Quote:
Originally Posted by KarlMalone
Do you have a desire to be naked in front of others again?
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Yes I definitely do. And I’m positive I will do it again. The question is: do we develop a different show (we are looking at a variety of plays) or do we revive Puppets and see if there’s more work to do with that. Colin and Lucy want to keep going with Puppets. (It’s easy for them because they aren’t naked, haha). I have mixed feelings about it.
Part of me wants a role in an edgy drama where I have dialogue and character development. Acting is the reason I got involved in this group to begin with. But so far the plays we’ve looked at are too tepid. This is where I ask for your help - if you guys know of any really edgy, boundary pushing plays, I would love to hear about them. We are thinking about developing our own script based on La Ronde. We would update it and modernize it and could stage it as bold as we wanted. I think our troupe has developed a bit of a shock reputation, which we like, but it seems hard to find material out there to perform.
If we do continue with Puppets, we might move it out of the pub to a different venue. Colin really wants to take it to Fringe but I don’t think anything like that is going to happen this year.
But if we continue with Puppets, we’d want to develop it further. We really only had a month or so of work on it. One of the things we thought was to introduce props. We didn't have enough rehearsal time to develop that fully so we didn't end up including it.
I know you guys are less interested in it, so I don’t focus on it, but in the violence scene (which is half the performance) Colin is a puppet and has this superhuman ability to balance and hold still. Which works to great effect, but we thought to introduce some elements of “danger” where he is posed on top of unstable things where a fall would be consequential.
What we found in both the violence and sex scene is that the key to holding the audience’s attention was creating tension. So for the sex scene that tension was created by the audience wondering how far something might go. Threaten to cross a boundary, creating tension around it and then pushing past it to the next one.
At the start, no one knew (for sure) we were going to be nude. So we created tension around the undressing. Are they going to take her bra off? The poser would tease it, unhook my bra but not remove it. Pose my arms in a way that the bra was still there, dangling loosely and everyone is wondering, am I going to catch a glimpse of nipple? Then off it comes and you’re teasing the next boundary. Later, oh my god, they put her hand so close to his bare cock. Is that planned or accidental? Are they going to make her touch it? Then, boom here they are wrapping my fist around it. But what makes it compelling is the lead up, the tense can’t-look-away, holding-my-breath, oh-my-god-are-they-really-going-to, then - boom - the payoff. And then escalating, doing it over and over and over.
So back the idea of introducing props, here were some of the things we tried. We talked about a condom - one fun thing we rehearsed was if (when) Andrew got hard during a performance, instead of turning the pose to hide it, we would have Lucy unwrap a condom and make a show of putting it on him. Only then we would turn him and hide it. But it might get a laugh and would introduce this extra level of tension with the audience like is he going to penetrate her now that he has a condom on?
We looked at clothespins - I wasn't sure how much I wanted to endure pain on top of everything else. The other guy poser (Glenn) was really into this idea and other things like it. I just don’t know. We never tried it in a rehearsal. I supposed if we revive the show we’d try it during rehearsal and see how it went.
We thought about a dildo - not necessarily for penetration, but the added tension of just seeing that on stage would be great. The audience would certainly be wondering "will they or won't they." We rehearsed with one once. It led to some great poses. Like me in doggy, back arched, Andrew kneeling next to me, grabbing my hair in his fist, threatening to penetrate me with the dildo in the other hand. Then Lucy put a condom on the dildo and then she slathered it with lube. I know this was a great way to create tension because the butterflies in my stomach were going crazy. Something about preparing the dildo for entry made it feel more real, like maybe she’s going to do this. All she’d have to do is push his hand forward. Then she made me hold the dildo and made Andrew stand up and bend over with his hands on the ground. I could see the look of fear in his eyes haha. So I don’t know where we’d go with it, like I said we only workshopped with it in once rehearsal, but just having the dildo prop in play added this palpable threat of penetration.
Lucy wanted to introduce a vibrator. I was sure that if there was a vibrator involved I would climax on stage. And I wasn't sure I was ready for that to be honest. Plus I felt like there's no way I could hold still during that so it would break the illusion.
We rehearsed with a blindfold once. It was weird just holding still and not being able to see. The posers said it would have an interesting impact on the audience though. Because the idea is like does this puppet even know what's happening or about to happen to them.
But here’s where I ask for your help again - do you guys have any interesting ideas for props that we could try? Or interesting ways to use a prop to introduce tension?
Do I ramble on in my posts? Sorry if they are too long, don’t want to bore you.