Sunday’s rehearsal proved to be, above all else, a lesson in
muscle memory!
We started with a warm-up lead by the wonderful (and sadistic)
Pauline (just kidding, I love you, please don’t make me do planks again!). We
started with yoga which I REALLY need to start doing on a regular basis as it
always makes me feel fantastic. * Note To Self: dig out my yoga mat from
Nancy’s yoga sessions at uni and start reliving those sun salutations. Amazing
American accent optional. *
When we were all stretched out, and slightly dizzy from so
much deep breathing, she set about teaching us a dance full of outstretched
heels and folk-ness.
For the first time ever I was grateful for the weird little
‘modules’ they always added onto my ballet exams, character dancing, Russian
dancing, Polish dancing. It turns out all of that training was going to be
useful! Two of the songs in this show, both the Yiddish-gospel style songs,
will have dancing in, and having the moves already hidden away in my muscle
memory has made learning them a hell of a lot easier. A lot of the cast members
(painfully accurate to the stereotype, almost all of the men) were complaining
about being unable to multi-task, trying to combine the percussive rhythm we
are beating out, the song we are singing, and the dance we are… well… dancing.
Personally I find it really helps me to both remember lines and lyrics, and to
get into character, to combine them with rhythms or movements. At college I
used to make songs out of lists of things I needed to remember as a revision
technique, and can still remember a lot of them now so it obviously worked!
I
remember watching an excellent documentary about dyslexia with Kara Tointon
(guilty pleasure alert: I LOVED her in Strictly Come Dancing), and they helped
her to learn her lines by associating each line with a movement so that they
became linked with her muscle memory, and thereby surpassing the section of her
brain affected by her dyslexia making it vastly quicker for her to memorise
dialogue. I’m not dyslexic but I HAVE been dancing and playing music from a
very young age so I guess that’s had an impact on the way I work! Humans are
funny things, aren’t they?
I always like to get off script as early as I can, I
remember lines much better once I’m actually IN the action rather than reading
it and imagining it. One of my favourite ways of working was when I did Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory (as Veruca Salt. BEST. ROLE. EVER.), and we just had
the script printed out large and stuck to the wall so none of us had to hold a
script and got into the habit of performing out to the audience. A good thing
too as that particular interpretation was just monologue after monologue… Most
people are starting to get off the book now and the show is feeling vastly
smoother for it. There are a lot of big speeches in this show too, but now they
are being performed rather than just read, everyone is being a lot more playful
and experimental and everything is getting a lot more interesting! I’m really
starting to understand and, if not exactly enjoy (racism and football
hooliganism are never going to be my cup of tea) then at least inhabit the
world we are creating.
We managed our first full run of the show today (though it
really was a stagger-through as we were missing Paul who is playing Nathan, the
protagonist of the show) and there is still a lot of work to be done but I am
really excited with where it is going. I actually felt really emotional
watching some of the scenes today, I think we’re on to a winner.
P.S. This blog was written from a coffee shop on a macbook
on the way to an audition and I have never felt more pretentious in my life. I
kind of love it. I R HIPSTER. (and now I just want to watch that thing with I R
BABOON. What was it? Some kind of wonderful cartoon…)
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