Untitled Curious Project/ Office Hours

Stop by the Museum of Contemporary Art and look for the Office Hours booth. I’ll be there starting October 19 through November 19, Tuesdays through Fridays 12-1p.

Jenny Magnus/ Curious Theatre Branch
Untitled Curious Project Theater Residency
Office Hours Project Statement

If dramaturgy is the practice of making the set of rules and relations in a composition evident and unmasked for clarity and conceptual deepening, then Office Hours is an embodied dramaturgy of the Untitled Curious Project. Themes of attention, continuance, and the conflicted eros of collaboration are brought into a direct relation with a public. They are a part of the work in a simple direct way, by being part of the conversation. Though the larger interdisciplinary work will likely be presented in a proscenium context, and the meeting of artists and audience will be of a more traditional relation, by prefacing that work with Office Hours, my intention is to make evident the giving and getting of attention.
In the larger work, the sculpting of attention will be central to the use of the MCA stage; where the audience is looking, when; how sound helps create a hierarchy of narrative significance; and what Curious can create that is our brand of spectacle. We have long invested in what we call “The Introspectacle”, a deepening and intensifying of the work, rather than a visually magnified approach, largely because we tend to work in chamber-theater sized spaces. In bringing our work to the MCA stage, we are looking for ways to re-frame our work, rather than inflating it to fit the larger context. Office Hours is a re-frame; literally, a performed attention, one on one (or two), within a frame, of time and space (the “booth”). The notion of the theater as a place of work, not only physical but intellectual as well, is part of the re-frame, as well as an exploration of a sustained ecology of art making, staying in the process over a lifetime, and “retarding decay”. All these things come into play in the conversation during Office Hours.
All this being said, I also don’t entirely know what the work means, because it is part of a developmental process. This not-knowing is precisely what is at the core of the larger work, and though conceptual not-knowing is different than content not-knowing, for me, many questions are raised and that is what makes it fruitful.

Some topics that are concerning me right now are the notion of the theater as a place of work, not only physical but intellectual as well; a sustained ecology of art making, staying in the process over a lifetime, and “retarding decay”; the stress between parenting and being an artist, and how being a “good enough” mother and a “good enough” artist can work; the sculpting of attention, and how an artist can compose attention on a stage; the ensemble as tribe and clan, and how to maintain generational working relationships….but hey, I will talk about anything you want to talk about.  That is what being available is all about.

I consider the beginnings of availability, sitting and waiting.  I am thinking about how the idea works visually, and whether it fits in too much with MCA visuals or not enough.   Whether the signage is too fussy or not fussy enough… The sense of a gentle cradling is one way I imagine my attention to the people around me. Making sense of the experience, and observing the play between my inner state and my body sitting in this room.  I start to zone out, and bring myself back and insist on a hard focus of my eyes, looking at every person as they come down the stairs or in the doors.  I am not interested in a predatory looking, I don’t try to catch their eyes, to trap them into coming towards me.  Instead of pushing, striving, I relax, thinking about the banked fire and intensity that is not a flame, but a coal.  I think about gentle work, get confused and worried that possibly gentle doesn’t work in this context.  I wonder if I am being too safe, sitting behind a table?  Should I be pouncing? Reminding myself to make sure that listening is part of the point, not just the pontification of my ideas.  And the offering of the moment, the ephemeral moment that only happens between me and the discussant, fleeting, but a framed experience; a composition where one collaborator made the frame, but both are creating the content.

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