The DbD Experience: Chance Knows What It's Doing! (review)

I don't consider myself a "practitioner." Critical discourse is my primary mode of access to art making. Which makes me an odd, or at least a self-conscious, fit for reviewing Rachel Rosenthal's pedagogical treatise, The DbD Experience: Chance Knows What It's Doing!

Or perhaps it doesn't. As Rosenthal notes in the Preface, The DbD Experience is less a practicum on how to restage these workshops than an invitation to "glimpse into the space and time needed to train a person in free improvisation, Rosenthal style" (xvi). And for those who do, unselfconsciously, consider themselves practitioners, Rosenthal's generous and highly accessible description of how she has developed the DbD, or Doing by Doing, workshops will be invaluable in its eloquent and thoughtful approach to bringing together the physical and metaphysical facets of performance practice.

Housed between the depiction of her idyllic childhood and the revelation of another meaning of "DbD" (spoiler alert: it concerns her cat, Dibidi), Rosenthal's precise, extensive description of her intensive 34-hour workshops is very much a bringing together of her own art and life — the approach that grounds the workshop's methodology. Through a three-day regimen of body and voice work, individual and group exercises, and improvisations, theatre becomes a way of shifting the concentrated focus participants give these practices toward their "unconscious daily experiences" (29).

Rosenthal started the DbD workshops in 1979 in Los Angeles, coming out of Instant Theatre — a "totally spontaneous and collective theatrical form" Rosenthal developed in the late 1950s and continued, with some starts and stops, until 1977. ("The name ['Instant Theatre'] was a mix of the newly invented 'instant' coffee — a nod toward Pop art — and Zen!" [14].) In their current incarnation, DbD workshops take place from a Friday to Sunday, during which time students "hear three talks by [Rosenthal], do group movement meditations, exercises that address different theatrical issues, [...and] do voice work; receive training in lighting, music, set making, costuming and use of props" (22-23). The process, like Instant Theatre, is primarily improvisatory, with structures cumulatively built upon each other toward a final group improvisation called a Rambler. Distinctly rooted in theatre practice and implicitly critiquing the clichés of performance art (Rosenthal instructs her students to avoid the "been there, done that" strategies of that form, advising that "[s]hocking an audience is not half as interesting or important as touching an audience" [24]), Rosenthal situates the DbD experience within the realm of daily life: "A DbD experience consists of a confluence of events whose sum and interaction shape the space. [...] Each present moment is a constellation of things conscious and unconscious" (26).

Rosenthal follows the Introduction with an initial description of "What is Doing by Doing?" in which she addresses the broad structure of DbD. This is followed by three detailed sections based on each day of the workshop: "Friday: 'Origins'"; "Saturday: 'Connections'"; and "Sunday: 'Power.'" Each section includes a "Circle Talk" in which Rosenthal outlines a poetical philosophy of her approach to the overarching goals of the workshops. Friday's Circle Talk begins with an exploration of the role memory and imagination play in art making and expands into an abridged history of human development; Saturday's is a discussion of the relationship between subatomic physics and our connection to the people and world around us, particularly as a way to reconcile humans' "adversary and hostile" relationship to "Nature" (67); and Sunday's considers the hazards and responsibilities that come with the power one assumes as an artist. These Circle Talks, too, are improvisatory gestures that "contain material and thoughts that are prominent in [Rosenthal's] life at the time of the particular DbD" (40).

The sections are further divided into specific exercises and techniques — mostly descriptions of concrete strategies, though occasionally more abstract elaborations of the environment of the workshops. My favorite of the latter...