Friday and Saturday night were spent finishing the rough sketch of the show’s opening, which includes song, movement and text.  This is challenging work, but the company proved up to the task – if a little bewildered by it in the moment.

Celeste Miller, lead movement designer, led the cast through a full physical warm-up at the start of Friday night’s rehearsal, then asked everyone present to tell of a time when they really noticed the river.  People offered stories of floods, of river crossings that made their stomachs jump, of gifts from the river like pottery shards and hide scrapers, of moments when the river – or people in it – picked them up when they fell, of snowflakes meeting their reflection in the water.

Celeste used her particular gift of watching what people say as well as listening to their words, and picked out eight or so moments where people had illustrated their words with evocative gestures.  She then taught those gestures to everyone, and incorporated them into the opening entrance, so that by the end of the first song the whole cast is on the bleachers, moving in unison – with choreography that came from our stories.  It’s a marvelous process, and the end result is something close to magical.

Putting together movement like this is hard work, and we weren’t done with it by the end of Friday night.  Saturday consisted of coming back to the gesture phrase, introducing new folks to it (several cast members were absent Friday night), and then adding more movement to underscore the text that follows the opening song – descriptions of the geology, forestry, and Cherokee creation story of this area.  We incorporated the "River Round" and got all the way through the final piece of text, which is a list of the ways in which we are rich.

The last thing we did on Saturday before our check-out was to run the whole opening sequence.  It’s about 6 minutes in duration, and it took us 12 hours to create (four rehearsals), plus untold hours of Celeste and Nicole’s time to shape the movement sequences (this doesn’t just happen on the spot, lemme tell ya!).  When we were done, there was a definite feeling of triumph in the room, for having accomplished something difficult and beautiful.  Julianne Wilson (whose stories permeate the show) was in the room watching, and was, as her grandmother used to say, all verklempt over it (really touched and amazed).

This week we will finish staging most of the text pieces of the show, review the opening, and begin to work out some of the musical moments.  When Celeste returns on Friday, with Nicole Livieratos, we will choreograph the construction dance that ends Act 1.  We’re into our third week of rehearsal, making great progress, and we still have a long way to go.  Stay tuned….

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