Tech Meeting and getting things on its feet! (13th November).

Due to being stuck with joint pain,  possibly due to the sudden change in cold weather, I was late for yet another rehearsal. I've decided, now to just pay for taxi's round to the university; I am not coping with walking around to the building and getting myself organised for 10am rehearsals. Jack and Sarah very kindly had a tech rehearsal as Kane was also late and arranged for us the next week to have the shadow screens for two whole days! This is fantastic news as it has been a great stress that we haven't be able to rehearse certain scenes at all.

After this we all met up in the canteen and went through the running order. Jack had wrote the narrative for the Charlie Chaplin scene which was as followed. 

We decided to work on the scenes that did not require the shadow screen. Kane wanted to incorporate the Gymnopedie piece into the performance and thought it would be a good platform the blackbird scene. We decided that instead of doing an obstacle course, it may be better for us to actually map the auditorium and count our steps like a blind person would do to navigate. We went through this a few times by ourselves. Jack had also wrote a narrative about the blackbird scene, and so we thought - to create a transition between the scenes - it would be nice  that while we perform the 'circuit', the music could fade in whilst Sarah is just stood wistfully watching, in awe, this blackbird. It would be like a collective of her journey to the bird and the nice moment where she can stop, actually see a beautiful image and let the world pause for a moment. All the thoughts she has during the day, manoeuvring around, having to constantly imagine what things look like could wash away. Me and Jack sang a duet over the top of the music and it was nice to have a moment in the piece where image and sound joined beautifully. Hopefully this would create more of an impact when the audience would be later denied there senses again.

After this, it was more discussions on what we had or what we were going to do. Something I did reiterate to the group from what Niki had said - and when I studied DV8 at college - is that, the piece doesn't have to be busy on stage all of the time. We didn't need to panic and have loads of extensive high energy action going on all at times. In fact, Ron Vauter from 'The Wooster Group' states that when you stop being so bravura and stop it means "the audience can use their imaginative powers and they're the ones that fill in that gap.. they become true collaborators" (Etchells, 1999, pg 92).  As we are used to do more naturalistic plays, the urge is to have the piece more theatrical and constantly busy. I feel if we relaxed and trusted ourselves more; we could have a really engaging, captivating and yet, very simple piece. Although it appears we didn't get much done today, I was glad we gelled nicely as a group and got a another section sorted.

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