Building and rehearsing is continuing on and picking up steam. The studio is brimming with giant frames and swathes of fabric. Every day I am jumping from wrangling large, intimidating builds to fine tuning the rigging for small hand puppets.
We are quickly reaching a point of being out of time to think things through and needing to just make it happen. I spent most of one Saturday sweating inside a puppet, itching from studio dust and slowly fumigating myself with PVC glue. When I finally called it, it was still in a state of “maybe”.
This is actually further along than it was at that point
That said, it’s great to have more projects to give the volunteers again. They are paper-macheing and base-painting up a storm, and sometimes I wish I didn’t have the privilege to work on the more complicated tasks so that I could join them on the easier projects. But each time I hit a breakthrough on some problem puppet, the depth of satisfaction reminds me how silly that is.
It is also a little disheartening to watch certain puppets break or malfunction due to design error during rehearsal. However, it’s empowering to know I can tackle those issues myself. No need to wait for anyone else to make my puppet work for me, I can do it first thing next work day!
Time for some reconstructive surgery! Everybody gather ’round!
All lined up and reporting for duty: Meghan goes over finishing touches with Jake
I’m becoming dangerously attached to the roles I’ve been filling in rehearsal. Jan and Donovan continue to warn us that some cast-shuffling may still occur as volunteers fill in and we figure out the best roles for everybody. Yet, here I am becoming fully dedicated to each little gesture. It’s so hard, to put your all into creating something and still be able to let it go.
Likewise, I definitely get sucked into certain build projects, and sometimes they get pretty far out of hand before I admit I need help. Or sometimes I forget that just because Jan or Donovan made the suggestion doesn’t mean it has to be the way it’s done. Meghan and I struggled with the dusty nightmare bird puppet for most of Saturday, and come the next work day she had no qualms not getting back on that project.
“We put in our time. Let someone else wrestle it for a bit.” She said.
“I just feel like it would be irresponsible to walk away from it…” I whined.
“Don’t you mean you’re too stubborn to let it go?”
I did a literal double take, not expecting Meghan to have me pinned so well already, and responded, sarcastically, “You know, it’s really rude to just lay out the truth like that.”
Thankfully, she also gets my brand of snark, and we shared a laugh before she made good on her word and abandoned the bird, and I also worked on something else. For a day. Then I went back to it.
It helped to check my own ego to remember when I assisted Donovan as he struggled with the creative process of a particularly large and complicated puppet. It involved reed and pvc construction, taping and weaving them into form, and mostly I just held things in place or followed behind with finishing touches. It started to go awry when he wanted to put a specific curve in one of the PVC pipes. He went through nearly our entire supply of ¾” PVC, each one snapping or kinking on him from just the slightest wrong touch, and all I could do was watch the frustration mount.
This is the head of said project, almost entirely reeds
Eventually, he left that project for the day. The next morning, Jan had taken over that particular part of the build, as he has a little gentler of a hand when it comes to pvc bending.
I say this not disparage him, because he is an excellent builder and director, but to remind myself that this entire project is an exercise in feeling things out and “make it work” moments. There is no shame in stepping away to a different project, or asking for help. Even the greatest of us falls to that sometimes.
And besides, Donovan later completely saved the day on the dusty-deathtrap bird puppet and now it’s actually in a state of “yeah….that’ll work!” Hooray! I’m only a little jilted that I couldn’t find the solution myself. 😉
Tail feathers!!
A Sense Of Scale 