We ended the first week of rehearsals by singing the wonderful round composed by Joanne Steele for the first scene.  This was after we had worked on refining the opening movements of the show - a waterfall of people coming down the bleachers making eddies and splashes and flowing fast down the mainstream of our metaphorical river.  

What has been amazing about this first week of rehearsals has been the fearless willingness of every member of the cast.  Celeste Miller, our lead movement designer, asked people to step outside their box while we created movement together, and everyone complied.  On the first night, we created circles to step into - circles of personal power.  So I guess it’s all about getting out of the box and getting into the circle.  Transformative things seem to be happening already.

Saturday afternoon, Shimi offered a workshop on personal narrative and aerial dance that yielded two terrific aerial dancers who are part of Canopy Studio in Athens - I’m hoping they’ll become our aerial dancers for the three brief moments of magic realism in which they are needed. 

Mentioning Canopy Studio makes me think of all the people who deserve thanks for making this production happen - just this week!  Canopy loaned us the aerial fabrics for Shimi’s workshop - thanks, Megan.  White County High School loaned us an old wrestling mat to make a crash pad underneath the fabrics.  As ever, the intrepid Roger Williams (volunteer fireman, Bear #2, all around good guy) was there to help, hanging the fabrics and organizing getting the monster wrestling mat out of the truck.  John Kollock put up with me bugging him about scenic designs, with excellent good grace.  ST Shimi, who taught our workshop, also helped me think through the aerial choreography, and made a strong connection with Liz and Tina from Canopy.  John Holloway and Wally Warren made excellent plans for our humanities exhibit.  And Celeste Miller and Nicole Livieratos are going above and beyond the call of duty - they were up at 7:30 am on Saturday morning reviewing video tape to identify their movement catalog (or bank, as Nicole prefers) from which to give choices to the performers.

We still need a few more performers, and ‘feelers’ are out.  I hope by the end of the coming week to have settled the cast list at last. 

There were some terrific comments at the end of the check-outs this past week - Roger offered that there are people out there paying to get this kind of workout and creativity connection, and the people in this cast are getting it for free (I think it’s an even exchange of a commitment of time and talent for a valuable experience).  Paul Brown was pretty amazed at how unique this show is to this place - "we own it" he said (he also used a colorful expression to describe the feeling of just trusting the process - "don’t worry about the mule going blind, just load the wagon").   Many folks were surprised at how fun this is - I guess they didn’t expect it to be.  That’s one of my basic operating principles.  If there’s no laughter, it’s not for me.  So fun we have.  As well as meaning.

7 1/2 weeks to go….

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