Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I hope that you're all well. Thanks so much for watching this video. We're going to be exploring in this ways to structure your rehearsal. So when we think about structuring a rehearsal, I want to begin by saying that like how long you rehearse for and the contexts that you rehearse within are as easy as saying how long is a piece of string so everything that we talk about here is going to be quite general but I will kind of dig into some specifics but you of course understand the context of your rehearsals and the context of your cast and the context of where you're rehearsing best and the way that you structure your rehearsal of course will need to be flexible to your particular context. But hopefully I'm going to give you a little bit of an insight into ways to structure your rehearsal process and maybe the different steps to think about it. But before I do that, maybe I should let you know who I am. So my name's Ellen, I'm a theatre director and I've been doing it for about 10 years. I've got a lot of experience of working with young people and with people who maybe are making theatre for the first time. And over the course of my career, I have kind of worked with lots of different directors and led my own rehearsal processes. And kind of by and large, most of those end up kind of feeling a similar kind of structure. But that also includes, you know, I've worked on devising work as well as Shakespeare and Chekhov. So the kind of two different ends in terms of kind of beginning points. Now obviously for Connections you have a fantastic wealth of fantastic plays and I hope that you've enjoyed picking your play and that is going to very much be the thing that guides your rehearsal process. So I have included in this tutorial a kind of graph which is very broad but shows you maybe some of the steps that you might need to think about. Before we go into that, I just want to say that before you even start about rehearsing, there are so many steps, I feel, that are useful to you as a director, to your creative colleagues, whoever they may be, young people or colleagues, and of course your cast. You all need to understand fully what you're about to do so that you together can proceed through the rehearsal process that keeps everyone engaged and also gets you to a point of being able to share a fantastic piece of work. So, I'm going to be leading you through a process and like I say, the kind of timeline for that will be obviously dependent on your context but I'm going to kind of talk you up to the home performance because that's like the biggest first hurdle and then after that your Connections Director will obviously support you in thinking about the next phase before you transfer to your partner theatre. So as I say, I got some experience of working in devised context as well as scripted context, and the way that I tend to work in devised work is that often, and lots of different productions will be like this, you'll have a period of what we call R&D, research and development, and actually it's becoming much more common that even kind of scripted pieces have a process of R&D research and development at the beginning. To kind of work out what this play is, what it could be, in an advising context we kind of think about like what is the story or what are the themes, but in a play context an R&D process enables you to play around with the script before kind of of beginning at act one, scene one, and going through. And I think that the best rehearsal processes, or let's not call it best, let's call it most successful rehearsal processes, often begin with a period of research and development, and essentially play. Because these things are called plays, and I would encourage you from the very beginning, when you're thinking about beginning your rehearsal process, that you have play front and centre of the room, so that you can be building your cast and your ensemble at the same time as exploring what this amazing piece of work that a writer has given you contains and all the potential in it. And I think particularly for Connections projects, and for lots of others, but I think Connections particularly, obviously at the beginning you're really wanting to think about how are you going to nurture this cast, especially with the year that we've had and it may be that your cast have made plays before but you know we've had a lockdown and that's not been able to happen or maybe it has um but also you may be working with people who haven't ever done a play first um and it's their you know it's their first time so keeping things lively open not restricted at the beginning of a rehearsal process i think is really important so if we have a look at the graph now um i have um sort of um suggested that at the beginning so I think it would be really helpful to have a first period of your rehearsal process as an exploration period. Now here I've just put weeks one to two but obviously you know you can think about how many sessions that is but a really decent chunk at the beginning that shows the way that you're going to be proceeding with this piece and also finding ways to play around with it and then we're going to move into the development phase where maybe you take some of those ideas and you begin to kind of nurture some of those, choose some, chuck some away but you start to kind of develop those and then and only then I would encourage you to begin at the beginning and work through. And then there's also this idea of priority moments and I'm going to dig into that within this tutorial and those moments maybe are things like you know that there's a really you know you want a kind of all singing all dancing opening and that's not going to happen in just one or two rehearsals that's going to take the whole rehearsal time and maybe that's your warm-up at the beginning of every rehearsal with your ensemble and then kind of by the end and well towards the end you're getting closer to your performance I'd encourage you to do some runs and so to kind of get it going so that the first time that you're stitching it all together isn't your dress rehearsal because that therein lies stress and of course feeding in the technical aspects and before you go into your home performance space so you can be bringing in music or sound effects maybe even experimenting maybe with some lighting things and we'll dig into that and then you have your home performance and all that that brings in terms of a moment of success, that you've reached that point and that that's the goal that you're aiming for at first. So that's a bit of an overview and now we're going to dig into each step on its own. So, explore. So I'm assuming that you will have chosen the play that you're going to be working on and maybe