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In the realm of art and entertainment, even the murky place where the two meet, there is a tendency to codify artistic gestures. Critics, and the public, use the names of creators, percieved progenitors, of forms and themes to create taxonomies of appearance. "Spielbergian," and "Kafkaesque," seem particularly prevalent examples of this.

On the following pages I explore the possibility that Richard Foreman has carved out a new category: "Formanesque." The links below lead to various stages in this process, each a discreet artifact unto itself.

 

 

HEY (external link)	This is the original, raw notebook text from Richard Foreman's website. I chose this notebook to work with after skimming through several of them, because it contained parts of the text of My Head Was A Sledgehammer. Rather than pull from multiple notebooks, I worked only with material from "HEY," in order to spend more quality time with less text.
What Time Is It?	This is my first stab at creating a "Foremanesque" performance text. My strategy was to mimic what I understand Foreman's working process to be: I went through the notebook, and pulled sections that seemed to resonate with each other. Then I re-wrote the pieces to fit more smoothly together, making the disjunctions as seamless as possible. This text might be analagous to something Richard Foreman would cobble together from his raw notebook texts, before he edited it further and assigned lines to specific characters.
(I Like Actors Who Appear, Etc.)	This is a second revision of the performance text. I chose not to assign characters or a scenario, but rather to produce a clean, streamlined text that could be brought in at the beginning of a rehearsal process.