•In the Landscape Form, Being Swamps Doing. When one is out in the woods, looking at the trees, one is engaged primarily by the “realness” of the trees as they simply exist. In the same way, the audience will respond to the realness with which we simply exist in the image/sound picture at each moment of the piece. “Landscape” is a radically simple form, in which, as a performer, you are doing something much, much less complex than what you are used to doing in regular theater. You simply open yourself up to feel the energy which is in the space at each moment, and that’s it. Your job is now done. There is no need to make anything happen, to make the piece “develop,” or to make it “entertaining.” When a person looks at a landscape painting, or watches the weather changing outside, they have no expectation that what they are watching will tell them a story, only that it will be real, and organically structured. The audience will enjoy our work in a similar way.

•In the Landscape Form, the Prime Directive is: feel the energy in the space more and more sensually, more and more physically, in your breath and in your voice box. Use your vocal line (that is, your words and your silences) to have the most physical, sensual experience of the energy that you can, feeling it directly on your vocal cords and in your breath. Continually feel the energy more and more sensually.

• The “energy in the space” which you are trying to feel has a kinetic, flow quality, and an emotional feeling-state quality. Make sure that as you sensually feel the energy, you include the sensation of how it moves or flows, and also its emotional or feeling-state quality.

• Your tool for feeling the energy is your Vocal Line: both voiced and unvoiced. Think of the vocal line as a continuous throughline. Your silences are merely the “unvoiced” portion of your breath. Use the voiced part of your vocal line (i.e., words) whenever you can feel the energy in the space more sensually by using words, and use the unvoiced part of your vocal line (i.e., silence) whenever you can feel the energy more sensually with a silence. Silences are often better when the energy is very calm and still, or when you partner’s voice is giving you a very full experience of the energy, making it unnecessary to add your own voice.

• Your vocal line is active, and reaches into the energy actively, in order to “feel” the energy’s flow and feeling-state quality. Use your voice just as you might reach your hand into a black box, in order to identify, by touch, what objects are inside. Your silences need to be just as active, and you should actively use the shape and contour of your silent breath (and usually a little bit of body movement) to feel exactly what the energy is doing.

• You always “drop to the floor” of the energy. The way to get into the energy is always to “relax down into it.” If you discover, in a certain moment, that it is possible to drop down into an even lower energy state, this is a good thing to do. When the big climactic high energy states are coming, it is almost as if you are trying to delay them as long as possible.

• Use any word that gives you the most sensual experience of the energy. Since the Prime Directive requires you to focus only on having the most sensual experience possible of the energy, you won’t be focused directly on the issue of which word you are saying, or on whether or not the words mean anything. You will simply use any word which gives you the most sensual possible experience of the energy. In practice, much of the time, this will mean you will grab words which are for their sound texture and physical feeling on the teeth and tongue only, not their meaning. At times, a word which is descriptive will give you a more sensual experience. When the energy in the space is very character-like or directly emotional, the language will tend to be more directly expressive. All of this will take care of itself. All you need to do is keep trying to get more and more of a sensual experience of the energy, and use any word which helps you to feel the energy.

• Repetition helps. When you are focused solely on the Prime Directive of having a more and more sensual experience of the energy, it is only natural to repeat single words a lot and repeat short phrases. This is a good thing, since what matters is the realness of your sensual experience, not finding new words, not verbal meaning, and not trying to make the scene “develop.”

• Your partner’s energy is a part of the total energy. The counterpoint form in “landscape” is simply that you are focused on feeling the energy in the space. Your partner’s energy is a part of that total energy, therefore you will feel every change of your partner’s energy.