Fourth Day... (Friday 17th April)

So here we are so soon, the fourth day. A third of the way through now. The weather is miserable and we are rehearsing in a white box that hums, strange things may happen today...
The video camera is out and we film the gesture tales, then gingerly sit round the TV and watch it back. Its good but can be better, as with everything, we can always push it further. Setting a trigger to speed up we try it again, film it again, watch it again. It is better again. There is a moment where three of us step forward and pause; it seems we have found the climax in this section, the moment where it needs to become something else. Who knows what that will be? We leave this, until tomorrow, it has become the way we start our working day.

Back to the orchestra today. Is there anything there? Will it fit conceptually? Sure it’s fun to do, but is it exciting to watch? We shorten it today and adopt poses which contradict the text. We run it and it feels good, but is it enough? Will it make the final cut?

Break, it’s still raining.

Our collection of lamps for Postscript Mk 1 have been housed in bags for the last six months but today we took them out, plugged them and switched them on. And off, and then on again. We spent a lot of time playing and just seeing what happened. This is always a good place to start. Silence, gestures, remnants of bedtime stories, snippets of action, the reappearance of the dog mask, what did we want to do? Nothing set in stone but plenty of thoughts, ideas, and beginnings to explore and develop. Lots of questions about what we want to repeat, what we want to show, how much do we want to give to the audience?

Some new stories were bought to the table today, Rick went first and read his aloud recording it on to the Dictaphone. A story of a naughty troll who comes good, a classic tale of rebirth. Then we turned all the lights out, as if going to bed, and listened to the story through the slightly fuzzy recording. It felt good to just be listening to the words but we want to subvert the story, maybe with an interruption, maybe the use of 'ping turn the page'. Again this felt like the beginning of a piece of material, definitely something to return to.

Lunch, more rain.

Then we turned to horror. My simple tale of a dark house on a hill, a ghostly figure and a naive man who would meet a messy end. Pablo and I assumed the main roles. With bulbs in hand we played with setting the scene, pulling faces in the light, hamming up the horror and telling the story. This section was very much about the details, exactly where the light should be held so you could see my hand but not my face. Tweaking and re-working to make it perfect, maybe a new genre was just was we need to keep things exciting. And make things a little scary!

Late afternoon proved a little trickier in terms of finding material or stumbling across something that was conceptually clear. We found a few moments to start with...the dog mask re-appeared in a tender dance with a light bulb. Should this be juxtaposed with another fragment? Suddenly Daisy was on stage, moving provocatively lighting up her body and whistling 'Blue Moon'. There were lots of questions about the story behind this action, is it the girl with the rose, is it a new story? How do we want to make a connection? We concentrated on choreographing Burlesque style movement for Daisy, it started to come together.

That was where we left the day, as I said it felt like a day of beginnings. Plenty to be working with, plenty to explore, plenty to develop. It will all come together, but not yet, its only day four.

Laura