Rehearsal Room Notes: Week 2

Character Development

This week the actors implemented the character homework they had been set the previous week. With everyone sitting in a circle, each actor spent a few minutes as their character explaining to the rest of the group what they were doing before working with the band Divnity. They explained how they'd met Sharkey - the overbearing manager - and what their lives had been like up until the events of the play. They revealed their hopes and ambitions and their worries and insecurities.

Character Spotlight

Sharkey feels a cut above everyone else apart from Alex, whose intellectual life before Divinity is most down-played. He feels that celebrity culture is the aristocracy of the modern age and he wants a part of it. He has always had a thirst for money and power and here, as the puppeteer of an influential and vulnerable girl band, he has it in abundance. Sharkey is the lynchpin - for better or worse - of all that corrupts and disintegrates as the play progresses...

Movement

In the last half hour the group did some movement work based on three celebrity/modelling poses each actor had to find in the media. Everyone then split into groups where they worked the poses into a sequence of four, with the fourth being a shared position. They had to work through the sequence faster and faster, with the fourth position changing each time. The actors are learning how to best use their bodies in the space provided, with a focus on integrating into rhythmic harmony with everyone on stage at the time.

Rehearsal Room Notes: Week 1

This week the cast and crew began with some bonding exercises. It's important we all get to know each other as rehearsals progress, so we ran around trying to tell as many people as possible one fact from our day. We discovered that one man had spent his morning playing with a sword, one lady had eaten birthday cake that was not her own and someone else had claimed a free pasty, among other both interesting and prosaic excerpts of daily life.

After the introductions, the chosen Spring Season play was read through. Just hearing the characters being read aloud together showed how accurate the casting is, even before the stage and movement directions are implemented. IN HIS IMAGE has been written by dedicated Heat&Lighter Rosa Connor, so this term is exciting for its support of Heat&Light talent. It's also the penultimate one for Director and Company Producer Kelly Wilkinson, so we're striving to make it one of the best terms yet.

If everbody has completed their character and movement tasks before Week 2, then the next rehearsal should be even better - and the characters even more well-defined.

See you next week!

Stephanie & Emily