The Meaning of Yoghurt

We started the new week with a new synopsis, and a new plan - to work through the play scene by scene, deciding content, staging and music.

Yeon and Judy and Simon, the lighting designer, went to Leicester to visit the Peepul Centre, which will be the project's second venue in May 2009. In the meantime the actors began their improvisation at the beginning. The very first scene, where Norang and then Aka arrive at the building site, seems fairly fixed already, and when we tried it with the lights off it gave a hint of the atmosphere which the start of the play may have. The next two scenes are altogether more fluid, and the actors have by now developed such a habit of inventiveness, it seems churlish to be asking them to narrow down. But over the course of the week, that is what we will need to do.

Our problem this week may be staying focused on the current purpose, which is limited to exploring the story so that we can create the script. Once everything is stood up, it is hard not to work on scenes to the point where they 'work'. The fact is we do not need to go this far, and cannot really afford the time to, either. When we have enough evidence to enable us to 'write', then we can move on.

It is a harder process than last week's, and takes some adjusting. In the afternoon, we stop to discuss things, and get involved in a long discussion started by Minato, raising the question of the meaning of Yoghurt. His approach to the music is very different - with a strong emphasis on symbolism, and he was finding the meaningless of the name Yoghurt a real block to his creative approach. Norang is repeating a word again and again in searching for the cat, which is an unmusical word, and which has no positive meaning. Mijeong in turn felt that it was important that the name was 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It was an unexpected conversation at this stage, and a challenging one.

The actors are drumming with Minato every day, and he has decided that they should do a little performance on Wednesday lunch time, to focus their minds, and so they will play outside the theatre. It is going to be a fascinating aspect of the project, to see how the music evolves.

In the sfternoon session we stopped for a while to welcome 40 teachers who were participating in a careers day at the REP. They watched a little of the improvising, and we introduced them to the project. Their response, to a random section of the process was encouraging. On Friday morning we have quite a sizable audience joining us for our work in progress, apparently, so this was a good dry run.

In the evening, the writers meeting was more complex than previous ones, as the issues we are wrestling with get more complex, but it was fruitful too, and aftre we finished I wrote up the first three scenes in a form which begins to resemble script...