Conflict emerges

The play is written when the devising company is cast.  Players tend to scout the common ground they have with colleagues.  Sometimes in terms of what to create, sometimes how.  The rest is identifying and building the dynamics that arise.  There’s more room for this without a script.  Or, perhaps in a process that at least doesn’t start with a script on the table.   These inclinations and dynamics come from sources more immediate, more personal than one’s day job, age, sex, relationship status, even a cultural background.  When something sparks, clicks, when something’s found, all it needs is space, time, and an initial direction.  In any direction.

Take, for example, Catherine and Jeff.  They’ve never met before our rehearsal process.  But from that point on, there was something in their working relationship.  Some sort of “Hey, you.  Let’s rassle. “

Suffice it to say it’s not as sexual as one may assume… at all.

In solo discussions, Jeff talked about fighting.  Fighting.  I said, “It sounds like you’re looking for a fight.”  He said, “I love to fight. Not really destroy anybody, and not out of anger, out of sport.”  (I believe this.  He’s an older brother, and a very very nice guy.)  On the other hand, Catherine is constantly expressing a wildness, an animalistic rage, a sensual, grotesque villain, who needs a nemesis.  It didn’t take long for the two to want to beat the hell out of each other.  This expression, this dynamic, this fighting event that wants to flourish between them, we found a context for it last night.  In the video attached to this blog, you’ll see Jeff instigate a conflict (as he explained he often did in the role of older brother.).They meet, in wolves bodies, and a half-wolf, half-human experience for them both culminates in an attraction-conflict that ultimately provides us with the root of their character’s relationships, if not the characters themselves.