Othello: Week Two

So here we are.  Managed to grab an hour to myself away from the Big Othello House for a shot span of time.  It feels great!  We’re halfway through the second week of the project and have been joined by Juan and Harold who are our musical director and choreographer respectively.  The original core group who were part of the original Bulawayo version of The Gospel of Othello have been joined by a variety of Harare-based performers including musicians and actors.  Things are progressing really well but it’s definitely intensive and demanding.  The combination of simultaneously working on the dance and movement, music and text components of the show is both stimulating and exhausting.  In snatched moments of free-time it’s hard to know what to begin going over and working on myself.  And I’m a little sleep-deprived…! The five girls are sharing a room which makes for an intense communal lifestyle! But all in all it’s really good and there’s some interesting ideas and work emerging.  

For me personally, I am at the stage of needing to somehow learn lines and work on the character of Desdemonda in various ways.  I also need to learn a whole bunch of music – most in languages other than English (and I’m not very good with languages!!) as well as dance routines and chorus work.  I have an interesting relationship with dancing.  While I love it, I don’t think I am particularly good at it (it’s definitely a myth that all girl’s can dance well!) and I’m finding, as I guess I did expect to, that there are many things that are culturally specific and what’s normal or default to one person is actually so different to others from another background.  It’s already emerged in terms of dance – what’s natural in terms of beat and body to everyone else isn’t necessarily to me – and I’m sure it’s also evident in other areas too.  But that’s the beauty of what we’re involved in and for me it’s part of the reason I wanted to be involved in this project.  I didn’t expect it to be easy.  But I did expect it to be stretching and stimulating and that’s certainly what is emerging.   

This about sums up our relative waltzing prowess...my Othello & I have a lot of work to do!!