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with apologies to Howard Barker.
1.       You are probably making theatre for the wrong reasons.
2.       Few people go to the theatre to have a bad time and be improved. How will you target them in your marketing?
3.       Poetry may make nothing happen but it lacks theatre’s social aspect.
4.       Shared light is spooky, because look how hard you are working and how still the audience is.
5.    The banks have gotten pretty chummy recently, haven’t they? 
6.       Evolutionarily, it may not be in your interests to be happy.
7.       Nihilism in the elderly is disconcerting, isn’t it?
8.     Truth in the theatre is quite hard to define. 
9.       All that junk food is altering your perception of things.
10.    When the actors are having a bad time, comfort them by calling out things like “its ok! None of it is really happening!”
11.    Try getting up there and helping out. See what they do.
12.   Discussion of Facebook will not, in itself, make the work avant-garde.
13.    All this coffee is making you edgy. Have you added up what it costs you in a week?
14.    Lists can be written more quickly than novels.
15.    If you want to watch people bored at work, there are fast food places where you can do it for free. 
16.    It is more about the asking of questions than about being so presumptuous as to proffer answers, wouldn't you say?
17.     You will see all these things differently in a few years. 
18.    The news media in this country is very emotionally invested.
19.    We are doomed with or without your scholarly concern.  Stop reading those depressing books and go outside, its sunny.
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Where all your Beckett royalties go
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To paraphrase Tom Waits: Here is an old one that fell down the side of the stove while I was cooking.
 -Ralph


This is an OPEN BOOK text. 
You may have as much time as you like. 
You may talk quietly amongst yourselves. 

Q1: 

How can we keep politics out of entertainment? 
Should David Bain be allowed on Dancing with the Stars? 
Which television insurance ads have made you cry? 
Which antiperspirant deodorant sexually arouses women the most?

      (Choose ONE, 5 Credits)

Q2:

What text messages have you sent to yourself?
Would you prefer to lose a finger or your cell phone? 
If I can imagine it, is it on Youtube?
If I only knew you through your Facebook page, do you think I’d want to fuck you?

      (Choose TWO, 10 Credits)

Q3:

If I am 1000 kms away, chatting with you on Gmail, how close am I to you? 
If I am in front of you, texting someone else as you talk to me, am I closer or further away?
If I am kissing you, thinking about something else, how close, how close am I?
How about when I hide my eyes, like this?

        (Choose as many as you like, 15 Credits)

Q4:

What is the difference between a celebration and a curse? Can both exist in the same moment?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how in love are you today? 
What lies do you believe?
Do you have your priorities right?

      (Answer all questions, 50 credits) 


Extra for experts! 

What kind of art should you make as the ice caps melt?  
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On Exponential Curves

We started a bit early tonight.    

We started at one o’clock. We felt normal.   

Two. Lightheaded by this point. We were able to make plans. We could still do tongue twisters.  

At three o’clock we got that mild feeling of floatation, or gliding. Vodafone told us to make the most of now.  

Four. We knocked over objects, we spilled drinks. Cosmopolitan declared it the Summer of You.  We played truth or dare.   

We got to five. We were unusually confident. We got bolder, more flirtatious. In sports cars, green became the new red. Someone suggested strip poker.  

Six. Our speech got pretty slurred. MacDonalds used climate change to sell us coffee. People’s first names became interchangeable. Bad hangovers became likely. Nostalgia. Nationalism. Spin the bottle.  

Seven. We saw lines of large trucks filling Lambton quay. We had sex with randoms.  Ex partners received incoherent text messages. Somewhere around here we reached a sort of point of no return.   

Eight. We hit a spike. The gulf turned to shit. We had breakdowns on the footpath outside Shooters. We gave up on empathy.

At nine o’clock we basically said fuck it, lets make a night of it.
 

By Ralph (with a nod to Don Patterson). This was written for Wellington theatre collective Binge Culture’s last show, Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish, but wasn’t in the final version. 
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Between tremors   
 

Wooohooo! Ride’m cowboy!

26 mins ago

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“preliminary | 6.6 at a depth of 5km, 90km NW of Tuatapere”

21 mins ago

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