In her final blog post, Nescha Jelk reflects on the rehearsal process of Land & Sea, written just before she popped over to Sydney to assistant direct Old Man for Belvoir. Talk about a busy lady!
As our rehearsal
process is nearing to an end with opening night creeping up (exciting!), now is
a good time to give you some insight into what a rehearsal process actually is.
If I tell someone
that I’m a theatre director they will sometimes ask “So, what is it that you
actually do? What do 5 weeks of rehearsals for a show actually involve?” I
completely understand why people ask questions like these. Whenever I went to
the theatre as a teenager, I would always struggle to imagine what it would be
like to be involved in the process of making a professional show. Due to
theatre being such a niche industry with a small and closely-knit community of
theatre workers, the fact few people have been in a rehearsal room for a
professional show, and because theatre work is so dissimilar from the regular
9-5 job, it's expected that most people don’t know much about what goes behind
closed doors. So here’s a rough step-by-step of the Land & Sea process.
Usually, the
first step is choosing a play or concept, which is done by a director or
artistic director of a theatre company. Instead, director Chris Drummond, and
playwright Nicki Bloom knew that they wanted to collaborate on a show together.
A range of concepts, ideas, and
interests that they mutually found inspiring surfaced over a number of
conversations. These included exile, loss, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loop theories in Godel,
Escher, and Bach and I am a Strange Loop, Christoph Mathaler, Eric Satie,
and war, just to name a few.
These subjects
were explored on the floor with actors over a two week creative development. I wasn’t privy to this process, so can’t give
you exact details on what this period entailed, though I do know that impulse
grid work was often used. In grid work the actors are only allowed to walk,
stand still, sit or lie down within a confined area. As the name suggests, the
actors are encouraged to follow their natural and immediate impulses, and to
refrain from pre-planning their movements or actions. Once they are following
these impulses more freely, new elements may be added to the ‘grid’ or playing
space. For example, Chris would scatter books such as Hofstadter’s I am a
Strange Loop, Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, or Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland around the ‘grid’ space that the actors were
inhabiting. The actors would then be allowed to pick up a book, flick to a
random page, read a line from the page, and see how it would affect the
impulses of the actors. Over time, movements would become more fluid as people
responded more freely to their impulses, and interesting images and
relationships between the actors would emerge.
The raw material
created through grid impulse work served as an inspiration for some of the
images and narrative in Nicki’s first
draft of Land & Sea, with
regular consultation with Chris.
After a number of
drafts had been made, there was a script
development of Land & Sea. The
script was workshopped for 1 week, to
see how the script works when performed by actors. (A quick side note: if youlook on Brink’s website, you’ll see that Brink currently has a show in
development called Black Thread White Thread
to be written by the wonderful UK playwright Bryony Lavery. An exciting project
definitely to look out for!)
For some shows,
the first day of rehearsals is when
all the cast, creatives, and crew are in one room together for the first time.
It’s an interesting time to see how everyone gets along. A fascinating aspect
of theatre work is that it’s very rare that the exact same group of people work
all together more than once; every rehearsal room has a different energy
according to the mix of people in it, so your workplace environment is
constantly changing.
On the first day,
Chris gave an introduction to his thoughts of the play, and the designer (Wendy
Todd) presented a model of what the finished set will look like, along with
images that had inspired her design of the show. Then there was the first read
of the script by the actors - a really exciting time, because it is the first
time that you truly get an accurate idea of how the ensemble of actors will co-inhabit
the world of the play.
During the first week of rehearsals of Land & Sea, more impulse grid work
was done to try to find the performative language/style of the acting, with
Hilary Kleinig’s improvised
live music accompanying. Chris wanted to make sure that the actors didn’t get
trapped by making big decisions about their characters too early. He was weary
that there is a fine balance between the actors’ different characters being too
overtly different or too similar (this will make more sense once you see the
show).
Once the
performative tone of Land & Sea
was discovered each scene of the play was analysed and 'stumbled through' by
Hilary and the actors. Each scene was read out by the actors, and then
discussed briefly. Chris then set up the scene to be loosely performed; he
would give the actors a clear playing space and boundaries, he would ask Hilary
to play a certain piece of music, or to improvise on a certain idea or theme,
and would then leave them to do a cold run of a scene with the actors holding
their scripts. In the way that Nicki has written Land & Sea, it is a finely composed piece. Many pieces of music
in the show are actually dictated by the text. The music in Land & Sea is just as important as
the text. So seeing the scene loosely performed with the music and being able
to have a glimpse at what the play could both look and sound like was crucial.
