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LilyBlog 9/18/12 – Photoshoot and Haiku-Off
SEP 18, 2012
We recently had a photoshoot for the cast of The Lily’s Revenge. The theme of the shoot was “Mad Hatter Wedding Party” and I watched as everyone entered wearing evening dresses, disco green shirts, and smudged eyeliner. After changing, we jumped into Act II, The Ghost Warrior: An Act in Iambic, Song, and Haiku.
Hopefully, those of you who have a built-in cringe reaction to hearing “theater” and “verse” in the same sentence will outgrow that fear and dread by mid-October; because the entire second act of The Lily’s Revenge is in verse!
Why is Act II in verse? Because it’s set in the garden (i.e. The Last Fabulous Place) and “flower speech is flowery.” They can’t speak the way humans or deities (like the antagonist, The Great Longing) do: they have their own vernacular and anyone who enters their space must abide by that rule.
Primarily, they speak in iambic pentameter (a form consisting of an unrhymed line with five feet, each foot containing an unaccented syllable and an accented syllable) but they also have a “haiku-off” (haiku being an old form of Japanese poetry that is composed of three lines: the first of which has five syllables, the second has seven, and the third has five). The haiku-off, at this point, is kind of like a mixture of voguing and a poetry slam.
For me, one of the best parts of the rehearsal process so far has been figuring out the verse and scansion (the act of scanning a line of verse to determine its rhythm). I watched Taylor Mac, an actor who is well-versed (ha, ha) in Shakespeare, and our vocal coach troubleshoot why a line wasn’t scanning; I was so invested in how they were working on it that, when they figured out the beat, I almost jumped. Instead of trying to imagine Shakespeare or Marlowe writing verse plays, I was watching a contemporary playwright go through the same process.
