We had break until Wednesday, so we were unable to meet with the students at John Marshall. We reminded Laura that we would not be seeing the students then. While on break, we each thought about how the act would be performed. I thought a lot about the props that we would need and how to incorporate a lot of humour into the practice. Wehave constantly reminded the students that this project is really dependent on what they would like to add. We have been trying to pay close attention to the details in the text for how the movements could be portrayed. We thought about how stage directions could enhance the comedy in the play. Molly, Taylor, and I thought about each character and their motivations. We brainstormed how these characters could represent their stories through inflection and stage directions. We have given a lot of thought about how we want the act to look but we also have had a lot of flexibility in order to incorporate the student’s interests. We want the project to be extremely successful and we want students to start moving around! In general, we have not assigned roles yet (because we are unsure of how many students will attend). We want to begin blocking, we hope that we will have enough students.

October 12th Post

On Monday, Molly, Taylor, and I went to  John Marshall High School for the second time. The first time, we had a good number of students wwho seemed to be interested in the project. However, this time when we arrived, there were only three students. One student, Dante, was new but excited to be a part of theJepson Shakespeare Project. We asked the returning students to see if they were interested in any specific part to which they responded that they were open to playing any part.

We were curious as to why the student rates had dropped off from last week. Laura mentioned to us that many students were involved in other activities afterschool that prevented them for leaving early or participating in both activities. She also mentioned that the gap from the rehearsal time and the dismissal time had many students leave early. The wait time in between both were between 30-40 minutes. Since Molly and Taylor both have classes until 2:45, it is difficult for us to leave any earlier.

During our rehearsal, we read through th script and described the plot the students again. They mentioned that they had finally started the book in class (Laura told us they took a while to start) so the students had a general understanding of the play. We then diverged and learned that many of our students were seniors. They asked us about the college application process, Richmond, class, extra curriculars, and more. We reminded Laura that we would not be at John Marshall the next week due to Fall break and that we would be back on Monday, October 19th.

During the class work day on Thursday, we read through the act and focused scene by scene. We wrote possible blocking and staging notes for the script and created a running prop list. Realizing that estimating the number of students at rehearsal was difficult, we wanted to combine parts. Titania and Hyppolita were a natural doubling. We also wanted to combine the mechanical characters in case we did not have enough students. At this moment, it seems like we may have approximately five students.