actually before this Directors Weekend you've already started to talk to your cast about it, or maybe not, but I'd encourage you that for the first, let's say even the first quarter of your whole rehearsal time, that you're in a period of exploration and development. So explore can mean understanding the plot. Some of these plots are tricky and difficult and maybe are structured in a narrative way, in a different way than your cast has ever So spending some real time kind of getting to know your play together, maybe you've cast, maybe you haven't, but finding different ways to kind of spread the play out, dig into it and I'm sure that you've got lots of exercises that you can do for that, but one might be that you storyboard your play, whether that be in tableaus or that you get each group to sketch out a kind of beat of the play and put it together. I sometimes think that seeing a play visually on a wall or on a floor is really helpful to kind of get a sense of where you're going because sometimes when you've got kind of a stack of papers and you just look at page one and then page two it doesn't always help you to understand the whole arc and I really think that for young actors it's really important that they begin to understand the bigger play and understanding their roles or the function of each moment of the play to get it to where it goes. So thinking about doing some timelining of the play and within that you might want to start to muck around with certain bits, maybe there's a kind of problem moment that you know is going to be challenging to stage. So in this kind of beginning phase of exploration and play, thinking of ways to activate those moments, to problem solve it together and you as a director may find that very useful because it gives you an opportunity to see the different ways that you could be doing this piece and that's inspired by your cast and that might give them a sense of ownership and a sense that they're in this too, that it's not all on you as the director and that your full ensemble are there to support the emergence of this fantastic piece of theatre. So develop. So maybe from the things that you've explored in your exploration period, there are some juicy bits that you kind of want to start working up. So you maybe start to spend some time on certain moments of those, and you start to dig a little deeper into those and form those. It could be that they're just singular moments from the piece, or it could be character development. So you could spend some time on working on how to support your cast to get into their character and maybe during this period you can begin to finalise the casting. Now I know that sometimes connection plays don't have assigned lines so maybe in this first bit with Explore and then Develop you start to nail down some of those key decisions that are going to shape the rest of your rehearsal process. So you've spent let's say four weeks out of your rehearsal process beginning to explore and experiment with your play and begin to make some decisions and some of those decisions may also include design, you may have some decisions about staging and whether you're going to stage it in the round or end on or whatever you kind of want to decide. So then finally it may feel like you get to rehearse so by that I mean going from the beginning to the end, step by step, but hopefully before you do that you, through your exploration and development, have created this timeline, as I say, and you can understand as a director but also as a cast, the different kind of layers of the play. So it may be that there's quite a lot of like one-on-one character moments, like duologues or even monologues, so obviously you may not want to rehearse those moments with 60 other people in the room. So that really starts to define how you're starting to rehearse and how you're working with your cast to most effectively use the time. It could be that, say, monologues could happen in lunch hours, where that's an intense amount of time that you can spend with your particular actor, or if you're in youth theatre context that maybe someone comes 20 minutes early or you know you can work that out but finding ways that you best make use of everyone's time as well as yours as director is going to be really important when you're working chronologically. I would encourage you to work fairly chronologically just because I think all actors appreciate that but particularly younger actors who are maybe, you know, new to this style of making art, making theatre, and that through that chronological rehearsal process, your actors may be able to start to feel the kind of arc of their character journey, and they may have been able to start to identify that in the exploration and development phases, but that that can be built on, and rather in TV and film they kind of like shoot things out of sequence very much when you're working your play it's really useful to go from the start to the end and it may be that you do that in big broad brush strokes that maybe you spend not that long physically staging the play understanding where people roughly are going to be so that you've got a kind of sense of it or you may want to go a bit slower and work a little bit more detail whereas with the broad brush strokes you yeah broad brushstroke the whole thing and then you might go back and then start to work on finer things. That's really up to you as a director and you will understand your cast better. But also thinking about ways within this chronological rehearsal process that you encourage the cast to remember what they're doing and so you may want to kind of share with them some of the skills of how you can like draw blocking and write things down. Obviously always making sure that in a rehearsal they have their script and a pencil and a rubber because things change but it's really important that they take responsibility for their journey, both their character emotional journey but also physically as well. So alongside the chronological rehearsal period you may also have priority moments that you've already identified that are going to take a bit longer to stage. For example, you may have a scene that you know demands quite a lot of a kind of physical approach to the staging and we know that those things take practice, especially when you're dealing with lifts. I don't mean stair lifts, I mean lifts and also when you're thinking about any choreography and movement, it takes a while to get those things physically into the body. the same with music and singing so it might be that you also find ways that during your rehearsal process that you return to these more challenging stage moments often so that might be your warm-up into a rehearsal and maybe you always have 20 minutes of singing a week or however you structure