Composition #3

Mondays are always a bit odd – we don’t get the schedule until we arrive at the theatre and then sort out which room we need to start in. Viewpoints first, with Leon, was quite interesting today. We broke up into groups of three – each person labeled beginning, middle or end. The beginning folks started and worked in open Viewpoints – basically movement and relationships with no specific rules. The trick today was that they would slowly build up a movement score that needed to be memorized by the other two in the group. Middles then built the middle, and ends the end. By the end of the class we watched the same basic pattern executed by three completely different groups of people. Interesting to see the difference in timing, movement style, physical relationships, etc.

Suzuki was a day when we were told that now we know the basics it is time for us to start paying more attention to our own work. To that end J. Ed. Had us start with the walks and restart the line every time someone was on the wrong foot. For some reason I chose this day to head toward the front of the line – which got to redo any number of walks any number of times. Exhausting, but we got the point about group work. We then paired up and worked to help our partners identify areas they need to work on. At the beginning it seemed impossible to get this vocabulary down, but three weeks in we are starting to get how to refine these movements on our own.

We presented our composition piece today and it went very well.  Anne and Leon seemed to like the structure – Anne’s point was if we changed any of it she would be very mad. So – we have a great sound structure, but need to work on specific acting moments. Basically what we ended up with was a kind of military drill framework in which each of us breaks out at some point. The idea came out of some improv work in which we developed competing siblings that really didn’t listen to or care for the others.

Our first thought was to isolate each sister in a lane on the stage – completely separate – talking but not necessarily to each other. Emma saw this just was not gonna work fairly quickly and so we pondered what other alienation or isolation ideas we could use. Anne’s comment early on in the composition classes stuck with us when she asked “who’s dream are you presenting?” We decided that the ghost of their military father hung over these three and went from there. The drilling movements work well for three characters bemoaning deadening lives and repetitive days. In the end I think we were all quite happy with how it turned out. It will be nice to refine this one and present it again on Thursday to all the Workshop folks plus others. It will also be nice to see everyone else’s work.