Midsummer: the beginnings

I’ve begun very tentative work on the hybrid dance/theatre Midsummer Night’s Dream in collaboration with Paulo Mano de Sousa (head of Southern Arc Dance).

Paulo’s vision includes the complete Mendelssohn set of incidental music, and we decided immediately that the fairies should be dancers while the lovers and mechanicals should play Shakespeare’s bits. (We’re also wanting to make it a site-specific event; more about that as it develops.)

To that end, I’ve snagged the text of MND from Project Gutenberg and dumped it into Scrivener, dividing acts and scenes into separate documents. I’ve been going through and cutting lines as much as I can — we want the show to be about an hour long (!) — and trimming the action down to its bare essentials.

I am vain enough to think, though, that audiences will be so entranced by my actors’ performances that the length won’t matter (as long as they don’t have to stand like common groundlings).

Much work ahead, but at least I have made an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT.