Groundwork

The goal for this week’s rehearsal was to create a timeline for the performance. Making the timeline took forty-five minutes, but by the end we had mapped out the entire performance down to the minute.

I taped a giant strip of packing paper to the wall and then had a separate piece of paper for each performance section. We pinned the sections to the packing paper, moved them around, added sections and took some away until we came up with a sequence of events that we were all happy with. We now have something concrete to refer to.

In spite of some gentle grumbling from one of the participants about the amount of time we were taking over it, making this diagram was essential. We all needed to have a sense of the final piece, and now we are all able to see it visually.

This is what we came up with:

The group has agreed to do an improv game in the performance (I think this is really exciting and brave!), and we decided on Fortunately/Unfortunately. It’s the quickest and most concise, and everyone is very familiar with it.

Seven of the nine members will be doing monologues. Tom isn’t doing one because he feels that his stories are best told in the play he wrote, and Norman is participating in the group as a director rather than as a performer. He has said on numerous occasions that he is interested in helping others tell their stories rather than in telling his own.

About half of the participants have already written a monologue and the others will have theirs finished by the end of June. I’ve met with everyone privately at least once to work on these, and have been recording our conversations. I hope to create digital stories with each participant in addition to the monologues so that everyone can have a web presence.

We’re doing choral speaking with the poem that Fiona brought in, and then are ending our performance with the play. Tom is comfortable with doing an excerpt of it as a teaser, and we will have printed copies of the entire play for audience members to pick up on their way out.

The digital components of the performance will happen sporadically throughout the hour. These are: three of Barry’s poems, Edward’s digital story, and an interview between Norman and Barry.

It is going to be a whirlwind performance – and I can’t wait.

After making the timeline we still had fifteen minutes of rehearsal left, so I took everyone through a quick physical and vocal warm-up and then we practiced our choral speaking with Fiona’s poem.

When we were done going through it once Barry said, “That sounded pretty ragged.”

He wasn’t lying. I’m hoping we can rehearse it enough with everyone speaking in unison, but if it doesn’t work perhaps everyone can be given a couple lines to memorize. We’ll see what happens.

It sounded much better the second time we went through it because everyone had more confidence. We also added gestures, and the movement gave certain parts emphasis. I told the group that we are going to practice it every week until it’s perfect – or until we decide that it’s so “ragged” that we have to stop!

At the very end of rehearsal Katherine read her monologue for the first time, and it was spectacular. The group was really happy with it, and I think it got everyone excited about their own monologues.

My days at Baycrest have become very full because I’ve been meeting individually with each member of the group. This week I went in for an extra day to catch up with Tom and Nora. Being busy like this is amazing – all of these meetings have been incredibly interesting, and I have such a nice time sitting and talking.

We’re on a good track. My only concern now is to make sure that everyone in the group feels that they have a big enough contribution to make during the performance. There are two major factors. First, a few group members are unable to read because of vision impairments, so reading a monologue will not be possible. The other thing is that there are only six characters in the play, meaning that there are not enough roles for everyone. I already have some ideas, and I’m confident that everything will become clear very soon.

But of course, if anyone has ideas, feel free to comment!