Church-ness

Tonight I missed a church rehearsal. I was ill. Still had the guilty feeling I associate with a lie-in on a Sunday. Reminds me of the obligation to attend church when I was young. We used to sit through services knowing that we could go to the sweet shop afterwards. Sometimes it felt like we were being bribed by sugar. Wondering if the church-ness of the site should be referenced more in the text. Perhaps the performance is part-wedding, part-christening, part-wake? The same characters at the different events. Three events bound by the same seating plan. The same absent buffet. Now that the piece is focussing solely on the church it makes more sense to investigate acts of communion that take place there. The reason people come to church. The reason people perform in the church drama group. Asylum. Escape. Catharsis. Pretense. Play. Make-believe. Stress-relief. Exercise. Fun. Fellowship. Worship. Laughter. To become someone else. There is a danger in my applying self as source techniques to the project that I prevent the usual transactions taking place. There are introductions to each performance. Inductions. Safety instructions. Please turn off your mobile phones. The toilets are 'Down the corridor on the left etc.' I showed one of the videos to the MA Group and they suggested the introduction seemed joyless and contradicted the joyfulness of the performance - or why people perform. In some ways these rules - these parameters of the experience are there to comfort us - just as the rules of the church are there to provide guidelines to the way we live.