present: Dale, Jeff B.
We talked a long while, just getting caught up. Finally, we dug out Old Man Wind [doc] and Bear and Rabbit [pdf] to work on, as promised in whatever the last meeting was.
We futzed our way through Old Man Wind, playing back and forth with the text for a while. Dale settled into the role of OMW, Jeff took the other parts for the nonce.
Dale became interested in the end, where OMW lies down in the water and promises to return. He worked on that more, sitting on the floor perpendicularly to the audience and slowly lying back, exhaling deeply on the last three words. One more deep breath/in/out, and then Jeff delivered the coda.
We then backed up a bit and played with the part where OMW changes the four young men into the different animals. What we noticed was that the first young man asks the Wind what he should become, and the Wind doesn’t answer him. The other young men decide rapidly on their transformations (some interesting body possibilities here) and leave. Then the Wind turns back to the first YM and demands, “What will you be?”
It occurred to us that the issue was that the YM was trying to abnegate his responsibility for choosing his own transformation, an idea that ties neatly into our Creativity arc. We developed an Image, wherein the Wind reaches into the heart of each YM as he decides, and empowers the transformation, a moment of ecstasy, perhaps?, and then with the first YM, it becomes an agonizing struggle about accepting the responsibility for change.
We ran back through OMW and started developing some staging ideas. Still very sketchy as a whole
Then we turned to Bear and Rabbit. We kept the cartoony nature of what we had done before and pushed it even further. Jeff’s Bear was heartier and boomier; Dale’s Rabbit was more Roger Rabbit, making constant hilarious under-comments as the action continued.
Then we adjourned for the night.
Fun stuff.