Rehearsal #6: Improv and Movement

I missed the last two rehearsals because I was out of town on business, and boy did I miss a lot. They sang. They dance. I have a lot to catch up on.

We started rehearsal by reviewing the dance vocabulary, and this was where I realized how behind I was. They had apparently practiced complex maneuvers called “cascade” and “waterfall”, and I had no idea what was going on. I think I picked them up, or at least get the general idea. They should allow us to improvise some pretty complex group dance numbers that will hopefully look pretty impressive. It’s all just following a leader, really, but doing it in an organized way. I’ll go into more detail about it once I’ve had more rehearsal time to master it.

Then we moved into improv. At Un-Scripted, we often find that it useful to practice the first three scenes of a long-form. If those are solid, the rest of the show pretty much falls into place. We’re also experimenting with different types of suggestions to start with. We tried some plot heavy suggestions before that not surprisingly made the scenes very plot heavy. Last night we focused on suggestions that were more relationship oriented. This seemed to work nominally better, except that all the relationships ended up being very similar.

One thing we need to get a handle on is family relationships though. These figure hugely into Bollywood, and as we explored last night, the family you live with might consist of a fairly far flung assortment of distant and tangential relations.

We also have some new puppets, thanks to Mandy’s tireless construction efforts and the help of our interns. We needed some new girl puppets and the new ones are going to be fun to work with.

I don’t know that much was revealed to me from the scene work we did. I have a better sense of how certain people play and how to play off/with them. I’m interested in getting to know a few of the newer people and very interested to see how they react to being in the middle of a show.

The most useful part of the rehearsal came at the end when we experimented with using movement and dance to tell silent scenes between a person and a puppet. One person and one puppet (with puppeteer) would go up onstage and interact (with music in the background) as if there were two good friends having a great time or as if one was pursuing the other who was playing hard to get. They were very inspiring. We need to incorporate some of that movement both into our regular scene work and in our dancing.

Next week: 2 rehearsals! And I’m not missing any more.