These last three days have brought us a much needed shift in how we work.  As we approach the presentation of our work, the lovely freedom we’ve had to enjoy the process has crashed into the reality that we need to have some semblance of a finished product by Saturday at two o’clock.  Surprisingly, this has been a very very good thing.

 
The process indicative of this workshop has been, before Wednesday, marathon discussions. We talked about what we thought characters would and would not do.  We talked about how imagery while avoiding creating specifics.  We talked about theme.  We talked about what the audience would think.  We talked about the merits of making it a comedy.  We talked and talked and talked like the Phidippides of theatre!   Ideas (mine and other people’s) weren’t shot down so much as they’re quickly picked apart (by me as well as other people’s);  picked and discarded many potential concepts before they had a chance to ripen.  As a group we have a penchant for finding ways to spin in the mud.  What is the balance between supporting each other and following tangents?

The personal effect of this type of process was exhaustion.  Despite usually going to bed optimistically, I sometimes woke up dreading the day.

These past three days have seen a breakthrough from that.  We’ve moved forward.  Since Wednesday, we’ve gone back and forth between two types of processes:

The first, more familiar to Iris, (process A) was to create theatrical moments.  After spending too many days in discussion that seemed to drag us backwards, we still were able to put together beautiful, insightful and moving theatrical moments of dance and song minutes.  We let go of our heads and began creating with necessary recklessness. Creating without thinking allowed dreamtime and magical realism to seeping into the play.  At one point, Electra is instructed to sing a song.   Dreamtime starts as she steps away from he microphone as her voice continues to sing.  She acts out a realization and then, as dreamtimes comes to a close, she returns to her microphone, mournfully finishing her song.  In less than a half hour each, we staged a series of these moments:  Childhood friends being reunited, an earthquake, a leader crawling from his cocoon, a pack of wolves disarms a criminal, the Greek chorus even appears at one point. 

The other process we’ve used in these past three days, process B, was how we wrote the script.  We sit around a table or in the living room or in a coffee shop or in a park or anywhere with internet.  Jenny gives us assignments, scenes to write.  Then she plugs them into the script.  Later we modified it, so that the script was on a google doc that we all had access too.  Each of us agreed to let anyone go in and edit their work. 

Perhaps I’m the only one with an ego so susceptible to bruising, but this process frees me from the much of the destructive attachment to what I write.  I still have the joy of playing with the characters, creating their voices and actions and imagining their stakes.  But I am freed from fearing that I’m the one dragging down the overall quality of the piece, as well as the pressure of feeling I’ve been instrumental to its success.  Even the scenes that I started are edited by at least one other member of the group.  We had 10 hands working out the kinks on one script, trusting each other’s knowledge in the overall vision enough to tend to each moment and make it as good as it can be. 

We’ve gone back and forth between processes A and process B. 

Wednesday
1:00 to 6:00 – process B
7:00 to 9:30 – process A (with Miriam White, who is amazing.)

Thursday
12:00 to 3:00 – process B
3:00 to 5:30 – script reading (we had SOMETHING… but we needed a lot more)

Friday
10:30 to 7:00 – process B (and some more in the evening)

Okay, so we did more process B, but that’s because we need a script.  But give me a break.  We discovered process A earlier and we have a reading tomorrow.  Which reminds me…


We have a reading tomorrow?!!?!

The optimist in me thinks we have a concept with great potential, but lacked the time to make it complete.  The pessimist in me worries that character driven drama simply can’t be build by consensus.   For the moment, I’m leaning toward optimist.  I’d sooner believe I’m in capable of doing something than accepting that it can’t be done.  That and our ideas are good.  Expressing them has been a challenge.

In the meantime, I’m reminding my worries that failure is the greatest teacher.  We have the courage to show up.  We’ve created moments of beauty and ideas of merit.   We’ve created a world with care to detail and thought to our message.  No matter how the script looks, these past weeks we’ve come together and done something.  It has been a rare and pure opportunity for which I am already grateful.