A Pilobolus Field Guide The Natural History of a Primitive Arts Organism

We get asked the same questions a lot, so here, in a

FAQ
list, we answer some of the most common... as well as taking the opportunity to hold forth on a few others we havent been asked but ought to be.

WHAT IS PILOBOLUS, ANYWAY?

Pilobolus crystallinus is a phototropic fungus of the family Zygomycetes. Its macroscopic - about 1/4 inch at maturity - and its coprophilous. Actually its enthusiastically coprophilous, for unlike its more fastidious brethren - Lasiobolus cainii, for instance, which grows exclusively upon the dung of porcupines - Pilobolus is non-discriminatory in its love of dung and if given a chance itll cycle through the digestive system of any herbivore. It grows on a stalk as a small bladder, pressurized by cell sap and topped with a tiny black cap filled with spores. When the time and Pilobolus are ripe, this entire sporangium is blasted off with incredible force and the little spore bags can shoot over a cow like clowns out of a cannon. Its reported that the acceleration - from 0-45 mph in the first mm of flight - is the second fastest in nature. Pilobolus is also a fine marksman. It has a kind of primitive eye that guides its aim and countertop experiments with an illuminated target show it can hit a light source with remarkable accuracy. Alternatively, of course, there is Pilobolus, the arts organism, a collaborative dance company living in the hills of Northwest Connecticut and currently engaged in its 38th year of creative mitosis. And to answer the inevitable question...

WHY DID YOU NAME YOUR DANCE COMPANY AFTER A FUNGUS?

Well, clearly P. crystallinus is worthy of emulation. Its small but feisty, energetic, responsive, adaptable, adventurous. It lives outdoors. And its got good graphics; the name looks cool on a page and seems to house, even for those unacquainted with its personality, pleasantly obscure reverberations of athleticism and Greek muscularity. (And even in 1971 we recognised a better marketing line than The Vermont Natural Theater, an earlier and quickly jettisoned alternative.)

SO HOW DID YOU ALL GET TOGETHER?

In the fall of 1970 the primordial Pilobolus was an earnest huddle of four young men at Dartmouth College, in sweatpants and panic, surveying the mist-enshrouded prospect of their first choreographic assignment. The notion that we should somehow stand by ourselves, alone, in front of other people, was inconceivable, so motivated more by fear than collegiality, we clung to each other, for moral as well as physical support, and in this way, commingled and mutually-supporting, we began to build dances... en masse.

IS THIS DANCE OR GYMNASTICS?

The training of dancers has traditionally focused upon the centering of a single body moving alone through space. Our approach - and it was one arrived at through nothing more than sheer necessity - was to construct ourselves into a group shape, something that we hoped made references beyond itself - to plants or insects or cell walls - and then to try to make it move. We subsequently discovered that when people dance together its called partnering and that its customarily done in pairs. The dance world seemed not to possess the terminology to deal with a clump of four men twisted together like proteins and we attracted a lot of curious attention. And incredibly, the possibilities seemed to open in front of us with constantly renewing detail as we explored the opposing and mirrored sides of this new world... the first a purely physical one where weights and balances and the forces of tension and release yielded continually surprising ways of moving... and the second a sort of parallel kingdom of psychological suggestion where, because we were constantly in physical contact with each other, the resonance of touch flickered through all our interactions inside another domain governed by emotion and implication.

HOW CAN YOU START A DANCE COMPANY WITHOUT ANY TRAINING IN DANCE?
In retrospect, the notion that a group of men who didnt know what dance was could create choreography of validity and merit was profoundly subversive. It proposes that training and technique and knowledge of a field and reverence for its traditions and history are all interesting accoutrements but ultimately unnecessary for the creation of art. And this certainly raises interesting questions about the nature of the naive, the primitive, and what is now referred to as Outsider Art. In fact, dancemaking with Pilobolus can easily be seen as the choreographic equivalent of chainsaw sculpture. (Theres also the curious fact that although we humans have a record of our species artistic activity going back more than 20,000

years, it is perfectly clear to everyone that the art itself has not become any better. But thats another subject.)

HOW ARE YOU DIFFERENT FROM OTHER DANCE COMPANIES?

