Great workshop yesterday. We incorporated the text of a poem into the chorus workshop. The group was very open to the work and we got to a place I’ve never seen before.

After one hour of basic chorus exercises, which we went through in just half an hour (Dara calling out leader switch, leader switching within group, more than one leader) we were taking a piece of text (Ruth Eisenberg’s poem JOCASTA) and handing out two scripts of it, which belonged to the Jocasta speaker and the Chorus speaker. Then there was a 4-7 person chorus improvising in the background.

The rhythm of the text was the “music” they responded to.

By our final improv, the characters were fluidly and naturally moving in and out of the chorus, in and out of text, and the responsibility for the storytelling was collective.

It was beautiful.

Jessica and Lava had many questions and ideas about how this method could be used – Lava wants to try it with a newspaper article. I’m still blown away that this simple integration of text, which I’ve been fighting off for so long (and avoided in MOH&H by the expedient of text without a linear sense to it) worked so well.

Credit to Jessica’s amazing calm sense of direction, and to the group of folks who were so open.

We had a very talented actress in the group, Betsey, who had a broken foot, and incorporated her sitting on a chair – that was a good development too.

It’s such a joy to me every time I get to do one of these workshops – and now I think pushing towards text is something I’m always going to do. Linear, narrative text, poems or plays, with characters and speakers. Why not? It works! And it’s the next logical step.

I’m so happy that Lava and Jessica both saw other ways this method could be used, with approaches different from my own. It means something about it must work. Lava also liked the idea of “the set being another actor.”

Jessica was concerned that with improv blocking some nights would be much worse than others, and I didn’t have a good answer to that, only to tell her that with training, that doesn’t happen. But she did wonder if you could use the improv chorus just for the chorus folks, not the characters. Which is what I did in Human Bombing, albeit without improv, so yes, you can. It’s just a method, and it works in a lot of different ways.

Abandoning the specificity of “this moment must look like this” has freed me greatly as a director, but I do understand that it’s not exactly what everyone wants to do. If I want this technique to be used I have to be open to any kind of use.

This is such a great feeling, to have shared the work with strangers and have them become friends. We went to the Tiki Bar afterwards and celebrated, but we evaporated early cause I was kind of wiped out from yesterday at Powells (I got both FLATLAND and GOLDA’S BALCONY) I also met with Melina, the MOH&H graphic designer yesterday at Staccatto Gelato. She was a former virtual collaborator from that show, and we’d never met in person.

Zack and I are off to Seattle this AM, at the end of our road trip.