite. One minute is too short for a writing assignment unless you do thirty of them.

2) Photos are awesome.

3) It’s uncomfortable working without the tools/skills for this medium.  When we started making dances, we ran forward with a youthful enthusiasm and didn’t much care if we knew how to do something. In fact, we kinda liked it when we didn’t know how to do something. A lot. (You can tell by how often we get on stage to do something as best we can, and then fail.) But something has changed (*cough*we’rethirtyone*cough*).  We want to be better. We want to realize complicated ideas, but the tools at hand are Microsoft Paint and elbow grease.  It makes me realize how much live performance comforts us:  we can use our bodies to live-action it, to make a thing happen despite obvious limitations (e.g., we are not in outer space, but we will try our damnedest to be in space anyway).

I’m not sure where this lesson leads: Maybe we need to infuse our experiments with more real-time work? Maybe we need to infuse our experiments with more let’s-fuck-up? Maybe we need to invest in Photoshop? This question is still wriggling around. It’s like a live wire combined with the elephant in the room. It’s the electrified elephant in the room, which brings us back here: 

p.s. We picked a name for our 10th anniversary show: Unearthing the Family Jewels!  It’s perfect because a) it involves jewels, and b) it involves genitalia.

Expect more details soon. 

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by Tara King

Rehearsal report: a question.

Monica assigned us, about a month ago, something she had done in her Power, Privilege and Oppression class (What a class title!)  

The task, as summarized by me: Find your resistance. Who, if they walked into your life tomorrow, would you struggle to serve to the best of your abilities, more or less because of groundless (and perhaps unintentional) bias on your own part? Is there a group of people who you just don’t react well to? What three steps can you take to reduce your resistance to that group?  

I think, in the context of her program, this is about moderating how your perspective and place in society affects how you can help your clients.  

In the context of Mad King Thomas, I think it’s about making ourselves better people, which is a corollary of our motto, Making the World More Awesome. We’ve had a while to think on it. I think Theresa and I were meant to settle on a specific demographic, but it seems we’ve both unravelled the assignment about to the edges of usefulness.  Sorry, Mo.  

I’ve been developing little tests to figure out when that resistance is flaring up: If I feel a physical tightening in my body when I encounter someone I don’t personally know. If I find myself withdrawing into my mind and overthinking when I contact someone. If I don’t want to listen to a person, or I discount what they have to say as “illogical” or “irrelevant”, or I try to shut down the conversation as soon as possible, or I just look away like they aren’t there.  

Sometimes the test yields false positives: A guy at the grocery store tried to talk to me and I averted my eyes and walked quickly on. He called me out for “not being supportive”, which made me feel a little bad. But the reason I was avoiding this guy is because he was there as a representative of the L.A. Times, and while I have no particular beef with the L.A. Times, I don’t need to feel bad about resisting corporations. (In response, I said I support him but don’t wish to give my information out or subscribe…so it helped even in this case.)  

Anyway, once you start to notice this resistance, you also see there’s a flip side to all of this, which is the groups of people you feel comfortable around. Of course, all comfort is relative, isn’t it? A professor warned us that the end result of a postmodern education was permanent alienation, wherever you go. And maybe they were right. Postmodernism of the sort Mad King Thomas acquired at Macalester reduces the comfort level you have within what you perceive as your “own” group. It reminds you not to make assumptions, not to live so Euro/America/self-centric. It dismantles the idea that you belong in any kind of group at all.   

But! The key with this exercise is not to remember people are different from you (duh) but to make active effort toward understanding those you don’t (and in some ways can’t) understand. To make effort toward expanding outward from your own self-centered humanity to the humanity of everyone around you, and, eventually the humanity of everyone on earth. Right? You make sure you are, yourself, a human, and then you extend the courtesy to everyone else. That’s the basic deal.  

Anyway, it’s not hard to leap from there to what’s been happening in Ferguson and New York and …. It’s not that hard to leap from examining why you feel nervous around X group of people to seeing how a cop might react inappropriately to a group. And we’ve all been separately agitated about the #blacklivesmatter situation. We are sad that this shit is happening, and that it has happened for generations, and that the system is STILL failing to address it. I am sad, selfishly, because I’ve lost family to police violence, and I am sad, socially, because other people are still losing family that way.  And I am privileged because, as a white person, it’s way, way, WAY less likely to happen to me or my family than it is to a black person.  

But I feel so encouraged that people are out there, navigating this situation with more and more grace, more grace than I could really hope for, even as the system fails, even as white people overstep and fail to listen, even as people get mad that their Christmas shopping was interrupted. I want to keep noticing when my shoulders get tight and to take that as a reminder that I’m not treating someone with the most dignity that I could.   

Anyway, there’s the rehearsal report for this week. 

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by Tara King

Aesthetic Objects

Hey! Look! It’s a Mad King Thomas dance you almost certainly have never ever seen before, called The eyebrow, or some expression of doubt or daring on their faces:

That’s Liz Schoenborn & Stephanie Stoumbelis. They’re so great.  They jumped in to our totally confusing and aimless process with nothing less than complete enthusiasm and they performed the hell out of the dance we made with them.

(The most productive rehearsal for this piece involved five serious hangovers, a little bit of makeup from the night before and a bucket of Halloween candy.  It generated the phrase “industrial glitter,” which is one of the most useful and perfect phrases of all time. I also hit my head really hard that day while acting like the NFL robot.)

People sometimes say only Mad King Thomas can perform Mad King Thomas work, which is untrue (although I feel flattered when I hear it). 

The difference, as far as I can figure, is that when we make a dance on ourselves, it’s a really extended form of dramaturgy (as if I even know what that word means).  We talk a lot until we find the bones of the thing, then we let performance tell us how the flesh hangs.  We sometimes finish pieces earlier, which means we get to practice them, which occasionally leads to crazy things like polishing the work.  But the basic arc is a lot of back end research, discussion and argument, with a relatively miniscule amount of work on the front end (what it actually looks like to the audienc). Mad King Thomas bravely dances on with only half a clue what’s happening elsewhere on the stage, but fully aware of why it’s happening.

When we make work on other people, we suddenly get to WATCH it.  It’s totally different and usually we get drunk with power. (Do it this way. Okay, do it backwards. Okay, do it faster. No, really faster. Okay, say it with a British accent. Now cry.)  The piece gets more codified and rigid.

At this point the dance has become, more or less, an aesthetic object. Something we can look at and turn into something we find aesthetically (rather than performatively or emotionally) satisfying.  A thing rather than a lived experience.

When we make work on ourselves, we don’t know what the “right way” is to do the dance.  We’re out there singing and dancing with only our internal sense of the appropriate to guide us.  No one says, “Not like that, like this.” 

When we make work on other people, we constantly say, “Not like that, like this.”  So our dancers DO have a sense of right vs. wrong.  (Yuck.)  That’s where we go astray.  We reenact power structures and exert controls that completely undermine the basic promise of our work:

You already know how to do everything you need to do.  Everything you have ever done has prepared you for this moment. You are ready.  

All Sparkles, No Heart hasa big cast.  Only three of them are Mad King Thomas, so I guess it’s time we figure this out.  Luckily for us, everything they have ever done has prepared them for this moment.  We just need to get out of the way.