20th November, 2024
We are at the end of week 4, and have made some progress this week but the pressure is beginning to pack on. It is a Wednesday afternoon and everyone is tired and at the end of their tether, we have been going in circles for the last 2 hours over how to direct a movement section to the R.E.M. song ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’.
We have already devised 2 sections of the song, but the final section is proving difficult to devise. From a professional perspective this was a difficult moment for all of us, particularly myself, as I felt as though my ideas were being rejected and so I was finding it a challenge to engage with other peoples ideas. I believe in this moment my professionalism may have lacked a little, and so I decided to take a minute to myself outside of the classroom to clear my head and come back to the session with a fresh mindset. In my moment outside, I was able to brainstorm and come up with an idea that involved all of the cast and provided a solution to our little porblem and so we tried it out. We grouped together as an ensemble as though the world was ending (linking to the theme of the song) and held each other, representing a feeling of togetherness with the aim of this being cathartic for the audience. This worked as a finale for the song that lead directly into the following scene, this truly felt like a breakthrough moment for myself, as I had been able to provide an appropriate and useful idea that had aided the devising process.
Upon reflection, the issue may have been resolved earlier if we had decided to put a pin in that section and return to it later at a later date. However pushing through the difficult moment proved valuable and a good lesson for me as it meant I had had to put my personal feelings aside and focus on the task at hand.
22th November, 2024
Following the breakthrough moment, I decided to take on what I had learnt to every session, which became particularly useful during a music rehearsal for another song we were going to play.
As a group we had decided it would be nice to include some live music, between the 8 of us we could play the piano, viola, bass, guitar and flute. However it was clear only the flute was the only instrument small enough to be able to take on the flight and carry around on our visit. The performance was going to include two pieces of music that were performed live; ‘The Hanging Tree’ by Future House Remix and ‘Whatever’ by Oasis. A combination of two female singers were going to sing these songs, accompanied by myself on the flute.
‘The Hanging Tree’ was certainly the most difficult of the two songs. Considering it was a techno remix of the original song and it was being covered by a female soprano singer and a flute, it proved very frustrating to achieve the same desired effect the music achieves as the live music took a more acoustic approach.
This meant that several alterations needed to be made, including a key change to better suit the soprano voice of the singer. However at this moment there was a conflict of interest for the intentions of the song, and as we only had a week or so until the trip time was growing thin. I decided that perhaps it would be better for me to learn a different version of the song that fit everyone’s preferences – this took a few hours of extra rehearsal and some patience in re-learning however the result was certainly worth it. This meant we were all able to focus our time and energy on a different section of the devising.
This week overall has felt pretty difficult, tensions have often ran high and it has been challenging to make progress – this is particularly worrying as we have little time now to work on the performance. This is because next weeks sessions will be used to create workshop plans that we will be running for the students in Romania and then on the last afternoon we will be performing the finished show to an audience!
A week in Iași, Romania! 