Time is moving very fast - there are only have 2 regular rehearsals left before we go into the theatre! Our actors have been hard at work in classes diving into their scenes, setting blocking, and refining their characters for our big performance on May 28th at 11am at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. You do not want to miss this show! Click here to grab your tickets, and read on to learn more about rehearsals, and see some photos of our Monday class in action!
Monday Recap (by Katie Yohe)
We kicked things off just like always with an awesome dance party moving and grooving around the room! Alanna led us in a warm-up with some lovely movement for our spine, and also working on our diction (which, incidentally, sounds a lot like beatboxing!). We finished warm ups by going around the circle reciting one of our favorite tongue twisters: “We Speak the Words We Want The World to Hear!”
After a quick review of the day’s schedule, we went around the circle with our check-in question. This week, we had to really put on our thinking caps and share who we are most excited to see in the audience at our big show. For many people it was their mom or dad, but several of us have teachers, aunts, cousins, and other special friends coming. As an actor, it’s really great to have one special person in the audience to look for because it can really help to ground you, and give you someone to direct your monologues to.
We played a round of Make a Scene much like last week working on different levels. It’s awesome to see everyone’s improvisational creativity, especially when coming up with reasons to crouch or lie down! This week’s scenes were at an ice cream shop (Ben was a delivery person, Fletcher was seated taking orders, and Andrew was crouching down cleaning up spilled ice cream), a park (Hannah was sitting on a bench putting on her rollerskates, Colleen was jumping up playing basketball, and Rachel was crouching down playing volleyball), and a movie premiere (Claire was in the audience eating popcorn, Lucy was strutting the red carpet, and Emily L was a kneeling photographer). At the end of the game we made one giant group scene on the moon. Specifically, we were broadcasting the very first rock concert from the moon!
The rest of the class focused on Twelfth Night. First up: Sweet Viola! We’ve been working on the chorus for “Sweet Viola” for several weeks, but this week, we really dove into the verses, which basically recap the story of the entire play. It’s a rapid-fire character review, and our actors strike poses as each character while the narrator sings through the song. After that, we broke into groups for our second scenes. We worked with our scene partners to create beginning, middle, and ending tableaux to show the action of each scene. It was fun to present these to each other, and also add some lines in to make them “talking pictures”. Now everyone knows their main characters so the remaining two rehearsals can be dedicated to running scenes and blocking!
We worked hard, so we even had time to run through “Hey, Ho” before check out. Emily L was on marker duty this week, so she led us in “I Take from the Heavens” and we were out for the night!
The Friday class has been working on their scenes as well, and had fun diving in to the music for Sweet Viola. They also have a big job of creating a shipwreck! You'll get to see more from them in next week's blog!
