Week 8: Director's Challenge

Section 3

Again we had another cast member missing and so I had to step in as Luke as it was Alexis' week to be lead director and so I took a step back to watch and write down any changes that we could make. We used the first 10 minutes to go over the lift that we did last week so that we could add in the person that wasn't here last week. We then went straight into a run through of Section 1 and 2 to see how fluid we could get it. In the video it is still quite lumpy but we think that fluidity will come with the cast learning their lines and coming off script. We made sure that we highlighted that learning lines was the key to unlocking the potential of this play and so we had to put slightly more pressure on the cast to learn their lines. https://youtu.be/FAHDPfuVzzE (We were in a room with another group and so sometimes it is hard to hear the lines that are being said. Although we could this to our advantage and try to get the cast to speak over the noise so they are using their full vocal range but this may just add to the chaos.)

Improvements that I thought of and we discussed as directors:

• Synchronisation of movements - The sharpness of the unison look up and then down. We definitely need to reiterate what words that the two movements are on and make sure that each move is more defined to help emphasise the move. 
• Staging - From a different angle the chair that I am sat on could block the girl sat on the floor but with our actual staging she will be sat on a riser which brings her slightly higher but I think that we need to investigate a little more when we have our full set. 
• Natural movements/twitches - The small movements that we have previously told them to avoid are slowly making their way back in, so I think that we need to be stricter about the movements and so in the rehearsal in half term I think that needs to be one of our focal points throughout the rehearsal.
• Reactions to lines - We need to figure out whether we want the cast to react to each others lines because reactions are quite natural and we want the audience to realise that these actual people being themselves onstage not characters, but on the other hand if the reactions are too big then the audience's attention will snap to that reaction so maybe the compromise is that the reactions need to be big enough for themselves to be reflected but small enough not to attract attention.
• Lines being said over movement - I think that if there's a movement going on the rest of the cast who aren't involved need to watch the movement so that they help draw attention to it and then the lines commence. If the lines are said over the top of the movements I think that we lose the author's intention, to see how long an audience can go until they lose concentration, as the style isn't reiterated after the movement. The movements should offer the audience a break from the stillness of the lines and allow them something to think about and if this is overridden with lines then it defeats the purpose.
• Fumbling of lines or loss of place - Because we are in the early stages of practice, we expect these but I think that we need to tell the cast not to react if someone does as we want them to really understand the atmosphere that we are trying to set up and if the cast are laughing or breaking that atmosphere by reacting to the loss of lines then they are disrupting the whole piece.

At one point, I actually did a leg swap by accident as a natural move but I think that we could use that as a small move to re-attract the audience's attention. I also think that the synchro movement on the line "we know the sun sets in the west and rises in the east", looks really effective and the pause before Joel's line, which is after, really helps emphasize the movement and I think that we should add a pause after every movement as it sets it apart from the rest of the piece and it could accentuate the snap in and out of the stillness. 

After this run through when then did a read through of Section 3 with the cast adding in their ideas for movements and for the positioning of those movements. Because we have done this process will both of the past sections, the cast have started to look deeper where and why we were putting the movements in their places which is what we wanted to happen. We gave them slightly more freedom with section 3 as we wanted to allow them to feel a part of the directing process. Although we do want to let them have an input, we do keep adding in ideas that we actually want and then letting them expand of them. We then narrowed down the movements that we wanted into around 2/3 and slotted them into the section. We wanted our cast to feel like they are really apart of this process and so we started asking him questions about how we are going to do the movements. For example there are a series of lines that talk about the fact that the cast is always looking forward and they wouldn’t be able to tell “what’s happening behind” them and a specific line that we previously decided we wanted a movement on was “unless we turn around.” We knew that we wanted a movement here as it was an interesting concept that not everybody thinks about in a drama piece and so we asked the cast what do you think we should do. We had many ideas including a look over the shoulder, turning around and looking at each other I’m confusion as not many people think of that. As directors, Alexis commented that we would like the movement to be a turn around but then she sparked the question of  should it be the whole cast? We had a small discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of doing a whole cast turn around but then we decided that the positives outweigh the negatives and it would look very effective. So we told the cast to all stand on the word “camera” from the previous line and then, once the line had been said, to turn around it a circle in silence to emphasise the move.

The final thing that we did in this weeks rehearsal, was practice the fluidity of the lift so that when we showed it at the end of the session we could do it fluidly enough for everyone to see what it would be like in the actual performance. Some feedback that we got was, when Peter, the boy who has his back to the audience throughout the lift, says his line, it is directed towards the back. We knew this from practice but we thought that we would focus on the safety aspects of the lift as we are still in the early stages and so we didn't ask him to turn around as we wanted his focus to be on the lift. We did think, with practice, that Peter could help lift Leah and then just before they begin to rotate her, turn around and say his line to the audience. This would mean that only 4 people would be spinning Leah which could be a safety hazard and so we want to be absolutely certain that the 4 can do that before we put it in the real performance. Overall it was a very successful rehearsal, getting everything that we planned to do completed, staying on track to block everything in the next week and helping fuel the casts understanding of the play as a whole.