Promised Land Rehearsals (Monday 14th May 2012)

Promised Land is a big show with a big cast so the rehearsal process so far has been full day rehearsals on Sundays with everyone, working on crowd scenes, songs, and just getting a sort of 'rough and ready' version of the show together, with 'smaller' scenes with the main characters being rehearsed on Monday and Tuesday nights, ready to slot in at the weekends. The idea has been to get everyone knowing the feeling and flow of the show before focussing on precise details and blocking.
I'm part of the chorus, half of which is going to be more prominent in the football scenes set int he 1970s, and half of which is more prominent in the 1900's sweatshops. I'm a sweatshopper.

Up til now we've spent a lot more time on the football scenes but on Monday night all the sweatshoppers were called for our first focussed rehearsal on one of our scenes.
The rehearsal was spent working on two key areas.
The first was to keep the sweatshop 'alive' during scenes when Avrom, Rosa, Jimmy and Meyer are all talking. This will be infinitely easier once our props and sewing machines have been made but we did our best with what we have! Aahh the powers of mime-sewing...
We started the rehearsal with some games to get us all focussed and aware of everyone in the space.
We started with a clapping game which looked deceptively easy but which proved incredibly hard. Standing in a circle a clap is passed around. First it is 'caught' from the person next to you, and then you 'throw' it to the next person. So you clap twice, once to your left and once to your right. Eventually you build it up to throwing and catching it across the circle, or you do if you haven't had a long day at work and your mind isn't on your dinner like most of ours appeared to be that night...
Next we tried another game, 'Chaos', an old favourite of mine. This game has three parts.

1. Beginning by standing in a circle, one person walks over to another and taps them on the shoulder. That person then walks to another etc. By the end of this round everyone must have walked and tapped another person. No one should have gone twice. You have built two relationships, with the person you are tapped by, and the person you tap.
2. Trying to avoid the people you have already built relationships you say someones name, then they say someones name, until everyone has said a name, and also been named. You now have four relationships, The person you're tapped by, the person you tap, The person you're named by, the person you name. Now continuing the naming pattern, the walking pattern starts again, so you have two different things to focus on.
3. Once everyone seems confident in those two patterns a third pattern is introduced. One person throws a ball to another person, again trying to avoid the people they already have relationships with, that person throws it to someone else, etc. There should now be six relationships, the tagger, the person you tag, the namer, the person you name, the thrower, the catcher.

AND GO! Try running all three patterns simultaneously. The only sounds being made should be the names. A great deal of focus and awareness is required to keep this going.

Rod (the director) added a new level to it which I haven't ever tried before but which I will definitely use in future!

He asked us to play the game as though we were in the sweatshop, hearing the mob gather outside, planning to run us out of the city. We weren't given any specific emotion but allowed to feel our way into a character. Some people became militant, some angry, some frightened and a diverse range of characters was built. The names being called became orders, or cries, a search for reassurance. The walk became a path to find friends and allies, the ball became something we could use to fight against the mob. And the game became something more, something serious. Nothing was dropped, no one giggled or stumbled, everyone knew what they were doing and why they were there to do it, and a game became a tool.

We did some basic blocking for the scene, and to keep things 'alive' started building relationships up with the other sweatshoppers, crossing over to them, borrowing or giving things, etc, and identified points in the conversations where we could react or become involved.

The second aim of the rehearsal was trying to figure out how the songs were going to be worked into the scene without feeling clunky.
It's been easy to fit songs into the football scenes, as chants and songs are something which happens quite naturally in that environment. One person starts off singing 'Marchin' OOOONNNN TOGETHERRRRRRR' and everyone will join in.
However, in a work environment it's a lot less natural so we spent a lot of time building up a percussive section and figuring out when pieces of the set would be moved on and offstage, and how we could work them into the percussion.  We also tried to figure out ways for the songs to start organically within the sweatshop rather than being started by the band, so one worker whistling becomes a cue to sing, and Meyer tuning his violin can give us starting notes. We looked a little at the emotions behind the songs as well. At the end of this scene Rosa leads us into coming out from our machines, spurred on by her mission to get the workers to unite against the bosses, rather than fighting each other.

Lessons Learned:

1. Clapping isn't always easy.
2. Games aren't just for fun.
3. A living stage is an interesting stage.
4. It's really weird that the closest real life gets to musical theatre is in a football stadium.