Friday 3 April 2009

Casting

Yesterday myself and Emma audtioned the actors in our project for the final show. It was as new to us as to some of the actors who had never auditoned before. We began the audtion with a few games; bang splat, zip zap boing and the chicken and the chair game. We then put chair in a line and put a piece of paper on each chair which had a description of a character for example an evil pixie, a depressed businessman. These were characters that had some relation to the characters in the play. The actors then had to stand on a chair and act out each character for 30 seconds. They did this at the same time and would rotate until they had done them all. After these warm ups we asked them to find groups of three and read through and rehearse a short scene from the show which we had given them. They then had to improvise the scene to relay the story. This exercise is similar to something I had done in the Chekhov lecture. Instead of them reading from the script it forces them to perform the story and really work as an ensemble. We then gave them a choice of three short monologues which they then had to read for the class.

Before the casting myself and Emma had many conversations looking at who we saw as each character. However after the casting we had both changed our minds on many of the characters. Last night we decided not to talk a lot about the casting, instead we came together today and discussed our ideas and came to a final decision. Suprisingly it did not take very long as we had both had similar thoughts.

We have posted the casting list and rehearsal schedule on facebook so take a look!

2 comments:

Carolina Castro-Freire said...

A monkey on drugs???

Rosie said...

.....or a purple table