This week, Jessie received a text from our contact person saying we were not having regular rehearsal hours and that there was not an activity for us to come to with the scholars, so we did not go to Henderson. A blessing for me, because it was B-Schools second wave of midterms and I had a lot to study for. However, we were so ready to show our scholars actual Shakespeare texts 🙁

We planned out that we were going to divide our script into three parts so that we can have three waves acting out each character. Since our act does not have that many characters, and we have 25 scholars, it made the most sense for us to do it this way. Again though, this is just a trial and error – what seems to make sense in our heads may not play out as planned. We also got ready to make nametags for the scholars and we would try to divide them up into roles with a lot of speaking and roles with little speaking, depending on what each would prefer.

The most frustrating part about practice being cancelled is that we have fresh ideas to improve from the previous session, which is now three weeks in the past. It is impossible to ask scholars to recall what went wrong or what they need to do better this week, because they simply do not remember that the last rehearsal we had was just me.

For our next session, I want to begin with ground rules, that the scholars and Jessie Carolina and myself agree with. I think this is a great way to hold them accountable for their actions. A punishment for disobeying a rule they generated could potentially result in them sitting the rehearsal out.

As there are limited weeks left before the show, I am excited to get the scholars hands on Macbeth. I think their enthusiasm will make for great actors and actresses.