Friday 11th September (Rent Street Style Physical Theatre Lesson 2)

In this lesson we improved on our physical theatre street routines in our groups, we did these to the song 'Rent' as it is probably the song that we would use. It is also the first song in the musical and we need to make sure we have lots on energy for it. Doing our routines to a Rent song was really fun and added a lot of energy and enthusiasm as a class. It gave us an idea of how our final performance might look. We just ran through what we did last lesson with the new song at first, and then develpoed our routines by changing them slightly and adding things like facial expressions and expra movements. We then created an order for all of our groups to go in so that they over lap and blend well, making it all flow better.
The first run was succeessful, however my group and I decided we need to improve our timing with the music and the unison of our movements. The things that qent well were the link to the narrative of the play, being chased by police or finding someone for money, we remember the routine well, our facial expressions and we used the rhythm of the music well.
As a class we talked about the important qualities of the film, I thought this includes the levels they use, their exaggeration and the high energy. My ideas for recreating these things in our production are to use the scafolding to create more atmosphere with the levels, also I think we should be in character when the audience comes in but as people on the street rather than our actual characters. I really like the idea of coming out of the scafolding whilst siging songs like 'Rent' as an ensemble and increasing the volume and singing to the audience.

Doing this without our specific characters was really interedting as it allowd us to think about how we would interact with the ensemble when we do get our characters. As we did not have the set it was quite difficult to move around the space not knowing where we could and couldn't move or where the audience would be.

I think we could build on group interaction by combining groups together to create more complex routines, this would make new groups that we can combine ideas in and this will help us to work better as a company. At this stage, my character interactions are quite minimal, there is only one or two other groups on stage when I am and I find myself having to pretend to interact with people that aren't there.
My character interactions with other characters are quite minimal at this point. As we don't have our named characters yet, we are just playing anonymous people on the street. This means we are all equal in status and authority.


After discussing these things we ran it again with the Rent song, this was much better than before. The timing with the music as a class had improved a lot and the timing in my group of our movements were in unison. My character was much better, I had more active facial expressions showing aggression and power. As a company we used the space much better, at first we all gravitated towards the middle but this time we walked around the room in all four corners to make it more even and give all the audience a chance to see us.

To improve, I think we still need to work on our group unison, we are in time but it doesn't look as natural as it could.