NIME Performance Plan
Monday, November 26th, 2007Rosie and Meredith enter at stage right. Rosie is walking purposefully forward, but Meredith is tied to her with a corrugated plastic tube. She struggles to keep up, walking backwards.
Rosie stops when she sees the Spherical Miracle Machine. Unaware that she’s stopped, Meredith backs up into Rosie and knocks her down. Rosie gestures to Meredith and they both stand up to look at it. They are in awe of the machine.
Meredith reaches out and touches the machine, causing it to turn slightly. They both jump back. After a beat, Rosie pulls one of the strings and releases some balls into the clear and pink bucket. They yelp in glee, then look at each other excitedly.
Throughout the performance, Rosie and Meredith communicate with each other in high-pitched yelps, low grunts, and exaggerated body language.
Rosie pulls the cord three or four times, causing the same reaction as before. Then Meredith begins turning the machine. Rosie pulls whichever string is aligned over the bucket. They play this way for half a minute, getting faster and more fluid.
Then Rosie gets bored and begins wandering. She comes across the ball sorter. On top of it rests the spinner. She tosses the spinner to the side and lifts up the sorter. Rosie examines it carefully. Meredith picks up the discarded spinner and explores it. She spins it tentatively. Rosie and Meredith hurry back to the machine, toting their prizes.
Rosie gestures to the sorter and Meredith ignores her. She gestures again to the sorter and the bucket, and finally Meredith puts down the spinner.
While Rosie holds the sorter, Meredith empties the bucket into it. Rosie shakes it until the balls are sorted. Then she takes the sorter apart and hands two of its compartments to Meredith. They both pour the sorted balls back into the funnels of the machine.
They begin to play again but Meredith quickly loses interest. It is clear she wants to pull the strings, but Rosie won’t let her. Each time she reaches toward a string, Rosie bats her hand away.
Meredith stomps away, pulling Rosie behind her. On another part of the stage, she discovers the resonating trash buckets and the costumes. Meredith and Rosie put on the matching vests and hard hats. They push the resonating trash buckets over to the machine and move them into place around it.
Meredith picks up the spinner, spins, and authoritatively calls out a command (in squeaks and yelps). Rosie operates the machine, dropping one category of balls into one of the buckets. She grabs the spinner from Meredith and spins, calling out a command. Meredith obliges excitedly, turning the machine and pulling one of the cords.
They continue playing the machine like this, back and forth, until one of them pulls the wrong cord or spills too many balls. That person gets sprayed with Silly String – which Meredith and Rosie will discover attached to their vests.
They play until any of the funnels runs out of balls, then work together to sort them and dump them back into the machine.
After sorting, Rosie discovers a funnel on her side of the tube that connects her to Meredith. She looks at it and looks up at the funnels on the machine. Then she picks up a few balls and drops them into the funnel.
Meredith and Rosie work together to move the balls into a clear container on Meredith’s end of the tube. They do this while continuing to play the machine, grunt and yelp, and spray each other with Silly String.
At some unseen cue, Meredith and Rosie suddenly become alert to their surrounding and stop playing. They drop what they’re holding guiltily. Then they slowly and methodically restore all the parts to the same way they found them. Last of all, they take off their hard hats and vests. Rosie pulls Meredith, balls still bouncing in her end of the tube, off stage left.
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