We would like to thank everybody for coming out and seeing the show. It’s been a great two weeks of performances, and every night had been a very unique and fun experience thanks to our diverse applicants who helped in building Lush Valley.
The photos of our Lush Valley applicants taken during the show can be found here.
A big thank you also to all our contributors who helped shape the show over the entire process through workshops, think tanks, readings, etc. It was a pleasure to be part of this great community.
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We are are extremely grateful for the generous support of the following people:
Anonymous, Alexandra Beller, Jamie L. Bennett , Richard Brundage, Nicole Burman, David Cote, Rima Fand, Gia Forakis, Vanessa Gilbert, Sally & Fred Harris, Rachel Jendrzejewski, David Koren, Dominik Landowne, Leeda Marting, Donna Roseman, Lake Simons, Carl Skutsch, Kathleen Turco-Lyon.
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This week has been very exciting for all of us – Suzi has returned to New York and joined us for rehearsal! Monday was a big catch up day for her and we talked through the entire show, all her scenes, songs and dances. For the rest of the week we continued working on Wanda’s solo texts and her scenes with Jason or Ernie and made some great progress by finding the humor and little details which Wanda’s character brings into the show.
The full cast days during the week very much focused on dance and song. After the run last Saturday, Kristin had the fabulous idea of changing Georgie’s rap into a fantasy sequence and now the entire cast gets a chance to join in into a funky hip hop dance choreography, uncovering some unexpected dance potential in some of the actors! Great fun and considering that the whole choreography was designed and rehearsed within a day, an encouraging balance to a rather bumpy run thru on Thursday with very little and at times slightly challenging audience. Yet, these rehearsals are an important reminder that the show builds upon its diverse audience and that the officers will face different applicants every night. But we started all fresh and confident on Friday morning filming Wanda’s TED talk, officer interview and declaration as well as some of the footage for Georgie’s rap fantasy.
Check out this preview of Lush Valley in Time Out New York’s Fall Preview edition!
We are getting excited to build Lush Valley with you, our audience members, and the production dates near. Get your tickets now!
We have continued working on fine tuning scene work this week, as well as making sure each transition is as smooth and specific as possible. On Thursday, we focused on the think tank section of the show, where each officer helps their group create part of the new Lush Valley Oath of Allegiance. We are trying to get each officer to engage their think tank group as productively as possible, so that we end up with an Oath that represents every one of our new Lush Valley citizens.
On Saturday, we had the pleasure of having about 15 audience members visit our rehearsal space for a run through. These rehearsals are always the most enlightening, because we need our Lush Valley applicants in order to figure out the traffic patterns and timing of the show. We found a lot of things that were working really well with audience in the room, and some that needed tightening up. The dances in the show can be a bit tricky for the Lush Valley officers to navigate with audience members in the room, so it was great to see those sections as they would be in performance so that we can adjust accordingly. We also were able to see how the various paper materials in the show – from intake forms to checklists to voting ballots – were fitting in to the entire piece, and how we need to tailor those to fit the needs of our audience members.
We are excited to get deeper into rehearsal next week, as we speed towards tech and the beginning of previews on September 7th! Stay tuned for more updates!
Don’t forget to vote for the LUSH VALLEY national bird, flower, food, colors, motto and slogan on our online survey, Identity Politics! Identity Politics, which began as part of the Figment Festival, is a project that we started to help form a national identity for LUSH VALLEY. Cast your vote online, and see the results of the vote incorporated into our production, which premieres on September 11th. Voting officially ends on September 6th, so don’t wait!
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Thursday afternoon we staggered through the entire play. A few people were invited as audience members to watch the skeletal structure of what’s been created in the last week and a half take form, and, my goodness, it was a wonderful thing to witness. As an intern I have been watching each scene being rehearsed individually so it was a marvelous thing to see all these teeny tiny scenes suddenly slot together into this huge theatrical moment! The bare bones are definitely there and are a great, informative structure to work with over the next few weeks.
Friday morning we worked on Jason and Miguel’s scene, finding the different colours and rhythms inside it. There is some great humour here as the two characters are juxtapositions to each other and we played with Jason’s naive banter that does not seem so well received by Miguel. Great fun! We then worked on Miguel’s lecture experimenting with gestures that had already been chosen and adding a few more. We experimented with the changing rhythms in the text as one danger with the gestures is they can take over the text instead of complimenting it; but it was captivating to watch as the physical gestures really draw you into the text.
Saturday we worked on Kim and Miguel’s scenes and delved deeper into the text, exploring its subtext. We also rehearsed the scenes using a ‘melodrama run’ to see if there were anymore discoveries with breaking the genre of the piece ; however, we soon discovered it was already in the scenes, just extremely understated! Thursday afternoon’s stumble through brought to light some staging issues in another scene that was intended for the Public Office space, so today we worked on re-staging this scene and moving it to the Break Room instead.
We took some large steps with the character of Kim today, finding several varieties in her personal life with one monologue and similar layers as a strong, liberal minded Muslim woman in another monologue. There’s a real humanity within each officer and with moments like these we hope the applicants will be able to see that as well. After lunch, we worked on ironing out the kinks in Georgie and Jason’s relationship. Will these two ever be able to find a common ground?
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It was a slower paced day in rehearsals than it has been this week. The first half of the day we sat with Georgie to work on her monologues. Qui, one of Lush Valley’s writers, was a fabulous helping hand with Georgie’s spoken poem and rap. They’re starting to take a really exciting shape! After working on short scene between Ernie and Georgie, we focused on Ernie’s monologue before jumping into one of the final moments, “Suspicious Minds”! There are still a few kinks in the bridge to work out, but choreography is giving some very good flair to the piece!