Another result of our enthusiastically collective enterprise was the conviction that an individuals response to his own solitary creative impulses is only one way to make art, and that two or three people or more can work together simultaneously to structure their ideas into real forms, benefiting from the power of group thinking without losing the essential idiosyncrasy of individual intent. Now in a certain sense this is all obvious. The arts are ancient and their history begins with untrained practitioners at the service of communal ritual. But the world of dance into which our improbable spores were blown in 1971 was a very different growing medium. Even the relatively brief history of American modern dance was thick in tradition and its evolution was sustained by an unbroken thread of mentor/protg relationships referring to and drawing strength from the same history as new choreographers turned themselves sequentially into dance priests and priestesses for succeeding generations. When we began to make dances, this daunting genealogy was lost on us. We were entirely and unspeakably oblivious of what had come before... and in countless ways our lives as choreographers has been made possible by a sort of useful and insulating Forrest Gumpishness. With no history to draw from weve had to invent our own. And in the process weve learned some things... specifically about about how people with no training can work together to make dances... but perhaps more generally as well about the ways in which a group can approach problem solving. Certainly, the group itself is an inexorable feature of our business. Unlike a painter who can keep a sketchbook during a trip to the mountains or a composer who can sit at the piano and let her fingers wander across the keys, in Pilobolus, because of our defining interest in the ways that bodies interact, we need our fellow choreographers as well as an entire company of dancers... all in one room at the same time.

HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE IN YOUR COMPANY NOW?

A few strata of evolutionary detail: Although Pilobolus began as a mens company, we were soon joined by two women (including our first and only dance instructor from college) and continued until the early 1980s as a group of 6 dancer/choreographers who both created and performed all our work. Then, over a period of years, we replaced ourselves as performers with younger and more flexible dancers, two of our fellow founders left the fold entirely for more controllable circumstances, and we remain now, as weve been for the last twelve years, a company of four choreographers and six dancers.

HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR THE CHOREOGRAPHY?

While everyone brings to this strange event (collaborative choreography) a highly individualised set of references - indeed the entire success of the enterprise rests upon that necessity - for us the art of

making dances is really a social process. It can, without question, be a cumbersome one. But this process has its own fashioning power and like the action of wind and water it has carved and polished itself a track. It is that track we follow and it defines, in a kind of anthropology of self, the developmental stages through which we inevitably pass as we go about the eccentric task of making dances. And so there we are in force on Day 1. Were going to make a dance about... anything and nothing. And by far the most common beginning for us, in Pilobolus, is a substantial billowing Nothing. There is a certain odd purity about this act without preparation. It is, finally, an act of self-analysis, in which we find out what it is were thinking about.. this moment, or this day or this month. And the dances, the strange fruit of our enterprise, are a record of sorts that we lay down, like dandelion wine or raspberry jam, of our social and psychological interactions over a specific period of time. So because its what we know best and is often the most interesting way to start, were going to assume, in the following answers, this scenario of unpreparedness as a model to describe how we go about our peculiar business.

WHERE DO YOU GET THE IDEAS FOR YOUR PIECES?

Every Pilobolus dance without exception begins with a period of improvisation, which in our case is really just a form of creative play. We sometimes think of ourselves as a group of jittery kids in the attic of an old house on a rainy day. We make faces at each other. We rummage in the closets to see if we can find any toys. Sometimes well play music in the background. Well bring in things we find around... a length of grapevine, a piece of rope, some old clothes. We drink coffee and throw food. Once we discovered a tree outside a studio we were working in that was covered by fabulous tiny purple plums. Logically enough, we began to compete with one another to see how many plums we could cram into our cheeks. It stretched our faces into completely unrecognizable masks and we figured we had to put this onstage. The problem arose from supply - where would we find a consistent source of plums - and the fact that cheek pressure burst the plums and purple drool ran down our chins. So we set out to find a reasonable substitute and discovered that large English walnuts worked perfectly and they became a central costuming aspect of one section of a long medieval dance called Monkshoods Farewell, which featured us as affectionate hunchbacks with the biggest cheeks in stage history. In any case, you never know when or where youre going to find something cool, so we continue to play like this for days, as many days really as we can afford, for it is here and from this nearly random activity that every dance is discovered. There are any number of metaphors that we use to describe this exploration, for thats really what were doing. Were plopped in a strange land and we climb the tallest tree to look around and see where we are. Were looking for a ring, buried in the backyard, and we dig an insane number of holes to see if we can find it. Were constructivist sculptors looking for junk.... walking along the shore picking up pieces of beachwrack. Heres a bit of bone... a shred of fabric... heres a stone that looks like Richard Nixon. But all these ways of describing our play assume the same set of initial conditions. Theres a world out there that must be explored, actively and as thoroughly as possible.

