The ankle bone's connected to the....

So.

Here we are wrapping up the fourth week of the 2006 ArtSpark Festival.
I think that collectively the urgency level hasn't yet raised to a level of worry, and I can say definitively that it hasn't for Team Infinite Perspectives. We've spent the last week or so primarily back in the office trying to piece the show together from the pages Dewey has brought us.

Or as I told ArtSpark Staffer Matt last night: playing Tetris with pudding.

Any (successful) show has a basic logical form. Even a non-linear show has a workable logic. But they have logic because the pieces they have are solid. They are created, are 'real' and then you work out the logic and piece it together in the most effective way possible.

We have lots of pieces, but they're still a bit runny in the middle, and we have pieces yet to come that we have to plan for in the logic we have created for the show.

Something that Martin brought up when we were talking about things we liked in theatre (as we move on a more transparently useful conversation to have had) was a love of the "arbitrary, but not arbitrary for arbitrary's sake". He wanted shows to adhere to the logic they had created in their own world.

I can say without reservation that there are large swathes of arbitrary in this show. But we have created a framework, a logic, for the show that allows for it. Even encourages it.

So we have found a logic that allows us to include many of the things we like in theatre from that self-same early discussion . The political without abandoning the entire show to polemics, the arbitrary without annoying the audience, songs, slapstick, in retrospect I really think that we've created an insular modern Commedia Dell'Arte. We have our three characters (Clay, Illy and myself) who have a defined set of characteristics, and then we play with and against types in a variety of scenaria.

And those characters' details are being drawn in increasingly clearer lines. Which is always healthy for paranoid actors to see (hi Mom *waves*).

Last night, with Dewey unavailable, we took the opportunity to beat the hell out of a few of the shorter 'framing story' scenes.

Oh and we did.

We worked those scenes of a combined 3 pages for two hours.
We managed to strip away a lot of the traditional 'first rehearsals' overacting bloat and get to some meat. With very little space to move (our restrictions, not ArtSpark's) there is a lot of tension built physically which gets transferred nicely to a lot of the text.

It also allowed us to see that scenes which we had thought were going to need cutting instead can be flushed out with discussion of the ideas that we really want to talk about.

For example, in one of last night's scenes, the Cynic and the Romantic are discussing the need for and the benefits of change, even change for change's sake. The scene is playing quickly enough that we're going to be able to flush that out into a broader discussion between the two to the benefit of all, even those of us who chant through that entire scene.

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I think on the whole things are progressing very well. The group is as committed as any you could ask for, unafraid of working hard, and turning out a decent product through that work. We are no longer ahead of pace, but we are on pace I think...and I think the pace we planned on is a touch aggressive, so all to the good.