24.2.2014

   After half-term, a week's pause from all the rehearsing of the play, we finally got back together to start the last few rehearsals before the big show. Since a week's break, I felt that people's focus was all over the place, which was obvious from going trough the scenes once again. The main thing we needed to work on today, was to just get our focus back on the right track and remember all the hard work we have done before. Once we started running the scenes, with every run trough I could see everyone get more in tune, lines and cues were remembered better and the over all pace of the pieces seemed to get better as well. Since none of us is using a script anymore to prompt with our lines, the emotions within the scenes have become much better, letting us actually act and not just read what we are supposed to say.

   On my first scene as Nell, I used a lot of the afternoon to practice my dancing bit, just going trough it over and over again to get that confidence and easy feeling that Nell would have mostly likely had in that moment. During half-term I added  a bit more tease to the start of the dance, letting Nell show her legs at the start, before starting the actual dancing around the stage. I also showed it to two of my group members, to get some notes, if it was whimsical enough, and luckily they felt that the small changes that I made worked well with my character and the situation.
   We also worked on the scene where Mrs. Marshall comes of from outside, been thrown shit into her hair. Before, Sophia would walk around the stage saying her lines, but after some comments and looking at the scene ourselves, we felt that it would be better, if Mrs. Marshall would plant herself mid-stage on the ground. This way she would be the center of the attention, but also show her reaction to this humiliation. We also sharpened our own reactions, trying to imagine the smell of shit and dirt.
   With the second scene I play Nell in, we worked on our blocking a bit, changing something to make the scene look and work better. We made the part with the actresses teasing Otway with their breasts a lot more spacious, so that we all had our space to work on. This way the stage won't be as crowded and it will be more effective to the audience as well.