#transitionsmuststop

“Monday, it’s just another morning

Tuesday, I only feel like living

Dancing along with every song”

 Time to pull together to make this show happen, with the help of the amazing Dalida!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFOe5sGnQK0

Monday, March 6th 2017

Rehearsal in Eliot Hall: we rehearsed our various dances quite successfully. Then we knocked at Josh’s door for the risk assessment, and finally we invaded a computer room to start creating the flyers!

 “Laissez-moi danser, laissez-moi

Laisser-moi danser, chanter en liberté, tout l’été

Laissez-moi danser, laissez-moi

Allez jusqu’au bout du rêve“

 Tuesday, March 7th 2017

We tried to re-work the weakest scenes, of which Tendai’s and Nayantara’s final scenes, and also mine, “Two Years”. But I felt that every time I was doing this bit, something was missing. Changing clothes is too simple, too flat. So Nayantara suggested me to lie on the sofa and change clothes there. I would not be allowed to sit. Rehearsing with this new configuration was hard, because we didn’t have the real sofa for the moment so we had to rehearse with three classroom chairs, which is quite unstable. But there is something with this new scene, it is quite sexy, calm and odd. I will try to develop those feelings in the coming days.

Wednesday, March 8th 2017

I wasn’t supposed to be in Canterbury today, so we ended up having no room to rehearse in. We finally found a little space for our run, but it wasn’t very satisfying. This run was about 57 minutes long, but we know there are scenes that are a bit too long and flat, so we’ll fix all that very soon and we are really looking forward to Pablo’s sound advice tomorrow!

Thursday, March 9th 2017

Supervised rehearsal with Pablo: once more the energy wasn’t fully there, and we also had to stop several times to switch sounds and lights. I also feel now that the transitions are not really working, we’re trying to make them flow but maybe this is one of the reasons why our piece lacks dynamism. Pablo highlighted this issue and also asked us to question the weakest scenes. Are they really relevant for our performance? My company is meeting tomorrow again, and I feel it’s going to be a long day.

Friday, March 10th 2017

We spent the entire rehearsal time thinking about a new order. Once again, we put all our sections on little sheets of paper and each of us presented a new structure. After many discussions, some disagreement and a lot of patience, we finally managed to have a “new Lovebirds”.

We will add projected titles and not-finished love stories to enhance the dynamic of the performance and avoid naturalistic transitions.

We gave up a few scenes: love potion (which didn’t bring anything to our piece and even slowed it down) and my slow motion running. Still I do not agree on cutting Nayantara’s coward scene, as it is one of the “most contemporary” scenes of our show.

Sunday, March 12th 2017

5 ½ hour rehearsal in Aphra: The most important thing to do right now was to devise our new transition or “incomplete love stories”. Key of success is to tell one’s story with a certain pace, directly after another one’s story without cutting and without any pause. This was a very hard exercise for me, as I am not very good at improvising at the moment and I also had to face language barriers. Staying in the dynamic was therefore very complicated, and I started worrying about it because I do not want to let my colleagues down if anything goes wrong with my texts during the final performance. I will rehearse these bits several times to be more comfortable.

We will include these “transitions” three times: At the very beginning of our performance (before introducing ourselves); the popcorn scene becomes a part of it as well; the ending scene (after the film and before the final dance).