Full Team Circle and Performance Team Rehearsal

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday September 18, 2010 – Full Team Circle and Performance Team Rehearsal

For me, this was a big day.

Last season we saw that there was a need for the Tuning the Air company to spend more time working together in the circle. We were opening up the show to more improvisation, and more intentional hazard. But we had settled into small working groups – the Performance Team, the House Circle, Sgt Bones, etc – and were not making the opportunities for all of us to sit in the circle and work together. There were times when I got together with the House Team on guitars (this morphed into the Music Lab), and of course there was the Monthly Open Circle where we could all take part. But the open circle is geared for beginners, and the music lab is specifically “educational”. So we changed the weekly schedule to include 90 minutes on Saturday morning for the whole team. We invited Frank to take charge of these sessions, so that the entire team (myself included) could focus on the work. In this way, Alexander Technique became the unifying theme for the season, with a specific focus on breath and breathing. Sandra Bain Cushman came into town for a week of intensive work, that mirrored and amplified what we were doing with Frank.

We made a lot of changes last season, so it is difficult to say precisely what was responsible for the huge qualitative shift that occurred, but I feel very strongly that it all sprang from the foundation of this work together.

This year as we began the pre-preparation for the new season, the question of what it takes to be on the performance team arose on a number of occastions. In our 5 years we have lost a number of players to normal attrition and necessity, and we have added a few players as well. There are certainly quantifiable standards and requirements that we could enumerate; but the truth is that no one currently on the performance team has absolute command of everything that might appear on that list. Clearly, it is not a matter of checking off items on a list of skills.

In fact – and this is the tricky bit – skill is not sufficient. There will never be a Tuning the Air audition. There is something else. For myself, I always know when someone is ready to be on the team – I can’t explain it, and it is always impossible to justify/rationalize on the basis of qualitative standards.

The x-factor is that it really comes down to “what does Tuning the Air need?”

Parenthetically, in every case I have known when a player is leaving the performance team, because I have seen that in fact they have already left. I was “taken by surprise” only once, and frankly that was because I really, really didn’t want to see what I was seeing; active denial – not a useful quality, but a human one I suppose.

So, in discussing the question of what it takes to be on the performance team with the Tuning the Air Artistic Director, Music Director and Managing Director, I came to the conclusion that holding the question is better than sitting down and trying to answer it. It is something that needs to be seen, rather than enumerated. Holding the question is active. The decision, then, was to dedicate the full company portion of the Saturday morning rehearsal to working together at the highest musical level we can, giving everyone who wishes the opportunity to see themselves in that circumstance, and hopefully to recognized the qualities required, as well as the skills.

We know how to do this. It is not a class. I do not have a pile of exercises that will unfold to reveal the answers. It is not for me or anyone else to “teach”.

So, without any preconceived plan, we set ourselves up in the circle, and sat for a few minutes in silence. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jaxie’s hands move to her guitar. We all responded by quietly bringing ourselves to a place of readiness and responsiveness. She played a note and passed it across the circle. Forty-five minutes later, the improvisation came to its completion. Fantastic.

Compared to that, the Performance Team rehearsal that followed was mundane. Necessary, and very good work done on a very practical level. I actually love this part of the process.

We dove into Vroom once more. I am substantially off-book at this point. There are 3 parts that I still use the score for, but it is more of a security blanket than a necessity. Two of the sections are short, rhythmically eccentric lines that simply need a bit of drilling. This rehearsal served that purpose for one of them, and a little practice before Monday should take care of the other. Then there is one long but technically very easy passage that simply needs memorization. This should also be possible before Monday. The primary accomplishment of this rehearsal was that we reached a full-group understanding of the piece. A very clear sense that we have turned the corner from hacking through the parts to addressing the Music.

Ran The Children’s Hour, A Day In The Life and Space Zombies! From Outer Space!, taking a few moments as necessary to address problem areas. The rehearsal ended with a little more R&D on Holzt’s Neptune, which we are chomping at the bit to get up and running.