Over the past week or so, I have been experimenting with the style of my show. In doing so, I have uncovered that Spalding Gray’s style is what I am looking for from this show. His sets are basic, and the running narrative broken up by seemingly unrelated stories is, ultimately, what I am looking to achieve. I have been working on how I would like to stage it – going from a fully furnished bedroom to a more sparse and barren one, with only a few pieces of furniture around the room. Also in my experiments, I have decided that Music is the part of music therapy I would like to be looking at – as I have found several videos of dementia patients responding to it. I recently remembered my first two CDs ever bought for me, as well as the first few albums I bought for myself. My Dad first bought me Stevie Wonder CDs when I was around 10 because I had been humming Superstition, and he wanted to nurture my interests in him – so he bought me Talking Book and Music of My Mind. The first albums I ever bought for myself was Demon Dayz by Gorillaz, Riot! by Paramore and Wasting Light by Foo Fighters. I have decided to focus on Stevie Wonder, as I feel his music will add more of an “older” texture to my show, as both of these albums were released in the 70’s.

I have also been looking at ways to make my staging and blocking feel more worthwhile for a 3/4 thrust- so I have been looking at activities I can relate to the brain and how it memorizes things. Given the setting, I felt that things like dancing, or using pogo-sticks (However visually interesting it might be to watch me trip and break something valuable) would not fit the theme properly. So instead, I decided to try something I only do when anyone is intending to visit my room, and tidy. I felt that tidying was something that most of us have done, and can, therefore, grasp a metaphor between tidying and the brain storing memory. However, I don’t intend to stick to this space specifically, after having gotten blackout drunk recently, I decided that talking about alcohol is an experience that most people would do outside of their bedroom. So, in this, I intend to treat this space like a nightclub – a setting not unfamiliar to most students – and create something that is – at least slightly – visually interesting for an audience to watch through my godawful dad-dancing. I’ll do some more experimentation – though I acknowledge that I have catered this performance to my preference of rehearsing in my home – and see what sticks and what can go.