theatre of poetry, passion and philosophy
I’ve finally succumbed to the Great Move to Thesis (theme for WordPress). I paid the money, and so far so good, it is proving relatively easy to manipulate at my simple-headed level.
Still haven’t figured out why the logo is not showing up in the header, but that will happen. Meantime, if you have any suggestions, I’d be more than happy to hear them!
After all I said yesterday about the benefits of getting up on one’s feet to rehearse, today was another story…
I’d booked the room in the Michie Building, the one that is undergoing major renovations at the moment, and arrived in good time to get hold of Security to let me in, and warm up properly, get myself focused and ready. Then I realised there was no air-conditioning in the building.
I did persevere for about half an hour, but I was truly melting away. While that might be a good thing – I could do with losing a few kilos, nevertheless it meant I was becoming even less focused by the minute, and more distressed, so I made my way to the library and booked a study room, well away from other booked study rooms.
Lauren and I made contact at the given hour, but Angela is still having trouble with her settings. She can hear us, but we can’t hear her. We decided to go ahead, working on the second half of the play.
I did try to keep the volume down, but it didn’t take long for a librarian to come knocking, explaining that the rooms were not sound-proof. So I tried even harder, bringing my volume down to barely voiced, while trying to keep my throat open and relaxed at the same time as working really hard to allow the passion and the pain, the fun and the frivolity to be expressed.
The result was a very intense experience, with some surprising revelations to me, and to our director Angela. Wow. Who would have thought!
I took a photo of the screen, it’s kind of weird, cute and surreal all at once.
I know people are fascinated by the fact that we are rehearsing online. It’s kind of cool, using the latest technology, and it’s totally amazing that we can do it at all, thanks to that technology. It does have its challenges, however.
The first, obvious one, is finding a time when we are all up and about, as there is a 16 hour time difference between Brisbane, Queensland, Australia and Phoenix, Arizona, USA. We’ve found our ‘window of opportunity’ is 6.30 pm in Phoenix, which is 11.30 am in Brisbane the following day.
The next challenge is to resist the temptation to sit in front of the computer screen, reading the text, or talking face to face, chatting about this that and the other – all relevant to the production of course, but it’s not really rehearsing.
Rehearsing, for me, is trying stuff out, on my feet. It involves moving about in the room, exploring the different surprising moments that occur when I move in a different way, or to a different space. I am much more responsive to my scene partner if I am physically active.
So I am delighted to report that today, Lauren and I both abandoned our chairs, and started leaping about, me in the seminar room on the sixth floor of the Michie Building at UQ, St Lucia, and Lauren in her tiny work room in her home in Phoenix. We only worked on about five pages of text, but boy oh boy! What a Difference!
We are alive.