about gallery archive artists review home demotic 2006		artists' statement Improvisation weaves itself through all of Demotic. Having said this, we are left to meditate on what is meant by improvisation. Like free speech, improvisation initially seems to imply the license to do whatever we want with little responsibility to anyone else--in other words, pure chaos and abuse. But there is good improvisation and bad. The good variety has rules and agreements that take the participants out of themselves and direct everyone's efforts toward a common good, while still requiring the creative contributions of the individual. Good improvisation is anything but permission to do your own thing. In sharp contrast, it is a charge to promote the health of the community. Good improvisation requires listening and choices that are made in relationship to the contributions of others; it is a model for the great society. Herbert Marcuse defined revolutionary art as the representation of a perfect world because it would lead the public to see how their world was flawed; and this perception would feed a growing dissatisfaction and eventually turn into political action aimed at making things better. On July 1st, 2004, we entered the Beall with some ideas, a collection of electronic devices, and ourselves, and we improvised. Rehearsals took place in the evening after a full day of work, and the artists often had to spend more than two hours in traffic just to get to the Beall. Still, for artists, it doesn't get any better than this--a perfect world where we get to work together in a creative environment for the common good--and as such, it forms an integral part of what we have to show you. Theater tells a story about its own beginnings that foregrounds something else we want to show. We are told that the first person to impersonate another person in a performance context was the semi-mythical Thespis, whose name gives us the word thespian. It must have been a powerful and disturbing event when Thespis, recounting the sacrifice of Iphigenia by the Greek army, stood in front of his audience and spoke the words of Agamemnon that sanctioned the killing of his own daughter for the sake of the war, as if he were Agamemnon himself. Of course, we don't know if this actually happened, but the rumor of it is so powerful that it haunts the entire history of performance to the present day. One can only imagine that the second most powerful event in theater was the second time he performed this little trick. The third most powerful event being his third iteration, and so forth. And this is a problem because we now take this act totally for granted, oblivious to the magical and psychologically disturbing power it once had. Naturalism, a relatively recent style of acting, even goes so far as to criticize any awareness of the 'heroic actor' as bad technique. The image of Thespis slumbers uneasily, and so do audiences. One way to understand all performance is to break it down into 'what is presented' and 'how it is presented'. For us the 'how' is very important as we seek to wake up the image of the actor, and in doing so wake up the audience. The actor is the one who acts, giving voice to the dead, to those who do not have voices of their own, and to those who have no actual voice, but only words on a page or in the scrolling window of a chat room. The online players in Demotic are working with text in a virtual world. The reality is that they are spread across many different time zones, and some of them have never met in the flesh. However, their fantasy is that they are together somewhere. They can interact; they can see each other; and most importantly, they can speak to one another. They are improvising a conversation with roots in the same distant source as theater: storytelling and ritual. They come together and repeatedly act out the same storylines; yet it is an improvisation, so it is different every time. One of the constants is the characters: their names, their histories, their idiosyncrasies: immy the immigrant; pap the shiftless patriarch; the loyal but melancholy hound; the unspeakable landlord; meme the old crone; the mischievous kid. American memory, the theme of this project, is reflected in the very American archetypes that surfaced in our characters. But the fantasy has been extended. We've set things up so that immy and pap and the others can listen in on what the actor and musicians are doing with their words. We've given them the benefits of a physical body with an actual voice. The online characters now participate in the reality of the actor, while the actor has been drawn into virtuality. The overlap between these different realms creates imaginal space. --Robert Allen + Antoinette LaFarge