I had my second design meeting yesterday for Antigone. It went quite well, although we are still very much in the early phase of the project. The show does not open until early November, so we have a lot of time to kick around ideas and get things into place. This is good because it looks like we will need the time.
I am fascinated at how different every theatre process is. There are similarities, sure, but every time there is something unique. There is always some new element to engage. The texts are different, the people are different, you are different. Every project requires finding the vocabulary with which to speak to your collaborators. While it is nice to have people you have worked with before, with whom you have developed shortcuts, there is something truly delightful in the discovery process with your fellow artists. I love how the process of discovering the vocabulary for the play mirrors, if not is the same as, the process of discovering your collaborators vocabulary.
The team for Antigone are all people I have never worked with before. So it is interesting finding out how the other people think. Our first design meeting was devoted exclusively to the text. We talked. All we did is talk. Hours we talked. I felt a stronger connection to the text, but no real sense of the play, the production. In the intervening weeks a few images were emailed back and forth suggesting various colors and textures and emotional responses to the text and the action and the setting. This time around we poured over the images for hours. There was lots of talking this time too, but now it was focused on the images. Some music, melancholy and grey.
This is a difficult but necessary part of the process. It is necessary to look collectively and try and find parallels to and connections between your collaborator’s visual thinking. What are they seeing? What are you seeing? Where do these two visions overlap? This is where collaborative art forms really carry out their core essence. They are a kind of collective vision of the world. When it works out right, the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.
We have a final production meeting for Hitting the Wall today and then we load in on Sunday. This process was remarkably smooth. The ideas just flowed one into the next and we have a fairly strong footing upon which to stand. I am feeling confident about the show. It is quite simple, but we do have one stylized sequence that remains a bit of a mystery until we can see the actors on stage under the lights. Actually there are two. Both are a bit of a visual risk.
That sense of the unknown is fantastic. It is terrifying and wonderful all at once. You begin a room full of individuals. Over the weeks or months that follow your initial meetings you slowly learn to become a unit. A single entity looking through many different eyes and thinking with many different minds, but all of a single goal and a single vision.
Finding this collective vision is not always easy. Often it is a difficult and arduous path. You must somehow trust your work to these other people who you may not know very well. You must trust yourself that you are seeing clearly and communicating effectively. Every moment is a test. Every moment a chance to grow beyond yourself and become more and more in accord with the vision. Although these plays are quite different than the project he describes, this idea is shown clearly in George’s discussion of his theatre minima:
theatre minima is a theatre of exile from maximal theatre practice. Exiles bring themselves, voluntarily or via compulsion, to live in strange lands, external or internal, for which they may have very incomplete maps indeed (perhaps they only hint at the shape, suppleness and contours of the landscape), lands which they internalize as they explore. The dream of redemption (or at-onement) is to find in this land of exile a home away from home, impossible and meaningless perhaps, but a condition to be attempted nonetheless, so that the face of despair is not the only one we ever find ourselves able to recognize; to glimpse and recognize, perhaps, the face of joy.
