The End of Term Four, part II

So we were off! Off to research, without ever really touching base with each other, on the monstrous theme of Looking for Love. Kamili (playwright and teacher from Philly) went to a Love and Intimacy workshop, Alexander (London) and Marta (Lisbon, Portugal) went to Soho to people-watch at bars and clubs, Meire (Brazil) joined them at some point, and the three American girls (Xan from Seattle, Naomi from Wisconsin, and I) went speed-dating.

Yes, speed-dating.

A word on speed-dating: it's the single most exhausting thing I've ever done, and I've done some pretty exhausting things. Three minutes each for TWENTY-TWO guys, most of whom were either lawyers, accountants, or air-conditioning salesmen. (I'm not kidding). There was also one guy who worked for the Ministry of Defense who completely stonewalled any innocent attempt to get more information through casual conversation. That was fun. And it's amazing how long or short three minutes can feel, depending on the guy. And it's amazing how fucking tired you get of telling people what you "do" - especially when you're there with two classmates, so they've already heard it once and are going to hear it again. I can't tell you what a breath of fresh air it was when "UK" plopped down next to me and challenged me to a thumb war. Now there's a three-minute date!

Anyway, it was a fascinating way to spend an evening, though I wasn't able to appreciate it until several days later. As soon as the event itself ended, I was so overwhelmed, exhausted, and headache-tipsy on white wine that I made my excuses and fled the scene. What fodder for theatre, though! How full of characters, rhythms, sound, and desire! I was pretty pumped about figuring out our piece based on what we'd observed and experienced - now it was just a matter of getting our entire group together so we could start brainstorming and rehearsing together.

This ended up being MUCH more difficult than it sounds. Because everyone had split off and done their own things for the research, we were all on different pages in terms of images we wanted to use, themes that we felt were important, or just structure or the overall point of the piece in general. What resulted was hours and hours of struggle, compounded by very different styles of working and very different personalities which often ended up in conflict. If I'd blogged during the process I'd be able to give more specifics on the ups and downs of the journey, but in retrospect it's pretty much a general wash of "hard".

So why "hard"? Well, first of all, creation is often hard. It seems to take a very specific chemistry within a group for a creation process to go well, and often it's a chemistry of unexpected ingredients. Regardless, that "good chemistry" was one that, for whatever reason, my group had trouble finding. When the time came to start building a performance after two weeks of "research", the going got tough. The good news is that as much as we were struggling, there was the feeling that we were struggling together. There were a couple of fall-outs between individuals, but it could've been much, MUCH worse. The most difficult thing seemed to be that we didn't really know what we wanted as a group, and consequently weren't able to band together under the collective banner of our cause. So we tried, and we failed; and we tried, and we failed. Over the course of two weeks of relatively intense rehearsal (during which we also had class, and I also was working my two-and-a-half jobs) we constructed, performed, and scrapped about four different pieces, all drawing from experiences or observations that at least one of us had made. Try as we might, though, overhaul as we might, it still just. wasn't. working.

This is the point at which one gets very pleased that there's a deadline. Our final public presentation had been set for Friday, 6th July, and I can't tell you how much we were all looking forward to the following weekend. The Wednesday before we had a showing for the teachers, in which everyone (all eight groups - four from the morning, four from the afternoon) were characteristically picked apart over the course of hours and hours of presentation. After everyone had gone, they told us to take ten minutes and then come back. The presentations had already run grossly overtime, and the afternoon groups (mine included) were supposed to get in several more hours of rehearsal that night, so I think we were all feeling impatient and more than a bit exhausted when we were finally regathered. It was then that Thomas lowered the boom: we weren't going to be performing on Friday. He and the other teachers had determined that we were not ready to perform, the pieces were not performance-worthy, and so they were pushing back the performance to Monday. MONDAY. Three extra days of rehearsal; three extra days of Hell. You can imagine the looks on all of our faces as we saw the paradisical vision of our weekend slipping away from us. We were all aware of the upside, of course - we recognised that we really did need more time to make something that was actually going to be good, and that with the weekend at our disposal, we actually had a shot at it. But at that point, the news felt like nothing more than a cold, hard, stone in my stomach.

to be continued....