Another Day, Another Post

Hey Everyone,

We've made it to Sunday! I remember last Sunday we had our preliminary meeting and then a day off on Monday before we started working on our feet on Tuesday. Everyone felt so restless on Monday and we all found ourselves brainstorming ourselves out of our minds with ideas, wanting to sprint into action...now we all realize we'll really need these Mondays to rest.

Today we're going to run the string of scenes we've worked through this week. Starting with Act II.i and finishing with Act III.iii. We will then begin tremendous work on I.ii, in which there is a ton of exposition, movement, puppetry and hypnosis. We don't have all of our props and costumes to explore with yet, but we need to tablework through this scene more thoroughly and mark out much of the movement. Because we have limited time in the venue in Edinburgh, we're shaving as much of the exposition as we can and replacing it with movement phrases so that the background to the story is still clear. This is a challenge. I think we've made some good decisions thus far, though.

Yesterday we polished up the Harpy, which is running very smoothly. It's such a force of power now that the thoughts are flowing and building on top of each other. The movement also corresponds directly with what the piece is saying, which is also proving to be very effective. We worked through the scene that surrounds the harpy yesterday and worked transitions in and out of the harpy, which are still tricky without basic costumes to work with. We'll see how the timing plays out once we've gone prop shopping.

Felix, our faculty advisor from the first show, came in to work with us yesterday. We showed him the physicality we found in II.ii, the drunk scene, and asked him to help us with specific transitions that we were only doing sloppily. He cleaned them right up...he really is magical. When we showed him the harpy, he said something in his dear Russian accent along the lines of, "it's good, not need my help." We're feeling confident with Felix's watchful eyes supporting us. He also gave us food for thought in how each character can have a "stock" movement, meaning if you tighten one area of your body and let the other muscles relax, you notice how that tight muscle changes and effects the movement of your body as a whole and creates a character. We found that if we tighten our butts, we have a really great Trinculo (the jester) walk. ...Try that one out at home. :P

I started editing the promo video yesterday. If I can get that up in the next few days I will see about some harpy footage. It will be brief harpy footage if I get it up because I want those of you who see the show to still experience an element of surprise.

We lost Dana's promo video footage - having the camera on while we weren't shooting her and having it off while we were - but we're reshooting her work today and will have that to throw into the mix, which will be quite helpful as far as editing the story goes.

Alright. That's that. Thanks for reading. For commenting. For making me feel like this is worth my time. :P ...I would do it anyway...I like it.

J x