I am and am not named Antigone

It's my introduction to Woman's Will and we're wrapping up what has easily been the most curious and multidimensional week of rehearsal I've ever experienced.

Coming myself from a mixed background of traditional theater, physical theater and clown, I've participated in the creation of work with all kinds of different texts: solid and static text; no text; physical "text" without words, borrowed and reconstructed text, original text created by by the performers in rehearsal. BUT! I've never before encountered a text that is, in fact, a solid and set text, a PLAY, but with no formal indication of which lines belong to whom, or in fact which lines are lines and which are stage directions ... stage directions such as: "Time does not like this remark. Becomes a weasel, or a vicious hedgehog, backs up, puffed up in raging horripilation."

In school, I loved studying poetry - I being able to take the time to enjoy every contour and resonance of a single word, and the relationship of those contours and resonance with those of every other word around it. My clown teacher likes to say that clowning is a kind of poetry, in which every moment and image is intense, distilled, resonant. Here is theater, a play, in which this exploration is textual and physical: three dimensional exploration of language - and the philosophy, and the history, of the story of Antigone.

We have sat together amidst piles of big sheets of papers, free-associating around words and images from this play: Eggs. Eyes. Spiders. Web. Cat's Cradle. We have taken time to vocalize words from the text, finding every corner of every consonant and every possible shape of every vowel, every way of putting them all together with variation in pitch, speed, breath, timbre, looking for the sounds of the three Furies (also the three Graces, also the three Facts)... We have found different ways of moving individually and together to shapeshift as these characters do.

Shapeshifting, role-playing: They all are and are not themselves and one another.

This is the tip of the iceberg!

--Clotho, the one who spins