Director, Three Exploratory Workshops
Van Gogh, Almond Blossom; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
I invited a large group of theater buddies to come to my apartment to do some improv with an eye to devising something. Between five and ten people came by on three occasions. I at least had a great time. My secret goal was to see if I could convince a few of them to commit to a ten-session workshop where we’d put together an entire play.
On day one, we did some exercises to do with the audience-room-actor dynamic. This combination of things presents some interesting problems to do with communication and attention. Then we talked about phrases, which I define really broadly and vaguely.
On day two, we had a more theoretical few games about phrases, then some games about objectives, then some scenes. We devised some moving sculpture-things that I took home and used as writing prompts.
On day three, I brought in a short, mostly nonsense scene that we tried to do in different colors or in different environments. We played a game where you build yourself a little environment, for example, and did the scene in that environment. Then I introduced my written material based on the sculptures from the previous session and we used those to generate some prompts for scenes.
The homework assignment I gave myself, where I took the sculptures from day two and wrote a poem and some exercises for day three became an important preview of what I would later try and get the whole team to do over the course of ten sessions. Writing for theater is always odd because it is a much less complete event by itself on the page than other kinds of writing. My hope is that writing with a closer, earlier, recursive relationship to the performance than writers normally have an opportunity to maintain will lead to some interesting theatrical discoveries. It also means we can get a script that fits the people, rather than trying to find people that fit the script, which I think puts the actors in a position to give better performances. It’s all very fun and exciting.