Week Twenty-Five Part Two: Junk

Rehearsals Begin

Tuesday 1st April 2014

     Today was the day of our first official rehearsal.  Beginning abnormally, without a warm up exercise, we received some unfortunate news about the lesson being shortened; this meant we had less time to rehearse as many scenes of the play as possible.  So once every member of the tutor group was present we began rehearsing as many scenes as we could in the little time we had.  To begin with we set the room up in the style of how we wanted the staging to be for the main performance.  Having the audience seated on the front and the sides of the stage, including six entrances and exits for us actors to enter our scenes.  With the room set us as our chosen staging we then turned to our teacher who gave us the scenes, which we were to be rehearsing, and we also planned our staging in which a certain actor would enter a scene and why, as well as beginning to create the scripted atmosphere.  With everything ready on stage and actor ready, with scripts handy we started.

     Our teachers main focus was the Dual Casting choices, the idea was to have both actors who play the part of Tar in act one and act two to perform their opening scenes.  As well as both actors who will play the part of Richard.  This was important in our rehearsal process as we need the actors to both understand how they were to create the character and make their performances similar.  As well as making the fact that they would have to present to the audience that both actors play the same character.  So when it came to the last scene in act one, our teacher decided to include a scenario of when the first actor changes into the second actor and it would make the change more obvious so it wouldn’t confuse any audience members on the actual night.

     Rehearsals were under way, and we managed to create the scenario of when the actors change.  The scenario consisted of both actors on stage saying their lines aloud and then slowly the first actor would exit, whilst the second actor would remain on stage delivering their lines and continuing the performance.  This was all extremely helpful as we managed to get a bit of line rehearsals out of the way, as well as working out stage directions for entrances and exits.  There still needs to be work on staging and movement, but all in good time we should be able to construct the performance in a professional manor and make ‘Junk’ and entertaining and above all and interesting performance for audience memebrs.