WHY IS IMPROVISATION LIKE A MUSHROOM FORAY?

For a dancer at work on the inside, this improvisational process is like feeling ones way around a dark room. You touch the end of something and then run your hands along it to begin to distinguish what it is. Its corporeal and linear. For a choreographer on the outside, the experience of watching improvisation is more akin to hunting mushrooms. (And as you might imagine in a company named after a fungus, several of us are loyal members of the Connecticut Valley Mycological Society). May is morel month in CT and anyone who has looked for these incredibly elusive little guys will appreciate the combination of stealth and instinct required. An average morel is not very tall and almost exactly the color of ground litter in early spring. Some morel specialists simply stare at one for a few minutes before foraying out, implanting some memory of shape and texture. And one of our company members says he can only see them when hes sitting down, like waiting for deer in a blind. He claims that after blurring his eyes and scanning for a minute or two the morels pop out like gnomes from behind a rock. So we sit in our studio, trying to find the morel, the ring in the ground... something that catches our eye. Were like crows looking for something shiny. And in this semi-conscious state weve spent many thousands of hours watching dancers improvise.

DO YOU USE VIDEOTAPE?

What happens then when we see something that catches our eye? We stop, generally, and go back and try to do it again. What was it we saw out of the corner of an eye? An arc of energy... a quality of touch... a lightness? We fiddle a little, make a notation, and go back to the chase. There are several methods of academic dance notation, and as ways to grasp these fleeting impressions of movement, they appear maladroit. Useful to scholars, perhaps, but not in general to us as choreographers, and our dances remains in many ways an orally-transmitted form, passed down directly from one body to the next. Film and videotape have changed a lot of this but have not succeeded in completely supplanting other practical tools like pencil and notebook, the scribbles of which act as a sort of opposable thumb allowing us to hold on to a slippery and elusive object.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE A DANCE?

This process - of improvisation/recovery/notation - continues for a number of days. It is restricted to some degree (not surprisingly) by money. Because of the relatively large number of people required for this kind of experimentation, we have to schedule our work periods quite closely and weve developed a rough calculus to allow us to budget our time: A four-week choreographic period can allocate about five days to unrestricted play and will produce about 20 minutes of finished choreography. This formula is flexible but pragmatically based on a kind of effort/return ratio in which the rate of discovery is fairly stable for a while and then begins to slow down. Each choreographic cycle seems to have a vein of mineable material that can be drawn upon and there is a point at which its simply too expensive to keep digging. There are two other issues relating to the question: when do we stop? The first has to do with our sense that this entire process of improvisation (which is really a sort of conglomerate seance) requires a particular frame of mind... of relaxation and openness and humor. It needs its own atmosphere. It needs cultivation. The process by which one uses its fruits... takes all this material and starts to make something out of it... has an entirely different set of requirements. It is amazing how unplayful one becomes during the work of composition and its not a pleasant feeling to realize that youve just run out of ideas and have to go back to the other place to look for new ones. So the inclination to survey the land well while youre in residence is strong.

The equal and opposite recognition is that unlimited play is a sirens song. We used to work with a dancer who was a particularly imaginative improvisator, a seemingly bottomless source of physical skill and wit and originality. But he couldnt stop. Like a fisherman who always thinks the mythic bass of his life is lurking in the next dark bed of weeds, he was addicted to Possibility. But there is a point in the creative process when you have to make something... and that means you have to draw a line and begin to work with whats in front of you. A vast lolling undifferentiated mass of material eventually needs analysis and organization in order to be useful.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE SUBLIMITY OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS?

