Well, as the good book says, sometimes doing nothing is more than we can handle…or something like that. But we really did almost nothing before Xmas. almost. There was the staging of the rumble and Tonight, the quintet before the rumble. This was very slow and due to the size of the ensemble complicated blocking work, especially because a lot is tried and made up in the moment by the creative team, or so it seems. I am totally fine with that, I myself find that I like to work with a loose structure and a bit of a trial and error process. when you have a lot of people waiting for 4-5 hours in the rehearsal room though, the mood can turn. This is what I think happened before Christmas. People were tired, they wanted to go home and when they realised that they were not even really doing something at rehearsals the got frustrated. I myself am keeping away from this frustration and the badmouthing and constant complaining that goes with it and am just writing about it because I feel it is an important part of my experience and also something I can learn on. I have the feeling that those people complaining are often the ones who are most unprepared and confused in the scenes. My idea is that they complain so much not only on the outside but also inside that they just kind of shut down. They are not really interested anymore and therefore don’t pay attention as much as they could. I think it is important to stay positive, to stay awake and work with what you get, to create your own things and to find your own way of doing what you think the creative team is expecting. That way you are at least doing something and if they do not like what you do you can always change it or they can tell you what they would like. Just standing there and not doing anything won’t do anyone any good and from what I saw will slow down the process even more.
There is one rehearsal though that I want to highlight because I feel like it was something special. It was maybe the first time that I felt like real acting and character work was happening in the room and on stage for me. Before we blocked a lot, learned choreo and tracks and then went home, thought about it and applied it to the character in the next rehearsal.
This time it was different. It was an evening rehearsal, I was called for 8-10pm and it was just Chino and Marias (the part of Maria is double cast). When I arrived only one Maria was there and she was in a pretty bad condition, crying while talking to the director. When I came in I immediately started to change in the changing room section of the rehearsal room and tried to ignore as much as possible what happened as I feel that it was nothing of my concern. When I was finished I went back into the space and stayed a bit in the background until the director included me into the conversation, so I joined. Immediately I realised that the Maria Actress was unsatisfied with her approach to the character and felt like she could not access the role. She also complained about one of the Tony actors who was very much focused on himself instead of focusing on her to literally let the love happen between them.
This is maybe the time to say that the main characters are cast by opera singers. Most of them, as I later learned, have never really had a real actor training. People like Merlin, Hagen, Meisner, Adler a.s.o. are completely unknown to them and the acting they do, they do with their instinct and through the music. A role as emotionally complicated as Maria with such a development and to he is a real challenge and can seem very hard to approach when you don’t have a clue how.
The rehearsal that now followed was strongly led by what I learned at college and by exercises that we did. Phillip (the director) allowed us to try a few things like repetition, and other acting techniques like trying to establish the distance you want emotionally to the other character actually and physically on stage. we also pushed each other across the stage depending on how strong our need and our intention was. It was a brilliant rehearsal and we came a very very long way with the scene. In the end, everyone was happier with it then we were in the beginning and we met with a couple of other people for drinks in a bar. Happy end I guess.
I also want to mention that I did some more intense character work before the scene. I went deeper with the 9 questions and made a few points clear to myself. I will post pictures of my handwritten notes into this blog post but must warn everyone of my handwriting and grammatical errors. When I start writing and get in a flow only very few things matter to me. Grammatical correctness is not one of them.
That’s it for now. Good Night
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