Rehearsal #11: Group Mind and Dance

We had rehearsal Wednesday night at the movement studio space at ACT. If you haven’t rehearsed at ACT in a while, they’ve completely re-done the 8th floor. It’s very disorienting if you’re used to the old lay-out.

We started by working on group mind characters. That’s when a group of characters (a group being as small as 2) share a group mind. They may not say exactly the same thing or even have exactly the same personalities, but they are essentially the same character. They have the same opinions and reactions. When you have a lot of characters on stage at the same time, it’s generally useful to gravitate into group minds. It generally keeps scenes from devolving into chaos as everyone tries to get in their ideas. Group minds can also be very fluid. One moment you might be in a group mind with characters A and B and then be an individual in the next moment. As with anything, there are no hard and fast rules.

But it’s a useful skill, recognizing when group mind characters are needed and knowing how to do them.

They often take the form of Character A and their group of followers who are all of a group mind. That’s what we practiced as it’s fairly common in Bollywood (and most stories really); you see Male love interest and his friends (of group mind) and Female love interest and her friends (of group mind).

For some reason, whenever we work on group mind characters, I feel compelled to mention that we at Un-Scripted first started working on group mind when founding member Brian McBride noticed that the cheerleader in Better Off Dead dates the entire basketball team and how the basketball team functions as one character.

But that’s not all we did. As we were in the movement studio, we also worked a lot on dancing. We would start a scene and then Mandy would play a Bollywood song off a CD (as we were sans musician) and we’d dance to it. Because we weren’t also trying to invent lyrics to the song as we went, we found we did much more interesting and fun dance numbers this way.

That got us to thinking, that generally when a song moment hits, we sing and maybe fit some dance in if we can. For this show, we need to think of them as music moments, not song moments, and remember that we can also just start dancing and throw some singing in if we can.