Ten hours of rehearsal is tough. By the end, I had a headache and just wanted some chicken nuggets and fries. I did find time to practice yelling, which consisted of me stepping outside when I wasn’t going to be onstage and yelling behind DuPont. My Process Journals up to this point have been more about what I’m doing to make myself feel/perform better, but I haven’t focused as much on how I’m feeling, so now is a good time to remedy that.
Marc gave me the note that there was a better operative word to use in one of my lines, which was a great note, but during Marc’s comment, I heard laughter behind me. I don’t know if it was correlated, but it made me feel self-conscious and ashamed.
Next, we ran the sequence where we rushed onstage whilst the train was turning, which was a big safety concern for all of us. We never ran it slowly, and when the scene ended in a major crescendo of music it was laughably bad, hence everyone losing their minds with laughter when it was over. It was almost beautifully chaotic, despite us slightly fearing for our safety. We only ran this once more with mildly better results, and that really worried me. On top of that, the train was rotated to a steeper angle than usual, and, naturally, it concerned me because it went against what we had blocked for the past three weeks. I communicated it repeatedly, but the only answer I got was that ‘we rehearsed it differently to what we’re doing now’. Then more menial things came about that struck me more and more the worse I felt.
I didn’t feel heard, I felt ashamed, and the sprinkles on the moldy meatloaf were that I didn’t perform my best. It’s hard to be in the moment when I’m placed in new surroundings and could be interrupted at any moment or need to start from the middle of a scene.
After a smidgeon of soul searching I found that the reason why all these tiny hiccups impacted me so much is that I’m scared. We are so close to opening and I feel like I need to be so much further along.
For tomorrow, I need to recognize that this is a technical rehearsal. There are opportunities for me to try new things, but what I really need to do is fully take in the new elements so they don’t surprise me in the future; so I can be in the moment later.
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I also watched Grand Hotel! It has been a long time coming, but I couldn’t find time until today when I had hours between times I was onstage. Marc recommended this movie to us as an example of how people in the 1930s moved, and I did some enhanced exploration because I could do more than imitate their motions (ie. I am already in my costume, so I can actually replicate their movements).
It provided two useful bits of information.
- Don’t use your shoulder to emote (shoulder and head are connected at all times)
- Now that I’m wearing my costume, I now see that while their movements are constructed in a way that doesn’t wear out their clothes, the clothing isn’t binding them to those movements.
This means that I can’t ‘slack off’ on the work I had done previously. I thought my earlier exploration was being done so I was prepared for the constriction of the clothes (so I could fully embody myself in the costume), but instead, I need to continue using what I learned within the clothes, rather than the clothes doing it for me.