First day...

First day…
There’s always things in life that don’t go exactly to plan.
Rehearsals are one of them.
However sometimes the smallest change of plan can lead to unexpected places.
We started with a little show and tell. it’s a nice way to get ideas and thoughts out and moving. Edward Steichen and Cindy Sherman’s photography. Filmic and iconographic images.
We thought of the way that the moments we found for Postscript Mk1 served the same purpose. Maybe now we’re looking at how we can explore those moments, unpack what they’re made of, what stories they tell.
We talked about Booker’s “The Seven Basic Plots”. Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, Rebirth… Is that all there is? Is every narrative just clouded by archetypes of places, ideas, symbols and people?
We wondered if the show we are now setting out to re-make was a visual attempt at Flash fiction… Or a set of Six word stories now begging to be made into Twelve word stories, No-word-but-myriad-of-image-stories... Or perhaps we’ll just be taking these archetypes and putting them in a hinterland space together…
High flown talk indeed. But that’s what first days seem to need…
My carefully written rehearsal plan went out of the window as our props collection was unexpectedly locked in a University building over the bank holiday. No props complicates the first line of my carefully written rehearsal plan. “Unpack and look at all props, lamps, etc…”
Oh well, we just jumped straight in anyway.

Games where we try limit our actions to all but a few like walking, running, jumping, sitting. We found Classic FM on the radio and you can play the game for quite a while and everything goes quite Zen. Add rules where any actions are allowed, try telling a story, trying to create an inner logic. We tried imposing stories to try to enact, but that didn’t work. But when we thought less about particular stories but simply of the Seven Basic Plots with their each particular set of associations the Zen returned…
Sometimes its quite striking when a single image can give you and instant read of the story behind it. Cinderella spotted trying on the glass slipper, Grendel and Beowulf fighting it out, The Very hungry Caterpillar chomping his way through the week…

We returned to some old material we wanted to play about with. We expanded split seconds into whole minutes then cut them in two, which half of the story is important? What happens if one person tells the first half, the other; the second, and a split second in-between by a third. What does that do to the story?
This got us through the rest of the day… what happens when you tell a story in a series of flashes each minutes apart? What happens when four people try to express one story with no words and only 4 actions between them? How much can we give with a limited palette?
What happens if that limited palette is orchestrated by a conductor, baton and all..?

It seems like there’s a lot of questions today…
I think I might have to relax my rehearsal plan a little.

Rick