On Thursday night, we had a very short rehearsal – about an hour and fifteen minutes – working on the Woods Colt monologue, the story of Zebbie Phillips, a woman who made her own way in the world.  It’s a first person story, and two terrific young women are cast in the role (many roles are double cast in this show, because lives intervene sometimes): Erin Watson and Lauren Turner.  We talked our way through the text, discussing the emotional arc of the work and ways to play that.  This practice is commonly known as "table work".  Few productions have the privilege of time in which to undertake it.

Lauren scored a terrific loan for the show yesterday from White County High School – a wrestling mat, to go under the aerial fabrics we’ve borrowed from Canopy Studios.  The mat was stored at the Rec department, and it took 8 prisoners to tote it out from storage and shove it in to the back of my little Chevy S-10 pickup.  This was rather a surprise to me, on account of the picture in my head of what I thought we were getting was those 2 x 5 folding tumbling mats I spent a lot of time on during YMCA day camp.  The ones that would fit in the back of a pick-up truck.  And not drag on the highway as you drive back home.  But the picture in my head didn’t match reality, so they taped some yellow caution tape to the back of the mat.

The guy who was clearly in charge of the prisoners was non-plussed by the specter of the mat hanging out of the back of my truck. "Are yer front wheels on the ground?"  I was okay. 

Unloading the mat was the first part of Friday night’s physical warm up, and it worked.  The night was warm and humid, and everyone who grabbed on to the straps around the mat got sweaty.  And then, in the movement rehearsal with Celeste Miller and Nicole Livieratos, we all got sweatier still.  As we were checking out, Mary Geidel said "I hear people talk about the humidity and the bugs, but for me it’s just like summer camp, I went to camp at Echoway (sp?) just up at the top of the Sautee valley and I loved it." 

The movement rehearsal was quite a marvel.  I’ve written before about the amazing instant cohesiveness of this group of people – whose numbers diminished a little today, on the last day that folks could legitimately pull out this week.  Not only were folks cohesive today, they were creative, and brave.  Physically brave.  I watched, and the company of performers took amazing risks leaping and climbing all over the bleachers, which are sort of a waterfall.  We created rocks for children to walk down – the backs of adults.  Folks rolled down the bleachers and leapt up them, and even climbed the wall. 

This was a night of both process and product, when a group of people who didn’t know they could do these kind of things made beautiful performances.  Even if Hope Holloway, our stage manager, and I were the only audience.  Jerzy Grotowski will tell you all it takes is one person to be an audience.  And there’s some Grotowski in the physicality of this work we’re making.

Tomorrow morning we  will resume with more movement work, more focused on creating mutually agreed upon landmarks in the movement, and adding singing.  That’s a task that will take 2 hours.  Time flies.  And tomorrow afternoon, so will people, in Shimi’s "stories in the air" workshop.

More on that, later.

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