April 30, 2013

We began today by going over our “rehearsal schedule” for the remainder of our time. One of the participants had offered me some constructive criticism that, while she appreciates how flexible and open ended things have been, she feels that a little more structure would greatly benefit the group. As always, I listened to her and have provided some more structure. It seems to be a good thing for everyone to have something solid to look at that tells us ahead of time what we should be doing each day. We continued our work on Act I Scene ii today. Since everyone has such a great understanding of the characters at this point, we are working mostly on physicality. This is a challenge for everyone, but they are all making good progress. We also talked about Miranda’s challenge in this scene – even though she doesn’t have many lines, she must be constantly listening and reacting to what’s going on.

We also spent some time discussing the power struggle between Caliban and Prospero. The woman playing Caliban has been very aggressive in this first scene, and the woman playing Prospero feels that it may be too much. We discussed how Caliban’s rage comes from his actual lack of power, and that feeling of helplessness makes him lash out. The group determined that a good way for the woman playing Prospero to justify the fact that she lets him go on is to look at where Prospero is silent for awhile and then pulls the rug out from under Caliban with threats of physical violence, which scare him.

At this point, I asked the two women to take all of this in and then just follow their instincts in reacting to one another, whatever they did. This freed them up quite a bit, and the scene started to flow much more easily.

Masks!

These masks were made by Nina Barlow and Holly Conroy for Water Works Theatre Company's 2011 production of The Tempest. They are currently on loan to our group for their performance. We are all very grateful to be able to use such beautiful pieces.

April 23, 2013

We continued our chronological review of the play today with Act I Scene ii. We focused on Prospero’s story. When we first started exploring this scene, one participant had the idea that if spirits of the island were to act out the story in pantomime while Prospero told it, it would help the audience understand what he was saying. After choosing from the masks to determine which one fit each character best, we began exploring how to do this. We explored different types of movement for each character based on how the mask worked with each participant’s physicality. After some initial hesitation, they realized how moving while wearing a mask is different from moving normally, and they embraced it.

We all worked as a team to figure out how to translate Prospero’s lines physically, and, while it was time consuming, we ended up with a very powerful pantomime. Every group member present made some sort of contribution, many of which were better than what I was coming up with in my head.

We will review the pantomime and add one or two more details to it next time, and then we will plow forward with the rest of the play. Today was a very positive day.

April 19, 2013

Today was the first day I was able to bring in the beautiful masks that Water Works Theatre Company is loaning to our group for their performance. We spent some time at the beginning of the session looking through the masks and trying them on. The women love them and expressed a deep appreciation that they are being loaned to us. Having the masks there proved to be a big morale boost after the challenges we discussed during the last session. Those who had expressed doubts last time made sure we all knew that they are feeling better after our conversation.

We spent the rest of the time working on Act I Scene i. We have some new participants since the last time we worked it, and we were also a little rusty on the decisions we had made at that time, so it proved to be somewhat time consuming, but very constructive. The group continues to come up with fantastic staging ideas that come out of their deep understanding and ownership of the material. They decided that the model ship should be on stage with the curtain closed behind it as the audience enters. At the top of the show, Prospero and Ariel will enter from either side, Ariel will hand the ship to Prospero, and Prospero will “create” the storm. The participants on the other side of the curtain will provide sound effects. Eventually Prospero will laugh, giving one participant her cue to pull the curtain open, revealing the boatswain struggling to maintain control of the steering wheel, which we are miming.

Everyone had great energy beginning to commit to the physicality of being on a boat in a storm, and their ideas for how and when to move, and how to exit, were also fantastic. This is going to be a wonderful, high energy beginning to the performance, and they all are feeling confident in what they have accomplished.