Acting and Workshop

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. Since I'm a state employee, I have the day off, and I plan to use it to its fullest extent. Whatever that might be. At the moment it means taking the chance to work on a project I've been meaning to get to and updating you on my life.

Last Wednesday, I auditioned for the Anatomy Collective's spring show, The Prometheus Myth, which is a movement/puppetry-based show in development around, well, the Prometheus myth. It was one of the most fun auditions I've had in a while and as such would have been worth going to in and of itself. I got a call from them on Saturday, and they told me that I've been cast. I'm looking forward to it. The show looks to be great fun, and the people doing it are neat, so I'm stoked. First rehearsal is on Wednesday.

My Strange Dreams...
The Strange Dreams of Nobody in Particular is my contribution to Tantalus's summer. I've been promising for a while that I'd talk about it here, but have been avoiding it because I'm not really sure where to begin. So I figured I'd just choose a place now and get it all out. Sorry for the information dump.

Strange Dreams...is going to be a serial show to be performed in its complete form over the run of a weekend. So Thursday will be one part, Friday will be the second, Saturday will be the third. The complete version will take a mosaic narrative structure, which will mean that an audience member can conceivably take in only one night and still leave feeling as though she has seen a complete show, or she can see all three nights and see a larger, richer show. Each show is like the tiles in a mosaic: each can stand on its own as a simple thing of beauty, but taken as a whole, they fit together as a large and intricate story.

At its core, Strange Dreams... is about storytelling and the simple type of theatrical magic that comes with listening to a good story told well. Spectacle in this piece will be minimal and largely peripheral, and the audience will be asked to use their imaginations to a degree not often asked of a modern, movie-going audience.

Since I've never created a show of this type, and since I've never seen a work of serial theatre, this piece poses several major challenges. Marketting is one of them. How to get an audience to come back several nights in a row? The other big problem is structuring the shows so that they can both stand alone and fit together.

I didn't know how to do this, so for the past month and a half, I've been in workshop with Tantalus folks and some trusted friends, exploring the art of storytelling and developing ways to tell a large story using several smaller stories. In the past two weeks, we took the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and wrote stories around the negative space of Orpheus and Eurydice. Some of these stories intersected directly with Orpheus and Eurydice's story, some were far reaching, but related to the story. The idea was to use the negative space surrounding Orpheus and Eurydice to paint a picture of the myth itself. We played with this method for two weeks and then applied a structure, based in a nine-card tarot reading, to the whole thing. The first row of the nine cards dealt with the past. The second with the person that the reading is being done for. The third is the future.

We assembled stories in this way, wrote a few new ones and adapted old ones to better fit the tarot structure. On Thursday, we presented the findings of the workshop to some close and trusted friends in the form of the nine-story telling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I have to say, I was impressed with what we created. The workshop presentation wasn't the show we're going to perform, but it was an impressive piece of theatre in itself. From the comments my friends made and from their suggestions, I've learned a great deal about how we need to approach Strange Dreams... in order for it to work. We still have miles to go before we can even think of sleeping, but it was a very successful workshop and for the first time in a while, I'm absolutely confident that Strange Dreams... is going to be an amazing show.

Finally, what this workshop has renewed in me is the sense that there really isn't any excuse for bad theatre anymore. The show we presented at the workshop was put together in two weeks with no script, no costumes, no props, no money expended, just five people working hard and playing with their imaginations, and what we ended up with was an hour-long show I'd be proud to present at a festival. Given that, I can think of no excuse for creating a bad show. Just something to chew on for a while.

PS...
If there's anyone reading who is skilled in brazing metals and would be willing to share some of that knowledge with me firsthand, please let me know. I'm at a bit of a loss with a project I'm working on at present. Thanks.