WBI: Lacuna Group workshops, p.4

You may wonder, if you are of a curious mind, why I keep writing about Lacuna Group’s doings over here at Lichtenbergianism.com rather over at lacunagroup.org.

Even in my indecisive floundering, this is what I’m doing.

That is a great question. The main reason is that here is where I started thinking about William Blake’s Inn and its premiere, and my exploration of what Lacuna’s workshops would be like are a better fit for the “What Is Creativity?” message that is my usual thrust here. Trust me, once the workshops actually get going, all that minutiæ will be posted over at lacunagroup.org.

I’ve been struggling about when/how to have these workshops. I have a couple of weeks blocked out at Southern Arc Dance in June, but it’s getting to be a little late to advertise those, especially with school about to be out. So it’s more likely that we’ll start later in the year.

The main issue I need to consider is the scope of the workshops. Do we have a separate workshop for each of the sixteen songs? Can we batch them, i.e., all the King of Cats pieces, Wise Cow, etc.? Does every song need to be workshopped? How long is each one — a week? Do we even have sixteen weeks to work on this?

Do we need to have a workshop to set the overall parameters, i.e., “this is what the show is going to look like overall,” “this is the color palette for the show,” “no children under 10/8/6,” “all puppets will be x/y/z,” that kind of thing?

Probably I will schedule the more complicated songs first (“Milky Way,” “Sun & Moon Circus,” “Tale of the Tailor,” for example, just so we can hammer out all the technical issues: galaxies, dancing celestial objects, disintegrating houses, etc. There will be pieces that I will probably make all the quick, easy decisions for, and there are probably a couple of pieces that won’t require any real staging, like “Postcard,” for example.

Okay, first step is figuring out which of those categories each song falls into — complex, simple, not needing hooshing up technically — and then making a schedule that won’t grind me into dust before it’s all over and done with.

Be right back.