Tuesday, January 26

We're off from regular classes for awhile in exchange for workshops. :)


ROY HART WORKSHOP
For the week, two instructors from the Roy Hart Theatre in France are visiting to work with the 1st and 2nd year students. (Find out more here and here.)

The workshop seems to be about vocal exploration, and finding out what crazy things our voices can do. Some of the exercises are things that are already part of our classwork, and some are completely different. We were bears. We explored the space with sounds. We used a piano to match pitch while saying things like "Mamma Mia Pizzeria Lasagna", "I love chocolat" and "dark soul". It was really fun.


MACHINAL
Our first rehearsal for Machinal went well, I think. We started with a read-through, and then talked about the director's ideas for the production. It's going to take place in present day, but with an atmosphere of "the world is ending in three days". Instead of making the main character a victim or a villain, we're going to present it without judgment. I'm pretty excited about it.

In the second half of the rehearsal, we did some ensemble-building exercises, some of which we had done at our initial callbacks/workshop with the director. We have to do everything in unison (such as sitting down as one, standing up as one, picking up chairs as one, etc.), which we're getting better at.

We did a lot better at one game than we had the last time we played it, which involved having to use our chairs to spell out a four-letter noun, one letter at a time, without any communication about what the word was going to be. In the workshop, it took a really long time to spell out "PLOT" (and it was quite frustrating). But in this rehearsal, we spelled out "POOL" without nearly as much difficulty. A good sign, I think. The director commented that he notices a lot of growth in our group since he saw us in September. I hope we can continue that road of progress.