Triple - Historical Context - Blog 8 (Greek) - 22/01/16

Today, I continued to direct my Greek Theatre physical theatre scene. After last lesson, I devised the rest of the movement for my scene so that I could have a it arranged for everyone the next day. Pictured right, is my choreography.

I began by teaching this to everyone individually. Although this took more time, I feel it's easier to remember something when you're taught it by yourself rather than as a group. Once I had taught it to everyone we began to run it a few times. These runs were very successful but there were some issues to sort out.

Firstly, none of us had learnt our chorus verses so in this run through, we couldn't actually perform the runthrough properly but in the next lesson, we'll make sure we all know the verses. Secondly, Dan didn't feel confident doing contact improvisation because of medical reasons, so for this reason, I changed the scene so that we skip Dan's contact improv so it goes from Lorna's, skips Dan's, then straight to mine.

Finally, upon performing a few runthroughs, I noticed that there were quite a few blank spaces where we were all just standing still waiting for the music to get to the next section; there were only three luckily but they needed to be dealt with. The first was at the very beginning where we don't come onstage for around 30 seconds. To resolve this I will cut the audio from the beginning up to when we enter when I edit the track. The second gap is in between after we take our 4 steps into centre stage and when we turn in our respected directions to then perform our combat sequence. To resolve this Lorna and choreographed a short sequence for that time period; this amount of time lasts 16 bars of the song. For the first four bars we would each swap positions in our formations clockwise four times. E.g. Lorna would step into my position on the first bar, Toby's position on the second bar, Dan's position on the third bar and back to her position on the fourth bar. For the next section we'd all lunge forward in our respected angles twice, each lunge lasting 2 bars. Finally for the last 4 bars, we will turn anticlockwise 4 times whilst marching, one per bar. This is then followed by the turn and combat sequence which was already arranged. The final issue with blank space was when we rise from kneeling and circling Cyclops, by the time we get there we have loads of time until we start stomping. To resolve this we will do rise and circle him in slow-motion.

With these changes, the piece is a lot more fluent. Next lesson, we will focus on creating our masks so that we can finally perform and film the piece.