Okay, I’m not ready to let this thread die yet, and, for some reason, I seem to be obsessed with something at the center of our ideas; that something is still too vague to be determined. Also, we seemed to have veered off topic a bit. Alas, I did also begin rehearsals for two shows this past week so I’ve been a bit busy and have not been able to keep an eye on the thread.
If you will permit me the analogy, last week, while watching
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (the movie), I was struck by a thought. It is the scene when Aragorn (Mmmmm…Viggo Mortensen) sees the pyre of Rohan burning and makes haste to Theoden screaming “The beacons of Minas Tirith! Gondor calls for aid.”
The beacons have been lit; these flaming signals of hope or entreaty carry the only message that gets through…it’s a lovely wide, sweeping shot…over snow covered mountains and into green valleys, into darkness and finally into the light of day in Rohan, but Aragorn still sees the flame. This flame is essentially a death knell for the inhabitants of Middle Earth, yet they rally and go to war. This was the most efficient method of communication.
Here are a few questions that bubbled up from my oddly programmed subconscious that I humbly submit to the venerable SM Network:
How do we, as stage mangers, achieve this sort of purity in our communications while making the determination of when X needs to know Y?
Aside from reading the rehearsal report to an uninterested designer, how do we make sure X knows Y? This seems to bite many folks in the booty at inopportune times.
On average, how long does it take you to create the average rehearsal/performance report? How much time do you spend in thought, if any, on how you word your notes? This question is in part derived from Mac’s comment that:
…I think we spend too much time on the medium we use to deliver information, rather than looking at the information we are delivering.
What do you think?