On Tuesday, we pushed on with our conversation.  We remained within our world of dystopian steam-punk, but we branched off some in our brainstorming.  Sometimes we veered too far from our concept, and at other points our tangents inspired us to expand how we thought of our story.  We continued to speak about who Cassandra is and what kind of power she has.  Some thought she should be able to predict most any future event, while others felt it was important she be limited in the number of visions she was able to see.  We explored the rules of the world the play was going to live in.  How subversive is the meeting Cassandra is attending?  How does she get people to come, and what kind of event are they expecting?  What does the crowd they think of her and her eccentricities?  Later in the day, we began to explore the possibility that the meeting was actually not some kind of subversive underground meeting, but a scheduled radio broadcast.  This was a significant departure from what we’d been working on, but the group decided to go with it.  The meeting became a group gathered to listen to an entertainment radio program that began with a portion of propaganda.  We talked about how, instead of being the organizer of a meeting, Cassandra might be a technician who attempts to fix the radio when the scheduled broadcast cuts out.  She ends up taking the opportunity provided by the malfunction to speak about her message of moving up to the surface, or perhaps she causes the radio to cut out in order to speak to the audience.  This option seemed more dynamic and interesting to us, so we abandoned our previous idea and pushed ahead with this new one.

On Wednesday morning, we continued to expand on the idea that this meeting is actually a radio broadcast.  Early in the day, we were given a challenge during which we were asked to write what might occur during the broadcast from different perspectives.  Some wrote from Cassandra’s perspective, and others wrote from the crowd’s.  We created an array of stylistically different material that helped us to bring to life what we’d been discussing.  We performed what we created for each other and offered up the ideas the material inspired in us.  We then began to ask, “who makes up the audience?”  Should we focus exclusively on the relationship between Cassandra and “the crowd”, or shall we explore the individual characters that make up the crowd?  We decided to individuate the crowd, and our conversation began to focus on who these people might be.  We made the choice to stay within Cassandra’s story and to include characters she has some kind of relationship with.   After discussing possible options for a bit, Jenny asked us to do an improv as characters she chose for us.  Our improv began at the start of the radio broadcast and continued as the broadcast is interrupted.  The performance was hardly polished, but it allowed us to get an initial glimpse of how these characters might be brought to life and to relate with each other.  Afterwards, we spoke about some of the potential relationship dynamics that the improv inspired us to think about.  By the end of the day, it seemed that this new direction had really been building some momentum.