Reflections on any parts of the project that might be significant pitfalls to the project's development and final performance: includes technical questions.
List of "tasks" ordered in terms of difficulty and desirability, that will need to be completed according to this schedule before the performance is ready.
Archived here are past iterations, as well as a compendium of solutions to previous problems and questions answered through Risk Area and Task List sections.
Source code: play5.java Built with Processing
The play generator generates three things. 1) stage directions 2) characters 3) dialogue. This, ultimately, shapes into a play once performed by actors on the stage. Basically, stage directions are generated as a collision of the plays fed into the play generator program. The resulting stage directions are most likely a fusion of these texts placed together. Likewise, two characters are generated in the process, and once the characters are chosen, their dialogue is a collision of all the various dialogues spoken by the selected characters. Currently in the example play generator, there are two plays colliding: Hippopotamus Dreams by Victor Liapin, from the Czech Republic, and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.
These texts were selected for their stage directions and their absurdist content and also for the repetition and syntax of the stage directions. The syntax of stage directions in general is a fairly regular and repetitive structure, and our experiment is to call our audiences attention to this pattern and see how this can be conceptually demonstrated through performance. When these texts collide, the result is an elegant repetition of directions. This, in translation to performance, turns into a dancelike, rhythmic, movement on the stage.
Both the audience and the performers see the collided text for the first time, and also, most likely, for the only time. The juxtaposition between the stage directions and the dialogue as well as the actor’s own interpretation of these lines creates a play in which all performers are attentive to the way these particular elements of a play inform each other.