Harold opening I'm forgetting the name of

[benorbeen]

... at least I think it has a name.

It goes something like this:

A and B start facing each other.

A is talking to B, B is listening to B, perhaps responding.

A I think it telling some kind of story.

Suddenly, C tags out one of them. (Not sure which, if predetermined.)

C continues the story, or maybe acts as a new listener.

What is that called? It's basically a run of tagouts but the form of two people talking is kept. It's not a scene in the traditional sense.

If you know it and could give me a quick rundown of it, that would be added awesomeness. I want to introduce it tonight in my class.

I saw it at lot at UCBT in the early Naughts, but I haven't seen it for a long while.

Ben

[benorbeen]

Taught it last night with a lot of success!

I gave it the name of Rotated Conversation.

I coached it this way.

Start off taking a suggestion.

Two people step up and face each other.

One starts talking, the other listens (talker/listener).

The talker relates to the suggestion with a personal story of some sort (personal was a key word). The listener listens, but also comments or asks questions or asks for clarifications.

Someone from the backline may tag out a listener while the talker is talking. Usually this is when the talker says something that associates with the person in the backline. The new listener then finds an opportunity to share her association with the talker, who eventually becomes the listener but actually continues talking/relating as if there was no change in listeners.

At a point, another person in the backline can tag out the listener. This whole opening gets rather addictive as people have more and more associations with what's being said, and start to tag out more frequently and quickly. It was also very engaging to watch. Issues that developed were that it turned into a 5-minute opening, meaning less time for scenes. This happened partly because of the addictive nature of the opening, but also because sometimes talkers had extended stories or went on for a while.

I refer to openings as "ideation," meaning the main purpose of an opening is to generate ideas (a diversity of ideas, in particular). This kind of ideation generated a ton of diverse and personal ideas, which led to starting with very different, personal scenes, and by such efforts, a lot of fun for the performers and for myself in the audience. As a (knowing) audience member, I anticipated seeing the stating of some of the ideas called out in the ideation, and felt very rewarded when they came up.

If you know a different, traditional name for this opening, or any history to it, please share with me. I've subscribed to this thread.

Cheers,
Ben