3.3.12 - Rehearsal 4

When I prepare a moment I think about a story I want to tell; usually it’s a simple story, a minute or two from life, or a feeling from life.  Then I think about the elements that I could play with to tell that story.  Again, I try to keep it simple: light, a prop, a movement.  Ideally, I could play with my idea and my elements in the space before I show the moment to discover what both do when they are in conversation with each other, but that can’t happen all the time.  Many times I am presenting a rough idea of the moment and it’s the first time I will have put it up on its feet.  But that’s okay in Moment Work and it’s one of the things I love about this way of working.  Andy said today in rehearsal that there is actually no way to mess up a moment because moments are just theatrical information and the more information, the better.  This really lowers the stress level when presenting moments, and usually makes the moments better because you are not second-guessing yourself.

We spent most of rehearsal today showing more personal moments we had prepared.  One of Jeffrey’s moment was about waiting for the school day to end (2:58 and the clock doesn’t seem to be moving) and that information led us to really want to include a moment like that in the piece.  Had Jeffrey not come into rehearsal with this, we might have never thought of that.  I don’t think the moment Jeffrey presented in rehearsal will end up in the piece as is, but I bet there will be a moment whose origins you can trace back to today’s rehearsal.  Realizing that is energizing.  Esmé, in her moment, looked like she was swimming in a desk and that opened up the possibility of using desks in a variety of new ways (as clothes, a limbs, as creatures).  We spent a good portion of rehearsal playing with the school desks in the room and it was really fun.  Everyone was listening to each other, open, focused, and playing.  Because of that we generated a new vocabulary with the desks that hadn’t been there at the beginning of rehearsal.

Before rehearsal, Andy and I met in the rehearsal room and charted out some of the narrative arc of the play on butcher paper.  Part of the play deals with The LA Times publishing ranking of public school teachers based on their student’s standardized test scores and a statistical method called value added.  We went through this story and verbalized the smaller events that make up the story.  We asked ourselves, What does the audience need to know in order to understand this story?  The next step is to chart out the other events of the play that go before and after the LA Times story.