[This article is cross-posted from Dale’s blog, with additional instructions for group members.]
Wow o wow o wow!
Tonight we had our first workshop for William Blake’s Inn. In attendance were Marc and Molly Honea, Carol Lee Shankel, Melissa Houghton, Laura Lambert, Brenda Weaver, and me.
I brought everybody up to speed on what we were doing there, and what our eventual options were for the backers audition in May: we could stage a piece, we could stage puppet version of a piece (to show what an elaborate staging would look like), or we could project designs/sketches/ideas of a piece.
We passed out the scores and scripts to our three pieces, and we listened to all three. I sang them.
Then Marc talked about some approaches he had taken to coming up with ideas for the songs. We decided to work on Sun & Moon Circus first, so I rolled out a long piece of paper and taped it to the mirror.
We listened to the piece again, and wrote down images and thoughts and moods and feelings and ideas and characters.
Then we shared, and this is going to be the most fun, coming up with all the ideas that we can then use as staging. Marc contributed the idea of the Tiger and King of Cats, et al., having a magic slide show in their room. Among the images they’re watching are the Sun and Moon. Tiger begins to hear noises and gets spooked. I talked about how the music was both ominous and antipicatory.
Other ideas: the Rabbit as butler, turning into a ringmaster. The Inn as the living quarters for children’s toys, and the children have come for a visit. Angels outside the inn with the chime that recurs in the music, like on a clock. The Sun and Moon appearing on swings, or on circus drums. The Sun and Moon both as dancers and as puppets.
The Inn in the background with puppet versions of the characters we see later close up. A fullscale circus at the end of the song, with tumblers, angel tightrope walkers, clowns. The Tiger is pushed to jump through a hoop.
Several of us realized up front that one thing we have to keep in mind is what children will do in each piece. Since I originally wrote the work as a song cycle for adult chorus, I especially have to think about working children into the vocal texture.
Lots more ideas as well, but you get the picture.
We then watched the documentary on Nancy Willard, Uncommon Sense. She is amazing, both as a writer and as an artist. Very inspiring.
Homework for next week: draw/paint/collage a moment from Sun & Moon Circus. This is going to be fabulous!
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If you’re one of our non-Wednesday members, i.e., you’re going to be a part of the creative process but can’t physically be there Wednesday nights, here are your instructions:
- Go to Dale’s William Blake blog page and download the score for 4. Sun & Moon Circus Soothes the Wakeful Guests. (It’s a PDF file.)
- Go to http://www.vyew.com and head to our room, which is ID# 067760.
- Explore a bit, but you’re there to download the PDF file of the script for Sun & Moon Circus. You don’t really have to have this, but it’s another way of looking at the text.
- Collect images from the web; imagine what the song would look like staged; add to the ideas we’ve had, even if they contradict what we’re already thought of.
- Add these ideas/images to the Vyew pages. You can also add comments to this post.
I hope everyone feels free to use these posts as a collective journal. My head is spinning with ideas after our meeting. And I’m telling myself one big thing as I continue to think about what we did: I’m telling myself not to get hung up on questions of stagecraft. That’s my personal stumbling block. That’s why I’m excited about trying to play with some visual ideas for Sun & Moon Circus and just be whimsical without worrying about actual stage design.
Had a thought later, inspired by the Willard film. Willard is fond of things that are “hidden”. Like hidden objects, hidden inner stages that get revealed. That, too, might appeal to the children in our audience.
“This Inn belongs to Wm. Blake…” I know that’s not the song we’re dealing with, but I can’t get past it. Will the audience see “this Inn” as a thing, as an item to direct their attention toward, or are we invited to be at the Inn, to enter the world of the Inn, to see the Inn as everywhere, the staged world? So my thinking is going back and forth between those two things. We touched upon the idea last night (I think it was Laura who mentioned it) of the Inn as a place of mysterious comings and goings and perhaps hidden surprises. The hidden idea again. It inspired the thought: what if the space is seemingly ordinary but objects can be detached, turned over, held side by side by puppeteers and we see assembled creatures. In other words, a lamp and a pillow and a piece of floor are detached and turned over, puppeteers hold the pieces close together, moving them in unison, a singer brings a mask or head piece into the image, and we see an image of the tiger prowling across the stage? And as Dale said, each time one of the animals appears it could appear in a somewhat different fashion with a different arrangement of objects. All these items of hum-drum domesticity or bits of the landscape or the archetecture are also “hidden” bits of moving three-dimensional representations of the occupants of the Inn…
I’m also seeing each song as a kind of mystical riddle, some evocative enigma. Remotely connected to what Magritte does with pictures or Joseph Cornell (I’ll try to get some images to our work space).