Suspect Culture Questions....

Hello. Dan, I was wondering if you could answer some questions that I have after our rehearsal on wed and from doing some more research on Suspect Culture.... Certainly - my replies are in bold.

1. How do Suspect Culture deal with lines once they have been given a script by David? are they set in stone or do they have the ability to sort of mush them around? I think it depends on the project. I know that Airport and Timeless changed a great deal after the first draft had appeared. I suspect - though I don't know - that Casanova and Mainstream changed much less. Some of the texts, like Mainstream, contain a great deal of space for making crucial decisions about casting and staging (as does Homesick, I guess). At the stage you are at - only a week or so away from performance - I guess they wouldn't be doing all that much 'mushing' about of the text, but if things ain't working, they gotta be fixed...
2. Going along with that idea, how text-based are their shows? are there bits of script that just outline improvisation on stage? Do the actors depend on the script for guidance, or is it more like our script where so much of it comes from their workshops that it's almost like the script relies on the actors for guidance? Again, boringly, I suspect that it depends on the project. The scripts almost always emerge out of a process of devising, workshopping, improvisation, discussion, so by the time the text appears it has caught some of the devising work. The clearest example of this is the script for Lament which you found difficult to read, precisely because you had to have been through the devising process to understand some of the references.
3. I assume that our workshop process follows along the same lines as their workshops, and I was wondering how much improvisation they do. It seems like we just sat and discussed more than we actually did 'improv games'. I guess our Sunday morning sequences and the migration dance were all improvisations, but they seem less physical and verbal than a lot of the more game like exercises that other groups use.... I am not sure. I think Suspect Culture are not a company that are afraid of sitting around talking about ideas. Some of the gestural work (which was key to the work from One Way Street to, I guess, Mainstream) would have emerged from physical improvisations, and they often do something very like the mapping exercise we began the course with.

Ok, don't know if any of those really made a whole lot of sense, or how much they will help us in the long run, but i was just curious and though there is an astonishing amount written about S.C. i thought Dan might be the best place to turn! no, not being sarcastic at all.

BTW - thought wed went really well. thanks guys! and if everyone who has one could bring in their slinky on Monday that would be fabulous!

Lauren Abend