DarkStuff - Rehearsal Diary Monday 19th March

It’s hard to believe that it’s really only two weeks ago today that we met, united around the body of that epic beast, the great white whale of Moby Dick….and I have to stop writing for a moment to confess that as I write this I’m having an internal battle about avoiding or using hackney’d seafaring expressions….damnit all.  I’ll use them now and get it over with.

The crewmates all aboard (baring one lost soul who we managed to scoop up out of the brine the next day), we examined our craft the Pequod (aka Bierkeller Theatre) before proceeding in a seamanlike manner on foot to the Grain Barge for the first read through of the script.

With the wind in our sails, the past two weeks voyage have taken us from the shared maps of our lives, through balls of pain, into shapes of ships, discovering the whale in the sound of a saw, via indepth character work, building backgrounds and relationship that give a tacit wholeness to the present moment we find ourselves on the hunt for Moby Dick.  Last week the actors got down to the dirty business of line learning and, freed from the script on key scenes, began to build the bones of their storytelling performance.  The speed at which the piece is forming and unfolding before us is breath-taking and speaks not only to the quality of the script, the direction & the excellent casting but also to the verve and dedicated spirit of all those involved.  Exciting times indeed.

Made moreso by today.  Today is the day we move our rehearsals into the Bierkeller so we really get to play with the story in the place that we’ll be living it and sharing it with you all in a couple of weeks.  This week in general looks set to be another busy one in which we nail down props (not literally obviously, that would be cumbersome and I suspect Bierkeller Alex wouldn’t be too pleased with us), sound & music and costume.  Phew.  Lots to do.  Right m’hearties, I’d better get back to it.

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