Moving to something new

Last night I headed up to Cedar Crest again to start work with Tim and company on an original play. We're calling our work the "Sparks project," and it's going to be a piece that we write together as an ensemble. Tim is there to facilitate the project as it goes along, but all the actors and technicians are going to have a hand in writing the actual script for the piece. After we introduced ourselves and laid a little bit of groundwork for the kind of project that we would be doing, we worked on an exercise that would generate a lot of text and do it quickly. Tim read a short section from a book he has, and then we started writing in our books about that section. After a minute or two, we passed our books to the left, read the last few lines that had been written by the other person, and then we wrote for another few minutes in this new notebook. That continued until we went all around the circle and finished up writing in our own notebooks again. We then read our notebooks out loud, sometimes struggling to peer through each other's handwriting.

It was a fun exercise, one that I've never done before. I tried to turn my brain to the "off" setting and just write whatever came to my mind. Through the first four notebooks or so, I found that I was engaging in a discussion with myself as I went from one notebook to the other. Each subsequent fragment spurred my mind into opposing directions, as I struggled to work through similar and yet different ideas. But after the fifth or sixth, and certainly seventh, book that crossed below my mechanical pencil, all the thoughts were much more independent and free-flowing. It was a pretty trippy thing to read all the results of this process, and I'm excited both to do my "homework" for this show, as well as come back next Thursday night to do some more writing (or whatever.)

Good thing I can program the VCR for Smallville...