Here is what our acting area is going to look like:
Our aim for the next rehearsal is to block the beginning.
Rehearsal 5:
Today we blocked the hide and seek part of the children’s scene although Amy and Sam were away. As they were away it proved quite difficult to block. I will be the seeker and everyone else is hiding behind the screens. I will go looking for them and then they will jump out and we will have a fight. This was all we did today but our next rehearsal will hopefully have everyone there and we will hopefully do some more blocking.
Rehearsal 6:
Today Emma, Sam and Amy were away so Kim and myself didn’t really know what to do. We decided we would start writing some more script. My character is called Julian and we have made him into a child that is scared of everything. Emma’s character is going to be the bossy child who thinks that she is better than everyone else. The other three characters are neutral they are just going to be normal. At the end of the scene there will be another explosion, which will close the scene and be where we change from children to soldiers in the war.
Our next rehearsal we aimed to block the rest of the children’s scene.
Rehearsal 7:
Emma and Amy were both back today but Sam was still away. Kim and I showed Emma and Amy what we have done since they were at rehearsals and they both agreed with what we thought of. As we were only missing Sam we had a run through of the hide and seek part today which looks quite good I think. We have changed a bit of it though which makes it better, everyone is going to be involved with the counting. I will start and end the counting because I am the seeker. My numbers that I am saying are 1,6,11,18,20.
When the explosion goes off we will each be freezing in different positions. Amy will be pretending to be an airplane, Kim will be shooting me, I will be trying to hide, Sam will be saluting and Emma will be hitting me. Emma will then break the freeze by tugging at Kim and pulling her in and we will all follow. The rest of the scene is then performed inside the air raid shelter.
Rehearsal 8:
Everyone was here today for this rehearsal. Sam thought that what we had all thought were good ideas so we will not be making any changes. Everything looked a lot better with everyone there. When we make ourselves into plans in this scene Emma and Sam are going to be one plane and Kim, Amy and myself will be another plan. We have decided that Emma and Sam should be in a plane together because their characters get on well with each other whereas Kim’s, Amy’s and my character don’t get on with Emma’s character. As I don’t want to play aeroplanes I don’t join in I just stand up with my arms crossed. Then when the next explosion goes off I get scared again and fall back down. In the process of falling back down I push Amy out of our plane and into Emma’s plane, which Emma isn’t to please about and soon, pushes her out.
For our next rehearsal we would like to have five minutes to perform in a couple of rehearsals time.
Rehearsal 9:
We managed to finish blocking enough for five minutes today. After the part of the airplanes we just sit down talking until Sam decides that we should go and look for father. Everyone apart from Emma agrees with her and stands in a huddle on the opposite site of the shelter to Emma. This then displays an idea of Emma versus us, which is also like a war (English versus Germans). When Emma decides we should wear hats to stop our brains from exploding we use hats that certainly wouldn’t stop our brains from exploding. Kim will be wearing a saucepan, and the rest of us will be wearing bobble hats. The weapons that we are going to use are rolling pins, wooden spoons and a cap gun.
Our aim for our next rehearsal is to be ready to perform our five minutes performance.
Rehearsal 10:
Today we had to perform our five minutes performance. I think it went well considering Emma was away. Kim played her own part and Emma’s which was obviously rather difficult for her.
The comments we were given were:
To include more poetry.
To use more space at the front when we are fighting.
So now we are going to use more space and place some poetry in the open scene where the children are playing hide and seek.
Aim: to practice our new bit of poetry and block some more.
Rehearsal 11:
Sam was away again for today’s rehearsal but we had to do our best without her. We added in the poetry in the hide and seek scene today. Whilst we are counting a couple of lines from a poem will be said. Then when I am searching I say a few lines. These lines are very relevant to what I am doing (trying to find the others) because the lines mention about being blind.
