Saturday 15th October, 2005
13:00-18:00
Nicholai La Barrie and Steven Beckenham.
Initial research meeting.
Feedback from reading Deep in a Dream biography.
Watched Let’s Get Lost.
Talked about the nature of the project – using found text.
Everyone very excited about that.
Talked about where the show might start, at what point in Chet’s life.
Talked about the need to make two lists:
- one of songs
- one of lines we think are important from people, including Chet.
Steve took Ronnie Scotts DVD to watch.
Nicholai took Live in Japan to watch.
Rehearsed My Funny Valentine with trumpet and piano – very good fun!
Saturday 12th November, 2005
Played through There’s a Small Hotel, My Funny Valentine with the piano.
Made a shortlist of must have songs:
- The Thrill Is Gone
- My Funny Valentine
- There’s A Small Hotel
- I Should Care
- Deep in a Dream
- Everything Happens to Me
Read through the text samples and talked through the implication of each.
Initiated idea of starting piece with Chet in chair asleep, as cigarette burns out he wakes up with a start, segue into saying lyrics to Deep in a Dream.
Nicholai came up with the reverse chronology idea which we all loved – Chet as old man at the beginning ending with Chet as young man, perhaps the Charlie Parker famed ‘audition’.
Talked through the main themes:
- Vulnerability
- Guilt
- Fame
- Addiction
Piece should explore what lies beneath the icon of Chet Baker?
An internal monologue of his memories – a unreliable narrator.
Actions:
Mark will email opening text to everyone at least a week before next rehearsal.
Nicholai will work on budget/funding plans.
Steve will contact Union Theatre with a view to going there in June 2006.
Mark will talk to Karena about Contact in Manchester.
Mark & Nicholai will talk to Toby and Jorge about their Edinburgh plans.
Next rehearsal:
19th December – Oval House Theatre (Nicholai will book space).
Tuesday 19thDecember, 2005
Discussed the artistic vision of the piece in much more detail.
Union Theatre – no reply from email.
Contact – not
We are much clearer about what we are trying to achieve and how we can go about it. The application of translation theory and its implication for adaptation of the Chet Baker texts now seems to make much more sense: we are in the process of foreignising the new performative work by looking at the textual structures of the original and reflecting those in the final work. Hence there will be a degree of improvisation in the textual form – a playing around from a central theme (jazz structure), a feeling of the iconic (we talked about video projection), and narrative/memory (from the Chet Baker memoir).
The idea of Speedball also provides us with a kind of freeform structure that should hold these elements together.
We read through the beginnings of the script (5 pages) and started to talk about how each scene relates to the other. The suggestion to move some scenes around will be written into the next draft of the script for the next rehearsal after Christmas.
Again, we talked about the songs and made a new list.
MY FUNNY VALENTINE
THERE’S A SMALL HOTEL
THE THRILL ISGONE
I SHOULD CARE
I’M THROUGH WITH LOVE?
ALMOST BLUE
I’VE NEVER BEEN IN LOVE
LINE FOR LYONS
TIME AFTER TIME
Actions:
Mark will complete mac application.
Nicholai will complete AC R&D application.
Steve will make a compilation CD of all the new songs.
Date of next rehearsal: 11th January.
Saturday 11th January 2006.
All actions points from last meeting have been completed.
Today, we welcomed Andrea Vicari to the project. She is going to develop the jazz composition aspect and act generally as a musical director for the piece.
We read through the latest version of the script. Tried a lot of SLOWING DOWN the reading, making it not predict what the coming lines were. This worked well. This was also the first full filmed rehearsal so the results will be interesting.
We reached a stumbling point with the sequence from the memoir – the woman in the boat. The text needs to be changed in order to work. Again, the fundamental questions of who is Chet talking to came up. In the adaptation, we need to be aware that the audience will not have been on the same research journey as us. In the showing and telling we need to strike a balance and it all comes back to two central questions: what is the story we are telling and why are we telling it?
Andrea thinks we need to rehearse the development phase with a quartet as that’s what Chet Baker used to play with. We looked at the funding implications of that and will present the budget to the Arts Council on Wednesday.
All in all, while not a particularly satisfactory rehearsal, we actually seemed to have achieved a lot.
Next meeting: two weeks’ time.
