Monday 27 April 2009

The beginning of rehearsals


This week has been a week of stress, productivity and learning lots of new things about myself and the world of community drama. We started rehearsals on Monday and have gotten off to a brilliant start. For myself and Emma as directors we need to learn to think faster and give our instructions to the actors more clearly. The actors need to learn to trust me and Emma , although sometimes they do not know where we are heading with an idea they must trust us to know that we do.


We have had some great work come out of this week, with Mark coming into supervise the Friday rehearsal he gave Emma and I lots of new fresh ideas and good ways to approach the actors. Our notes to them have not always been efficient and I think that is where we are going wrong, also our knowledge of the story and the characters is not dense enough. However we have got a great Water Nymph scene and Milky Magician so next week we will be working even harder and hopefully get some brilliant scene together.


Saturday was a daunting prospect for me. I was tired from the past week and needed a good day off but somewhere in Ham House I found the day off I desperately needed. I had my face painted, played lots of games with the children; who not many were there did hopefull have a good time. The children loved Giants/Heroes/Dwarfs and Bang Splat. Although I was talking with Mark after and he pointed out the use of miming a gun when playing Bang Splat. I am not sure what I think about this yet. I think that in a 'Utopian world' where gangs did not shoot one another then this game is fine; but we do not live in this world and so as Community Drama workshoppers we need to take in consideration of the schools we go to and the young people we work with when deciding what games to play with them.


Going back to Ham House, I really love working here, as Mark says it really does give you a new energy to do things. I think National Trust does this for me a lot, all their buildings are beautiful, welcoming and more importantly the people who work for NT are always lovely.

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