Just another normal weekend

Classes today.  This means Faustus and I really want to get the ambush scene sorted out for good and all.

Also got some of the Malfi cast coming in to work on a couple of specific scenes.

Antigone is built and looks great.  Now it just needs some paintwork applies - which I'll deal with today as well.

9am tomorrow sees the Antigone crew sorting out the technical elements - i.e the background projections (sample below) and the sound and light cues.  10am cast arrives and we test out costumes and makeup under said lights and they get their dress rehearsal.

2pm tomorrow I attend a Twelfth Night run.

When that finishes, need to finalise any costume issues at home.

Quite looking forward to all this.  It feels productive.

Maria is a bitch and other thoughts on characterisation

Twelfth Night rehearsal today.  We're into the last three weeks now so things are moving along pretty swiftly at this stage.  We're mostly over the line-learning agony hump.  We're mostly over the "urk, which entrance is this one?" issues.  We're mostly over the mechanical problems of remembering to bring stuff on and take it off.

In short (and I can only speak for myself - I've got no idea how anyone else approaches this), I've suddenly got room to think about Maria.

Now the thing is, I love playing her.  And when I'm playing her, I love her.  I love her sass, her bossiness and her single-minded determination to marry Sir Toby and make Malvolio into a laughing stock.

If I met the woman, I'd want to smack her.  Hard.  She's a lot of things I actively dislike and work quite hard to avoid.

One of the big games we all play with drama is the taking on of character.  It is also one of the hardest lessons that any performer learns.  You are not the character.  You are just the vehicle allowing the character to live.

Case in point.  A cast member yesterday at my Faustus rehearsal is playing a cardinal.  She hates it.  She hates feeling she's a laughing-stock.  She hates being smug and pompous and being made a fool of by Faustus and Mephistopheles. 

She is still at the stage of feeling that a character with negative qualities (perceived or otherwise) is a reflection of her.  We all do it.  Some actors never really move away from that and have real difficulty playing unsympathetic characters.  The key thing is, that if you can do it, a huge barrier falls away.

Once you're made that leap from "I am the character" to "I am portraying the character" a whole world opens up.  The freedom is immense.  You can find your inner clown.  You can use all the negative, non-permissible things you spend your whole real life denying.  Freedom.

This is why I love performing so much.

Susurration

Susurration.

One of my favourite words.  I love the way it describes so exactly that level of sound which is just ignorable (probably not a word) for a precise length of time before it bores into your skull and drives you mad.

This at least is how I apply it.

It's a great word for adventures, setting up an impending uneasiness as a strange not-quite-identifiable sound builds around a party.

It's also grounds for homicide.

I had a rehearsal today with a full cast.  Practically unheard of.  Most excellent.  We got to run two long and complex scenes from Faustus with all the relevant bodies for once.  Except that our rehearsal space is not large.  Pack it with a cast of 22 plus an additional 5 crew and a couple of bods just waiting for their own session and you have susurration in spades.

The problem is that nobody really means to be making a lot of noise and individually, they're not.  It seems unreasonable to keep asking for deadly silence so I can hear the cast.  So I try to ignore it.  I fail.  I yell.  I look at the sea of offended faces all thinking "Well, I don't know why she's screaming at me, I wasn't talking".  I apologise.

10 minutes pass and the pattern repeats.  For two hours. 

Someone grant me tin ears.

Irritatingly, as I finish typing this, I realise I've wasted a perfectly good post for the letter S.

Moving on to daggers

In my dreams, the daggers for Malfi (and Faustus later on in the year) would look like this:

Unfortunately, money is limited and health and safety must always be respected, so what they actually looked like was this:

Not as impressive, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Note, however, the past tense two sentences up.  Work is underway to convert the shiny plastic beasties into something a little closer to the top picture.  Side bits have been lopped off and handles wrapped in fabric and painted.  Cord wound around them.  Handles now look much better.  Attempts to de-glisten the blades have so far failed, but am about to apply sandpaper and hope.

Balancing Act

Half term has crept up with alarming speed.  January seems to have happened without my really noticing and taa-daa, suddenly it's nearly the middle of February.

The One Act Festival is a kind of starting post for the YT show season.  From here to the middle of July, we're in constant preparation mode as one show after another reaches the top of the heap.  In my case, it's Antigone first (12-13) March, followed a month later by Malfi.  Then I get a six week lull before Faustus crashes in.  In between those there are three other shows for which I have no direct responsibility other than being part of the YT team.  Which is, believe me, quite enough.

In the meantime, I'm honing my own acting muscles in Twelfth Night immediately after Antigone.  I've also somewhat foolishly agreed to stage manage Oklahoma! for the local operatic society.  Yay for good decision making.

Somewhere along the way, I also need to concoct a play for the Bowes Drama Club.

Oh - and I'm starting a long-awaited PTTLS course in ten days.  To make me eligble to teach adults.  Assuming that it doesn't get cancelled again.  Since I've been trying to do this blasted course since September, this is rapidly turning into a joke.  But I will keep trying.

Now, all this is either fun or paid or both so I'm not at all complaining, but it does mean I need to spend this non-teaching half term week with some care.

