25. February:
This was the first week of the strike affecting our teaching. We had talked to the teacher about how we were going to continue to work with the play, but this was difficult since only a few classmates showed up for our class. We used the space and the few classmates who showed up to rehearse some of the scenes in the play. We started off by walking around the space and slowly moving into walking at a slower speed. We used this warm-up to focus on core exercises and included som breathing exercises towards the end of the warm-up.
After getting warmed up we started to play scene 2 with the two men and the girl and scene 3, with the woman and the parasol. I stepped in as the girl in both scenes because nobody else wanted to do something. The energy of this class has made it hard to stay motivated during this process since it is only some of us who come every time and the other ones just show up once in a while. We tried to work together to go through the scenes a few times each. We had someone read the directions for the two men as they did the scene in a normal speed a few times before we performed the scene on our own without any directions and slowly moving into a slower speed. After finishing the scene with the two men we continued to work with the woman with a parasol. This was the first time we worked with this scene so we went through all the directions and discussed the movements and emotions of the woman and how the girl related to this character. We had some disagreements on some of the directions and decided to try out the different ways we saw the performance take place. Since I had a character in mind I had never actually thought so much about the girl’s emotions in the first few scenes but has I had to step in and play the character I needed to start thinking about her feelings related to every scene. I had thought of her character as an easy part to play because she doesn’t do that much in her scenes, but through this rehearsal I started to reflect over why she was their and what the water meant to her.
