We began with warm-ups as usual. I got my cast to play a game of word association to help them warm up cognitively and to try and help them become more spontaneous in rehearsals. This worked well as after a few times around the circle, the words came quicker and were often more creative. We then played the same physical exaggeration game I played yesterday. It worked for most of the cast but today, Eleanor struggled. I identified the problem as Eleanor having trouble creating when put under pressure. I will tweak the exercise yet again to account for this. I will now do a version where I call out an entity and my cast create a naturalistic version of the entity. After a short while, I will then prompt them to exaggerate it slightly. And then again, after a short while, I will prompt them to exaggerate it even more, until it is as big as it can possibly be. I predict that the other cast members will reach the peak of exaggeration before Eleanor, so I will have to find some method of pacifying them until Eleanor has had time to fully exaggerate her character. I may do this by setting simultaneous tasks to individuals, eg. recite the alphabet backwards while performing the exaggeration.
We got through what we had rehearsed previously very quickly and very accurately. Conor and Eleanor make very convincing and scary foster parents, which I made them aware of, highlighting their great performance. I also had a quick talk to Chelsea about making her character much larger and more melodramatic. We managed to block all the way through to the end of scene 1, meaning that we have now blocked the entire extract. I let them know what a great job they had all done.
I got feedback from John, that I should try and step away from naturalism as much as possible.
In further rehearsals, I am going to try to make scenes 1 and 2 much larger and more Brechtian/Artaudian. I want scene 3 to be much calmer and sweeter, so I want to keep it less animated and a little more natural than the other scenes. Now that the whole extract is blocked out, I don't have to be worried too much about linearity while rehearsing.
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