Monthly Archives: September 2007

Golda

Golda’s (wrapup from Week 3)

Some misc. notes from last week.

Aaron’s teacher Victoria has a warmup exercise with clapping echoes that’s interesting. We try it in warmup, with him clapping rhythms at everyone in the group and them clapping back at him. I would like to try it again.

I spent last week notating Aaron’s various 3rd-week acting notes in a clean script. It was a really good exercise for me. We worked section by section, once through for small notes and once through for connection.

When do you switch to a clean script, if ever?

I realize, in terms of Aaron saving notes, that what he saves notes from are runthroughs – he doesn’t save a page of notes for every single day. That’s probably a good balance. I never would have worked that out without blogging about it.

You can either write down blocking or else be focused on acting and intention – and in fact, the act of writing down blocking, because it is tedious, makes me automatically care less about intention. Chris Bolender had to tell me this.

Instead, I’m trying to be aware of the blocking and the feelings of it, as the overall picture of the play.

Paper tech:
Our front projector will be for more specific settings, for landscape, and back-screen for memory. Do front and rear projection have different feelings or is it just a technical thing? I’ll have to see.

Someone suggests crickets!

Lights is cueing off blocking and projections off language.

Editing is like directing. (As I edit essays.) What are you trying to say? What do you want? And actors are writers.

Is there something to be said for making a point badly? Is there a way for unclearness, or confusion, to be clearly expressed?

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the chorus

Schmorus

I have to write something on the nature of the chorus work I do, for a job, and it’s been too long since I’ve tried.

Some thoughts toward it.

The MOH&H manifesto, which I was hoping to use, was too cute and too show-specific, and also too much about the free radical / spontaneous / improvised chorus only.

Lots of people have choruses, but not everyone is going to be able to, or want to, make the leap to having them improvise.

I think in order to make this work and be useful for other people, not just those with Dan Jenkins to build them an improv light board, but any production using a chorus, I have to differentiate between what I’ve discovered about choruses in general, and what I’m doing with the improv stuff in particular.

The point is that both choreographed choruses and improvised choruses ARE choruses – two different means of arriving at the same thing – and that’s what I have to write about, not just my own way of doing it.

The way to get people to use more choruses in more interesting ways is to be able to talk about a variety of methods of using them.

The point is that I’ve been working as a chorus specialist for eight years, and if someone wants me to advise them on the subject in general, I need to not just tell them about my work in the field of the improvised chorus, but also about ALL the choruses.

I may have finally outgrown my extremism. This shocks me.

I would be sad if the improv chorus exercises became just that, exercises, a means of getting people to have freedoms in rehearsal that they dropped in performance. But if someone wants me to tell them how to use the methods that way, it will lead to better work than it would otherwise. I can’t control how this is used.

It’s all part of a chorus web, I guess, or chorus convergence, or Venn diagram. It’s not a linear progression towards one way of working. I can see my own work that way, but if I want to be collaborative with other people, I have to be open to all the possibilities.

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directing

Notable

Aaron saves more of the notes he takes in their original form than Bill, who used to get rid of paper as quickly as possible, or else type them.

He also gave Camille some notes in person, waiting for her to write them down, which was a good way for them to process together.

With a larger cast it wouldn’t be practical, but it seemed so powerful in this context.

To see the note go from the director’s handwritten paper, to his words out loud, to Camille’s words out loud, to their discussion of it, to her handwritten paper – all the technology in the world, and we’re still seeing how a piece of information is transformed between two humans.

It made me understand how a “note” works, more – and why, if it isn’t worth all that, you don’t give it.

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writing

Intellectual Disgrace

I want to write an article on my worst intellectual digression, counting phonemes in poems, and the value of going way off track. On the ideas that go nowhere that you follow for so long, and that seem, through retrospective-colored-glasses, so dumb.

But it taught me one thing – which is that you never know whether or not the idea is going nowhere until you do follow it.

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Golda

Golda: Week 4

From rehearsal today: “It’s not a monologue. We’re all in the room with you.”

We also learned today the value of starting GOLDA’S BALCONY at the beginning – it’s proving really useful, at least for now, to get the momentum of the start under all our belts before diving into detail work in the less-worked middle and end sections. This is, I guess, still Lisa James’s principle of working the first act more heavily than the 2nd or 3rd.

She once told me that you work the first act until the actors are really eager to move on beyond it – that if the first act is coherent, the rest will flow out of it. This was in reference to BOLD GIRLS in particular.

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quotes

The Need For…

From Diane Duane’s weblog. I’d never heard this before, but it’s a comfort to us speeders.

“The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the word instead of being pulled by them.”
— Raymond Chandler

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Golda

Golda – end of week 3

After today’s runthrough, which went really well, we moved into some issues of the fourth wall and storytelling style.

Q: Do I see the audience?
A: The same way you see the stars.

Aaron and Camille talked about the necessity of making sure that the Golda-storyteller character was always present. She can’t ever fully disappear into the other characters, because she has to make sure they (the audience) understand her story.

Full realism happens in the phone calls. Only then does Golda enact. All the rest of the time, when doing dialogue, she precedes it with a “he said” or “she said.”

They discussed the fact that Golda enjoys the telling.

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quotes

Quotestuck

“So with the devil’s-advocate moon grinning over my shoulder, with demure quails calling and bullbats diving and old Henry honking across the river that gurgled coyly to the stars, and with my stomach heavy with Viv’s cooking and my head light with Hank’s praise, right then and right there I decided to bury the hatchet. I would blame my sad beginnings on no fiend but my own. Live and let live. Forgive me as I forgive my debtors. The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.”

(from Kesey’s SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION.)

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the chorus

In the night I had a dream

Sick, really sick. At home in bed today. Sad to have missed our last day of blocking on our week of connecting closely to the text. It’s been such a powerful time. There’s a runthrough tomorrow, our second, and we go into tech next week.

In the delirium of sleeping for eighteen hours, dreaming of geometric shapes. And FLATLAND.

“I am no Woman,” replied the Straight Line: “I am the Monarch of the World. But thou, whence intrudest thou into my realm of Lineland?”

See, I think that a great way to tell a story of multiple dimensions and overlapping realities would be with flexible, choral casting: with the identities of the ensemble shifting as the dimensions shift.

Some of this comes from the isolation exercises I’ve always done as part of the longer choral workshops. And some of it from the infamous “Grid” of Planet Viewpoints.

Some of it probably comes from just wanting a challenge more ridiculous than MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL. As the Square writes, “This is the hope of my brighter moments.”

PS, the 2319 girls have a Labradoodle, Murray, and he has a Facebook page. Even dogs.

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