Another week gone. That makes three. We spent this week in Volks Oper Wien studios, where I rehearsed with Hans for Settlement in 2008 on the same street as the hostel Ivo and I along with all of DanceWEB stayed in, in 2003. Tomorrow we move to Kasino Theater for a week or so. Rehearsals are going well, by which I mean steadily; every day we make progress, and there has been none of those airless days where it feels the work is a vast, empty husk. Progress towards what, I’m unsure; there’s enough made of Fest, and enough ideas for it to become many different works. Sometimes in trying things it loops back on itself and spits itself out into a previous line or scene, sometimes repeatedly until we get slightly lost. Other times old ideas that came and went within the space of a single rehearsal, quick enough to have been written into and erased from the script, get remembered and resurrected – or remembered and discarded.

There’s three scenes now, the first is the shortest and for the moment the most certain, it hasn’t changed much in the last days (we’ve also been working mostly on the third this last week) except for some detailing, blocking and choreographing, working on the delivery. The second is still in flux. It also hasn’t changed so much in the last week, though there have been some large cuts of bits and pieces, rearranging of things, and it feels like for both scenes there’s more of this coming up.

The third scene though, that’s where all this looping and concentrating on things has been going on. I can’t really say if any of this is what Ivo wants or imagined it would look like or if any even will remain. Perhaps we’ll get to the last week and in a frenzy he’ll rewrite it into something we’ll all agree was inevitable to happen in what we’re working on now and assuming will remain to be performed, and the rewrite is in fact the work it always had to be. For what’s there now though, some stuff I thought was pretty good turned up late yesterday (I occasionally clap at things when I think they’re convincing). There’s still some explaining to do, in order to get to that stuff – if it even remains tomorrow – and how and what that explaining is will determine how what happens subsequently is interpreted.

Yes, still being somewhat vague and ambiguous. Perhaps some photos in the coming days …