SCORING

Observations on the Poe Project

By Bevin Dooley

Holy shit balls.

  I have never felt so close and yet so far away from a destination. I feel like I can see all the aspects of the project in front of me and I could just reach forward and pluck them one by one out of thin air, and yet, at the same time, as I reach for them they disappear.

    We wrote a script today, working with text lifted from ‘The Tell-Tale Heart”. Currently, I’m working on refining it, in preparation for teaching it to the class this week. If you guys are reading this, I hope you’re excited, because I sure am.

   This is what I see: a completely dark room. From the darkness, suddenly there is one voice whispering, “I want it”, almost inaudibly. More voices join in until it feels like the whole room is hissing and writhing with whispers. Then – click! Click! Click! Let there be light, as tiny flashlights click on one by one, illuminating the faces of the performers. Because the narrator is assumed to be male, we divided the text up among the 4 male actors in our class, and the women will dance. Paige, Yilin and I are creating the movement score in tomorrow’s rehearsal. In the text, there are interjections and repetitions that we want to build up using choral speech. We will be using this incredible piece of music, spliced together with a recording of a human heart beat.

I’m really excited to be leading the class through this portion of the project. I think that, quite often, we are restricted in performer-creation classes because of the size of groups: our grander ideas fall by the wayside because we just don’t have the people power to execute them. But now, we have no excuse not to test-drive our bolder ideas because we have a whole class backing us up, and willing to put our artistic desires into motion.