Day Two:
A company vocal warm-up to start. Richard Stewart and Marilla Wex are the ying and yang of voice work for our company. Richard is focusing on voice work and Marilla is our dialect ‘go to person’ for this process. Their skills are fantastically complimentary and we have a wonderful, freeing voice warm up that finishes with practicing the two dialects we’re incorporating in the play, East London and RP. Lots of energy in the room and a good, upbeat atmosphere.
Now that the voices and bodies are warm, we move on to working on the choral sections of the text. We look at units, (where there is a ‘change of subject’ in the text) and I introduce a game. It goes like this- when a Chorus Person is listening to a person speaking they always have the option of moving towards the speaker (if they agree), staying still, (undecided) or moving away (disagree). It just encourages people to keep discovering how they feel about what’s being said to them- and that they’re individuals within a larger group. It sounds ridiculously simple… and it is… and it seems to be an effective game- that can even be played in performance.
So, we play the game with a portion of the text that its easy to apply it to.
After we take a break I want to explore the tactics that people use to persuade a group. Each company member has one minute to speak about a subject that they feel passionate about. Topics range from the G20 (visceral, high stakes), to riding along the lake (beautiful images inspiring our imaginations) to the power of theatre, tiny dogs, heavy metal music and cheese… The people that are listening play the same game that we played before the break,(moving forward, backward or staying in the same place) with each individual speaker and then, (when everyone has had a turn), we share some tactics that we feel worked as well as chuckling heartily at some moments when people really didn’t agree with us. (I can share with you that most people in this company are not fans of soya cheese).
Then we applied the ‘passionate speaking skills’ to the scene work. I love it when a game helps us play a scene better… and it seems that this one really helped everyone play and listen actively and feel that they contributing as equal members of an ensemble. It was a playful and effective morning.
After lunch- we dive into more scene work, in a later section of the play. More text work, units, objectives… We have a highly focused afternoon with the dubious Lawyer character, Pollack, (that Paul Tessier is playing) and the version of Mother Cheapside that appears at the end of the play, (when she lives in a tiny apartment with twenty cats- and is physically threatened by Bryan’s character, Smackheaded Peter). We find an exciting ‘character arch’ through the scene for Mother Cheapside- and then it’s the end of the day. As always, Marilla considers her character’s objectives and actions very deeply…
Andrew McNaughton, (our assistant director), and I, sit with two immensely dense parts of the script for over an hour. There are a number of drug hallucinations in the play- and connections with ‘invisible forces’ during the hallucinations- so we talked a lot about what the story beats are and the relationships of the characters in the scene. We’re also looking for opportunities to trim the script, but it’s tricky… tricky, tricky, tricky… With our brains full of rich, spectacular images, (dragons, angels, flying over London), we head home.
Every path has its puddle