Today we had eight people show up. Dale played Sir Andrew, Christina played the clown, Charles played Mario (since he wanted to play a boy but we needed to fill the role of Maria), Javon played Fabian, James played Malvolio, Talia played Olivia, Rufus played Sebastian, and Jacob played Sir Toby.

We began the rehearsal by introducing ourselves, since we had a larger group than normal and some students who we hadn’t had in a couple weeks. Then we transitioned into the act by playing Zip, Zap, Zop. Once we got through a couple rounds of this, we decided to run through the whole play. We attempted to incorporate enunciating and projecting, emoting, and stage directions. We started by assigning roles and then having each student go to a “back stage” room and wait until they had speaking lines. We didn’t manage to get through the whole play, so during our work day we decided to cut down on the script more. Since the clown had the most lines and Christina struggled to read quickly the most, we cut down on some of the repetitive lines she had. We also tried to space out the script more to make it more readable.

For the upcoming rehearsals, I think we should focus on increasing the speed and fluency at which the students act. The more familiar they are with the stage directions, the quicker we can move through the script. I think another struggle we faced today was people getting frustrated or bored. Since not everyone was acting at the same time, people seemed to lose interest. Again, I think that the quicker we can move through the script, the less of a problem this will be. Christina still seemed to be disappointed that she was playing Feste and not Olivia which confused us at first because we tailored the role to her. However, Maddie said that this was because Christina thought Olivia was the main character. In order to keep her motivated and excited, I think we should keep explaining to her how pivotal of a role Feste is.

We ended rehearsal by telling the students three important things to keep in mind while acting: project your voice, never turn your back on the audience, and when it’s not your line stay in character.