"Everything's as if we never said goodbye"

Hedva, Lisa, and Maria hard at work on our devised Turbulence Festival work, One May Lead to Another.

It’s a fortnight into the third term, and the day after the conclusion of my Geektastic week. Things are moving steadily (albeit slowly) along for the festival piece, One May Lead to Another. My company members are great. They really care about the work, and definitely want to not only do this production, but do it well. For the first time in a while it’s like I’m focused on actually working to create something, and that feels good. Not that I wasn’t trying to create something last term, or even during RMO necessarily, but there’s something about actually building a piece of theatre that is satisfying in a very different way than cobbling together certain pieces of experimentation, (Stage Two) or conducting and analyzing research (RMO). It feels more propelling than either of those things, and it’s something I’ve missed for a while now←I realize as I write that, the last time I performed in a play was in May of last year (Oh my God, it has been a YEAR?! {*Succumbs to anxiety attack*}), and the last time I did a reading was in September. That’s a long time to be out of the game, silent. I’m happy to be finally diving back in.

Despite this renewed sense of theatrical creativity now eeking out of my every pore (it’s pretty disgusting, actually) I’m still making a point of filling my life with a million other little things. This is pretty typical of me, and I hope I can make a point of carving out some time to really follow through with the work that I’m setting out to do and that I want to do for this piece. This weekend I’ll be going for my traditional weekend jog with Max, getting my haircut (for the first time in months—literally, the last time I had a trim was on September 30th, the day I left for the UK the first time), seeing my course tutor in a performance, catching Handa’s Hen at the Little Angel Theatre (a perk from my puppetry class), and seeing The Spy Who Loved Me at the BFI. There’s gotta be an hour in there somewhere when I can read some Stanislavski. Right?

"And now we invite you to relax, let us pull up a chair as the dining room proudly presents - your dinner!"

Word on the festival proposals came through yesterday. Out of the three my name had been attached to, the one I was least involved in regarding development and the drawing up of the proposal was of course the one that went through. That's life, eh? Doesn't matter, as the company at hand I'll be working with include the ever fabulous creative producer, Maria, and my friend and fellow performing cohort, Lisa, both of whom went through Stage 2 with me, and both of whom I thoroughly enjoy working with in a devising process and on a personal level. The piece has the distinction being the only site-specific offering at this point (it was the only one pitched as such, though others may develop into site-specific work if space is an issue, or if they head in that direction), and revolves around the dramatic repercussions of what can happen over dinner. What will those repercussions be? What space will we finally end up in? What will we cook up for this less-than metaphorical dinner? Who knows. All of these questions will be discovered in the devising process, and I'll tell you when and what we find (without giving too much away, mind). Some of the personal goals I'm setting for myself for this project are the following:

• To have nothing to do with the actual act of cooking the meal (though I am ready and willing to make cocktails)
• To have an ambient soundtrack, full of jazz standards ranging from the 1930s-1950s in recording
• To have Maria sing a song in a very lounge acty kind of way (she does this often on her own without prompting, and it would be lovely to tap into such a natural gift)
• To create a distinct, interesting, slightly absurdist character for the show. Think Gormenghast.

The last one is a big deal to me, as we haven't really looked at character development and it's something I'm interested in returning to for the sake of my own training and my own sense of what I want my work to be about. Since the course is so focused on teaching us how to work in a devising process with other practitioners with different skill sets, some of our own skill sets get put down or brushed aside for the sake of just creating a "whole" piece of theatre. I feel like I've done a lot of things, but if you flat out asked me if I felt I spent a lot of time actually acting (or at least what I define as "acting") then I'd have to answer you, "No." I understand dramaturgy even more than before I came here, and certain working methodologies have been introduced to me, so that's great. But fine tuning my specific craft? No. No that hasn't happened. So I'm going to try to take this opportunity to make something that really calls on my discipline as an actor AND a deviser. It won't be a French candlestick but it'll be something.