scripting

We come in early in the morning while the Westside staff hip hop dance class is happening. They do hilarious moves to ‘bootylicious’ on the other side of the wall. We have just over an hour until Kate comes so we warm up quickly and do the carrying Christy tricks.
We have to think about moves that travel towards the fence where we are pulling each other forward and then retreating again. It happens quickly. Luke has a thought from something he’s seen me do in the past- melting thighstands. I want to climb up a little stepladder of backs. We’ve been practicing the surfing on bluebird. The tricks are all the ones we were training before we had the bunkbeds so they aren’t hard. Acro choreography is something we all love and by the end of the hour we have the basics of a scene.
We whip the set up quickly and are ready to go just as Kate arrives. She says that today we are going to script the show and pulls out pages of butcher’s paper. We impro the opening and she gives us notes and we impro it again and then we all sit around the butchers paper and write and talk and write. I watch the words go down and think – this is the storybook, these are the words of the storybook that I sell with the show. It feels like we are watching the show forming on the paper. Kate apologises for the torturous nature of the process but I don’t feel tortured. Like choreography, it’s a lot of devising time for two minutes of product but then you have it, the show, created exactly as you want it.
We workshop a dog-focussed monologue, look up prehistoric dogs on Wikipedia, and decide that the paperdance comes earlier than the bunkbed play and how do bring in Terry’s uncle who he thinks is a ninja.