A week ago we had our second official “playdate” to brainstorm for the original piece we are creating for next season. At this early stage, it is still termed “The Original Play” (TOP).
Nick has been doing a great job of trying to keep us focused on small-step goals during these sessions, and trying to keep our flow of thoughts organized. It’s so difficult to begin when you decide to create something from the ground up. What form will this piece take? What are we trying to accomplish? How do we even begin?
We started this session asking ourselves what things we have seen onstage that really excited us. We love cleverness in theatre – when something is accomplished in a surprising way. We like the idea of using research to avoid universal symbols – thinking outside the box to express things in new ways.
We also discussed different types of formats and storytelling techniques. We love ensemble. We feel true stories are disarming to an audiences, and discussed confession-type pieces. We like the idea of using movement to evoke a story; of communicating without words. Layers of stories. Vignettes that connect to each other in unexpected ways, stories that begin by finishing the story preceeding them. We would love to play with repetition – seeing the same moment more than once, with different meanings each time.
No matter what we’re discussing, we seem to always fall back into talking about content. We played with the idea of forced communities – a classroom, an office, a bus or train, a religion, an audience. How do we act in these situations and what does it say about us? We talked about the legacies we try to create for ourselves, and what happens when our legacy isn’t reading to anyone else. We love exploring shared experiences, of using “we” rather than “I.” Strongly connecting with our audience is something we feel we do well and is a thing that is very important in our work.
Content seems to be something most of us find easy to discuss, but we could talk about content for weeks on end and not get anywhere on structuring our ideas. Content can easily dictate structure, but structure can also form content. That’s a harder angle for us to come from, it seems, but maybe that’s why we need to keep pushing ourselves to do it. Frankly, this process is as scary as it is exciting for us, and sometimes we step back and say, what on earth are we doing? What are we trying to create, and to what purpose? Attempting to start this process from seemingly odd angles may be just the way to help us find that answer. Maybe we can sneak up on it from behind.
