Not I... Again

After our rehearsal last week, I felt a bit selfish. In my memorization, I had sort of forgotten that Jackie was layering her text over mine--so when the time came for Jackie to layer over me, I was a bit thrown, and wondered if I should adjust my speed to flow with hers. As I've been rehearsing, I've tried to keep that layering in mind. I wonder if it would be helpful for us to do a sort of line read round robin before we prop up our performance, so that we can get used to layering on top of each other.

The layering has raised some curiosities for me, though: about the multiplicity of the Mouth's identity/memories... different voices over different occasions... tracking the changes, the layerings... There's probably no time for this, but are there occasions of choral speech? When all of our voices come together? How does spreading the Mouth over all of us change the Mouth? Does it crack her/it into different aspects of the same thing? Does it make the Mouth the Mouth of many different people?

I also agree with Tania about how the "best" Mouth is a mix of everything we brought to class. I know I've found myself trying to focus on my mouth's physicality, as Joe did, while also trying to track some of the lovely interior work a few other people did, all while not losing my speed (which I quite like).

I'm still trying to negotiate those moments of what I see as dialogue. I feel the impulse to pause for a breath and listen in those moments, and to register the inaudible input in the speech that follows. For instance, in mine, there's a moment when I say, "what? ... girl? .... yes.... tiny little girl" and I feel the impulse to register this as a correction. Later, when I say "what? ... seventy? ... good God... coming up to seventy..." I register this as a correction and as a moment of... humor? Similar to Krapp's "Nine? Good God."

In my examination of the Mouth's text, I find my text fairly easy to track, because it adheres closely to a timeline: birth... childhood... a sudden focus on a single moment in her seventies... present day. The amount of focus--pretty detailed, sensory focus--on single moments (ie. the early April morning wandering in a field; being in the dark, suspended between buzzing) also helps me to clutch my text, because of how vivid they are. I've found it helpful to divide my text into sections.

I also can't help but notice how... sassy? Wrong word. But biting/sarcastic/witty the Mouth is. I'm thinking of phrases like "no love such as normally vented on the speechless infant," "eight months later almost to the tick..." Crude phrases, harsh phrases, but so juicy, so sharp. I like sinking my mouth into them.