At the last SuperGroup rehearsal that I attended there was talk of how to make the arrivals of performers to the performance a public event. How would people know to find the performers scattered around the city moving towards the performance space? How would they know that the conversation that they were eavesdropping on on the train was part of the performance? How would they know that they were not paying attention to the wrong thing?

If the audience pays attention to the wrong thing, they might show up at the performance with this conversation as their context for the performance:

A: And after that…
B: He talked about his time in Vietnam and Korea…
C: It’s hard being the person who keeps getting dropped and picked up again and dropped and picked up again…
D: [Texting] E: [Texting] F: I know…

Or this conversation:

A: Fuck!
B: [glares up from book, annoyed] A to B: When you’re reading a book you concentrate on what you’re reading and you block everything else out. This is a public bus.
B: Asshole.
A to someone else: I went to High School with Mariah Carey and lived next door to Biz Markie.
[B gets up and gets off of bus] A to B: Bitch!
A: Sorry, I pinched my finger in my phone and was just saying that to myself.

C: There’s so much dirty snow, it looks like God forgot to wipe his ass.
A: How old are you?
C: 21. I’m in college. I’m a mathematician.
A: A mathemagician?
C: Yes, do you know what the sin of 35 is?
A: Toothbrush.
C: The sin of 35.
A: Toothbrush. You shoulda calculated that joke you just told. It looks like God to wipe his ass? No. You gotta be smarter than that. It looks like we forgot to wipe our asses, that’s a good joke. How are you a mathemagician?
C: I took calculus in High School. It’s the highest level of math.
A: Caculas? When you gonna cut your hair?

In creating the performance, please prepare for these possibilities and all others.