WBI: How does a Lacuna Group workshop work? (p.2)

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I am imagining what the participants in a Lacuna Group workshop for the design of William Blake’s Inn would experience working on “Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor” (hereinafter simply “Tailor”). Go here to learn more and to sign up to be kept informed of when stuff is happening.

The first thing we’d do in the workshop — after learning each others’ names — is to listen to the song, singing along as we get to know it. Then I’d spread a long piece of bulletin board paper across the studio wall, and we’d create a timeline/storyboard for the piece. Here’s the breakdown:

timecodes are approximatish

First we have to grok what is the audience going to be looking at. We have the Tiger, who has asked for a bedtime story, and Blake, who tells him this unnerving tale of a man who captures flying things and sews them together to make a house for himself and his Wife — but the house comes flying apart their first night in it, forcing them to flee to Blake’s Inn.

So how do we show a man stitching “snails’ feet and comets’ hairs” into a house? What does that even look like? And then how do we make it tear itself apart?

The text gives us a short list of the Tailor’s building materials…

  • wool of bat

  • fur of mouse

  • moleskin suede

  • onionskin

  • velveteen

  • snails’ feet

  • comets’ hairs

  • robins’ wings

  • other flying things

…so we will need to let the audience see those being used. We might choose to add other creatures as we go along.

Participants in the workshop would now begin throwing out ideas, getting on their feet and acting ideas out, or making drawings or scribbling on the timeline.

“Pergrenations of a comet”

  • “Is the Tiger an actor or a puppet?”

  • “How about the Tailor and his Wife?”

  • “Does Blake sing the Tailor’s part, or does another performer?”

  • “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if the basses and tenors sang the Wife’s rant, falsetto?”

  • “I see the walls of the house being elastic, able to breathe in and out.”

  • “How scary/weird can we get with this? Like, can the Tailor do over-the-top movements with his oversize needle, stabbing bats and robins without even noticing as he pulls the thread taught, then plunging them into the fabric of the wall he’s sewing?”

  • “What’s supposed to be happening in those interludes?”

  • “After the calm of Tailor 5, what can we do to ‘button’ the piece in the Finale?”

The first part of this process is simply piling up all the ideas we can. We won’t use all of them, and some of them will not be usable, but the best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas to choose from. See: The Rules.

Pile up your ideas in comments. Next: The RIGHT idea.