Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "It started with a drawing"
The curtain rises on "[a] late evening in the future." Lit by the white light above a desk. Black-and-white imagery continues throughout. On the desk are a tape-recorder and a number of tins containing reels of recorded tape. A man consults a ledger. The tape he is looking to review is the fifth tape in Box 3. He reads aloud from the ledger but it is obvious that words alone are not jogging his memory.
Tape Exctracts:
Heather McIntosh: Kind of moved to Athens because of the music there. I love R.E.M. and Pylon and the B-52s. Playing in bands I was really fortunate to come into a crew of people that were like minded and making interesting things. You know, sort of experimenting in their own ways. Sort of, generation after, the generation after those R.E.M., Pylon sort of bands.
Don Chambers: It started with a drawing. Yeah, it started with A drawing. I really love the Beckett play Krapp's Last Tape.
I had always wanted to do this soloish show, built around that play idea.
I just had, I have a drawing of a table, sitting on an empty stage, with one bare light bulb above it and a chair and some recording equipment on the table. And then maybe, you know, you bring in a guitar or something, but that was kind of how I imagined.
I want to be free to go in a lot of different spaces artistically and emotionally - you know, from a ballad to a dirge to a rocker within one space. That was the impetus of vaudeville, but THIS was kind of taking the vaudeville idea of doing something, a variety show, minus the slapstick humor. I kind of thought it is somewhere between vaudeville theater and Dada theater of the absurd, you know. And also a little bit of just like a living room show that's really intimate like the Victorian parlor shows where so-and-so would read a poem and then so-and-so would play us a song and then here's my flower arrangement that I did last week and now we're gonna eat some food. I like that eclecticism and that's more of what it turned into. I think. Bringing in other people and bringing in other friends to play and do...I mean, there was all kinds of different things that went on over the course of the year. There was some comedy. There was, you know, a murder mystery theme night. It kind of bounced all over, all over the place.
Garrett Tiedemann: So each month, I mean I know like one of the things you and John shared with me you were the posters, so was each month sort of driven narratively by an idea like the idea that within this performance and within this telling is a narrative to break out if you want it to?
Don: Not a straight, it's very thematic, but not a narrative. But I was, it would be...
Garrett: You are presenting something or presenting a series of ideas that are cohesive within the moment.
Don: Yes. Yeah.
Everything, the magic the...I did some films as well and all of that for each month had to be. It all had. The ship had to be pointing in the same direction narratively.
It definitely shifted around and I don't know that I can step away, step back from it far enough to see if there was an overall tone to the thing that it created itself. There was also a hell of a lot of crazy mistakes that became...First, liked the first three months were just hell of everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