and so thinking about how do you allow time for these more technical or these more skill-based performance moments to develop and build. So I would encourage you to think about running that concurrently to your structured chronological rehearsal process as well. And then suddenly it's two weeks to go to your performance and you have got to the end of things so I would really encourage you to do as many runs as possible. So that means from going from the beginning to the end, eventually without stopping, but at first it might be a staggered run or it might be that you run the first half one session and the second half the other. And then that gives you as a director an opportunity to make notes and to deliver those and work those because some of those notes you won't need to rehearse, you can just trust your actor that they're going to take that on board and do it, but then there are some that you might want to work with them and also there are things as a director that you may realise once you see it all together that you want to change. So yeah, I think the thing to avoid is your first run through being your dress rehearsal. I would really, really encourage you to do two or three runs before that point. But also thinking about running things, kind of going back to the rehearsal, chronological rehearsal process, also think about how you can kind of recap on things you've already done. So sometimes in my rehearsals I will be working on something one day and for the last X amount of minutes at the end of the session, we just run what we've done that day. So that gives an opportunity to kind of cement that and remember it or you may want to do that at the beginning of your next rehearsal to run what you did last week but I would also kind of warn you I suppose that sometimes if you run something at the beginning of rehearsal you're just going to want to fix that and you're not going to get onto what you were wanting to do so I would say be careful with some of that. And then after that, well during that stage actually, I would encourage you to have technical aspects in the room. So if you know that music or sound is really important in your piece, there should be no reason that you can't rehearse that in the room. So you're not waiting for your technical rehearsal. There are some things that you can start to kind of put in early doors. If you know that there are some tricky props or fiddly things, get them in the room as as soon as possible so that those technical rehearsals can happen at the same time as your normal rehearsals. Of course, you're also gonna need tech before your dress rehearsal, but as far as is possible, it would be great if you can already have some of those things in your everyday rehearsals so that everyone can get used to it. And that includes your stage management team as well, especially if that's young people, that they get an opportunity to practise cueing because that's as important as an actor moving to where they need to be on stage is someone queuing at the right time and in the right way. And then it's showtime. So you have your home performance. You may have more than one home performance, which I think is a great opportunity for your actors, but obviously everyone's context is different. So you have your home performance and you do all of the things that you know about warming your cast up, getting them pumped and ready. But also the beauty of connections is the home performance is not the end. In some ways it's the beginning. So I think that there is some freedom to allay anxiety and nerves, to say this is the first time we're gonna get to do this and we are gonna get to do it again at the partner festival. But let's give this one our best go so that we can feel confident when we're thinking about transfer because that has a whole new set of exciting challenges and considerations. But that's it, you've got to the end, you've done your home performance and all of those rehearsals have really paid off. So I would encourage you though, when I'm thinking about kind of your chronological rehearsals and your whole kind of steps that I've shared with you, I really encourage you to sit down and kind of plan those out in advance. Obviously, your focuses on each rehearsal day are going to change as the rehearsal process continues. But if you can have a sense that, okay, so by week five, we're gonna be at page 36. Those kind of things can be really helpful for driving you forward, and then you know what you need to prioritise. So having a sit down, just yourself maybe, because you do need time for planning yourself, but also maybe with your cast, and you think about, okay, this is the end point, this is our home performance, now let's put in our key kind of dates of what we want to hit by when, so that we can work backwards, so we can have our home performance as the goal, and we think about our tech and our dress, and we think about making sure we've got enough time for our runs, and thinking about how much time we need for our rehearsals, and thinking about how much time we need for our development and our exploration. And really that process begins today or tomorrow at the latest in terms of thinking about how you're gonna get to this end goal of your home performance. And yes, that rehearsal structure planning starts as soon as the weekend ends really. And I really, really hope that you enjoy that process and enjoy the fact that it has a structure to it, that you're not just going in on the Monday saying, okay, we've got to do this, let's go, without really understanding your play first, because that is gonna pay off in many ways when you get into your chronological rehearsal process. And it may be that you wanna keep some of your notes from the exploring and developing phase around the room if you're able to do that, or just keeping ways to have a look at that. And it might be that by the time that you've got three quarters of your way through your chronological rehearsal period, that actually in some ways, everyone's kind of slightly losing sight of where we're going. So going back to some of that initial exploration, development work that you did, the kind of timeline of your play and working out the moments of your production that are gonna really need focus, can sometimes really help you ground yourself in where you're going. So good luck and I wish you all the best. I know that this year is remarkable and I am sure that as a result you are going to be creating remarkable pieces of work and of course you know your groups best, you know the challenges of bubbles and all of that, so you are the experts of your groups and you will become the experts of your play and certainly the experts of your production. So I wish you all the best with that and I can't wait to see some of your work.