Lists are our Friends

Roughly Annotated Ideas for Performances That I Need to Flesh Out.

• The Odyssey, with Odysseus played by a human, and everyone and everything else as puppets. Perhaps a series.
• The Illiad as a prologue to this. With a core of several humans. Puppets erupting from the Trojan Horse.
• The Work Song Project, a perennial familiar.
  
• The Vallodolid Debate. Spanish Dominican friar and bishop Bartolome de Las Casas, at the request of Emporer Charles V (in his capacity as King of Spain), debated the celebrated humanist Gines Sepulveda on the moral, theological and ethical injustice of the Spanish colonies in the New World. Sepulveda defended the infamous encomiendas, Las Casas introduced the revolutionary idea that the "Indians" were human beings worthy of respect and dignity. Forerunner of modern Liberation Theology.
  
• Untitled. Five homeless men and women living in an abandoned train station are driven out by a flood. The station is alive. Puppies, empties, plywood shacks, glistening rails. Place vs. Space.
  
• The Anabasis. Xenophon's account of a small, "elite" Western military force that got hoodwinked into invading Mesopotamia by monied interests, then betrayed and abandoned in-country, surrounded by hostile, armed populations that they don't understand. Survival through superior military force and dumb luck, and a long march up-country to the Black Sea. To be told as a story of loss, dressed in manufactured glory, desperate to obtain meaning.

Common Themes:

Loss
Entitlement
Humiliation
Wit
Deprivation
Animating Objects

Best,

paulmonster-stew