Bear Dreams come true
Tonight, June 4, we worked on the second Joey’s Dance scene - that which contains Working on a Building - and we created Bear Dream 3. This is a big crowd scene, something I’ve never felt particularly adept at staging, but we got through tonight pretty well for the first time assaying it. Sheri Kling made an excellent staging suggestion about where to position the picnic table, and that opened up the whole stage for everyone. The knowledge and memory of the nearly 20 cast members who were in last year’s show is an incredibly useful tool in staging this year’s show. The new guys learn fast in this environment.
The scene’s been substantially re-written since last year, as have all the Bear Dream scenes. There’s much more explication - Jessica Harris and Jennifer Hudgins commented Monday night when we staged the first Bear Dream that it’s much clearer now what and who the bears are. The edits we made have improved the script. The joy of a re-mount. (I suppose if I were to start a production company, I could call it Mount & Re-Mount.)
And I must confess I really enjoy the producer’s power in this field - community performance - to change the text as needed to fit the production. It’s the dramaturg part of the director/producer’s role in a community performance, which may have an equivalent in the regional theater model, but the power dynamics are different there. In community performance, the organization owns the script. In regional theater, the playwright owns the script. The community performance norm jibes well with my "I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission" nature.
The video documentation of rehearsal is incredibly useful. The camera sees things I can’t, and I usually end up with about a page of notes that will come in handy in subsequent rehearsals. Here’s what it saw tonight.
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