I really enjoyed Director's Challenge. I think it was a great experience having a Year 13 direct you and get to be in a small cast with a mix of years. I think I especially enjoyed it because I had Jermaine as a director who is probably one of the nicest guys you will ever meet, he managed to create a really nice atmosphere at every rehearsal and therefore meaning it was never dull even when you weren't doing anything. He really was a lovely director and very positive too, perhaps a little too relaxed, but he had a lot of good ideas.
I think one of the things I really liked about the Director's Challenge was seeing the development of Sam who was playing The Drummer. Must admit, in the first rehearsal I was a little confused about Jermaine casting Sam as the Drummer because he was just too nice and didn't seem to be able to act intimidating or confident. There was even a major question over changing actor when Isabel stepped in when he was absent and did a great job. But Jermaine kept faith and it really paid off. Sam really stepped up to the role and on the night delivered a very convincing performance, he just needed to settle into the role.
In respect to my own personal development, if I'm brutally honest with myself, I should have done much better. I find I fall into this trap every time I have a smaller part, I get too relaxed about the character and then in the last few weeks go, "Oh, I actually need to develop this." I do feel that part of it was a lack of direction on my character from Jermaine, but I should taken much more initiative. At the start of the rehearsal process I did go through my script and looking at what I thought I should be contributing with each line to the scene, but I didn't really think enough about the actual character just more about the lines. Mistake.
In the first rehearsal, Jermaine told us that each of our characters were simply meant to be "balls of emotion" as we didn't have names, just titles, so there wasn't really a specific character behind it, just a hell of a lot of emotion. On direction for mine and "The Singer's" role, he told us our purpose within the play was to break the tension which had just been building up between "The Drummer" and "The Boy" to contribute to the waves of tension in the play. I think we were also meant to bring some light relief to the play which had just been awkward, emotional teens so far. Therefore, in the first blocking of our scene, we burst in together laughing to break the tense atmosphere, then from that lightness we gradually built our tension until the climatic head-lock from 'The Drummer'.
Now that headlock. That caused a lot of problems. I don't know why it just didn't click the first few times that we did it that we need to DO MORE! As we hadn't blocked that bit till the last few weeks, I had decided to just learn the lines, which I think meant I was more just saying the lines how I'd run through them with "The Singer". We were also restricted by the atmosphere of the rest of the play which had been a lot of distance between each character and a lack of movement meaning we didn't feel we could really move much. Eventually, the night before the performance, Jermaine gave us freedom to improvise lines and movement and that just made it a whole lot better. It did contribute to me feeling a lot more comfortable on the stage in the actual performance as I think the restrictions I felt in the movement I could do meant I felt very uncomfortable.
Anyway, the performance and rehearsals were all very enjoyable and a good experience, especially for learning from mistakes. I enjoyed the rehearsals even when I wasn't doing anything on stage as it was such a nice atmosphere and I enjoyed watching and making little comments on the direction.
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