The rehearsal sessions for the play was very useful in the sense that we spent a lot of time changing and trying out new styles and techniques before settling down with one, for example some of our rehearsal session would consist of everyone getting their scripts and going through it page by page. This helped us in many ways such as becoming very familiar with every scene and to go into more depth with the content of play. Also we had to make some adjustments to the play to suit our capability for example in the play Massie was meant to be close with her grandma but in our class there is majority of boys over girls so we changed grandma to granddad.
Jireh the assistant director would be with us during every rehearsal session we had, he mainly worked on bringing the whole play together. When working with Jireh we would be working on scenes in the play and making sure everything looks up to standards. We would also work with Rob who was the main director for the play, while working with rob he would helped us developed our character and work on characterisation for example adding lines to the character to make them seem more believable to the audience. Working with the two directors was an great experience for all of us, as I believed it was very beneficial in many ways such as it made our performance much more stronger because we didn't improve on the play only we also improved on our acting skills, which made a big different to our play.
During rehearsals we made various changes with scenes some were more effective than others, some work and some didn't but all our trial and error helped us make the play the best it could be. Also we had to alter the play for it to be suitable for the audience because the play is based around many sensitive topics and we had to be careful about what we said and done since some people in the audience may have been often. With this play having sensitive topics we tried to keep professional attitude throughout the play in the sense that we wanted to show the audience that the topic related in this play does happen for real and it can affect many people's lives negatively.
All of our rehearsal sessions were helpful in more than one ways, especially when everyone was off script our rehearsal session was very effective. What would happen in most of our sessions was that we would first do a full run through of the play and our assistant directors Jireh would take notes and give us feedback on things we needed to work on either individual things our specific scenes that may need extra work. Also we would give our input on what we thought what we thought worked and what didn't work while performing. This helped us develop our play and acting skills because we would try and figure our weakest scene and try make it as strong as it could be which in turn made our performance strong all around.
Another problem that we faced in rehearsals was that we would always rehearse in one of our practice room, we never rehearsed in theatre until our tech run which was two days before we performed the play. I think if we had rehearsed more in the space we were going to perform in, it would have helped us because we would have gain a great sense of our surrounding which is good for actors because it helps the actors in many ways for example, when we were rehearsing in the room we would hear ourselves loud and clear also our projection was great but in the theatre it was different because the theatre space was much bigger so we realised we had to shout for some scenes so that the people in the audience at the back row could hear us.
I also think we should have rehearsed more in the theatre space because we would have been able to map and lay out our scenes much more better, all our planning for how our set should look was done on paper and only in the tech run we saw what it looked like but I believe if we had rehearsed in theatre more we could have designed a better set to suit the play in much better ways.
In addition to rehearsing on our own, we also done some rehearsal sessions with Sharon where we worked on developing our characters. for example we did an hot seating task where we had to make up our characters back story. This hot seating task was very helpful because it gave us a better sense of our characters and helped us to get to know our characters in much more detail. I felt that this task was very helpful because the script doesn't go into detail about the characters background and their story, but by doing this task I felt that it made my character much more realistic and gave me a much better understanding of our character.
Some problem we faced during rehearsal were issues such lateness or a member of the group didn't turn up and we wouldn't be able to work on those scenes that the person might be in but we would always find a way around it either to have someone else read in for them or to work more on other scenes. Other problems we faced were trying to decided the best way to portray a scene so that its clearly understood by the audience while also having an powerful influenced on them causing them feel sympathy for the characters and understanding their pain and struggles.
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