This blog is a continuation of my previous entry, Is-it-music-is-it-theater, which introduced our September 2008 workshops for the Slide project. (There is a detailed description of Slide here.) This is how the previous post ended:
What about theater? For the first day, while Steve and 8bb rehearsed music, Rinde paced our studio, jotting notes, sketching stage diagrams, grabbing and shifting boxes, stools and ladders. What was a sketchy scenario at the beginning of the week gradually gained shape and depth.
Several times during the week we were brought into Rinde’s confidence, and given a glimpse of a fascinating world. He led us through his preliminary ideas for the project, sometimes bringing thoughts forward fully formed, sometimes thinking out loud, but always encouraging our ideas or reactions.
I took notes during these moments, and below is a summary of these flights of fancy.
The central conceit
Slide is a remembered experiment. While digitising his past work by scanning old experiments into his computer, Renard comes across a pivotal moment in his life, triggering long-forgotten thoughts. (Rinde loves simple props, and suggested a centrally-placed file box which would emit a ray of light, into which each character would see different things.
More than a dry description of a fascinating experiment, the project seems to have grown into a penetrating but often poignant study of Renard’s own character and inner psyche. What is Renard’s background? Was he left at the altar? Did his house burn down in a fire?
Amateur chamber ensemble
In Rinde’s plan, 8bb and Steve Mackey “act” as an amateur chamber group in which the character of Renard also plays. At the beginning of the show Renard would be absent from the rehearsal, which would have dramatic value. Rinde: “This absence opens up many subtle theatrical possibilities.” Simple signposts bring the audience into the conceit. Perhaps an announcement: “Renard is often late for rehearsal.”
Each member of eighth blackbird may take a role in the drama, as ancillary characters. (I suggested the name “Duncan” for my character, since my father wanted to call me that when I was born). Steve would take the more central role of “narrator”.
What sort of music should the amateur group play? An early idea of Steve’s was to have the music develop – come into focus – during the show, as if the group’s rehearsals begin with quite poor playing, and develop into a polished final performance. This “poor playing” would be a more complex type of music that creatively explored the sort of out-of-tune, rhythmically distorted, timbre-ly rough style that a sight-reading session might produce. In other words: composed naivete. (This is something Steve had explored in the past, particularly in an 8bb party piece, Indigenous Instruments.)
For this amateur rehearsal section of Slide, eighth blackbird would be seated, with music, bringing to mind a music rehearsal. In other sections, 8bb would take a more active role in the drama, walking around and playing from memory.
The love interest
Rinde felt that Lisa, as the only woman on stage, should be highlighted in some way. Perhaps Renard is in love with Lisa. Declaring his love is out of the question, however, as clarity would run everything. Rinde: “Clarity looks too much like truth. This undeclared love creates dramatic tension.”
The phone calls
Members of the amateur chamber group would periodically receive cell-phone conversations, interrupting rehearsal. Renard is “present” in every call: always mentioned in some oblique way. At the beginning of the show the meaning of these calls is unclear, but later they take on greater intelligibility and poignancy. This blurry-to-clarity motion of the show would thus act as a metaphor for the “Slide” experiment.
Organizing the performance space
Rinde spent the workshop period searching for ways to divide the limited performance space into distinct “zones”: the living room in the pianist’s house, where the amateur group rehearses; the lab, where the “Slide” experiment is conducted; a dingy motel room. After toying with the idea of creating entirely separate stage areas for these different zones, Rinde decided to create more subtle designations based on lighting, simple props and dramatic context: the rehearsal room would be the normal 8bb setup; the lab would be a short elevated runway set-up, running lengthways through 8bb, in front of a large elevated screen; the hotel room, at the front of the stage, would be brought to life by a cheap plastic painting and a lampshade.
Workshop video
Below, a YouTube video featuring excerpts from some of the work we did with Rinde during our workshop week in September, 2008:
- The Kap and the Duv try out an overlapping cell-phone conversation;
- Rinde outlines the different “levels” of the stage setup, including the “chamber music rehearsal” space” and the “slide projection” space;
- The Alb and the Mac try an overlapping cell-phone conversation;
- Rinde continues to experiment with stage setup;
- Rinde introduces a theatrical “game” – “a tick that everyone shares”
- Two of these “tick games”
- Rinde reads from a section of the script that introduces the “slide” experiment
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