random - meet Valentin aka Chocolate Mouse

this is our mascot - an adorable little mouse that has begun popping by to watch our rehearsals, and sometimes gives furtive acting notes...

rehearsal snaps volume 2

More stretchey moments....

rehearsal snaps volume 1....

Rehearsals are getting more intense and more strenuous as we get closer to full runs, and to prepare the cast for the highly-physical show, Judy and Jon Lum take turns taking the ensemble through increasingly challenging warm-up sessions. Its fascinating to sit at my director's desk under a canopy of Mad Forest branches and hear the gasps and groans...

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And the crowd whirled on

What happens when individuals converge and become a mass? How infectious is a single person in a crowd? And what will you do when you become just one unit in a sea of madness?

Act 2 in full swing. There is strength as well as malady in numbers.

Personal grief or grief of the herd?

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Random snapshot: Jon's birthday Sunday before last. We're guessing he really, really likes this cake.

We're running!

Ah yes, after numerous rehearsals of individual scenes (there's about forty, each in bite sized portions), we're putting the show together again!

One of the largest challenges of Mad Forest, in my opinion, is reproducing something that was originally devised by an ensemble. The volume of subtext! nuanced and layered, because the words we're reading were formed in accompaniment to these actors' specific gestures, personalities, culture, and insight to the revolution. We've been probing and investigating almost every piece of the puzzle, and still we're discovering something new each time.

It has been thrilling, to enter a rehearsal thinking, "ok, we've already figured something out, let's see how we can make it better"; only to discover an hour later, that our choices can be turned around 180 degrees. Which gives the actor so much to play with...

And then we put act 1 together, and we're pleasantly surprised by the result. How the pieces seem to fit without worrying too much about how they should be put together, how the play develops from scene to scene, and how our characters, given their diverse scenarios, are fleshing out quite nicely. Not that we've considered the act solved, but at least we're feeling more secure with what we've discovered so far; that we're doing fine performing from moment to moment. And in the end, we hope to present a piece that does justice to those who have been repressed by a governmental regime, blind to its people's needs; and the sore after-effect when so much has been held back for too long.

Now on to act 3...