“Happiness is a Choice” are performance scientists who use improvisation and meta-theater to learn about each other and the moments that they share on stage. We try so hard to be sincere in our theatrical experiments, but have found that excessive self-reflexivity tends to actually diminish authenticity.
Experiment #20, “A Psychedelic Odyssey on the Question of Authenticity,” will explore this unfortunate side effect through story, sketch, improv, audio, and liberal use of the scientific method.
In this half hour we intended to test the following hypothesis: The farther away people are from Paul, the harder it is for him to tell them how depressed he is.
. . . and requires more analysis. or maybe less. it was after midnight–at the very end of a mini improv marathon–and we let a heckler get up on the stage and teach us the basics of improv.
I got two things on the roster here. One is about scheduley stuff, the other is further data on The Process (by which Happiness is a Choice discovers what Happiness is a Choice is).
Scheduley stuff: Even though I have insisted time and again that Happiness is playing late Thursday night/early Friday morning for Out of Bounds, that is not the case at all.
The truth is, Happiness is playing early Saturday morning at 1:30am, more commonly known as LATE FRIDAY NIGHT. Can we all like hang out a couple hours like at 11:30?
In Process news, Paul and I did an experiment on Thursday, and I wanna talk to you guys about it. I’ll make it brief, just getting out the main points, but I hope ya read this, because I think it’s very important in our efforts towards figuring out what we are and what works.
Proof is a strange concept. Evidence can be lost. The senses can be deceiving and unreliable, even among groups of dissimilar individuals, each witnessing the same event. Ultimately, proof is individualistic. It requires nothing of the individual who experiences it, and provides nothing in return.
Aside from hypothetical conjecture, every human has experienced an intimate knowledge of something that is very real for them, that they in turn are being challenged to explain to others, to convince them or convert them, of that something’s reality. Why is this important? Because I intend to relay my own personal experience- something very real for me, because it occurred to me. But, I will begin at the beginning, before I entered the picture.
There once was a key that opened a box. This key and this box may still currently exist, but if so, they are lost so far as tangible proof is concerned. I am of the opinion that they must have at least existed at one point in time, because of the story and it’s relation to my experience. The story involves a ring. I saw the ring. Therefore, I believe in the ring. Subsequently, I also now believe in the story of the ring.
