After rehearsal today I talked to some friends on the way to pick up my kid.
I was remembering a particular workshop when we were improvising from songs and the song I was assigned was; “At Seventeen” and I had felt like such a failure because I didn’t have any impulses for movement or vocalization. I just had a very strong image of a very sad teenaged girl in her room alone listening to the radio. It seemed an inauspicious place from which to begin to create some clown magic.
When I got home tonight, I looked up the song on youtube and found out the artist was Janis Ian and she is a fascinating person who still has a career. I watched about six youtube videos of the song by various artists and they all just stood there and sang as simply as possible holding their bodies almost still (if they weren’t playing a guitar) with eyes downcast part of the time because the music and lyrics are so powerful. So I was overriding my impulses that night I thought I was failing at improvisation. The impulse really was to do nothing but just to be still and to be sad. I fought that impulse and choked. I thought I had to move and sing gibberish. The text is strong. I just wanted to listen to the text and then I wanted to continue the original text, and the image of a sad teenaged girl alone in her room was so strong. It seemed wrong as a starting point for clown. I can see using that music and having a piece work. I love the pathetic clown. And yet…
What can I say…
…I choked…
It was just an exercise…
Just an improv…
Nothing anyone did from the improvisations that grew out of that song made it into the final show…
Just sayin…