AliceFraser

Adelaide Fringe Underway

Added 2017-02-22 02:53:30 +0000 UTC

Oh man. It's brutal starting a new show. 

 You force yourself to step deliberately into the unknown, away from the smooth joy of surfing something you've worked on for a year - knowing the beats, tinkering with the emphasis on a punchline to squeeze the laugh response from the audience up a notch, letting a silence linger for a tension ratcheting second longer, safe in the knowledge that you're going to slam a punchline home. 

 Now I have to think about what I want to say; what I AM saying; how far the distance is between what's in my head and why I say; how far THAT is from what arrives in the audience's head. 

 And reviewers! Dear god, reviewers coming to early iterations of a show - it's like someone coming into your laboratory and telling you whether your prototype is a spaceship yet (hint, it isn't). 

 The terrible fact that your lovely audience is a necessary casualty of the process of iteration; the human lab-rats in your pursuit of a medicine that works, having to swallow the stumbles and mid-steps and side-effects that are inevitable. That you can give them a good show, but it's not THE show. 

 And then in moments, it is. In moments you grasp the edge of the wave - the show you want - the show that becomes a relentless accumulation of rhetorical force, seemingly unrelated jokes and stories that begin to wind together with the terrifying, inexorably glorious power of meaning, twisting towards an explosive target. 

 But you don't know yet whether it'll get there. If you can ever get it there again... because it's a new show. And your only proof that you can get anywhere this arrogant idea of perfection is that you've done something like it before. But the new one has to be different. It has to be its own perfect. Maybe it can't be done. 

 But then again, maybe it can.