Rehearsal 17.4.14

The start of this rehearsal was a workshop with director, Alex. We did three activities/techniques with him:

1) Travelling sequence - for this we had to come up with different ways of travelling (ex. Lifting, going under people's arms) and then link it altogether. We then told Alex about our idea to begin our piece by hugging the audience. He suggested that we try doing our travelling sequences that we had made up in pairs from different corners of the room, travel into the middle via our sequences and then hug each other and travel back out to different corners. When we did this I felt that the travelling sequences were very effective but they wouldn't perhaps work in our opening because we are trying to create a moving, simple beginning to instantly grab the audiences attention, this may be achieved better with audience interaction rather than interaction between us actors.

2) Another activities we did was create a movement sequence using items of clothing. We had a scarf for Helena and a coat for franz. Me, mandi and daisy manipulated the items and the two characters whilst becs played the violin. We discovered that this is a very unique and effective technique because we can make the items of clothing tell lots of stories. I think this will be a good idea for the romantic scene where Helena and franz fall in love.

3) Gesture patterns - we had to get into pairs and come up with three gestures each. We then had to do them to each other,  copy them and then use them to create a sense of a conversation. I didn't feel this would be good for the romantic scene in our piece, however it might work in camp life between the characters of Margaret and Ursula.

For the second part of our rehearsal: our aim was to create our first camp life scene.

We found lots of props and old looking costume to work with and created a sorting room in the camp:

-we created people with coats, shoes, scarves and hats
-we strayed clothes and piled up suitcase to look like they've just been thrown in the room.
-we created a dance with the coats which was inspired from the artist ).
-had the idea to read out facts about real life survivors to help show that the coats we are dancing with symbolise other people in the camps.

We also created part of the first scene in which the child dies.

I feel this was a really beneficial rehearsal as we got a lot done and Alex has helped us to springboard into creating scenes.