End of first week

The rhythm of today is odd. Easing into the morning it has been about stretching, a brisk walk, and memorizing lines. We have rehearsal at 11:00, then lunch, then more rehearsal. After that the rest of the day is open. I think we can all uses some down time, but I keep feeling this persistent ball of energy building up – kind of like a coiled spring waiting to trigger. Some of this comes from the fact that Suzuki is precise and contained and mainly about controlling that energy. Viewpoints provides an opportunity for short bursts of the release of energy, but nothing sustained. The walk was fine, but I really couldn’t go fast enough – not interested in running since I have no idea what that would do to my legs. The plan is to hit the gym and ride a stationary bike for perhaps and hour or so.

Which did feel good – I’ll see if it was a good idea tomorrow or not. After such an intensive five days to have two days in a row much more low key felt odd. Necessary, but odd. We made good use of the time rehearsing for a good chunk of Saturday and Sunday. The piece is really lovely – I think we all can feel how well it came together. I probably feel better about this process and this piece than about most theatre I have done in the past 10 years or so. It is at the point where it really needs and audience – which it will have around 2:30 or so. We watch each of the 10-minute pieces and discuss the outcome. Then I suspect they reshuffle the deck, make new groups, and off we go in another direction.

I find that feeling each other out part of a new collaboration interesting – getting to know which sensibilities work well together and which don’t. The training really does offer a common vocabulary that everyone can draw on. We wove in some tiny Suzuki and Viewpoints bits, which work really well. At this point the structure is there – more time would only allow us to refine specific moments, many of which have already been refined.

The one big take away from this process has been the space. We started talking about the text in the library – which got us part way to shaping something, but would never have gotten us the whole way there. The first meeting in the space we ran into some of the same issues of just talking. Zoe’s suggestion that we just start by creating ideograms like we did in the composition class got us up and on our feet. Theoretically we each had one or two, but we really only got to two before things started to gel and we had a direction. The text came together as we moved thorough the space. A movement or action would happen and immediately a line or moment or a character from the play would be called for. So – some of the text discussion helped keep these bits in our head to be drawn on later. The upshot is that the piece feels like it fits in this specific space largely because it was constructed there

The other thing I think that worked well is I really didn’t feel any individual egos involved. Ideas would get tossed out, embraced, refined, shaped, and become something completely new embodied by all. The hard part about making that process work is being able to let go of ideas that don’t work. Having to work very very quickly doesn’t allow time to argue or convince, either we all agree or we move on. But even the discarded ideas shaped what we ended up creating. Excited to see what happens tomorrow.