Today was
our first rehearsal and it went really well. We started by doing some Viewpoints work, which is a kind of
rehearsal technique that begins by having people walk around the room on an
imaginary grid. Then we added some
school desks and chairs. After
doing this for a bit, we discovered that walking along a grid quickly is kind
of like passing period – everyone rushing to get from class to class and trying
not to bump into each other. This
might become a possible transitional moment or a form that we come back
to. It’s really cool how you can
just try something out, and by playing with it for a while a great thing might emerge. Many times nothing emerges, but it’s
really exciting when something comes up (sometimes from something totally
unrelated) that connects directly to the piece you are trying to make. We then worked independently on
creating gestures about trust, doubt, and betrayal. We each showed a sequence of those gestures to the group. We then did variations on those sequences,
tweaked them a bit, adding text or changing the tempo or adding more
people. Suddenly they were
transformed into something completely different. Two of the images that stood out to me were Madeline moving
her head across the desk and Esmé feeling trapped in her desk/chair. Lastly, we read some text moments that
Andy and I had written earlier.
I am going
to be using the word “moments” a lot, so I should define it now. A moment is a unit of theatrical time;
something happens on stage in a moment.
Moments are made out of theatrical elements: lights, text, sound, set,
rhythm, architecture, etc. A
moment can be five seconds long or ten minutes long; a moment can have lots of
text or no text. Moments are the
building blocks of the play we are going to create.
A random
question: What does it mean to do something publicly?
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