Corporate America: Unconventional Methods

Today I tried something new in terms of warm ups. I kept the goal from Monday's rehearsal to get everyone energized and ready to have fun. To do this, I thought it would be cool to do something a little bit different and on the athletic side. Today, my cast played stage ball, a game played on the One Act stage with a ball made out of duct tape. It's a hybrid of ski ball and soccer. The goal is to get points by kicking the ball through holes in between the audience platforms. The point of this craziness was 1. to get people's hearts pumping, 2. to get them to play around in the performance space, and 3. to bond as a cast and have fun. In the end, it only tired the cast out. I don't really think they learned anything about the space and I'm not even 100% sure they had fun. I probably won't be playing stage ball in any future rehearsals, but it was definitely interesting trying something new.

Aside from stage ball, we warmed up with a mix of improv games including "yes and," "speaking of," and "one up". These were interesting to see how the actors interpret a situation and come up with ideas on the fly. It also got them topping in on each other, which is incredibly important.

Once we started reading, I noticed that something was off. Actors were speeding through and slurring the dialogue, and weren't really in it. I tried to get them to focus and take time with their words, but that didn't really help. However, after coming up with an idea for one of the characters, I could see that enthusiasm and life was coming back into the rehearsal. Though we ran out of time and couldn't get through the entire show, I made sure to take the time to sit down and talk with the actors about their feelings, questions about the show, and the next couple of weeks ahead of us. I've decided to cancel tomorrow's rehearsal because the actors need to take the rest of this week and finish up their mid terms strong, as well as get off book. I hope next week we can get the energy as high as it was on Monday, then we can get some real work done.