Scenario 1:

If creativity is Darwinistic, then it consists of mutation, selection and transmission.

Rehearsals include performers, a director, and a writer.

The start is a single cell. A quote, an action, an idea.

From this, the performers create random new ideas.

The director and dramaturg hunt and kill the ideas that cannot survive in the thematic and theatrical environment of the performance. These ideas will not reproduce.

The writer and their video camera make sure that sucessful ideas are reproduced, not lost or sanded down to nothing by repetition from memory.

The organism grows day by day, by degrees.

Scenario 2:

The play is assembled by a tornado in a junkyard.

-Ralph

From the file marked "serious and meaningful":

Through my four years at university I became vaguely frustrated by how seldom it was acknowledged that we are, after all, bunch a apes. Artistic creativity seems to hover off the ground, encased in its theoretical fluff-speech; as a pretty staunch materialist I’m interested in ways to anchor it to the real world. I had a strong suspicion that belief in art and science are compatible in the way that belief in religion and science probably aren't (though other bingees disagree). I suspected that art had something to do with hot-wiring our ape brains and hijacking our lazy perceptive rules of thumb to create new experiences- messing with the wiring which has been created through evolution...

So I loved this lecture by Brian Boyd. Broadcast in 2008 in Nelson by Radio NZ National, it takes a nailgun and staples art's feet firmly to the ground. He says art is an adaption (not a hijacker), and the whole speech is fascinating.

The storytelling ape

Art constitutes another Darwin machine, an evolutionary subsystem effectively designed, in this case, for creativity.

Art shows evidence of good design to generate and accumulate successful novelty. Darwin machines depend on the blind generation of variation. Randomness, nature’s way of exploring new possibilities, seems an intrinsic part of brain function. But without selective retention, randomness alone could not generate generate creativity that exists in en force. As in dreams, a cascade of new ideas could take and lose shape almost without trace.

A testing as well as a generating mechanism operates within art makers’ minds. The low cost of testing increases our opportunity to refine what we do, through online feedback. Because art involves external forms, the testing mechanism operates also in the mindset of other humans, in terms of their interest. Attention provides the selective mechanism of art. If a work of art fails to earn attention it sinks. If it succeeds it can sail on even for millennia.

Crucially, we need to imitate in order to innovate. Starting from scratch wastes too much accumulated effort. Far better to recombine existing design successes.Established artistic forms reduce invention costs by posing well defined problems and offering partial solutions.

And in a system designed to secure attention, the pressure to avoid habituation, the dampening of response to prolonged or repeated stimulus, encourages innovation. [Because of this], art faces consistent pressure for novelty.

Ralph

It's a bold choice to put people in the dark. When you light your audience, as has been the norm for most of the theatre's history, you provide the space for a real time negotiation with them. You signal your openness to their engagement, boredom, puzzlement, or anything.

Shared light counters the voyeurism of most theatrical performances by setting up an atmosphere of openness and respect. This is especially true when audience members can see one another as well as the performers. We say: yes, you can look wherever you like, and in return we want to know where you are looking and how.  We want the right to see if you are with us or examining the lighting grid, because looking at the lighting grid is a truthful reponse to a performance.

It is a scary idea for the performer, because its hard to relax into what worked in rehearsal when you can see that more people are looking at their shoes than at your blood-stained hands. Or that most people are doing that grimacing thing.

Shared light reminds us that we are making the performance for this audience, not for ourselves, or the abstract idea of an audience. It allows them be a gathering of individuals rather than a unified bunch whose reponse we can summarise in the green room with theories that they "liked" or "didn't understand" what we did.

When the audience is lit, a commitment is made that the performance is going to happen in the here and now of play, rather than the there and then of presentation and masterpiece.

If we find this instinctively uncomfortable, maybe its because we're confused about the difference between the theatrical experience and the online experience, where you can be elsewhere from the action and in your underwear, while eating cereal.  Come on; be here, with us.