Sat aft. -- First read-through of Doors (director)I flourish with sufficient complexity of the right kind. This is the right kind. Three strict, difficult creative tasks/groups intersecting, cross-pollinating.
Sat eve -- Scene Lab, 4 hours with actors (playwright)
Sun morn -- met with Keith, Noir playwright(teacher)
-- met with Lara, Doors production-designer (director)
Sun aft -- Class: did Noir backstory improvs (director)
Sun eve -- dinner with Scott & free-writes about art (artist)
I wish I could convey how great the actors were in class today. I am going to lie awake a while and just replay them in my head. In hockey, I could tell from the moment I stepped on the ice whether I was "on" that day. The second game of a back-to-back double-header was the best -- hot, loose, skates like gloves. Well -- Acting In Performance this quarter is one long skates-like-gloves.
Yes, yes, yes. Yes.
Some hallmarks are -- there's oodles of time. Silences. The flow of the work is organic. I am easily, deeply, holistically efficient. In the time I'd normally do 2 structures, we'll do 6. Or, even better, I do 1 thing -- usually something I just thought up -- that incorporates all of those. Hallmarks in them are -- soft eyes. Relaxed absorption. Laughter. No one wanting to leave the space when it's done. Trust. Being busier interiorly than they are exteriorly. Sitting, talking, and acting like kids. Spontaneity. Time slowing way down: a deep profound experience and only four minutes have passed. I call myself "time-slipped" when this happens. "It's been 2:34 for the last ten minutes -- I'm time-slipped."
At one point, I couldn't figure out why they weren't fully following through on their physical-impulse statues -- and then I remembered, oh, this is only their 2nd class, they don't know how. Then I remembered, I'm the teacher, I'd better teach that now.
Today we covered:
Check-InsDoing Kantor's Objects first, they got how objects can "crack" and worlds come alive; the difference between an object crackling with potential and one just laying there inert. So when we got to backstory improvs, their sense of how to create a set was utterly theatrical. Simple, shimmery, evocative.
Classical blacks
Singing
Three new songs
All three sung simultaneously, standing in a circle
Choreo invented for all 3 songs, sung & performed
Intro of play & characters
Living org chart
Build a set
Kantor's objects (reverberant objects)
Shadow set
Shadow characters
Trading statues
SNACK
Moment of Beauty
Writing
Five Truths
Backstory Improvs
Afternotes
Backstory improvs:
Nightclub Workers After HoursThe closer the map gets to reality, the less use it is as a map. That list is only useful for the 8 people who happened to be there.
Anwen's Audition
Katherine's and Evan's Take-Out Dinner
Katherine and Evan One Year Later
Norma's Electric Car
Clarice's First Day Of School: Owl Pellets
Dissection Day
After the Breakup
Evan's Mom
What happens when a scene cracks -- like, when the shadow world broke through and lay there in shards, a upturned chair's chrome legs spinning idly in its midst -- is that, without knowing it, the actors began to perceive with their whole organism, what "cracking" is. It's when a fissure appears, out of which pours Truth.
It's a series of cogs, each turning a bigger one. There's the circle of Lara, Keith, and me, where the high-bandwidth, wild creative collaboration is starting to grow. Then there's a circle of the class, which is the juicy experimental lab. Out of those two, the collaboration and lab, comes potent yeast which we then take into the play rehearsals -- the biggest, slowest, most massive of the three.
Fractal creative development like this is the most likely to produce great results. Fractal Greatness Lab. Inside me, it feels like a tremendous lightning storm: there's finally sufficient potential energy, pressure, and spark, to ignite.
"You keep making the mistake of comparing theatre to jobs," Bart Sher said. "It's not. It's a drug. The proper metaphors for theatre are drug metaphors."
1 comment:
It sounds like dynamite!
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