The third week of rehearsals has been a busy one. As I’m writing this we’re doing a run through of the second act of the play, which we finished blocking this morning.
Now that the entire play is blocked, we have a strong spine to keep developing on and refining. Much of our work with our movement director Kloé Dean is adding to the pre-existing blocking with specific movement designed around the space and the characters. On Monday, she worked with the actors developing some of the big movement sequences in the play and working on the scene transitions.
On Tuesday Monique and I sat down with our composer Ife Ogunjobi to review his score and find the moments in the play to supplement with his music. We went through the whole script, playing tracks and working out which iteration of each song fit the scene best. The score draws from the wide variety of cultures in attendance at the Congress and Ife has written character’s themes to include elements reflective of their home countries’ musical histories. Hearing Ife’s music is an absolute delight and I can’t wait for the audience to hear it in conjunction with Kloé’s movement work. Meanwhile, our voice and dialect coach Joel Trill came in to work with the cast. The Royal Exchange module is a big space where a timid voice could easily be lost and there is a lot of responsibility in playing public speakers and doing justice to them. Thankfully, our cast are uniformly great speakers and with Joel’s guidance, there are no concerns about them being heard and understood.
Today, I’ve been working with our video designer Dick Straker. Video is a significant part of the storytelling in our show, helping set the mood, atmosphere and era. Our staging features six LED screens in the centre that will display videos that help set the scene as well as convey important information. We’ve been shooting close ups of drinks today and tomorrow we’ll be doing some work filming the actors. I’ve never worked with a video designer before, so this is a great learning experience for me.
This week, the play has really begun to take shape. I always knew this would be a brilliant production, but that has become evident from everything we’ve achieved in the past few days.