We are deep in rehearsals for The Sea Pageant, and normally at this point in a process we would be spending ~30-40 hours/week in the same room with the same people slowly moving forward, understanding new things about the work. The Sea Pageant is not normal, however, and instead we're going to different places all over the state every day -- most of the time outside -- teaching basically the same thing to a new group of people. In some ways it is very very simple, and in other ways. . . Well, totally not.
In April we held drop-in workshops, which is how we created all of the sequences that are now part of The Sea Pageant. This amounts to: The Slow Sequence, Dry Then Wet (a chant song we don't have recordings of), The Wild Ocean Dance (Group Leaders only), and Crowded in a Dinghy (song and dance). There are also two sections that have to be invented by the performers: Individual Expression, responding to the prompt "Of the shifting of the planet" AND the Group Expression (which is created with no prompts by the group, with the suggestion that it be 1-min long).
In June we enlisted 10 group leaders, who were each tasked with getting 9 other people to join their group, so that eventually we would find 100 people. We asked them to schedule 4-6 rehearsals in total and to decide when and where they would be. There are three lead artists who know the whole piece really well, and are assigned in some combination to each group's rehearsal. As Group Leaders made their schedules, we mapped out our summers, so that at every rehearsal, there's a lead artist with the Group Leader. Together we teach the piece, answer questions, address group-specific needs and creation, and offer a consistent experience. We have a really crazy google doc to keep track of it all. It looks like this:
On August 21, 2017 at 11am all 100 performers will arrive at the ballroom at Easton's Beach. For the first time they will all meet each other and we will have two hours to rehearse together. At 1:30pm everyone will go outside and perform The Sea Pageant on the beach as the solar eclipse starts. There won't be any amplification or music that tells the performers if they're together or not; there aren't any counts to rely on or backstage areas to hide behind if you mess up. If the performance all falls apart, so be it. We keep reminding ourselves that no matter what, The Sea Pageant is actually happening now. It's already a success. August 21 is just the excuse.
And figuring out what we do August 22, 2017 is the real question. . .