Tuesday 9 November 2010

And are you happy?


Just a quick one today because I'm absolutely exhausted.
Had a character workshop for 3 hours today. Started with a warm up, then moving around the space in character, getting a feel for how they moved and how they inhabit a space, then we hot-seated every character. This took a long time, since there are a lot of cast members and i wanted it to be pretty in depth. Some people were amazing, very involved, very intense, had obviously thought about their character and were completely immersed in the exercise. Some people seemed to not be bothered at all. We finished with an exercise where each character goes up to three other characters and in turn tells them each something that is true, but not expressed in the play. I've done this before in rehearsal and it has made people cry, and I've done it before where people didn't give a shit. Again, some people seemed to get the exercise and some people couldn't be bothered.
Overall i guess the session went pretty well. We did a debrief afterwards, talking about what we learned, what people felt worked and what didn't, and how the exercises affected their thoughts about characterization or the relationships between characters. Most people seemed to find it useful, so hopefully it wasn't a wasted evening.


Certain things, and certain cast members, are really starting to get to me. We never start on time because people (normally the same people) are always late. Certain people seem to treat rehearsals as a boring waste of their time, which is draining for the rest of the cast and infuriating for me. I've tried to talk to these people about these issues, but i think telling them off just seems to make them even more disinterested. It's beginning to really piss me off.
I have a small rehearsal of the first half of act 2 tomorrow afternoon, and we're spending the evening on act 3. Hopefully working in smaller groups will mean i have more time to focus on the actors that need more work, either in terms of acting or attitude.
If things don't pick up by the end of the week I'm not really sure what I'll do.


I think sleep is the best idea right now.

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