Natasha, Claire, and I all have a tendency to act a bit “off of the rocker” as they may say. We all have our own sense of reality, and our friendships have inspired one another to be more openly “crazy.” So naturally, it only would make sense that we would host a mad tea party for our class!
We welcome you into our world of spiritual madness. The liminal space in which we created is an environment of chaos. Natasha as the nutty professor, Claire as the psychotic genius, and me as the wandering spirit, we all played an exaggerated version of ourselves. Putting this experiential performance together was just as mad as the final piece itself. We all fell into our roles quite quickly, but we lacked direction with all the ideas and fantasies that came to life in our many group meetings. The most effect point in our process was making cupcakes. After only two trips to grocery store we were able to collect the proper materials to create the little sugary treats.
The time we spent together in the kitchen gave us united energy after we had used the day to come up with our personal scripts, costumes, and ideas. It took a while as we all had similar, wonderful ideas, but no one seemed to be able to put it to a piece of paper. Although the original idea was to research madness, we took it into our own hands and literally experienced madness.
I learned to be patient with both Natasha and Claire, just as I imagined they must have done for me. Together we found that out of portion anything becomes a form of madness. In our performance we presented exaggerated forms of academia, expression, and spirit. Claire was originally placed a human going insane between logic and spirit, but it did not take long until both logic and spirit became psychotic as well. What an experience. Just as you said Bruce it really was like “an acid trip down the yellow brick road.” I am glad that the experience was just as mad as the creation was. The biggest lesson I learned from this project was to always keep a balanced plate, unless I am ready to fall down the rabbit hole and lose a sense of ground and sky. If I were to do this, I would become a liminal space myself.
and now it’s time for another episode of…
LINKS! with Natasha. Who knows, maybe you’ll learn something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_norton
http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
http://nikki-giovanni.com/page_51.shtml
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfa/poemquot/neruda12.html (may not be suitable for children or adults who are allergic to sexy poetry)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi
http://www.lolcats.com/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177413
