“Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.”

--Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Saturday, March 27, 2010

What We’re Listening To

In my last post, I discussed concept material and sense-response work. Another form of this material is playlists – burned CD’s and weblinks to music sites that get passed among the creative team like cigarettes among inmates. Again, these tracks are concept material – most aren’t right or won’t make it into the final production. Their purpose is to inspire…

The below list starts out with the intellectual melancholy of Sting and moves on to the elegant pulp of Vitamin String Quartet. Dwelling there for a while, it drifts into rivers of darker strings and casts-off to explore new frontiers. Trading these tracks with each other is a kind of conversation we’re having about the ways we connect to the play and how we plan to express that on stage. I have posted some of them here so you might have the opportunity to listen in too.


Shape Of My Heart
Sting

Yellow
Vitamin String Quartet

Heroes (String Quartet Tribute to David Bowie)
Vitamin String Quartet

All I Want Is You (String Quartet Tribute to U2)
Vitamin String Quartet

Time After Time
Vitamin String Quartet

Clocks
Vitamin String Quartet

Hallelujah
Vitamin String Quartet

Fast Fall (Original Composition Inspired by the Music of Paramore)
Vitamin String Quartet

Dark Waltz
Hayley Westenra

Adagio For Strings, Op. 11
Barber

Into Dust
Mazzy Star

Devil's Dance Floor
Flogging Molly

Come Here Boy
Imogen Heap

Ghost Story
Sting

In Time
Mark Collie

Heroes
Peter Gabriel

Games Without Frontiers
Massive Attack feat. Peter Gabriel

Symphony 10 Mov. 1
Shostakovich

Klingon Battle
Jerry Goldsmith

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Found Objects

When directors are cobbling together the massive looseleaf tomes we live by in production, affectionately termed “Directors Books,” among the various pages of script notes, photocopied research and design drawings, we often keep a number of what might seem like unrelated or extraneous pages.  These are sense-responses: collected art, literature and material that if not directly related to the play, somehow resonate with the text for us.  We don’t always know how or why, and they may never translate into something rationally perceivable on stage, but somehow, they just go.

Here is one such item:

 

ULYSSES
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.