We also practiced the part of the play after the children’s scene. This is the part where we are changing into soldiers and saying parts from the ‘the horses’ poem. Some of these lines will be said together whilst others will be said singularly. This creates an effect, which sounds good when it works properly although it didn’t work brilliantly today because Sam was away.
Rehearsal 12:
Everyone was back today so we practiced the ‘The Horses’ poem part. This went very well. Today we also started on the next part of our performance, which is based around the ‘Five Souls’ poem.
We have many ideas for this poem. We are going to have some music to go behind this poem and each person is going to have a different action that’s going to be repeated. At the beginning we will be raising from the dead, because we died in the previous scene. Then once we are on our own block we will start saying the poem whilst repeating our set action. Sam starts off the poem and whilst she is saying it everyone else is frozen. Then when she finishes her verse she moves to the next block and salutes. Then I will start saying my verse and whilst i'm saying it I am pretending to climb a mountain because I am a mountaineer, once my verse is completed I then move to the next block and salute. Everyone does this. This is what the stage is going to look like during the five souls:
Our aim for our next rehearsal is to find some music for all the parts that we need music for.
Rehearsal 13:
Today we were searching for music. From the American Beauty soundtrack we have found music to play in the background whilst we are coming back to life and for the background whilst we are saying the ‘five souls’ poem. From another CD we found music to put behind our counting in the hide and seek scene and also to put behind ‘The Horses’ poem.
We spent the rehearsal sorting out this music and making sure that we will be in time with the music.
Our aim for our next rehearsal is to sort out costumes
Rehearsal 14:
Everyone was here again today so we went through the ‘five souls’ poem with the music. I think that the music helps me quite a lot with the timing and it seems to help everyone else as well. We also discussed costumes. When we are children we will be wearing all black but when we are soldiers we will be wearing a greeny t-shirt to show that we are soldiers now not children.
Our aim for next lesson is to find an explosion.
Rehearsal 15:
Today we looked through our many sound effects to try and find an explosion that we all liked. We did find some that we will be using. Whilst we were looking though we also found the sound of a plane flying overhead, which we thought we can use, when the children are in the air raid shelter. The sound effects that we will be using are:
Medium explosion with debris
Medium explosion
Large explosion
Military plane flying overhead
Our aim for our next rehearsal is to do the slow scene fighting.
Rehearsal 16:
We went through everything today with the music running as well. I think it went very well especially seeing as we haven’t tried everything together yet. We have added in a part at the end with the ‘ five souls’ poem. When we say the last lines ‘ I gave my life for freedom, this I know, for those who bade me fight have told me so’ we are going to walk towards the audience and each say it to a different member of the audience. Then when we walk back Sam is going to die again and the rest of us will look at her sadly. We freeze in that position and that ends the performance.
Rehearsal 17:
We practiced the ‘ five souls’ poem today and I think it went very well. We are making a lot of progress at the moment and it is obviously helping with everyone being at rehearsals.
Today we showed part of our five minutes to our teacher. Her comments were: possibly change some of our actions that we repeat and do not walk around in a circle when we say the five souls poem. We will think of how to correct this next lesson
Rehearsal 18:
We worked mainly on detail today and changed the parts that the teacher suggested we had a look at.
We are going to keep the same starting positions for the poem but we won’t walk around in a circle after each verse. Instead of this the person who previously spoke will change places with the person who is about to speak but how this is done changes every time someone else speaks. The person to speak will be pushed off the block that they are on and pushed to the floor which is where they will talk. This symbolizes the fact that they are pushed into being soldiers.
Rehearsal 19:
Today we thought of an ending. Once Amy finishes her part of the five souls poem (she is the last person to say it) we all step off of our blocks and form a line in front of the audience. Then guns are passed down the line and at the same time we point them towards the audience, this would hopefully make the audience feel threatened and we then repeat the chorus ‘I gave my life for freedom. This I know. For those who bade me fight had told me so.’ Then Sam goes back to the blocks and dies again and we all surround her and place a flag over her body.
Rehearsal 20: