Major Movements in a Service
1. Ingathering
Prelude, Introit, Call to Worship, Greeting, Announcements
2. Participating
hymns, prayers, offertory
3. Listening
prayers, readings, sermon, benediction
4. Transformation
all of above, culminating in sermon and benediction
Or can see it in terms of maintaining the order:
1. Ingathering
2. Hymn
3. Prayer
4. Reading
5. Sermon
6. Outflowing
7/20/07
G: Movements as neighborhoods we walk through
D: oil corporation meeting?
N: deliverables, actionables
using more explicit businessy stuff: bullet points, power point presentations, back to the filmstrip idea, agendas—but on a very subtle, quick level
Edward Tufty
G: Sermon as combining all the different elements of other movements, playing them in variation. Long and dense.
Hymns:
Prayer:
Reading:
1. Ingathering
for now, stick w/ our earlier chart of Prelude-Introit-Call (We are artists). “Innovation of Commercial” might work too.
2. Hymn
music is predominant. Stick with “Oil Derrick” idea from first hymn; deforms sonically and fades into parts of “Innovation of the Commercial,” that should be played with for a while, comes back into “Goodbyes” from “Oil Derrick.” Segue into field sound—train or oil derrick, birds and other outdoor sounds. Section ends w/ “Sherri stopped next to the tanker”, as last lines are heard the front (and other?) screens fade to white—the transitional cue is thus in the visual more than sonic elements. The visual fade is accompanied by a sonic fade to field sounds, no “music.” Leads to bringing text back onto the screen?
3. Prayer
field sounds verging on silence, image-heavy. Main text: Modernity of Est. Use words as water, which then solidify into the water/river animation. Preacher: “Heavenly faucet.” Segue poem: “When We Entered the Four Religion Items.”
4. Reading
all is textualized—images use more text (signs, etc), sound composed entirely of text, text in front is stripped down, less flashiness. “When we entered” connects to the “peak oil—oil fuels human progress—graphoilogy” trio—more cerebral, academic, focus on text. Lucky Mojo on front screen in bullet point/power point form toward end, but accompanied by soundscape that’s very lush and emotional. “In Bed” comes out of that, or is a part of that logic? Using the table idea, etc.
5. Sermon
By now, media are thoroughly intermixed, starting to use texts that are about the relationship of image, sound, text. Less about oil and religion, more about art. Foregrounding media issues—the meta-quality helps us explore the alienation/community dialectic. Repetition of motifs from other movements, coming back here in culminating ways.
Major texts: Begin with “Now 1920s,” which feels very anecdotal, sermonic. morph into are we writing? N8’s riff on that? “Sherri stopped next to the tanker” reprise. Use our Sherri texts here. “Women of Maynot” has relevance to this too. “Holy Spring Water”—use this both as strong visual tryptich element, and as part of the sound-text field. The third stanza is the key for this—put up the whole piece as a visual element but use N8’s reading of the last stanza.
Sound: the preachers should come in here and get played around with. Very few preacher elements beforehand, so that we save it for development until here.
“Interesting Facts”: strong poem, but not entirely connected to piece—strong on oil and fire, strong on Indian issues (connects to “rail of tears”), light on religion. Can be trimmed and faded in w/ Mindy’s “deeplong” or preacher (“dot dot dot”) which N has already done in a sound file. Has a benedictory quality (end), but also a historical framing (beginning), and a sort of preacherly ethos (sermon).
[At some point, have the floating heads from the back be played also up front?]
6. Outflowing
N8 reading “Still.” music continues long after text and image have faded
Keep in mind the use of the front screen to prompt, as if a prayer leader is up there. Page numbers? Filmstrip? Use the river animation w/ words floating by as if it were a ticker? “Oi” floats by, etc.
Hymn vs prayer:
hymn: music, rhythm, repetition.
Fractal structure:
The whole piece is organized like a fractal: each part engages in the themes of the whole, but each part also emphasizes a different aspect of the whole, giving the piece an arc to itself. This solves our concern about whether we’re doing an endless loop or a discrete linear performance. No matter where the audience enters, they get a version of the whole structure, but if they stay they experience the larger-scale structure. G: It is the loop and the line. It’s organic but yet formally structured.
