Rehearsal Blog
Week Three: Thursday 5 June 2008
Our third session, after a two-week gap. We were excited to hear that everyone had been working on their scripts in their drama sessions and were becoming familiar with the scenes and their characters. Today was all about identifying and physicalising their character’s ‘wants’ on each line. Maria began with a brilliant game called ‘dog and bone’, which involved two teams (Rosmersholm vs The Crucible, naturally!), each person numbered one to ten, standing opposite each other, with an object in the middle. When Maria called out their number, they had to race to pick it up and get back to their place without being tagged by the other person. Competition and energy levels ran high!
We then split into our Rosmersholm and The Crucible groups to work closely on a small section of text. The first stage was for everyone to focus on the first ten lines of their scene, and identify what their character wanted on each line. For example, ‘I want to challenge you’, ‘I want to interrogate you’, ‘I want to distract you’ etc. We encouraged everyone to try and think in terms of what they were doing to the other person, and to make it an active sentence, using transitive verbs. This was an excellent way of really thinking about the thought and the impulse behind the line, making sure that they really understood why they were saying it. We then asked them to find a physical way of representing that line, so instead of speaking the line and the want, they found a gesture which expressed it. The next stage was to add a sound to the gesture, and then finally, to paraphrase the line to say with the physical action. Everyone engaged with this task really well and came up with some really exciting and bold physical pictures. The final stage of putting the lines into their own words came really easily to them because they had been thinking about what the lines meant so carefully. It was really funny to suddenly hear the 17th century infused language of The Crucible and the Victorian formality of Rosmersholm transported into 2008!
We all gathered together to feedback and watch what each other had been working on, and after seeing a few from each play, students identified some subtle connections between the two. For example, both plays seemed to contain really intense relationships, power shifts and the fight for control and that there was a lot of anger in both sets of characters.
Sam made the vital point that the exercise was to provide a way in to the text, to give them tools which they can then apply to the rest of their scenes, and when taking it back into the language of the scene, not to forget what they had discovered through putting it into physical gestures and in their own words. What they had begun to find today was something on which to build.
Two more sessions left before our dress rehearsal and performance, which means two more weeks to learn all their lines! Next week’s session will focus more on character, so we asked them to begin creating their character profile.