Friday, 9/17:
Truly, this is the day that Tess had her one-on-one music work. I got ahead of myself in my last blog. On Thursday, we continued our group study of music with Dr. Page. Dancing the rhythms is a theme that he kept reinforcing and spoke to me as a great tool for us going forward. When each lady involved her whole body and EXPERIENCED the rhythm, any problems smoothed themselves out. Interesting correlation to my current study of Eurythmics.
GESTURAL WORK: For the audience - How to visually define character. For the actor - How to work outside in but fill the movement with the essence/quality that makes that movement/gesture unique and specific to that character. Since our characters were real people and full of life in our American history, I am interested not in impersonation for my actors, but embodying these women as fully as possible by using dramaturgical footage and pictures to inform gesture.
Academically, each actor selected 5 photos of their lady from a library of images cycled through on the wall during a rehearsal by dramaturgy. I used a combination of Michael Chekov's theory of Atmosphere and Psychological Gesture exercises to allow their bodies and mind to combine their own essence with the ladies' gesture to flow easily back and forth between each Quality/Gesture. These 5 Quality/Gesture is the physical language from which they will select every time they flow into their icon from another character. It will provide an anchoring quality for the actor to be fully involved in their icon as the scene begins and an identifying feature for the audience. Each character in the show will have an anchor. As we progress in the show into the "stock" characters, they will be developed in a more heightened/vaudevillian way.
ADVENTURE/SPECTACLE/MYSTERY: Directly following the Gestural Work, we developed the rough structure of the opening number where the audience's belief has to be suspended halfway through the number to go from "actor putting on a show" to "icon". We found that we don the icon by adding the last character costume accent (pearls, cross, scarf) on our appropriate lyric Adventure, Spectacle, Mystery and then grow into our selected Quality/Gesture on the last "Mystery" prior to the spoken explanation lines: "Mystery novelist, Agatha Christie vanishes........". We repeat that gesture at the end of the song for our final picture. It was magical to see them transform physically in an instant. Of course, the number has to be tweaked, but it was exciting to see that gestural work bring the icon to life.
Commenting as I read through these entries (what a great idea this is as a living/growing record of this rehearsal process ... I so often want to write a rehearsal journal but so rarely do.)
ReplyDeleteDr. Page's exhortation to "dance the rhythm" was so delicious to hear in rehearsal: that approach is exactly in tune with my own approach as a composer. As we've discovered in rehearsal, when I have to pin a tempo down to a metronome marking, it's often incorrect or at least not-quite-right ... at least in the moment. I do have a visceral sense of the proper tempo and feel of each number (or a range of tempos at which the song works) but it has to do with how it feels in the body -- sometimes literally how it feels in the mouth -- if the lyrics are "squished" or if the actor is feeling held back or restrained. [Side note: I know that properly I should say "tempi" but I can't help myself ... I usually wind up saying "tempos" and saying the heck with it ...]
One element of the creation of this score ... when I was first writing the show, the score was much different ... more written from the head ... very cerebral. Very "grad school", very ostentatiously complex. I became dissatisfied with the lack of "juice" in the score ... as I "got over myself" after having left grad school ... returning to who I really am as a composer. When Liv came on board, we scrapped almost the entire score and began again. (The holdovers are "Red Herrings", which existed in a slightly different form, and parts of "Vanity and Gravity", although that, too has been substantially changed over the course of time.] My process of composing now tends to take place away from the piano. Like Agatha, I walk around and work out the music in my body and my mind. My personal feeling is that well-written music has a strong rhythmic conception/rhythmic unity. I feel it when I'm writing, and I think that "dancing the rhythm" is the perfect way to explore this score. As I said in rehearsal, some of the songs look more complex on paper than they really are ("Point A" is the perfect example of this.) Sometimes, when time allows, I have taught parts of this score by ear vs by eye, so as not to implant the seed of "ooh, that's difficult" that can take root so easily when you see the multitude of black dots swimming across the page...
The highest compliment that I've ever received from performers is that my music "feels good to sing" -- that it's physically pleasurable to perform. My goal is always to create melodies which sit well in the body/the voice, allowing the actor to work intuitively and to pursue the dramatic moment, versus ever having to think technically and have to "fight the music". Of course, there are always "speed bumps" ...there are a few in this score that are always present, no matter who is teaching or learning the music. I always own up to those moments as spots where I didn't solve the particular issue very well from a musical perspective ... usually I have come up with a mental trick to get over the bump. I always appreciate the actors and music directors who find their own ways of inhabiting this music and bringing it to life.