Things were back in full swing with today's rehearsal, following the tragic events of last week which left us low of cast members and made the planned activities much harder. This week was our fourth week on the project and time to start pulling in what has been done over the course of the past four weeks and establish some characters and narrative for the final performance.
We started off this week with Ben's favourite game. After much googling of random objects and scenes, he threw the cast into creating them. Today featured such bizarre shapes as a sofa and a fashion show, the latter of which some members of the cast got quite into.
Once the posing was finished we want on to perform some physical theatre exercises. For this the group walk around the space while listening to calm music. Working together they need all find a similar rhythm and speed to walk at. Once this had been achieved they needed to stop walking at the same time. It is a difficult exercise and one that requires a lot of focus, but it can work and the cast did wonderfully at engaging with each other and working as a team.
In the next activity the cast were asked to thing about their own ways of moving. With guidance from Ben and Jake, they experimented with moving at different speeds and looking at the transition between those speeds. For instance, running and then stopping abruptly, or walking slowly and then bursting out into a run. Then they were asked to focus on their feet. In the exercise the cast had to pretend they were painting a picture on the floor with their feet and think about how that affected their movement. Some of the cast worked fantastically at exploring different levels and physicalities to complete their pictures.
After the break the group sat down and discussed the characters that they had shaped over previous weeks. The character whom had featured in our many improvisations all returned as we discussed which characters we would like to feature in the performance. With the framing device of the action being set within a half-destroyed St Anne's church, the cast had a great deal of choice in which characters they felt would best suit a story and provide interactions that an audience would find interesting.
Once the plan was made it was time to launch into some exercises that would help develop these characters physically, while allowing the cast to each explore his or her own self, deciding upon mannerisms and personalities. The success of this endeavour was proved when we sat down afterwards and were able to discuss the characters at length, along with their feelings towards the other characters in the story.
We went through each character's day, from when they got out of bed to them spending a night in an air raid shelter. From this we discussed what kind of lives these characters were leaving and focus in on what might motivate them to do the things they do.
For the final activity of the week we drew the blinds shut and turned on the ballroom lamps. The set up was simple; the cast were their characters and were inside the ruined St Anne's church, a place where they go to feel safe. Everyone was given the stimulus that they had to interact with each other in whatever capacity they felt was right. One person, however, had an additional stimulus. They would bring in a bag of sweets and would have to decide whether or not to share them with the group. During the exercise friendships were formed and enemies made as the sweets were eaten and the air raid siren started to go. Stranded in the church the characters seemed to bond with one another, if only from being trapped in the same situation together. When we discussed the exercise afterwards, every claimed it helped them develop the relationships between their characters. Alas, that was all the time we had this week, however the cast all produced some amazing work and the pieces for the final performance are starting to come together!
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