We had our first rehearsal for Headwaters tonight - a chance for people in the company to meet and greet one another, learn a little bit about each other, find out casting assignments and review the rehearsal schedule.

We had a lot of fun - we mapped some of our relationships, and when asked to map out where everyone lived, several folks climbed on chairs to indicate their mountaintop locations.  Most of the folks in the Headwaters company live in White County, with a substantial portion of Habersham denizens.  Those of us right on the border live either in Haberwhite or Whitersham.  The stories, of course, really do come from the goodly portion of beautiful northeast Georgia, as advertised.

We also mapped people’s relationships to rivers - whether they thought they were experts or novices.  John Edgar Boyes, age 11, put himself in the expert category, because he’s got nature class in school - I’m guessing his command of facts far outstrips most  of the adults’ (e.g., "are you smarter than a fifth grader").  People who have paddled many more miles than I have thought they were relative novices.  Rebecca Steele was more on the expert side, since the river’s pretty much where she was born and raised.

The rivers mapping engendered a discussion about the rivers in the play, and whether there were enough of them.  Members of the company talked about both literal and figurative rivers, and the way the headwaters are a beginning, which is pretty much where we’re at in the process of making a long-term production.

Any rehearsal has some logistics in it, and folks were patient with that and asked good questions.

We made agreements for how we want to work together, using a simple consensus model - if someone couldn’t agree to it, or we couldn’t work out simple language for it, it wasn’t an agreement.  Sadly, my hope of well-behaved dogs being welcomed to rehearsal didn’t make it to agreement status (my dogs don’t meet the criteria, so it was altruistic, plus I like how dogs help people be in rehearsal).

Barbara Luhn did a terrific job of introducing us to the physicality of singing, emphasizing what the muscles are that get used, and how they should feel when they’re being used right.  We sounded very good together, as a company, singing the song "Turn the World Around", which will open the show.  We heard the first preview of Joanne Steele’s River Round.

We ended the night with a creative visualization exercise I learned from our playwright Jo Carson, the utility of which was reinforced in a recent conversation with the amazing community artist Marty Pottenger, about finding a physical pathway to that feeling of being your best self.  The level of excellence this production is going to demand from people will require those best selves to do the work; it looked to me like people found value in the exercise.

There’s always more that happens in 3 hours than can be blogged in a night.  Suffice it to say, this was an excellent beginning to a project that’s been five years in the making (or more).

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 11:38 pm 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.