The making of work for GDA Christmas cabaret 2012
How do you devise a 5 to 10 minute piece when nobody in the company is available to attend workshops to make material?
This is how The Five Andrews are doing it:
- We've shared initial thoughts and ideas by email
- Someone, Downs this time, has volunteered to collate these and to try and imagine a guiding theme which might give structure. I like to use a mind-map to help me do this. A lot of my time has been spent finding a mind map tool that does what I need.
- The mind map certainly helped inspire a theme or meme and more material generating ideas quickly sprang from that.
- The meme I'm working with is that of declaring a story and then setting about illustrating that story but with material that works with the declared story being unfulfilled , or perhaps because of wrong assumptions or an unexpected environment.
- My name for the process at least, if not the piece, I've just decided , is 'Disappointing'.
- I've set closely defined homework for Sandiland and Barker to generate material mainly using the body and which is based on a declaration and its disappointment.
- We're videoing our homework roughly but legibly and sharing it on Vimeo.
- I'll probably continue to develop the structure after talking to Nic and Andrew and watching their homework so that we have a coherent piece.
- Andrew B. will likely get costumes together. Ideas already discussed . Still a lot to decide.
- We will need somehow to come up with an original soundtrack. If necessary I will compile original material and/or create something.
- We will get together, perhaps only once or twice all together, to assemble, rehearse and polish the work. Most of this work is adding clarity to movement, understanding what the sound track needs to do and devising transitions between sections of material.
I think we have just under 4 weeks to go. No one available? No problem!
AD