Tonight we started putting words in the midst of all that beautiful movement.  And it changes things.  

Words weren’t the only thing different about tonight from last week - we had four people return who hadn’t been present at the movement rehearsals on Friday and Saturday, we had five new cast members join the show tonight, and we had three of our most fearless movers and doers missing in action.  None of this was a surprise, but it does change the dynamic.

Moving large groups of people around and adding spoken moments is a process that benefits from a long rehearsal period - which is what we’ve got.  Tonight we laid out some broad strokes for the opening text of the show, placing speakers at various points, attempting a physical illustration of one of the concepts that get articulated  at the top of the show - plate tectonics, a little hard to show with bodies at this stage.  There’s useful material in what we did tonight, even though it’s a long way from public performance quality.

We managed to integrate song into the process, singing the opening "Turn the World Around" number while we entered and in between the "I Come From’s" that begin the text of the show.  In the early part of the evening, we did a little more table work, and the cast invented more "I come from’s".  Some of my favorites include:  I come from hillsides where trees grow thick and hard.  I come from frogs peeping, hawks crying and moonlight washing the pastures.  I come from where a pasture used to be, before it was developed.  I come from bald mountains where the spirit people of the Cherokee still reside.  I come from a little alpine village with rebel flags and funnel cakes.  I come from traffic jams of deer and turkey in the road.  I come from a valley too beautiful to put an interstate highway through it.  I’m also fond of a tough "I come from" - I come from the land of the three m’s - moonshine, marijuana and methamphetamines.  But I don’t know that that’s the image we want to project, or if we can find the right mix of pride and shame from which to pronounce it. It came from the first workshop Jo Carson conducted in Sautee Nacoochee, as we identified story topics.

I’ll work on combining the phrases we created tonight with the ones we’ve got already - also developed by the cast - and that will make the basis of a working opening, with music interleaved.  Or "interverged" as Andy Slack (our poster artist) said ’round the fire the other night, making up a new word I rather like.

The discoveries continue, and with a cast this big, everyone has a different experience of the night.  Our evening check-outs prove to be very useful for aggregating everyone’s experience.  I find the check-outs very reassuring - tonight I voiced some of my doubts about the chaos we created by adding words, and folks didn’t hesitate to contrast their experience with mine, articulating the power and the meaning the evening had for them.  I’m always grateful to people who want to dig into the work, no matter how messy.

On we go. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 1:33 am and is filed under Headwaters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.