No blinding - yet

I have all my cues and lines on an MP3 player now - and I see that my total participation comes to twenty two and a half minutes - if you take the cues out, who knows what it would be....

I spent some of yesterday touting choir concerts which I won't be singing in, but which I want to support. I also had an idea about trying to make a link between this production of King Lear and the Ashland Food Project for which I volunteer: lots of stuff about homelessness and starvation in this play.

And... I sent off my contribution to the monthly magazine which the radio station publishes. I based it on my thoughts from last weekend on the Goldberg Variations.

OK, back to the play. We didn't actually do the blinding last night - the fight captain decided she should wait until after the scene is blocked, which will happen tonight - I have a funny feeling we are going to be working on Sunday afternoon on this...

So, instead, we did some movement, some tai chi, and some trust exercises, and we talked a little about how the blinding might be staged, and how we'd get from that scene to the next where Gloucester is led on blind. I may not be going to the gym myself, but Lear is - Barry and I talked about him carrying on Cordelia in the final scene, and he told me that he had been doing weight-training, and that he would start lifting Cordelia next week, gradually increasing the length of time he held her up.

We then worked on some scenes on the heath (III ii and III iii). Once again I learned such a lot - I would pay to have this learning experience. There was a play which ran here in 2009 called Equivocation which was about Shakespeare: it opened with a rehearsal of the heath scene from King Lear and Shakespeare's actors complaining that it was impossible to act and made no sense - we all recalled that scene last night as we tried to find a line through for each of us. For me, the problem is in being the only character on stage who is not in disguise, insane or a professional jester...

I'm realising a bit more about how this whole process works. The director actually did have some previous knowledge of some of the students, because they have had internships with the Festival - that interface with the University is really important and a great benefit for the students. I also realise that this is very unlike the course productions I am familiar with from Winchester. There are six productions a year here, and all of them have open auditions, so the cast is not drawn solely from one particular year-group and you don't have to use everybody from that one cohort. t seems to work - everyone in the company gets academic credit for being involved.