More on Rude Mechs Workshop

Rude Mechs were interviewed Tuesday by John Aielli of KUT's Eklektikos, an Austin radio institution. The whole spot runs on his blog, Aielli Unleashed:

http://kut.org/items/show/17099

We all got to go down and sing for the interview...there's a lot of them talking about the piece, and we sing two live numbers. It's interesting to hear them talk about the piece and how it came to be.

More to note on the INBSH rehearsal process. There are two directors, a composer/lyricist, a writer/lyricist, an artistic director, and a projections designer in the room, in addition to a dramaturg and all the actors. This is a LOT of cooks. The Mechs have been working together for a long time -- they've got a lot of very smart HABITS and PRACTICES in place to keep from spoiling the soup.

1) They establish the RULES OF THE WORLD they're making, and they stick to them. There's a logic, and when there's a question about a choice, they defer to the logic, or clarify the logic. This pertains not only to story structure (we're used to that, even if we don't always accomplish that) but to everything in the aural and visual world. For example: In one scene, the projections show a side-view of everything happening in an office, and simultaneously show the things ON the table. So we had to spend time making sure that the timing of everything going on and off the table was solid.

2) They huddle to figure things out. They're good at doing it quickly, but they don't do their figuring out, too much, in front of the actors. It's "cool, go practice this one thing," then they figure something out and come back to us with "okay, this next." There are so many moving pieces and parts, too, that they do a LOT of "divide-and-conquer" -- They huddle up, split the list, take who they need and work on the pieces, then bring'em all together. Then they watch the whole thing, rinse and repeat. So they get to do some collective-brain-contribution, without stopping the process very long to do so, and they take advantage of being able to be several places at once once we're moving gain...so we get a lot done fast.

3) They do something I also saw Halena do in "101 Ways..." earlier this year, which is to give actors an assignment to problem-solve, send them off, and then have a show-and-tell. As in "we know we want a dance with rope here, but we don't know what it looks like. Take ten minutes, come back and show us five things you can do with rope." Then they used the stuff they liked to make a rope dance. In that case, they knew that the dance needed to (a) represent a boy tied to a lion in the desert and (b) be a little bit of a palate-cleanser between two songs.

4) They are 100% clear on the aesthetic they're going for. They might not always have been, but they are now (see the "rules" thing)...which means they can make definitive decisions faster and with confidence.

5) They encourage all of us to bring our "A-game" all the time, to come up with crazy and stupid ideas, and to be brave/fierce/badasses. They do this by explicitly offering the invitation to contribute like crazy, but also by modeling that at every minute. So their collaborators contribute more and sit around less.

That's all for now.