Makers Diary: Rehearsal

Nikki could not make it to this morning’s rehearsal, so I decided that Richie and Debs should work on their five minute entrances. Debbie made some interesting progress on her entrance but it still needs to be longer. We all had a discussion about Richie’s entrance and Richard expressed a wish to enter as a woman, he wanted to try and ‘fool’ the audience so that they would be surprised when he undressed. He wanted to explore the drag angle of a female image. He suggested that he should do a choreographed routine to the song that he composed as his entrance. All three of us spent the morning trying out different scenarios and devising him a dance routine. He will need to work really hard on perfecting it if he is to fool the audience into thinking he is a woman; that will be the key to the success of his entrance. If he wants to puncture their expectations and assumptions he will need to find a convincing physicality and movement. He is going to need a dress and he has already tried some red ‘porn’ shoes that I had in my collection of red shoes. I rang Lorraine to ask her to bring a size 14 red dress to see if that will fit Rich, if not we may have to make him one.

Once Nikki arrived we tried putting the opening section together in a sequence. We tried doing the opening elements in several different orders but we ended up with: ‘She’ text-Rich-Debbie-Nikki-undressing-redressing-inscription. This was really successful and I felt very relieved as it is finally starting to take shape as a performance.

We rehearsed the moon text and the rape text for most of the afternoon. I am really concerned about their words; they need to be off book as soon as possible to start to really get to grips with the physical aspect of the sections. I am not convinced that they even look at their texts and notes between sessions! We had to make a few adjustments to the moon text just to express our ideas more clearly and to make it smoother and easier for Rich and Debs in their section of the text. Our previous blocking was a little to cumbersome and messy with the potential to go quite wrong and somebody get hurt. We have ironed that out and if they could just be more confident in their lines and blocking we could move on.

We are going to have to get on to the participatory elements as soon as possible now or we are going to run out of time and that is the heart of the work-the reason for all of the texts and inscription. I am definitely going to have to drop the other two texts for this round of performances because it is more than evident that we are just not going to have time and Nikki, Richie and Debs will not be able to get off book in time with even more to learn. We will get them prepared for Camden though.