🦖Exploding Dinosaur Pillow Fight

Setup and Launch

The form adapts easily to a team of any size.

Ask the audience for two lines. Any of these work:

• a piece of advice someone once gave you;
• words you live by;
• a compliment you received or gave;
• a song lyric;
• a line from a movie.

Any two things along those lines will do.

The set runs 20 to 25 minutes and has two sections. The Exploding Dinosaur — three medium-length or longer scenes. The Pillow Fight — a series of fast scenes.

Flow

The form is related to the Deconstruction and inspired by it. In the Deconstruction one long two-person scene becomes the foundation, and the rest of the show takes it apart. The form is also close to Pretty Flower, also called the Spokane, which mixes tempos: one main scene with short offshoots from it. It is close as well to Detours, where the team replays one short scene piece by piece, and to The Cascade.

The Pillow Fight is essentially the Run of the Deconstruction.

The idea of the form is this. The two lines and their repetitions are moments that can exist between any two people. They are points in the geometric sense: any number of lives and relationships pass through one point, each with its own trajectory, origin and destination.

1. First source scene

Two players start a scene, and the first two lines spoken in it are exactly the two audience lines. It is not an opening — a scene that only gathers material for the rest of the set. It has to stand on its own as an entertaining and compelling scene. And it still gives material that comes back in the Run and in the third, convergent scene.

2. Second source scene

Two new characters say the same two lines, but they look for a different meaning in them. Express that meaning by any and all means available: a different gesture, a different tone of voice, anything that changes the stage picture. The goal is to start in a very different way from the first scene with the same text, and to set up a scene that contrasts with it. From there the scene goes its own way, independent of the first.

3. Third scene: the convergent scene

The players pull their opening lines from either of the two previous scenes. Those two lines may be unrelated to each other. Take a gesture or anything physical along with the lines. The audience lines are the goal here: the scene moves towards them and ends on them. The scene still belongs to the Exploding Dinosaur, but its end signals the transition to the Pillow Fight.

4. Pillow Fight: the Run

After the third scene the team runs a series of fast scenes. Anything that came up in the first three scenes can be quickly explored, revisited or played with in any way here. The scenes are quick and gamey — each one carries a game, a funny piece of behaviour played again and again. Anything that makes a good blackout scene — a very short scene that cuts off right after the joke — is in play. The point is to hit each other with anything the Exploding Dinosaur produced. Do not build detailed characters and environments. Get right to the funny. Trust your partners: their comedic instincts and their quick scene changes. The second point is contrast: the patient, grounded work of the first half against the much faster pacing and style of play of the second.

5. Second convergent scene: The Extinction

The form ends when the energy and the material of the Run are used up. Then start one last, quicker convergent scene. It exists for one purpose: to put a button on the set by converging back on the audience lines. The scene might be renamed The Extinction. You know. Because of the dinosaur thing. Right?