Week 21 and Show Day
So the week leading up to the final show was crazy hectic. We started on Monday, trying to get everything in order for our second run on Thursday for Pablo and our classmates. This has included trying out more short snippets for the introduction and ending.
On Tuesday we revisited the new transitions now that we had removed scenes and spent time on the new stories, trying to make sure we were not changing them too often.
On Wednesday we managed to do a very low energy run, early in day. We then spent the evening setting up our lights and sound. While not complicated the number of lighting, sound and video cues do take time to set up. Setting up QLab proved to be especially annoying because for various reasons slides would not save onto the operating system of the light room computer.
On Thursday we met in the morning to do another run. Then we performed for Pablo and the class. The feedback we received told us that we needed to cut down the material, rethink our slide titles, rethink the movie work in even more stories and fine tune certain scenes. We then sat down to decide which scenes to cut in addition to Potions. We decided to cut Tendai’s basketball scene, my defilement scene and Blanche’s shit list scene. We then decided which scenes to run again in our next rehearsal split duties on props and tech. We also agreed to cut the movie short.
On Friday we rehearsed some scenes in specific and choreographed others. We spent significant hours of rehearsal on getting the lines in the various parts together storytelling right. We also rehearsed the dances and spent time going over the tech script. It was at this rehearsal that we decided to do the popcorn scene with specific stories as opposed to just random miming, just to give our actions more specificity. We also agreed to entirely new titles that pointed out (a bit cheekily) that our performance while about love stories did not follow the actual narrative structure of a love story (the beginning middle and end). We also spent the morning cutting the movie down to size. Then the afternoon I spent with Josh trying to get QLab to work.
On Saturday we had a pretty decent dress run though we were dissatisfied with the energy of the show. The rest of both Saturday and Sunday was spent tightening scenes, redoing dances, going over cues and pushing the energy of various scenes. On Sunday we did a few speed runs- Tendai’s idea- which involved doing the performance very fast in different voices, accents etc.
On Monday we spent two hours together in the morning going over props and lines. In the evening between 9 and 11 we ran the show very quickly in the Aphra and included a new improvised opening where Rockin’ Robin is sung and drummed too. This helped push opening energy ever more.
On Tuesday, show day we met to do a final prop and tech check and to do two more line thoughts and practice the different dances. The show itself was exciting, and we were quite wired for it, so it passed in something of a blur. We had a good audience though- who were quite wired themselves- and it was over before we knew it. Videos and photos can be found on our blogs.