Preparations for the First Scratch Night

One week on from our last update, and the main theme of the whole week was the build up to our first scratch night. But, as the image above shows, there's as much drama behind the scenes as there are on the stage.

Monday: With one of our chief members taken ill, and another greatly effected by their absence, moral was low. Though we were able to save the rehearsal time by getting a lot of practical work done, our theory based preparations were lagging, with our biggest success in that department being when we noted down the music we needed. To make matters worse, for our website based class, only I was present as a participant, leaving a dark mark on our company's reputation. It was this class that I was in when I started writing this blog diary. However, while being up on feet, a running theme for our play was found from a stray comment made by Gytis; each of the four pieces in our anthology play focused on a different king of value.

Wednesday: With two of our members absent - one due to tragedy, and another due to a commuting error - it lay with me to update the absentee from Monday, and work on their scene. With all our attention focused on their scene, we were able to expand it beyond its initial concept and help the scene find its identity, with the process being more focused due to the fewer numbers. It was not until four hours of work that we decided to call it a day, making this our shortest rehersal time to date. However, that is not to say that things ran smoothly, as the fewer number meant that there was less feedback from the group, resulting in PG from rival company Virtual Living Theatre stopping by to give friendly feedback.

Thursday: The day of our company photo shoot. We managed to come together as a unit to get many photographs of ourselves done, with Alex Mockler acting as "Director of Image"; a cute nickname we gave him due to his role as Gallery manager. Unfortunately, due to a communication error, we did not find out until we were assembled in the studio that we had to attend a mandatory lesson that was set one hour later. Despite this surprising news, we managed to take enough photographs to fill our gallery, as well has some headshots for our individual biographies and a group photo (see below), before making our way to the mandatory lesson on Networking.

And that takes us up to this present Monday. After signing our newly devised contracts, we had our first rehearsal inside our performance space, which helped me as director, as it allowed me to better visualise how to show would look, and for us to use our environment to our advantage. One humorous moment involved Alex Mockler playing piano to one of more comedic pieces, which we found so enjoyable that we decided to incorporate it into the piece. Most importantly, we were able to time our show, and were pleased to find we reached the timing minimum with 20 minutes, and also began working on our cue sheet for the technical aspect of the show, resulting in us finding the correct algorithm to use for the beginning piece, as the audience reaction to the first scene defines how the following scenes go into each other.