Sunday, November 04, 2007

effects of change

I went to the most unusual audition today. It's for a film, and they asked people to bring in true life monologues. Nothing from plays, just come in and tell a story on camera. They filmed the auditions, and filmed them in groups of three so that they could get a sense of how you listen as well as how you speak. I was in the second group, but arrived an hour early due to extremely light traffic. I had brought my own set of headshots with me, as I'm still looking for three men for Sweetie Tanya.

I told an amalgamation of kidney stone stories, which had the desired effect of being amusing and horrifying in equal measures. Indeed, the stories from all the people in the second group were a sweet and sour mix of the goofy and the horrifying. I wish I had been in the first group as well, just to hear people telling their tales.

I get a bit spoiled, I suppose, as we do this sort of thing at the beginning of each Radiostar session. We tell true stories, based on a word or idea culled from someone in attendance. It's a good exercise, and the stories are often so compelling that Chris has often spoke of taking them and making them a podcast of their own.

I think it would be a good party game... to tell people not to bring food or drink, but a story to share, and to share them throughout the evening.

Most of the rest of this weekend was spent relaxing and working on Tanya. I had a fantastic meeting with our choreographer (Tonya Amos), and discovered some crucial things about how Nolan Cook's music will play into the piece. I also met an auditioner, who has become one of our Coffee Crush Chorus. I have an entire stack of old headshots of actors who will be getting emails from me tomorrow, hopefully ending my casting period.

But tonight was spent watching Doctor Zhivago. It's a long movie, but epic and gorgeous. I'd always heard of the film, but never seen it before tonight. Oddly enough, I am also nearing the end of a memoir about growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China. The book is called "Spider Eaters". The book and the movie bounce off each other in interesting ways, as both ultimately detail what it is to move as an individual through a revolution that denies the validity of individual meaning and experience. Both also heartbreakingly describe what happened to private homes and gardens that were gutted, over occupied and ruined during the revolution. In the film we see Zhivago's home, as he returns from the war, occupied by thirteen families and himself treated like an intruder. In the book, we learn of the author's grandmother, whose home was taken over by many families of the people, while she, old and suffering from diabetes, was stuffed into the pantry and left there for her last five years.

It's a quandry. Massive social change by its very nature requires the suffering of individuals. Yet, in the case of both these historical episodes... the change, for all its idealism, hurt the very people it claimed to serve and truly benefitted only those with a need for power. It seems to me that the moment that idealism loses sight of its impact on the individual, it becomes little more than a new tool of oppression. On the other side, there is a line from the film that gives me pause. "I told myself it was beneath my dignity for arresting a man for pilfering firewood. But nothing ordered by the party is beneath the dignity of any man, and the party was right: one man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic; five million people desperate for a bit of fuel will destroy a city."

But then again, what created the situation where five million people would be desperate for fuel?

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