A week ago today we had our ‘outside eye’ day where we shared our work with each other. It’s safe to say that since then time seems to have upped its game and changed the speed at which it passes. I have just returned from KAAT (The Kanagawa Arts Theatre, where we perform) where the tech team have been rigging lights and setting up kit all day. It’s an impressive operation!
I think the outside eye day galvanised everybody a little, or at least changed the focus of our actions somewhat – it definitely hit home that we were going to be presenting our explorations in front of an audience. We also had deadlines for any text that needed translating into Japanese, and deadlines for tech requests. Therefore much of the last week has been a process of narrowing down, refining, decision making, finessing. For me at least. This has been both sad and thrilling. Sad, because I was enjoying the experimentation, and was a little reluctant to make some of those decisions or commit to some things so soon. Thrilling because the live moment in front of an audience is the reason I make performance, and so there is an excitement in thinking about that too. Perhaps inevitably I feel a little that, with the pressure on, I have reverted to some of my more comfortable or familiar modes of making and shaping material. But not all of them, and the beginning of the process was certainly different to my habitual one, so I hope this will be apparent in the work on some level. Or maybe it actually doesn’t matter whether or not it is…I am not sure.
Post the showings last week I had some very useful conversations with Seth about where the piece was at, and how I was working. And I really wanted to blog about our discussions, but the ‘thing’ got in the way. Maybe I will find some time after the performances are done, to come back to those ideas and write about them.
The biggest thing for me was that I felt like I had made ten minutes of stuff that would serve as a good introduction for an hour long show. And although I knew I wasn’t making an hour long show, it didn’t really register until that moment that I had to think completely differently about how that material would sit as, for example, a ten minute chunk of a twenty minute show. What the journey for the audience was going to be, how the piece would resolve itself in this shorter time frame. Or I had to even change my way of thinking about the idea of ‘resolution’.
It came back to structuring. I’d had an idea of recurring two minute ‘chunks’ in the piece – related to the idea that if you survive a plane crash, you then have approximately two minutes to get off the crashed plane alive before smoke and/or fire kill you. I liked the idea of this ongoing two minute countdown, in which different (sometimes quite abstract) responses to ‘two minutes to get off the plane’ were acted out. And also a related idea of ‘your last two minutes alive’. So I worked with building the piece around a structure of two minute sections, and that is what it is now.
In a way, right now I wish I hadn’t worked so hard to try and ‘resolve’ the piece, and left it more open or somehow without a distinct ‘ending’. I think maybe the two minute structure could have carried the work, without some material I’ve added in that maybe points too explicitly to what the audience should interpret or feel. BUT I guess we will see how it feels in the performances this weekend. And then, we have the opportunity to spend a bit more time reworking or reshaping before we present the pieces in Brighton – so it could all change again!
Ira Brand
