In some other comment, Marc has mentioned the handbook he put together for his GHP students. I’ve been reading through it, it’s more like a textbook!, and beginning to work with him to edit it into a web-based document for our use. The more I read, the more excited I get about our potential as a theatre collaborative.
Marc is right: I’ve been trying to tame him, to keep from scarying anyone off, because I’m very excited by what I’m reading and envisioning for this group, and I don’t want anyone to be scared off. The people with whom I worked in Mame are totally capable of tackling some very scary stuff, but they may not realize it. Read Art & Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, or The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, by Twyla Tharp. The first is short and bracing; the second is more involved and process-focused. Both deal with the terror of creating the thing that is not. (You’re going to hear that phrase a lot from me.)
I know that the post which has generated the most comments is the one where we’re all suggesting scripts we’d like to do, but I have to be honest: I would be perfectly happy if we worked on nothing but our craft for a year, just exploring performance and how to get there, before bursting forth with a glorious production next spring. I would hate to see us get bogged down right away in calendars/schedules/rights/costumes/venues/money before we actually learn how to do deliberately what we achieved accidentally in Mame.
Or am I out of touch with what everyone else expects us to do?
I would have to agree that we should all know what we are doing before we jump into the fire and have a performance before we are ready. I know I’m alittle out of the loop for the moment, but what happened with Mame was amazing, not to say that the cast wasn’t up to it, there were just alot of things that happened….and Gina and myself were only there 2 or 3 weeks. It was a great performance, but I would hate to take another chance like that.
I think you are right in so many ways Dale. I think if we get together and just work on stuff we can understand where everyone is coming from and what they are willing to bring to this group. I dont think that we are ready to go into this full steam right now. There is a lot of things that go into putting on a show that no one thinks about. By saying this I truly hope that people dont take it the wrong way. I think that if we work hard we could do anything, but to make things easy and fun that takes time. I hope all follow everything I am saying. 🙂
I second (third?) the thought that we don’t have to dive right into a production. Why don’t we expand the scripts comment string to include any sort of material, literary or not, which we find compelling, which we might want to grapple with through various acting processes (for example, Herbert Blau and his group KRAKEN, my teachers and heroes, did a piece called The Donner Party–Its Crossing, using first-person historical accounts and other primary source materials)? Poetry, of course, always works well. Or any kind of pre-occupation. As far as actor training goes, it depends on what we’re interested in. Perhaps you want to create a more physically baroque and vocally extreme tool box. Any material will serve as a starting point; it can be a traditional scene, realistic in style or not, or it can be anything, really.
A year of developmental stuff before we do a production? I can only imagine taking a step like that if you guys want to develop craft or something crazy like that.
In a recent class, we were broken into small groups to quickly (5 minutes) create our interpretations of a excerpt from The Mikado. Not only was it immensely enjoyable to do the creating, it was also fascinating to see the huge range of interpretations spring forth from the same material. Here is what we worked with:
To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock
In a pestilential prison with a life-long lock
Awaiting the sensation of a short sharp shock
From a cheap & chippy chopper on a big black block
From a cheap & chippy chopper on a big black block
Could we not combine both concepts by playing not with entire scripts, but instead using our script list on the other posting as a source for doing scene work? By deliberately taking a scene out of context, you could wind up producing some really interesting takes on material meant to work another way.