Photo of the Day: An introduction to staged intimacy being led by Lauren at the beginning of rehearsal
Today’s Date: 7/18/19
Show Title: Richard III
Director: Matt Minnicino
Assistant Directors: Lauren Carlton & Amalia Oswald
Production Intern: Spencer Cohen & Grace Wallace
Rehearsal Room: Hunt West
What we did
Today we started with more of the yes game and then the campers worked with Lauren for a while on how intimacy is staged in a theatre atmosphere. Once they were all comfortable with that Amalia took over and the campers worked on the language of gesture through out the play, like how a York verses a Lancaster salutes, and what is a loving gesture verses an insulting one. After all of that was workshopped and set we went back into blocking starting with act 1 scene 3. This is a decently large scene so everyone who wasn’t needed for the blocking was set with myself, Lia, and the RDA’s to do text work. This amounts to scanning the text for rhythm, looking through it for rhetorical devices, paraphrasing, and searching for tactics. This helps bring clarity and specificity to the performance of a character.
Quick and Quotable
- From the play
I past (me thought) the melancholy flood,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.
- From the director
- “Why are we prancing?”
- “Is Margaret just living in a stairwell watching Netflix?”
- From the company (same as above)
- “Richard just goes downstairs to the kitchen at like 2 am for some cheese and Margaret’s just there eating dry cranberries” -Leah
- “Great! Now, can you slap each other in your groups?” -Amalia during gesture work.
Production Insights
Today I worked with Max doing the beginnings of text work on Clarence’s dream speech. We talked a lot. First, we scanned the whole speech. This was a first for him and great practice for me because it had been a while (the last 3 plays I worked on were all prose). Then we talked about what he was actually saying and the rhetoric of how he was saying it. All this went a really long way to teach me how to one do real in depth text work again and two how to do it with someone rather than for someone. For me it wasn’t so much a learning experience as a teaching experience because here was someone who is brand new to text work of this sort and I got to be there to help walk through it. It was great to watch him start to see all the choices that were possible within just this one speech and I’m glad I was there to help.