the lead up to Remote 1

 

Heading into this week everybody was definitely stressed and anxious. Because of our last show getting pushed back due to covid, we had less rehearsal time than usual. Then we spent the weeks we had before half term getting to know the story, auditioning, creating our own characters, blocking scenes and then hardest of all, dishing out all of the dash lines to characters that would make sense saying them. I think that was definitely a challenge because we ended up passing the lines around so much even till just before half term because we just wanted the show to make sense and then Dylan couldn’t do the show anymore so people had to get his lines. Then characters changed so different lines matched there character so it changed again. With this it made it hard for us all to remember our line then because of how randomly spaced out the lines were it made it a challenge to remember our cues, so I think even though I knew my lines I was still too scared to leave my script just in case there was a cue I’d forgotten about. However, we did a task where we all stood in a circle and did a speedy read through and I think because using the scripts wasn’t an option we really had to trust that we knew our lines and then when I turned out for me that I did know all my lines and cues when under the pressure it gave me a lot of confidence. On the same day a student who had already done this show before and ,who is now on Tom’s course, came in to give us some advice. It was comforting when she told us that she, and the rest of her class,  shared all the same problems with remembering lines and queues because of the nameless lines. Her advice to us was to either record the cue lines and then say your lines after so you can remember. To be honest, I think this could be great advice but I used a different method that I read about. The method I used was just going over all the queues and then just telling myself that what my character says after that line what I would personally say it. After that we just ran it without scripts (for the most part) so we could fully focus on our body language and cues. We moved the set around a tiny bit by just switching the tree and bench around but it was super easy to adjust to them changes because it didn’t really change much haha. We were all a bit annoyed that even though we had an important show next week we were only allowed to use the theatre 1 day in the week before we still managed to re block it all really well in the short amount of time we had. Tom told us we had to work on our stage craft so that’s something we worked on and by the time we did the show, Tom was impressed with our stage craft improvements. 

Okay, now it’s the week of the show, we’ve got 2/3 days of rehearsing to do and I’m pretty confident that we’re going to do well in the show because we always seem to figure it out just before.  Me and Justin have been thinking about ways to stay looking busy on stage since we spend so much time just sitting around on the stage and because we  don’t want to look boring/ out of character. We’ve decided to have coffee cups at the beginning of the show and wine at the end, then I got milk and a bottle so I could randomly feed my character’s baby throughout the show. I’ve been trying to work on my projection recently, no actually it’s been something I’ve tried to focus on the whole time we’ve been at college. I really don’t know why I find it so hard because it’s just talking  loud, it’s not complex and shouldn’t be difficult. Through the rehearsals I found myself focusing more on how loud I was than anything else. Kelly told me that she thinks it’s something I’ll have to work on forever because of my voice. I still try to be louder and it’s something I’ll be working on. I remember before preforming each Charlie show, my projection problem was the thing I was most stressed about because People couldn’t hear me enough so it’s what I was also stressed about for this show. We started to create our set by getting fake autumn leaves and scattering them along the floor, getting branches and sticks to make the trees and painting benches and boxes. Whilst they were doing that, me kadie and La Toya were doing media marketing together. It was a good opportunity because we could use Kelly’s phone to create drafts and posts on Instagram. Because the higher ups at the college have said that we’re not allowed to log into the Instagram and post ourselves and that we have to do it through Kelly, it has made things a bit more difficult because we can’t just post in the moment. One thing I did do was go through and follow some of the people who follow the apta account, this got us another 100 followers in a few hours. The day of the show was so much more relaxed and a lot calmer than the rehearsal days. I think it was just because we all know our lines and cues now and that the blocking was all right. And even if there was a problem it was a nice environment to work it out in.  We were ready to preform.