It can be argued that every good work is the result of a few moments of epiphany that are essentially mysterious (if intriguing to explore). We can subscribe to that view and add that we really believe we can maximise the opportunities for epiphany the iridescent butterfly of inspiration can be enticed to sit on our pith helmet - but weve found it not an efficient method to just sit around and wait. Theres always a lot of ordinary work that needs to get done and if we had to describe an overarching tactic, we could say we endorse a blue-collar approach to making art. You put on your coveralls, fill your lunch pail and go off to work. You spend, like a steelworker, some hours walking more or less confidently in vertiginous conditions, and you come home. Dont ask yourself every fifteen minutes whether your work is any good, because it usually isnt. But like timing rallies in the stock market, if youre in there for the long haul, you catch those moments when everythings going up. And if youre in the studio, or at your desk, or in front of your easel from 9 to 5, then youre likely to get something done.

WHAT COMES FIRST... THE MUSIC OR THE DANCE?

Once the period of exploration is completed, we spend several days analysing and compressing our ideas until the whole can be be reduced to a single page of notations. It often looks pretty thin at this point, but these jottings represent the raw material out of which each dance is built. Some of it will prove to be more valuable than the rest, but the important thing is that this condensed body of seminal physical material has, at this point at least, inherent interest. (And its importance to us reflects, perhaps, some fundamental priority of content over form, for rather than designing a structure and filling up its predetermined volume, the expansion of material will be allowed to follow its own course and it will tend over time to determine shape... or to put it the other way around... the work will inevitably reflect in its final form, for better of worse, the organic growth of that germinal material.) A disinclination to choreograph to music is one example of our resistance to confining form. Musical ideas often progress at very different rates from those of dance, so rather than following in movement the development of a composers thinking, we prefer to pursue our own train of thought and then... either work with a composer to create musical environments that support and sustain our movement... or else find pre-recorded music that fits our needs, draping it over the movement like a cape rather than squeezing our choreographic hand into somebody elses musical glove.

WHY IS SO MUCH OF YOUR WORK SO SLOW?

Speed is a function of the way in which the material is processed. And process is a good word because it feels at times like an military/industrial enterprise, extracting pure fissionable material from chunks of ore. A movement, a lift say, is taken and manipulated. We try it forward and backward. Moving toward us and away. If two people can do it, what happens if we add another person... two other people. Whats the vibe? Is it funny? Violent? Is it passive and creepy and insinuating. Triumphant, heroic... or beleaguered and long-suffering? What happens if its fast or slow? Speed is incredibly important, and it is sometimes useful to think of emotional expression as existing in a kind of spectrum, which can be refracted by the prism of speed. When something is fast, its exciting... bold, hostile, joyous... arousing... and essentially (it can be argued) monochromatic. But when things are slowed down, you can begin to see an infinitely more complex color range of human feeling. We always imagine were standing on the edge of an escarpment, watching the moods of our day spread out below. Its majestic and vast and we in Pilobolus, as lovers of slow motion, have spent many years wandering around down on the veldt.

HOW DO YOU REMEMBER ALL THOSE MOVES?

As we subject our catalogue of physical material to these transmutations (and we do feel at times like alchemists with pointed hats and planets) we learn about our materials and their constituent parts. Some are concentrated and reactive... full of possibility... mutating, like prions or Kurt Vonneguts Ice 9, everything with which they come into contact. A lift suggests a relationship whose tendrils twist suddenly into a story. Or, conversely, the corridor were following simply peters out and we walk around the corner and bump our noses on a rock. In either case, this process of expansion is where we begin to get our bearings. And here is where the peculiar history of our company becomes important again. Because we had no idea what dance was, weve had to invent our own forms. And in the process weve discovered some interesting things. Weve had to develop a spoken vocabulary to refer to our newly discovered physical one. Names become important, for they come to replace notation. The English writer Bruce Chatwin has described aboriginal creation myths in which the demiurge rises from the earth and strides out across the land, naming the new world, and as it speaks the features of the landscape spring into being. There is indeed something mysterious and generative about giving a name. It is a way of concretising it... of housing its properties... of holding on to it. And so our list of movements has become at once expanded and contracted. Knowledge of their physical potential has grown as weve done our experiments... but our ability to think about them and refer to them has become more concise. The list now looks different. It is a collection no longer of drawn notations but a lexicon of ideas with names like... sweet purgatory... the cardioids... galloping sofas... the invaginations... the appendectomy... flogging dolphins... pressed turkey... the little shop of horrors... hairballs There is at this point a real core of discovery, for as we continue to explore these ideas we find they become more familiar and that associations spring up. We begin to perceive similarities... family traits.

