I love rehearsal, it’s silly to say it, yet I do. Hard to believe it at times especially from my actors’ side of things. Rehearsal is a ritual,a ceremony like no other that I know of. The practice of it defines who you are as a teaching -artist.
Finding your other selves through the doorways of the theater,breaking into song, breaking into dance, jumping into character, characters speaking through your voice, living in your bones, living in the house of your soul, flexing your muscles.
Rehearsal can be such a magical place. It is a mystical idea filled with moments that arrive with such brightness. Moments that take the planned bits and pieces adding them up and creating an entrance, silence, a music cue building to a correctness. Practicing the play is a ceremony filled with traditions and customs.
The actors arriving is greatest gift of all. From out of the snap of the opening clap, actors moving through space I’d watch and talk, and guide the energy taking note of focus,tempo and speed. From this chaos and rhythm my craft would kick in. Gathering the flow, paying attention to the actors claiming the stage as theirs to own and to share with their fellows. Rehearsal has begun. Often the most important part of my teaching day. The actors arrive.The room centers within me,filling me with the gift of today and the expectation to move forward.
PLAY PRACTICE is a very real place no matter the room. Here was my best self, doing my best work I could muster. It was also the opposite. My most loathsome self, confusing, pissed off and immeasurably hungry in search of sugar products and coffee. Out in the seats I would find half-filled cups of cold coffee. If I knew they were from earlier that day,they were fair game.
Alas, a drug is a drug. Learn the ones to avoid.I still have rehearsal dreams,vivid weird shape shifting,especially since I started working on this. Much of this will bounce around because one thing leads to another. In my dream space while sleeping, I would find the answer to questions that I didn’t even know I was asking. I find notebooks of all sorts of shapes and sizes,bound in leather,bound with duct tape, plain, fancy. They reveal several things, picking one up opens the window to the past, a thought stopped in time, the original text from this project or that.
Dialogue notes, to do lists mixed with stage directions, music cues, light cues, hand written hieroglyphics revealing story.
I found this from a notebook from 2011 working on the production of Alison Grimm.....
These are my fears...... what can I control?
Print script.
Print schedule
Underneath it was written: Must learn from life and tell us that story by showing us your journey.
nobody believes you she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see-she hit her head.
She’s in another.... dimension?
an altered state...
Commentaires