We had our
second rehearsal tonight and it went well. Jeffrey wasn’t there.
We started off by showing personal moments that we had created as a
homework assignment. Meesh’s was
the first one: she sat at a table and discovered a plastic cup with water in
it. She played with the cup, drank
the water, spilled it on the floor, made sound with it. Simply put, she was learning. Because of that we discovered a form: a
structure that we can put other elements on top of and make moments with different meanings. I thought of two teachers arguing about
how hard or easy it is to teach students while Meesh discovered an object by
herself. We played around with
each of the moments people brought in, creating variations, discovering more
about the elements at play in the moment.
By doing that, one of the things we learned (re-learned) was how
important it will be to have student voices in this play.
Then we read
some text that I had worked on with Andy in between the two rehearsals. Reading led to some chatting about the
politics behind public education, about trust, about not judging the real
people we will be portraying on stage. Lastly, we did group moments with desks
and costumes, and blackboards and movement. Andy said something very important about moment work. Quick aside: moment work is the name
Tectonic Theater Project (of which Andy is a member) gave to the way they
work. Moment work is a way to
create theater that puts text on the same level as all other theatrical
elements (lights, sound, movement, costume, etc.). In moment work you find a narrative by exploring the
elements instead of coming into rehearsal with a fully formed narrative in
mind and using elements in service of that pre-determined narrative. Andy said that moment work
is working "in reverse" of the traditional way of creating theater. We work this way so we can surprise
ourselves in order to come up with something new.
No comments:
Post a Comment