We refine and divide and question the fundamental nature of shared characteristics. And slowly we begin to develop a sort of taxonomy of movement. Size, quality, casting variations, character and mood are all templates... sieves... that can be used to filter and comprehend the new order that this material takes on. And as we subject the material to this treatment, it develops valences. One thing reminds us of another. We connect them to see if they prosper in each others presence. And little by little, we can see structures begin to coalesce like planets out of interstellar gas.

HOW DO YOU ACTUALLY PUT YOUR WORKS TOGETHER?

It is our belief that the performing arts are fundamentally narrative. They exist in time and we place one thing in front of or behind another because there is a story to be told. It can be highly abstract. But there must be a reason for things to occur in a certain order. Melody for instance is a wonderfully engaging kind of storytelling. And we find that storytelling becomes for us a useful means by which to approach the construction of a dance. We take turns telling the story, ornamenting here, compressing there, and as stories do, they get better with each telling. And like Chatwins procreative demigod naming the earth into substance, we start to create, through narration, a genuinely metaphysical geography. This temporal nature of dance also reveals another aspect of our work. Because we do work (and move) in groups, the basic unit of composition is not a step (as in most dance) but a Move... a much more complicated object that exists as a aggregate series of interactions between several people. The defining feature of a move is that it creates an image. So in effect we are arranging and linking through time a sequence of images that add up to, we hope, a kind of landscape of the mind. It makes us feel at times like a soothsayer laying out Tarot cards, a collection of strange and suggestive images, placing one next to one another, waiting for some resonance to tell us were on the right track. And it is here, in this vaguely mystical process of analysis, that we attempt to balance and calibrate the swirling and disordering subtext of movement images with the logic and linear intelligibility of storytelling. And perhaps this all relates in some way to morel hunting. We perceive (or sense) with the periphery of our being an underlying pattern or reference. It can be subliminal, but it drives the need for exploration as we follow our seismic response to these movement images. And the more information we have in our heads, the more numerous and powerful are the references. (In fact, we spend our lives stuffing ourselves with fuel for these references... we read and look at things and live and work with all the energy and application we can muster. And weve found that, while our ability to comprehend our interior world is variable, these explorations are often illuminating as the dances offer some opening to an otherwise opaque region into which we can stare and see revealed in varying levels of detail and menace aspects of our lives that are not otherwise available.) So... with all this somewhere at the back of our minds, we begin to link our pieces and are left, after a few days, with an armature. It is a series of ideas that can be performed in sequence from beginning to end, and the assemblage of those ideas is generally, for us, a rapid process. It is also a nerve-racking and critical one. The ingredients are ready and waiting. And once they are put into contact with each other, like making bread, there is only a narrow window of opportunity to make changes. For a few

minutes, while things are still being stirred, you can add a little more water or a little more flour. After that it is extremely difficult and time consuming to alter the essential texture of your dough.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN A DANCE IS FINISHED?

After the linkage has occurred, a few more days are spent in which the dancers learn to perform this material, and then it is time to present the dance in front of an audience. And this is the beginning of the next phase, for the audience is an essential component of our process. We generally consider a dance to be about 75% finished at its premiere. The skeleton of the creature is essentially complete, but its muscles, and certainly its soul, are unformed. It is still inert. We see it as a golem, a potentiality lying on a slab; we slap on the electrodes, wheel the gurney out onto the stage, the audience provides a current, and we wait uncomfortably in the wings to see if our artifact will lurch into life. We also really believe, as in the evolution of useful things like the paperclip or the pencil so well chronicled by Henry Petrosky, that there is a movement toward efficiency and elegance as the work undergoes these developmental changes. There is a process of spontaneous mutation that occurs, for dancers will do incredible things in front of an audience; things they will never do in a studio. We select and edit these changes, taking what seems interesting, excising extraneous detail, and the work itself, we hope, irradiated by the audience, begins to fluoresce. (And here another central issue arises from the particular nature of the performing arts. We have an audience to serve, and the antithesis to personal discovery and effective self-expression is the necessity of making our work communicative. Or to phrase this as a question... if our stories are to mean something to someone else, is it necessary that we all share the same references? What weve found is that while we tell ourselves these stories to help us make decisions, the pieces themselves are not inherently didactic. We emphatically do not insist upon our own version of the events. Indeed, if we have done our job correctly, the associative range of the pieces will lead the viewer to his own conclusions. Flaubert said that the purpose of art is to induce dreaming and there is some truth in that. We attempt to cram our material with evocations. And when the range of associations reaches a desirable limit, a sort of dreamlike reverberation takes place as the mind flickers back and forth between references. And when the structure of the dance is well-made, these reverberations make sense... and they vibrate in harmony and your dances can ring like a bell.) In any case, we find that good pieces will continue to improve for about two years as layers of detail and understanding build up. And at that point, we can usually say a work is done. And that is the way we make dances.

