Refine, Clarify, make Specific

For me, the work in rehearsals lately has dealt with puppetry and dance.  I am a very spastic person, so getting technical and minute is hard for me but it's exactly what the work demands.  It's almost like counting out your stage life and dialogue to a beat:

1. Crouch           "Daughter

2. Look side        Of

3. Creep              Agammemnon,

4. Swing arm      And

5. Make wave     Bright gem

6. Shake head     of Clytemnestra...."

This is very exciting and will ultimately be very rewarding, but right now it is kicking my ASS.  I suppose it's really no different than typical stage blocking, but with that you're just, "Cross left and pick up the cup on 'This cup?'" and not elaborate, sharply defined modern dance-y moves that punctuate each line.  Maybe I'm just struggling with dancing, something I have never been a genius at even when it was easy things like waltzes in musicals when I was in High School.  

It's actually been really enlightening to work with a puppet because you really start to see where things don't work and why.  Usually, it's because you're not thinking of the puppet as your scene partner but as something separate from yourself.  A character of mine interacts with a puppet played by me, so if the storytelling of our relationship is told in a succession of looks back and forth, those looks better be damn clear.  

Here's an example:

A character asks me, "Is it yes or no?"

I'm looking at this other character.

The hand puppet looks at me.

I look at him

He shakes his head "No" 

I look out to the character and say, "Well...no..." 

The puppet cocks his head sideways.

So if you look at the wrong time or miss one altogether, the beat is mush and you lose the thread of what's going on in between the lines.  Repetition, I think, is the only thing that can get someone as spastic as me to get over the herky-jerky, split personality nature of this kind of performance into a relaxed, settled in, comfortable state where the puppet and I are actually flowing together.