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.

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.

Jessica called me last night, and we talked about the possibility of adding an improvised chorus into existing pieces of choreography – combining blocking for some characters with improv for others.  If this works, it would make it much more possible to use the method in different scenarios.

Anyone have an opinion about “spontaneous chorus” as a term? “Free radical chorus” hasn’t stuck with me – I keep going back to “improvised chorus” – but Portland liked “spontaneous.”