First rehearsal after the break.

After a slightly late start (due to unforeseen circumstances for one of the girls) the girls began by describing their chosen outfits for the day. They had come to rehearsal dressed as their character would dress today. Lee has chosen a baggy tracksuit jumper and baggy pants to represent Viola's attempt at cross-dressing. The loose fitting clothes would help hide her feminine figure. Shannon was dressed in a professional-looking black pinstripe dress and fashionable, yet simple, purple heels. She selected this outfit to represent Olivia's wealth, and professionalism afforded to her by her status.

Dialogue as the focus of today. We spent most of the rehearsal on vocal warm-ups and diction exercises to encourage the girls to consider clarity. We started by progressing from a hum to an open mouthed noise using Moo, Mah and backwards with Um, whilst moving slowly around the room. We then used an exercise I learnt from my director last year which focuses on consonant diction. The sound of each vowel is used in conjunction with every consonant. For example, for a: ba, ca, da, fa, ga, ha, etc. Then be, ce, de, fe, and so forth. I am not overly fond of this exercises as it is long and somewhat boring, however it is a good warm up and does the job. I think for future use I will use a shortened version, or find a different exercise for the same job. We then just repeated some sounds such as ta, da, bah and ma.

I had a list of tongue twisters sourced off the Internet, so we spent a few minutes repeating them. The point of this was not merely to warm up, but to get in the habit of clear diction. My favourite is a song excerpt from Gilbert and Sullivan's the Mikado:


To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!



I love the sound of this, and the imagery that it contains.

We then tried an exercise that I got off a website: performing a choral reading spoken in different ways. I used the poem that the website suggested, The Beautiful Snow by John Whittaker Watson.

Oh! the snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and the earth below!
Over the housetops, over the street,
Over the heads of the people you meet:
Dancing, flirting, skimming along.
Beautiful snow! It can do nothing wrong.

I read the poem line by line, and the girls repeated using the appropriate style. They repeated it flat, then as a teacher telling a student off, then as a new president giving his first speech, then as a 'proper' lady, then as a teenage boy, then as lovers. The last three were designed to mirror the characters from Twelfth Night, and therefore be directly useful for the girls.

We finished by repeating this exercise using segments from our script instead of the snow poem. I selected two segments of script (one for each actor) and gave them each two ways of saying it. Lee was asked to read it as if sharing a great secret, and then arrogantly. Shannon was asked to speak as though angry, and then vague.

This knowledge gained from today will be useful for the next rehearsals when we start the blocking. I think that working on the diction and meaning of the lines is important now, because then it will be subconsciously used correctly when we start to focus on the movement. The rehearsal was shorter today than intended, due to a late start and the need for an early finish today. We didn't get to improvise the scene using the actor's own words, however I will incorporate this into a future rehearsal as I feel it is a valuable exercise.