TUESDAY 22nd July:
Guess who’s back baby!? Only the whole dang ensemble! And what a reunion it was! We began, of course, with a wonderful warm up led by Ari, to get the blood pumping and those muscle’s toned. We then dived into the newly written quartet of politician scenes to explore how our clowns might approach playing those pompous fools. First, we explored the transition into the scene. How do the clowns change the set? How do they prepare to become these characters? Who helps, who hinders? My clown rushed around at pace, desperately flinging blazers at each clown whilst Vera and Abi locked in on one bench, spinning round and round. Ari did nothing but play to the imaginary audience, awaiting a blazer from myself and was then escorted by Lau to her place. We ran this transition a few times before setting exact actions and paces, exploring how Ari can eventually call “Order!” to transition the transition into the scene.
On reflection, the challenge with these clownish transitions is to find a balance between the clownish tendency to get stuck/distracted/forget and the actual need to maintain the pace of the show. The clown’s are incredibly competent during the opening montage – is it then odd that they lose that organisational ability completely later on? Perhaps its just a case of not becoming zombies – maybe every clown maintains the energy and purpose just some clowns have more tasks to complete than others.
We explored how to clown the politician scene through several improvs. By letting the clowns behave how they liked for a few runs through the scene, we were able to discover the games we could play within the scenes in-built conventions. For example, a rule of the scene is that you stand when you speak. Which clowns forget to stand? Which clowns sit down only to stand up again? Who stands at the wrong moment? The challenge with the scene is not over saturating it with physical gags as the text is also densely packed with puns and jokes. The text has to be heard. We must be wary of overloading the audience – which is difficult to manage without a director, especially with scenes we already know so well (we are so familiar with the material it becomes harder to imagine hearing it for the first time). We ran three of the scenes back to back to explore how each builds on from the next – which jokes grow each time, what changes – and to get a feel for how the intensity should grow. We are all narcissists and want the spotlight so need to be careful to really listen to one another and understand who is in major and who is in minor at each moment.
Following on from a production meeting group lunch, we plugged the full ensemble into the “Welcome to Cropshire” montage. Teaching the sequence to more people helped us to clarify the intentions of certain moments (eg. When we enter we expect Vera to be there…) and Ari, Lau and Ali helped develop some of the choreographic moments to really emphasise the synchronised swimming vibe (oh how I have been dying to synchronise swim in this show since day 1 and finally my dreams have come true!!!). Having now decided more firmly on our set – two empty door frames and a curtain rail -we were able to expand the proposal sequence a la Ari’s suggestion by creating a sort of ballet with Vera and Ari in the frames, pushed around by the rest of the ensemble. This flowed smoothly into the proposal, followed by the wedding, and then bang! We’re at the best man speech. All of a sudden we have the first 10 minutes of our show!
