Barbette's Skeleton (Part VIII): Cinematic Scripting (Patreon)

Good now, my strange and wonderful patrons! 

Picking up where Monday left off, today we're looking at how that first inspiration-fuelled hand-written act structure translated to a typed medium, and what that opened up for me in terms of being able to think through how the creative beats of LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE might need to go. 

There's so many moving parts, and they're all interconnected, dependent on one another. If I charge ahead too far down the road with one aspect of the act (music, costume, technical choices), then I might create dead-ends or big roadblocks for myself in other aspects of the piece. It's a careful, calculated, eagle-eyed shuffle right now. 

I'm trying to play chess, not checkers – y'know?

The screenshots I'm sharing today are from the 25th or 26th of September. This 'script' has already been through one more update since then, but I'm not going to share that for the time being. There's only a few more instalments left of Barbette's Skeleton [I'm not going to take this distantly spooky-adjacent series past October 31st; I'll pick a different name for post series after that point ;) ] and I'm going to touch on where I'm currently at in regards to costume and music before the month is out. 

For now, sit tight and enjoy the last little bit of discussion (for the time being) on the narrative aspects of this act development.

* * * * *

How does one document the shifting, amorphous blob of a beast that is an aerial-act-in-progress? 

My camera reel on my iPhone overflows with snips and scraps of this movement idea or that thematic repetition. It's teetering on the brink of being completely useless sheerly by virtue of how much there is. 

There is minimal codified language in circus: the vocabulary used for one trick or another is different from city to city and country to country. 

And while I'm sure the folks who did their Bachelors or Masters degrees in dance and choreography have clever ways of notating these things, I'm clueless as to how one effectively records a passage where I want to cross the floor at a certain angle, add in a rotation on one foot, hop to the other one while initiating a different rotation, and possibly inverting.

Like ... what?!

Here's just one example of an attempt to create a diagram for myself that would help me remember what I was supposed to do, mid-air, during a particular trick I want in the act. 

Do you think I have any idea what all those directional arrows on my little stick figure mean now? 

Correct. Absolutely no idea. 

While writing in my journal felt dreamy and romantic, and the pace of such an endeavour was helpful as I hemmed and hawed my way through different possibilities, my hand did inevitably start to cramp up pretty badly.

I decided to switch tacks and turn to my trusty keyboard to get my evolving ideas documented efficiently (and with more organizational possibilities). Look! Ooooh! Colour-coding!

You can see that I've started to make sense of what's been addressed and what remains to be accomplished in terms of my coaches and collaborators with the legend at the top of the first screenshot. 

I've marked "costume changes" with yellow highlight and no details, because I had to have a meeting with Michael Slack (my costume designer) to discuss those very things, at the time of writing this 'script'. 

There's a spot in the third screenshot (3/4 of the way through the act) where you can see I just had absolutely no idea what the fuck to do in terms of making the BIG transition from CABARET to CRÉATURE (I've got it now, though!)

And I might've gone slightly mad with power in terms of adding in detail that helps me remember what I want the different personas to be doing with the little bracketed, italicized internal thoughts of those characters. hehehe ::tugs at collar::

Here's how the above journal notes developed after 3 more rehearsal sessions with William over the course of that week:   

* * * * * *

It's not a perfect solution, but it's a solution that is working for me, for now! 

The most up-to-date version of this script is one that has answered some of the "???" in the above version, and has HEAVY DETAIL fleshing out the opening sequence for THE MAN (because I did some awesome work with an acting-focused conseil artistique that I really got along with – her name is Marie-Josée Gauthier). 

I'm excited to share that too, but it'll have to wait ... for now. ;)

Your next instalment will be landing in your inboxes on Monday, October 24th at 11:30am EST.

Have a strange & wonderful weekend!

XO

Ess