Where does the gaming fit into all this?  Where and when it can is the answer.  The PbPs will roll along quite happily as bar making maps they are not a huge time sump.  Those that have seen my completely inept mapping skills might well think not a lot of time gets given there either.

The real heartbreaker is Mikelmerck, which hasn't had anything like the attention it deserves for ages.  I'm missing it badly now, particularly as parts of the taster 4e adventure have been set there.  If I can find any time at all, I really want to write a starter adventure for it.  Hmm.  Maybe run a Google+ playtest? 

Long silence, purple hands

Apologies. 

I've never left a gap this long between posts before.  From this you will gather that costuming has been going on apace.  I've spent the last few days with my hands in the dye buckets.

That's been interesting in itself and I now know a lot more than I did about how well fabric takes to dye.  In the case of curtain liner (the stuff I used for the Antigone outfits), that is less intensely than I wanted.  The effect is quite good, but it isn't enough.

I've also made the revelatory discovery that dye does indeed dye.  It may not stick to the fabric as much as I'd want, but it does stick to skin.  And work surfaces.  And tiled floors.  And just about anything else it comes into contact with.  Lucky I was doing it in the kitchen.  Yes, I had that much sense.

Anyway the bulk of it is done.  Took them all down to the rehearsal yesterday and put them on the cast.  Since a lot of them immediately started wrestling each other, I know that the stitches at least will hold.  Looking at the colour scheme as a whole was very helpful.  It highlighted the intensity problem I mentioned, so I'll re-do a batch of the Chorus costumes next week over half term.

Malfi costumes are also hotting up.  I'm picking up a load of stuff to be finished today.  Easy going there I hope.  Faustus got the worrying maths treatment this week as well.  A swift count up revealed that I'll need 61 costumes.  That's costumes, not individual garments.  I'm trying very hard not to panic.

Numbers

Numbers are looming over me.

Costumes:
Number of Antigone trousers made and fitted - 6
Number of Antigone trousers to make -  10
Number of Antigone tops made and fitted - 3
Number of Antigone tops to make - 13
Number of Malfi costumes made and fitted - 0
Number of Malfi costumes being made - 5
Number of Malfi costumes that have unassembled parts - 11
Number of Malfi costumes that don't exist at all yet - 15 (Urk.  This is a bad number.)
Number of Faustus costumes that can be made - 8 (I know what the devils will wear)
Number of Faustus costumes unconfirmed - 33 (there are many changes and it is a big cast)

Rehearsals:
Number of rehearsals to Antigone get in - 6
Number of rehearsals to Malfi get in - 12
I'm not even thinking about Faustus in those terms yet.
Number of words learned for Twelfth Night -  0 officially, but about 50% in reality

Gaming:
Number of online games being run - 3
Number of online games played in - 3
Number of live games prepared for - 1
Number of pre-gen PCs for live game printed - 0
Number of Mikelmerck posts achieved in last week - 0

I look at this and realise why I don't like maths.  It keeps telling me things I don't want to know. 

Last classes of 2011

Got my last set of classes today.

I always do a mental tally of what's been achieved over a term - nothing formal, just a kind of balance sheet to help me focus on what needs to be done next.  A priority roadmap, I suppose.

We have dates for all our productions and some of them are coming up very soon indeed.  Antigone needs to be ready in the first week of March - which essentially gives us 6 rehearsals (12 hours) plus a dress/tech to get it right.  Planning is on course for that.

The cast have the bones in the right place, but some are behind on the lines.  Among the principals, nice performances are emerging, but they need to find more variety.  With these heavy roles it's a great temptation to give each line the same weight in an attempt to convey all the ideas.  That leads to shouty, dull performances, so we'll be looking at finding ways to give some light and shade to the scenes.  Most of the story is basically a monster family row played out in public, but I think there needs to be a greater contrast in the rare moments when Chorus and principals are not on stage together.

Malfi is now fully blocked at last.  Spent Thursday working through the small bits we never managed to do before, worked through the fights and sent the cast home with instructions that lines must be learned for progress to be made.  Costuming on that is moving ahead as it's complex and a pain.  We can't do a "proper" period, so we'll be concocting a house-style.  If it is internally consistent with the world we're building, it will both work and look good.  Fabric and colour are the keys here.

Faustus has the longest rehearsal period.  It also has the widest spread of cast experience and the big issue here is to help them blend.  Everyone is talented and some are very promising, but for a lot of this large cast, this will be their first attempt at a major piece of classic storytelling.  I'm lucky enough to have been able to seed it through with some very good, very experienced senior members who are acting as mentors (whether they know it or not).  I am much further behind with costuming ideas on this one, but that isn't the priority here.  Not yet anyway.

As far as Bowes goes ... well now.  The nativity went well (I didn't see it, but my spies are everywhere).  We are now therefore back to Drama Club only.  What normally happens is that we get a lot of new members off the back of the nativity (which is partly the idea, after all).  They start again in January and by the end of the Spring term we should be working on whatever their summer show will be.  I'll write something for them.  The theme pretty much has to be the Olympics (2012, unavoidable).  Some kind of Greek myth I think. 

Cast will range in age from 6-11.  I will probably only have one or two boys at most.  Ability will also be varied.  Suggestions?