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DAY 4- Rehearsals with 2

23/4/2013

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Molly
With the need for a puppet to use becoming very apparent during Monday’s rehearsal, Will and Matt spend the day at the LC workshop in Faversham, leaving myself and Carly to grapple with developing and building from yesterday. I think it’s safe to say that the ideas for this show hav

e been very free flowing and the subject topic combined with the internal/external idea make a huge and brilliant creative springboard. As ever, it is how you turn those thoughts and images into something practical that an audience can watch.

We started the day by grouping together the visual ideas that came out of an exercise done during Monday’s rehearsal. The first categories were, Specific and Non-Specific, the former being defined as a more rounded ideas that have a place within the character and narrative decisions already made and the latter being broader, more poetic notions. We then further grouped the Specific section and came out with four groups, Medical/Science based, Work/Routine based, Imagined situations and Emotions.

The plan for the rest of the day was then to get these ideas on their feet and work out some things to try when Matt and Will came to join us for the last couple of hours of rehearsals. To say that this rehearsal was a frustrating one, is an understatement, both myself and Carly felt as though progress was slow and with only two bodies to work practically with, it was very difficult to create and realise the images we both had floating around in our heads. I came away from the rehearsal feeling rather dissatisfied with our progress, as is often the way when you don’t quite managed to practically articulate your creative ideas.

However, upon reflection, an interesting concept arose. In order to find a way forward with just the two of us and no puppet, we started to work with one of us temporarily taking the role of puppet. We started to play with speeding up the physical process of MND, so the puppet (Carly at this point) went from having full mobility whilst writing, to dropping the pen, the pad, her arm and eventually not even being able to hold up her own body. It was therefore my responsibility as an outside body to come in and protect and support Carly, for her to be able to write, to stay upright. This then provoked another potential avenue for exploration that the puppeteers are not the enablers because although they theoretically allow the puppet to move, they are working on the basis that the puppet’s movement will physically degenerate and therefore, the enabler is the person from the outside, a contained forced that does not and cannot come from within the character.

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    Little Cauliflower 
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    " MND is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks the upper and lower motor neurones. "
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