New Things A-Cookin'

I began a new project this evening! Hurrah! I was contacted by a composer who'd been given my name by a friend and colleague (of KASPAR HAUSER and another Liz Swados project, WOMEN OF VALOR). She approached me about participating in this exploratory workshop, and the project sounded interesting (plus, I'd heard good things about the theatre company already). The subject matter is taken from James Agee's LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. He and a photographer, Walker Evans, went down to the rural South during the late 1930s, and stayed with families of sharecroppers. The images are somehow both brutal and beautiful. They're certainly compelling, at any rate.

Anyway, I'm one of eight singers in it (holding down the Alto fort, loud and proud as ever), and tonight was our first rehearsal.

I love first rehearsals. I love walking into a room full of strangers, or with semi-strangers, and digging in immediately. The first music rehearsals. Plowing ahead, creating sound and shaping space where there was only silence and stillness before. When you get to know people through their work first, I find it's a more profound way of knowing a person than you get to experience much of the time in everyday life. Then you also get to know people backstage, and on breaks, and see their ridiculous, hilarious, performing-monkey sides. I dunno. I love creative types.

So, this is really an exploratory workshop for the playwright, composer, and director to see what it is they've got, and help them assemble it a bit. Then they'll hopefully do another workshop a bit later. The music is stunning. Well, we've only learned one piece thus far, but it manages to have a down-home, folksy feel, as well as an overall unsettling eerie quality. Well. A cello scratching as a bass line for us to sing on top of will do that. We're singing this song in a round, which goes through three times in slightly different styles, and THEN, the fourth time around, each person re-entering goes up a half step. There are four parts on this song, so you are singing as loudly as you can, plugging your ears against the person next to you who is a half-step up or down, and praying you're still in (or out of) tune. It's quite disconcerting. So. Much. Fun. I LOVE this kind of thing! The darkness of it really appeals to my sensibilities, but also just changing as we go, based on what happens when you get a bunch of people who all have crazy, imaginative brains together in the same room! Perhaps it comes of having spent so many years doing THE MUSIC MAN and CHARLEY'S AUNT (and those are wonderful, don't get me wrong, and I LOVE them...), but I find it exhilarating to be in this close to the ground floor with a piece of material. It's one of the things I've taken away from working at The Flea this past year. New work is WAY fun.

Oh, speaking of The Flea, cool news - I've been shortlisted for a masterclass a few weeks from now that is being taught by Andre DeShields and Sigourney Weaver! There are about 15 or 16 of us that were chosen from the pool of Bats (the resident acting company at The Flea is called The Bats), and we have to go in and do our pieces for Jim (Simpson, Artistic Dir). He'll pick about 4-6 people to then work in the class. Obviously, I'm hoping like CRAZY to be chosen, but I do think it's way cool to be on the shortlist! It's prime grad school audition time, so my monologues are ready to GO! Sigourney ftw!

This has been long and rambly. I hope it makes sense, and that it doesn't sound too pretentious. I'm just excitable. I'm also sleepy. Let's hope this accounts for some of it.