Theatre Workshop Rehearsals

In rehearsals this week, we started to block the first few scenes for our performance. We planned what we are going to do at the beginning to make the storm look believable. We all come on in different orders, the spirits come on last, and do movements to represent our characters. Liyah, Dee, Marian and I all came up with set movements, which we are doing in different orders to make it visually interesting, but also to show that the spirits are a group who are working together to create the storm.

The movements we have come up with are:

Fire: waving our hands like we are flames.
Animal: crawling on the ground and being the animals we have researched to go with our spirits.
Torment: pulling our hands from our heads, as if going mad to show how we are making the people on the boat feel.
Wave: using our bodies to create a ripple effect to show the sea raging.
Capsize: making large circular movements with our arms to show the boat going over.

We go off stage first after repeating these movements, while everyone around us repeats theirs. The spirits are not on for much after that, so I spent the time in the wings learning my lines and trying to work out the best way of saying them, while we blocked the rest of the scenes.

We had a meeting with the set designer, who showed us a model of our set. There is a tree that's going to have a gauze, so you can only see things behind it, when a light is shone through. The spirits are behind the gauze and when Prospero says his line, "What a torment I did find thee in." the light will come on and show our silhouettes behind the tree writhing and moving all over one another, as if in pain, to show Ariel's struggle when she was trapped in the tree. This will look really effective to the audience and the visual effects will improve their understanding of the play, if they are struggling to follow the words.

We then blocked as many scenes as we could in the rest of the rehearsal.