Monday February 22, 2010 – Performance Team Rehearsal at the Wilsons
The Performance Team in a room, all together, for the first time this season. For me, the sense was that this was “rubber meets the road” day. We sat quietly, and I had a lot of thoughts rolling through my brain. It seemed that however much talking and planning and practical work there was to be done, beginning with Music was necessary, so I initiated a bit of circulating that took wing very nicely.
I felt like playing Brasil, and so we did.
From there, I began by addressing something that I thought needed to be said out loud. Even though I felt confident that it was understood by everyone already, actually articulating it felt necessary, in order to clear the way for what is in front of us. At the end of last season, and again when we first met to begin this season, a lot of thoughts, feelings and ideas had been expressed about the direction of the production, where we had come from, where we were, and where we wished to go. From this, we abandoned what had to some degree become “business as usual” in the way we work, going back to the fundamentals. Probably the most significant and important outcome of this was working together as the full circle, without the artificial segregation between the Performance Team and the House Team. In doing this, as Jaxie articulated it, we were going back to the Circle as the heart of the work, with the performance arising out of that work.
For myself, what had to be unambiguously articulated was that if we are going to move into a new direction, testing and incorporating the ideas that had been voiced, as well as whatever is going to come up as we move forward, the initiative and responsibility for this has to come from every member of the team. Put a little more bluntly – we’ve been working together for a long time, and so a bit of clunky candor is rarely a problem – no one should be waiting for me to read their mind and initiate their ideas for them, or to give them permission to voice an idea. Any level of passivity is never useful in this group, but at this stage even simple modesty or minor reticence is counterproductive. And the fact is that for 5 years I have been in the nominal drivers seat as far as the music goes, and it seemed important to me that the team hear from me directly that it is time to step up and step out.
That pretty much uncorked things, and the ideas flowed rather freely. Almost every aspect of the production was on the table, from the ramifications of the sound reinforcement question to ways of including the entire circle in performance to the ratio of hat to setlist, and everything in between.
One big question arose about how much we should be falling back on existing repertoire, versus writing/learning new material. The general wish is that we do not revert to spending all of our rehearsal time banging on repertoire, abandoning or setting aside the work we have been exploring with the larger group. In the end, the sense was that we realistically need to rely on a certain amount of existing repertoire at least at the beginning, but that we want this to be an evolving and dynamic season in which we add new material and let go of whatever is no longer relevant. Howard suggested that we might look at the season as a work in progress, with the aim of getting to where we would like to be for the opening of the Fall season, rather than putting the pressure on ourselves to get it all worked out and “right” before we open on April 15.
Working in this spirit, a list was compiled of existing material that we could have up and available on very short notice. We came up with:
- 49 Notes
- Eye of the Needle
- Voices of Ancient Children
- Batrachomyomachy
- Where is the Nurse?
- Wig Maker
- Twilight
- Lament
- Harmonium
- Trapiche
- Thrak
- Sigh and a Kiss
Thursday will be an all-in Tech Night at Fremont Abbey, working with a sound system to discover if it is something we wish to incorporate in this season’s concept.
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