Notecards

I've made notecards for my play, "Contact/Space," (the new title I'm not fully comfortable with)... I gave all my characters names, after doing some googling of baby names and their meanings and looking at pictures of friends to see if their names would click with a character. When I start crafting a character, I find them a "real world surrogate," a person that I know whose personality I can mine as a starting point for my character. Then, when I find a name for this character, something odd happens. The new name and all the "meanings" behind that name mix with the personality of the "real world surrogate," and a completely new being is born: a fictional, full character that is both separate and fully connected to the real world around me.

Back to the notecards... I made use of the dead time here at the call center (blogging from work, hooray!) to create these cards, each with stripes of a different highlighter color indicating which characters are involved and if a "dance" takes place in the scene. 18 cards. 18 cards of gestating scenes, monologues, and dances. Now, the question comes to the forefront: How do you "write" a dance? Being married to someone getting a masters in dance notation, I don't ask this question lightly. What I'm trying to do is represent dance in the script without giving choreography. I'm also trying to keep the dance from "mime" or from turning into things such as "a dance about seduction," or "a dance where people break up." I want the dance to be a character in the play, a living, breathing entity that interacts with the characters, has its own drive.

Easier said than done.

But at least the characters are leaping into the notecards and coming more to life in the back of my mind. We're halfway through the month of November, and I have about two weeks to finish this play. But it only needs to be 75 pages of a first draft, and I'm about to crack this thing wide open!