For me, it was the first time that I began to ‘get’ the play.
Because Land & Sea is a deeply poetic and
complex play, we had to do a lot of digging for the story behind the text.
Rather than construct an interpretation in the first week, Chris was interested
in finding images that would allow new meanings of the work to be discovered.
Chris took time to experiment with different blocking in each scene until the
larger interlinking story gradually revealed itself. Therefore, no single
interpretation of the text was really locked down until the end of week 3. It
was a time-consuming process but ensured that each moment of the play became
impregnated with meaning for the actors, so that they could clearly understand
their complex characters. No moment in Land
& Sea was imposed by Chris onto the actors. Every action was carefully
placed and discussed.
The process of
searching for an internal allegory through exploration of images continued
through the second and third week of
rehearsals. When each scene was revisited, new possibilities were
discovered. Slowly but surely, an over-arching story was burgeoning to reveal
itself brilliantly. Characters were taking clearer shape, as the understanding
for each character’s function in the play grew. Chris then began to direct the
actors in a more traditional mode. One of the big tasks in directing is finding
the action behind each line. For example, if character A says “stop it, you’re
killing me” to character B, the scene could be read very differently depending
on whether character A delivers the line with the action ‘to seduce’ B rather
than ‘to plead’ with B. This is an ongoing process; Chris and the actors
constantly experiment with different actions on different lines to find the
most interesting and appropriate result.
Over second and
third week, the creatives were also busy. Hilary (on top of attending
rehearsals) was collating and mixing the recorded sound design for the show,
the production crew were building the set, Geoff was crafting his lighting
design, and Wendy was finding more and more set pieces and props. Geoff and
Wendy also regularly visited the rehearsal room, as the direction of the show
took on a clearer shape. This included attending all of the full practice runs
of the show, which usually occurred at the end of each week.
By the beginning
of the fourth week of rehearsals,
the overarching story behind the text, and a large percentage of choices about
actions and blocking had been locked in. In this week, each scene is visited in
length for the last time, before tech and dress rehearsals take priority in
production week. Timing, precision and detail were the primary focus of this
week. The actors had learnt their lines by the start of this week, so they were
no longer holding their scripts. This meant that they can put more focus on
responding and reacting to the other actors, which added a new level of
intensity to the work.
The rehearsal
process finished with the production
week which is usually full of
late nights and take away food as everyone is working hard to polish off every
element of the show. The construction of the set, costumes and foyer and
lighting grid was finished in this week. The sound system was installed. Chris
plotted through lights and sound with Geoff, Hilary and Lucie Balsamo the stage
manager, who runs the tech during performances. Chris took great measures to
besure that every single light will shine at just the right intensity, and that
each sound cue will be played at the correct volume, at the right time, and for
the right length of time. Set changes and transitions between scenes were also
rehearsed mercilessly in this week - and once you see Land & Sea you’ll understand how big a task that was. Badly
timed lighting or sound and technical disasters can ruin a show, so it’s vital
to ensure that these elements all cohere seamlessly. This time-consuming
process takes a lot of hard work, but its necessary.
The first dress
rehearsal (when the actors are in their costumes on the finished set for the
first time) is thrilling. The set, costumes, sound and lighting will lift the
imaginary world of the play into a wonderfully palpable and tangible place.
Then it’s just a matter of running the show many times to ensure that the
acting, live music and sound/lighting cues are consistent, and so that Chris
may add small finite details to the actors performances.
Thomas Conroy in Land & Sea. Photo: Chris Herzfeld
Preview performances are essentially dress
rehearsals with an audience. The energy of a show completely transforms once
you have an audience in the theatre. Giving the actors a chance to practice
running the show with an audience is important, so they don’t feel too awkward
on opening night.
Last, and
certainly not least, there is the opening
night. After which, Chris, Nicki, the actors, Hilary, the creatives and the
crew will have a well earned drink for all their hard work. The first creative
development of Land & Sea happened
two years ago, so its been a long and exciting process for Chris and Nicki.
Nicki, Nescha and Geordie Brookman on opening night. Photo: Jonathan Van Der Knaap
One thing that I
do know from my limited experience is that no matter how much work you put into
a show the artists working on the show will always feel as though there is more
to discover. More to unearth, portray, reveal, more details to add, or
different ways that a scene could be played. I don’t think I know any
director/actor/designer/writer who has ever said that they felt that their show
was perfect or complete. This eventuality is unavoidable as perfection is
impossible and artists will always be their own worst critics. But it’s what theatre such an exciting and
inexhaustible challenge. It reminds me of a wonderful strange loop:
Hofstadter's
Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
