On the Soup

Though my track record awards me no green to gripe, we and I should blog more often. Yes, we need to nurture this connection to our public, our audience, without whom we could not exist. Yes, we need to document our process and enliven our aesthetic by maintaining an open forum through which a collective artistic vision may flourish. Yes, we need to kick in the high gears of our marketing machine and spread our ever-chiseled message to the world.

That's we.

But I need to blog more often to indulge in my fetish in the creation of new theatre, to chart and grapple with and better understand the genesis and movement of ideas; to ask where they come from, why they were necessary or slicing at that moment, how they become owned by one to owned by all to owned by none, how they evolve to dominate or retreat to die, and where all the various points of departure become so deliciously distinct.

I've had a lot of ideas for this project, yet am trounced by the continual onrush of those of others. An artist and friend once said that making theatre is like cooking: our ideas are the ingredients, and our relationships are the fire. I'm warmed by the well-stoked interconnectedness of Elephant Foot honed over months, even years now; but my senses are overwhelmed by the cavernous selection of must-do ideas, and wonder, if we don't want to spoil the soup with too many flavours, why not make more than one meal? Perhaps that's the solution, and perhaps that's why we've always had more than one - more than a dozen, I'm sure - premises on the chopping table. Yet Duck, Death and the Tulip is a hefty enough task, and I'm impressed and inspired with just how complex the mix is becoming.

I'm working on the 'score' of DDT, which is more structural than musical, and though I'm trying to capture the moods and transitions of the book, and our interpretation, via the atmosphere of sound, I'm more keen to uncover the fundamental: who are they, what happens, why, and what is changed? I want to find this spine so that we can locate and define its many offshoots and reincorporations. I want to get the broth just right, to carry our imagination to its greatest possible reality.

Maybe the best part about food is that it's transitory, that there is a right time to consume, that it gets too cold; it exists in the now, and freeze-packed noodles are frankly shit.

I think we can apply the same to theatre.