HOW IS THE PILOBOLUS CREATIVE METHOD LIKE PRIMITIVE SCIENCE?

Finally, our elaborate group interaction is probably not fundamentally different from any creative process. Its as if we inherited. as individuals, a certain access to our subterranean regions and thats what counts and all subsequent experience has maybe improved our craft but really has no bearing upon our ability to make art. Is this true of other people in the arts? Or does it strike any chord in a scientist? Its tempting to refer to art and science as related quests. They both attempt to ask questions and propose plausible answers. The answers that appear to be most useful are preserved and this accumulating body of evidence adds up to a view of the world we inhabit. In that sense, weve always looked at science and art and religion as merely different expressions of the same impulses that guide and goad all our search for meaning. Howard Gardner, in the original presentation of his Theory of Multiple Intelligence, defines primitive

science as that which attempts to classify objects and weave mythic explanations... and thats a pretty concise description of the Pilobolus creative process.

ANY LAST THOUGHTS?

It seems clear to us that the production of art is an essential feature of human endeavour and, at its best, its capacity to affect our lives in a beneficial way is enormous. Yet, interestingly, it doesnt get any better. Great art is very great, but in the twenty or thirty millennia from which we draw our record of human artistic expression, we see no improvement. The Palaeolithic Venuses of Catal Huyuk and the bulls of Altamira are as complete and confident as anything being made today. Techniques may be discovered and subject matter undergo changes in fashion, but the underlying capacity of art to provide utterance to mans subliminal responses to his world seems as finite and constant as the speed of light.

SO... TO WHAT DO YOU OWE YOUR UNCANNY SURVIVAL?

Well,...maybe a few concluding words about the collaborative relationship itself. We have survived... and mere survival, as spare a goal as that may seem, is not a tangential concern for any arts organization. The sands are in fact littered with the bleaching bones of failed modern dance companies. Pilobolus is in its 31st year of life and we believe we owe much of our health to the bio-diversity of collaboration. People shake their heads, look at us in bemusement, and say, How do you do it. A friend in Vermont once remarked that a weasel in his henhouse put less feathers in the air than a reasonably agreeable Pilobolus rehearsal. So why, in a world where the artist traditionally sustains a solitary and interior dialogue, have we opted, to the general amazement of all, to spend our adult professional lives in the midst of utmost clamour? Is it a flaw of character... an anachronistic hold-over from the 60s? We ask ourselves this question daily, and the answers, of course, depend upon whom youre asking. In the most obvious way, there is an appreciation for the ghastly scale of effort required to run even a small touring dance company. Theres the momentum of our joint history. We even feel at times its as simple as an attraction to companionship. That would constitute a plausible answer... just commitment, a fear of loneliness, a certain adaptability to circumstances. Pilobolus, like the dances it creates, has never been a concept so much as it is a process. Weve never envisioned a hard-shelled structure into which we had to shove our evolving enterprise, but instead weve seen our company as a rather soft-bellied protoplasmic organism that could stretch and deform itself to accommodate its fluctuating needs. In any case, it seems to work... as if we had stumbled, like the crocodile or the ginkgo, upon some primitive but effective formula for survival. So were still here, amid the tumult and the strife, making dances together. We all have differing flash points. We all harbor types of inflexibility and irrational behaviour. But we also believe in our collaboration and are somehow able to endure its unique and exquisite agonies. For finally, and most importantly, there is a belief in the willingness of our cochoreographers to enter into a creative relationship of genuine emotional depth and we have, together, discovered things about the physical and psychological interaction of human beings that, at their best, hold some measure of real truth and beauty and that would have remained forever hidden to us had we been working alone. ##