exploring scenes

  

Fortunately Martin, our writer, who began the process with an overall picture of the direction he wanted to go, but few concrete details, came with some scenarios to explore. His ideas were developed through improvisation until a first scene emerged based around the life of a religious fanatic in the 2nd Century AD.

Meanwhile were are searching for the best way to open the show. How do we lead the audience into the theme? We don't want to teach anybody, but rather invite the audience to examine with us the questions that arise from thinking about reincarnation and karma. What experiences might we have had in past lives to lead us where we are now? Why do we keep coming back? Do we keep repeating the same patterns, incarnation after incarnation, or can we learn and evolve through our experiences? The basic hypothesis that we are working with is that we choose a new life so that we can rectify, balance out the imbalances of the previous life and thereby use the lessons learnt to take the human spirit further on its path toward freedom.

On this basis we took our first scene and reduced it to a series of essential pictures. This was then distilled further until we had one gesture for each character which expressed his/her inner state and relationship to the world. What would be the balancing gesture, for the next life, of the character gesture that we had created? Through this work new ideas for the next incarnation arose, which led to new scenarios to improvise, which led Martin to write new scenes.

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