Under the Zelkova Tree

We started the day with a writer's meeting, for a change today, and Caroline Jester, the REP's Dramaturg, sat in on the session to get a sense of the project and the process. These meetings have a rythmn and atmosphere all of their own, with the three languages making everything slow, of course, but the effect of that is positive as well as negative. There is a shared knowledge that we cannot afford to waste words or time, and the group has picked up a very healthy tendency of cutting pretty quickly 'to the chase'.

The first section of the discussion this morning reflected on the day of music, and we put some decisions in place about the way of approaching the music in the rest of the fortnight. The idea of the shape of the music echoing the shape of the relationships within the play seems strong, and there will be a progression in the way the music comes together along these lines. Although the actors will generate some percussion themselves, there is already a commitment to having a musician, set apart from the action, and he or she will be picking up the lead from the action, and supporting it. There seems no way to be able to incorporate Young Ju playing the gayagum, which is a shame, since it is such a potentially beautiful thing to include. But there is a place for singing, particularly by her, as she has been showing in improvisations. There is also now a clear task of creating a new clapping game of our own.

The rest of our discussion was around the introduction of the grandmother's story. Mijeong has drafted a version. It is about a special child, 'All Our Child' who is born in an ancient community. His talents are great, and when knowledge of him comes to the ears of the king, he feels threatened and vows to have him killed. The boy is protected by his family, but he reveals himself. Before he is killed he manages to pass a message that he has hidden the secret to everything underneath the zelkova tree.

Nishida likes the way that this is a story of hope. He is not a hero, he achieves nothing, but he leaves hope. We are now suggesting a link to this story, involving a tree within the building site, where Aka used to play. When the children find the remains of this tree, Norang cheers Aka up by telling the story, and they conceive the idea that the secret from the story may be buried under where this tree once was.

Before lunch, Mijeong tells Young Ju the story quietly, in Korean, and the actors then hear it for the first time, within an improvisation. It is a little clumsy - trying to relate the story through the language barriers, but once again it is an improvisation which points the way for the decisions about how we deal with it in our actual play. A second run at this part of the play also leads us towards some ways of achieving the digging, using milk crates.

Towards the end of the day, there is an opportunity to divide again, and while the actors work with Minato on the clapping games, there is a spontaneous meeting about design. Yeon has some images of korean textiles which she wants to share, and the creative team debates the way forward on design. Everyone responds well to the feel of the images - monochrome and geometric, on translucent cloth - a possible backcloth, and a template for the feel of the whole set. Up to now, she had placed a wide variety of abjects within the performance space, for the actors to experiment, and we had taken the whole space as representing the whole site. The decision is now made that the action will take us to different corners of the site, transformed with as few objects as feasible, supported by lighting, with only the actors involved in these transformations. Objects will be symbolic, maybe at times adapted versions of real objects, given the feel that fits with the overall pictures we want.

At the end of the day we have to say goodbye to Mera, who has been translating throughout, but who leaves tomorrrow for a month in India. Yerang who will replace her, visits to meet with Mera and pick up the baton.

In the evening most of the company watched Jasmin Vordiman's company in an impressively brutal piece called, Yesterday, and on the way back to their lodgings everyone was wondering if we could get more bare bottoms and physical violence into our show....