I never thought I'd write a list that included 2 hamsters, a spider's bed or alter, and, 1 shadow web full of trembling wheebles, yet that's exactly the sort of things that ended up on my list of items that I'm going to need to build for HYPERBOLE:epiphany. With auditions happening in less than a week, on Thursday we locked down which pieces are going to make in into the show, whittling it down from all the great ideas that have been flying around an unassuming Long Beach garage for the past month.

I'm really excited about the pieces I'll be directing. I've got some of the most technically challenging material, which means I might not end up with exactly what I'm imagining, but it also means that I got to spend today making this:

It's a mockup for a spider puppet for one of my pieces. He may not look very impressive at this stage, but a few hours work convinced me that this design - which I was initially resisting, because it confines the performers to below the puppet - is actually going to look great, and give me enough flexibility in staging to make him do all the things he needs to. With a few simple changes, we were able to take the number of performers needed to operate this puppet from 5 down to 3, which is a big improvement when there are three other groups of puppets onstage at the same time.

Speaking of performers, it'll be interesting to see what auditions next Saturday shape up like. We've got over 60 people signed up to audition, including a pair of Chinese acrobats and a fire dancer! Lots of people who would likely never show up at a regular SOSE audition. There have also been a few confused folks, who don't quite understand the concept of performing without their faces or voices. ("You mean a mime, like on the street? Well, if that's what you mean, then yeah, I know about that.") And, thanks to some interweb magic from the folks at Technorati, I've already know a bit about Jonathan Nail, who wrote about booking his audition and linked back to SOSE. Go theater geeks!

I've got a lot more SOSE stuff to post, but keep checking my Flickr stream for new epiphany photos, and I'll have another update after auditions.

(You can click the photo to see my photoset of all the H:e photos I've taken so far, including several stages of our first practice masks.)