Twas The Rehearsal before Christmas...

Hi there!

Firstly i would like to apologise for not posting in a while, im not sure ive actually sat down since the beginning of the Christmas holidays. Our last heritage rehearsals were a couple of weeks ago before we took a break for Christmas. 

On Saturday we started with a gentle warm up to wake up a bit, and a vocal warm up to get us thinking about how to use our mouths. 

We then read through the script and picked out important information to help our understanding of the play, and asking questions about its nature; to help develop strong and meaningful interpretations. We did this by calling out "FAAAACCCTTTT!" whenever a fact came up in the script, this took the majority of the day; there were 130 facts - i cant even imagine how many questions there were! 

We then spent the rest of the day rehearsing the "Northbridge Anthem", a song which has been drilled into the characters' heads, one which they are under the impression they must practice and perform to the rest of the village as part of the the mayday celebrations. The anthem has a four part harmony, so after we learnt our parts we sang it whilst walking around the rehearsal room, hearing all the other parts whilst trying to keep singing our own. Just like this:

After Saturday's rehearsals - in the evening - Gavin finally posted the cast list! Unfortunately for me i was at work so i didn't get to find out until about eleven when i had finished!

Here it is:

Sundays rehearsal started, like normal, with a vocal and physical warm up. We had been given homework from the previous week, we picked a character's name out of a hat and we had to research them and come up with our own interpretations about them. We then fed back to the group, discussing and debating our ideas about individual characters. It was a bit English Lit. However i like English Lit so it was good! This exercise took a while because we could not agree on anything! 

After we fed back our homework, we did an exercise where we would decide who our characters' enemies and allies were. We then stood up in the room and arranged ourselves so that our ally stood in the way of our enemy. This got quite complicated as we had to keep moving around!

We then did our first read through of the play as our characters, which was a lot of fun! Here's a picture:

 That was our rehearsals over for the weekend and for the year. It had been a really good start to the play, we had made a lot of progress over the first few rehearsals. Our understanding of the main themes and individual characters has improved massively. 

It was nice to have a break but i cant wait to start up again! Our next rehearsal is this Saturday, the fourth of January.

Thanks for reading, 

Greg :)

 - Here's cast member Jack dressed as a dinosaur!

- Also, it was Mark's birthday on the Sunday! Happy Birthday Mark!