Planning First Rehearsal

So we had a good audition! Good energy in the room (some of it, as Marie pointed out, was the "nervous energy" of an audition) and, by the end, we had a good crowd. A few surprises, a few punches to roll with, but a good start.

If all the folks we liked accept, we've got a working group of seven -- three men and four women, with the strong chance that we'll add two men and one more woman, bringing us to an even five and five.

We want our first rehearsal to be three hours long. We know that we want to push movement, continue to push physical training, but that we don't want the session to break down as "class, then making stuff" -- we want to INTEGRATE training and generation, to the degree we can. We got a little of this today, and we want more.

IDEAS for FIRST REHEARSAL
- I'd like to get the story in the room. HOW to do this? Have someone READ the story...go around the circle and TELL each other the story, passing off the wand...Bring in a huge sheet of paper and do a timeline of the story...pair people up, and have them come up with a way to tell the story, then share with the group? I just want to give us a base point of "these are the things that we know happen in the original story"

- What about doing more of the GENERATIVE work with the story...We could pick a part to deal with...my idea would be to give everyone the title of their piece "and she fell in love with the mysterious voice" or "so she went to the underworld and" or "there were once three beautiful daughters," then give everyone an IMAGE from our collection of images, or a few PROPS, or a few more elements to include like "a silence, an entrance, a moment of ecstasy," (or all of the above) and give them time to work something out. We could have a pile of pieces of text (I'd have to work on this) that folks could mine for dialogues or diatribes...and see what happens. So basically we'd control it somewhat, decide what variables we want to fix, and give folks time to work. We could work in two small groups, show the pieces, the do what Tom talked about at our "breakfast meeting" and keep things, throw them, have people do the pieces again but differently, etc.

- What about giving EVERYONE the homework, between now and first rehearsal, of reading the C&P story, and finding ONE image or piece of music that feels, to them, like their way into this story?

Okay, that's what I've got for now. Thoughts? Comments?