This project was an investigation of the intersection of the compositional methods of 500 Clown and Double Edge Theatre, hypothesizing that a marriage made between both will result in work that is as honest as it is imaginative, and as autonomous as it is collaborative; that is to say, I wish to explore and exploit the many tensions and oppositions built into the act of creating live performance (as articulated through the shared / similar vocabulary of both companies), in pursuit of a deeper understanding of how, why, and what to create.

I set out to examine the cultivation and culmination of absurdity, intimacy, resilience, and presence as a made manifest through rigorous physical and imaginative exercise.

There is one final comparison to be made between the work of these theatre companies and the work of visual artist Dianna Frid, by whom I was trained to engage in an especially rigorous cross-disciplinary consideration of the aesthetic elements of time, space, line, color, and shape. I find her critical vocabulary particularly useful in understanding and exhausting the creative possibilities offered by the presence or absence of an object in space. Moreover, this comparison is directly pertinent insofar as I find it directly applicable to the creative theory of theatre director Tadeusz Kantor. Kantor’s use of “poor objects” in his performances is akin to Frid ’s material transformations in that it is the performative gesture—that is, engaging in an action with the object—which transforms and transcends its former use, and renders the reiteration poetic. It is a not a superficial alteration—rather, consequential.

Precariousness is a concept by which material (object, body; image, sound, text) can be manipulated, and it is the degree to which the manipulation is intentional that is a measure of the creative potential of a work.

Engaging in action, as catalyzed by the presence of an object, is both the means and its end.