But John, don't go away mad. Seriously. You asked a serious question earlier that, as I said, I was going to respond to, and I am. And I do think people, even at this point, have stuff to learn.
So here goes.
Although I've called narrative my "format," that's not quite accurate. I think of narrative as an approach not a prearranged structure. In Get Up's shows, we have one prearranged 'bit' in that, given time strictures, we usually only start two or three story stands at the top of the show. Some narrative people even dispense with that and just go. But after that, there is no structure. We're just following our own curiosity of what might come next, a curiosity we hope the audience is sharing. I think because as humans we all carry around story structures in our head, if a story's working it might look from the outside that we're hitting specific structual 'beats' intentionally in a show, but we're not. In that way, I find narrative to be it's own little inspiration engine, because that's all we're chasing, that feeling of what should happen next. What feels right for that moment without concern for structure.ratliff wrote:"Inspiration trumps obligation." Meaning that if it becomes obvious to the group exactly what should happen next, for god's sake don't get hung up on the fact that it doesn't fit into the prearranged structure.
Shannon (or anyone, but I know you'll see this), what's the equivalent in narrative? Can you think of examples of when you were inspired to do something you weren't "supposed" to do? Did it work?
A while back Jeremy had a pretty good blog post on this which you can read here, and he captures something I think as well about why certain structures aren't for us and some are.
But I still haven't quite answered your question. What happens when I might feel the urge to break a rule of narrative. Hmm. I don't know if it's ever quite happened. I think this is because narrative is a little like capitalism--it can absorb a whole lot that might seem antithetic to it initially and at the end of the day, what do you got? Capitalism.
What do I mean by that? Well, even going meta on a story still reads as story as you pointed out earlier. Shana and I not too long ago had a show where there was a story inside the frame of a Princess Bride like situation of a father reading his daughter the little fairy tale-like bit we had done up front. At the end, we had an ending that didn't satisfy, so we had the daughter ask the dad to retell it the "right" way. And from within that, the characters in the fairy tale yelled back at the father narrator. But even that, formally, still read as story.
That's about as close as I can come. I think the only thing to "break the rules of narrative" would be to end up doing something that in no way could be read as story, which would be what? I don't know. Deciding not to talk and just prance about on stage for the remaining 10 minutes? Or to go out into the audience and start asking them questions about their personal life or something like that? I say that seriously, because I don't know what else, once the narrative train is on the tracks, the audience wouldn't read as story anyway. They might think it's a bad story, but a story nonetheless. And I've never been pulled in that direction yet, because to be pulled there would have meant that the initial narrative was so boring to me that I lost being interested in what came next.
OK, stick around, all right? No one's trying to give you indigestion.
