catching up

first off, sorry it's taken me so long to respond to all of these wonderful thoughts...it's amazing how much one misses when only being gone 5 days.

anyways, i have lots of thoughts, not all of which are fully formed yet, so i'll just start with some of them.

i really like this idea of creating a sort of "fabricated russia"...a russia that is an adaptation and culmination of all the different ideas and movements that impacted our american theatre and art world. this idea really clicks for me because it's sort of mimics how i imagine each new baba assimilating to her life, taking in the history of all the baba's previous to her, and adapting them to her chapter of the story.

i think that creating a fabricated world somewhere between reality and fiction would also be very disorienting for an audience...again this idea of dismantling their security. they know this world...or at least they feel like they do, but they also don't know it at all.

whoever had the idea about incorporating smell (audrey?), i love it. i think that's a great way to generate the closeness of a world, but i think it could work really well witht he disorientation of the audience...like when you're walking down a street and suddenly you smell something, and it kind of reminds you of elementary school for some reason but you can't place it and it's unendingly frustrating (does that happen to anyone else or just me?).

in response to eva's questions:

--i'm not sure BY really knows what she wants or what motivates her, and i feel like that's one of the most human things about her

--i think the house could be really representative of the change in the role of BY of the years...as each old BY makes way for a new one, there is some part of her left within the house, something which helps create this history----i'm interested in how the house remembers things? does it try to warn new baba yaga's about making the same mistakes the baba yaga's that came before it made?

--that being said, i feel like the house is very old, and feels grand, in the sense that it contains a long history...sort of like "if the walls could speak..."---what types of things, marks, objects, smells, sounds, are left behind by each baba yaga?

--i feel like the story is more narrative? we're definitely following a specific storyline of a person (BY), but their voice changes and evolves---i don't know if it needs to be clear how the "torch gets passed" every time, but i think there should be an obvious connection between each BY

i think my last thought for this really long post is that while i was going through catching up on everything, the image of russian nesting dolls came to mind, and it felt really fitting with this idea of a slow unravelling of this story, and how each baba yaga rests inside the niche that the previous one left for it.