On the 8th we had a rehearsal at one of the “new” cast’s house and it turns out that she is not so new. Kristin Mochnick is one of the original casts of “Voices” and it turns out that I met her already a few times.
I met a few other people whose names I’m afraid I forgot, but I will have plenty of time to practice their real names as well as their new adopted Russian names during rehearsals and during the shoot.
The cast is pretty big this time and I think this new draft will be amazing. After the read through we watched a short scene of the movie “Blood Wedding.” Cindy is finding inspiration from this film for our documentary.
Since I don’t have any money to spend on video rentals, I’m hoping to snag this copy from Cindy for a couple days before we shoot, so I can see the entire film.
The revisions to this piece have been harrowing. I need at least ten hours at a time to work on it. I just finished about 2/3 of it, and I’m very happy with how it’s changing. Dramatizing some stories in the monologue, and finding a way to do so while paying respect to what I know of the real person’s experience.
I had to immerse myself in what already works about the piece, including the material never used before, used but then discarded, or material I had heard so often that I forgot the real meaning behind it.
Trying not to think about staging while I wrote it, I couldn’t get rid of the admonishing acknowledgement from the Director side of my brain: this will require completely different staging than we’ve ever done before.
This is yet another place in the journey where I am happy that I trust my cast.
So now we have true character interaction and story arcs.
But on my walk/chai break, I realized the first hurdle we’ll have to overcome in the storytelling transition to video. The purpose of the video is to give a demonstration of how the piece works onstage. Strange concept, I know. We’re actually creating the piece in a heightened rehearsal area, just to make things more exciting. Well, here is our first hurdle: the piece tells many stories at once, in different locations. Onstage (live) it works because you just immediately accept that if Person A (Stage Left) is talking and then we move to Person B (Stage Right), well, it’s theater and clearly we are in another place and picking up Person’s B story. When orchestrated correctly, the audience will follow you into different locales. If we can’t see the whole stage when that transition happens, will the transition get muddy? Do we need to always have that transition visible (Both Person A & Person B in the frame when they toss the baton back and forth)?
Question to the Production Team. Let’s see what they think.
Last year, at the October performance I knitted an endless scarf that was over 10 feet long at the end of the run. But the scarf was made out of some expensive yarn and for me to continue I needed something that wouldn’t affect my bank account. Yarns are not cheap and so I decided to look for some at thrift stores and at the 99 c store.
Since I couldn’t find anything that I liked and anything that would fit my budget if I was to knit something 100 feet long, I posted an inquiry for free yarn on bigcheap, on freecycle and on Hollywood-Happy-Hour.
Within a couple of days, I picked up one big box of yarn from an artist in Silver Lake and another big bag from Kristina Wong, an actress who knitted during one of her own stage productions.
And the yarn was beautiful! All kinds of colors, textures, thicknesses and types. I decided to undo the original Chornobyl scarf and use the expensive yarn to make a scarf for myself this winter. And I was looking forward to starting a new one for VOICES from this donated batch.
So with the New Year starting, I’d like to think of the scarf as a symbol for a New Beginning.
Happy New Year to all! May your dreams come true! Be happy, healthy and kind!