We’re two weeks into rehearsals, and the show is on its feet.  As Teri said last week, our process is fluid and sometimes we don’t know the answers.  It’s going great.  Something Meg said during table work our first day was very comforting to me, and I’m sure I’m paraphrasing: “Where you are now with what you know now.”

Something else that struck me our first day was how much immediacy I felt to this ancient story.  Granted, our play is set firmly in the present, which helps.  But I wondered in this story and in the need to tell it, just how similar our world must be to the ancient Greeks.  What would it have been like to see this and feel this in the open of a Mediterranean amphitheatre?  Obviously, we’ve come a long way in the areas of technology, industry, etc.  But how much have we changed?  I feel like we must feel the same.  Being people must feel the same as it felt to be people thousands of years ago.  Cultures have changed and come and gone, but people are still feeling the same things, making the same choices.  It was all very cyclical for me, I felt tied into something.  That sounds like hippie talk, but what are ya gonna do?  Anne Bogart (SITI Company), postulates that “our charge is to receive tradition and utilize the containers we inherit by filling them with our own wakefulness” (emphasis added).  Something something something about repeating history if we don’t learn from it…

 Second week we worked more specifically into beats.  In the show I play a soldier, Stuart.  Finding the military posture and stance and putting it my body has been something of a challenge.  I have no military background other than a couple of years of ballet, which isn’t quite the same.  But the gestures, the presence, the active quality of it is becoming easier and easier to access, and at times muscle memory is even starting to jump through.  We did fight choreography over a day or two.  Won’t give away too much, other than to say it continued to develop my kinesthetic connection, and through that, a more instinctual understanding of my actions.  Apologies for being Quoty McQuoterson, but something by Uta Hagen really clicked with me while we were working this week, “…I must remind myself that the voice and speech, the soul and the mind, are not separate from the body but originate from it, emanate through it.”  Going back to another Greek (Plotinus), “We are not separate from Spirit, we are in it.”  This week was all about body-mind for me.  The work goes on.

 We did our first run for the designers on Friday, and that went smashing.  We are still working instinctually through the show, and I look forward to continuing the process.  See you all in the theatre.

W