Rodent fiction
Aug. 24th, 2007 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabKeek'k could remember when the pair of Guinea Pigs who had made the first trip to Titan had returned; he had joined the space agency just after that. When Kipit and Ray had stepped out of their ship, they were singing a song from one of the three operettas they had written en route. All three operettas were still occasionally performed, and enjoyed even by people who didn't pay attention to the other career of the writers.
One of the things that made the Guinea Pig operetta entertainments so enjoyable was the way they were performed in both Guinea Pig and Common Hand simultaneously. Of course, people from any Family could hear - but not everyone understood Guinea Pig. Common Hand, one would think, had nothing to do with singing, but the Guinea Pigs had taken to including it as a form of dance movement. When Guinea Pigs performed their own operettas, there were no tail movements, but when a Squirrel troupe sometimes did one (Squirrels being one of the other few Families who could sing), they also added tail movements to the words; once in a while this led to some naughty jokes.
That Kipit and Ray had had years to work on their shows was obvious in how well the Common Hand worked with the music and the plot. One could picture them, sitting there in the cabin, trying bits out on each other, and saying "Wait, if we change this word to that, then we can use this gesture and it will lead naturally into him reaching for that seat, missing, and waving his arms around!" The last of the three operettas written had a great deal of physical farce in it - even Guinea Pigs might get a little impatient just sitting for 14 years or more! That one was often performed by kits in school, who thought that wrestling and somersaults were definitely more fun than having to memorize lines.
One of the things that made the Guinea Pig operetta entertainments so enjoyable was the way they were performed in both Guinea Pig and Common Hand simultaneously. Of course, people from any Family could hear - but not everyone understood Guinea Pig. Common Hand, one would think, had nothing to do with singing, but the Guinea Pigs had taken to including it as a form of dance movement. When Guinea Pigs performed their own operettas, there were no tail movements, but when a Squirrel troupe sometimes did one (Squirrels being one of the other few Families who could sing), they also added tail movements to the words; once in a while this led to some naughty jokes.
That Kipit and Ray had had years to work on their shows was obvious in how well the Common Hand worked with the music and the plot. One could picture them, sitting there in the cabin, trying bits out on each other, and saying "Wait, if we change this word to that, then we can use this gesture and it will lead naturally into him reaching for that seat, missing, and waving his arms around!" The last of the three operettas written had a great deal of physical farce in it - even Guinea Pigs might get a little impatient just sitting for 14 years or more! That one was often performed by kits in school, who thought that wrestling and somersaults were definitely more fun than having to memorize lines.
