Set Choreography

Pete Brooks' diary
It's been a fairly busy couple of days. On Sunday we marked up all the positions for the audience truck. It is a unnegotiable fact of making performance, that, just as inany other manufacturing process, it is not enough simply to know what you want to happen, you also need to know how to make it happen, and in the case of tracking shot, cueing, and the marking up of the floor are the key to getting things to happen in the right way at the right time and take quite a bit of thought. Last night we worked through all the set moves. Who moves what and to where.

Everything has to be choreographed. Every set element has it's place at every moment, not just when it's being used and because it is the cast who are moving stuff, there are costume changes to be taken into consideration and also lighting and projection positions. There are 15
set changes in 40 minutes making for a complex interconnecting puzzle that takes hours to solve. It's frustrating and difficult without being challenging in an exciting way. It's just something that needs to be done. It reminds me of something a TV director friend of mine said, and this someone who has directed episodes of both The Wire and The Sopranos. He says the director is just a traffic cop.

A footnote: I have just noticed that the blogmeister has been describing these diary entries as being from Pete Brook's diary. Dissapointingly they are not, they are from Pete Brooks' diary.(what a difference a space makes) I saw Peter Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream when I was at school and, reservations about his recent work not withstanding I have always admired him. The truth is we do not have a great deal in common other than that we both work in the theatre and are both bald. He came to see a show of mine once (Clair de Luz in 1994) I was so nervous when I heard he was in the audience I went to the toilets and vomited.