Lesson 2 (Rent Street Style Physical Theatre) Friday 11th September

In this lesson we developed our movement routines. We started to put what we already had to our movement sequences and then put them to the opening song of Rent, 'Rent'. I think that putting our big planned out movement routine to this song worked well as this is the first full song of the musical so it needs to have lots of energy and power to create a big impact on the audience. At first I found this hard as the song had a different pace to the one that we had rehearsed with, this meant that we either had to change our timing plan or cut out some bits. To get around this we held out poses for longer in each area, and then didn't pay attention to the beat when walking around the space.




Things that worked well in the first recording


Once we had worked out an order and spacing for the routines to the song, we recorded it and then watched it back to evaluate ourselves.

• What I thought personally went well was the whole pace to the performance. I really liked how groups didn't wait for the group before to completely finish but they overlapped it so there was no drop in the pace and the energy. I felt that this was important as it is a fast song, that creates the whole story and life of the show, and gives context of what the ruff areas of New York are like.

• The second thing that I thought worked was my groups reactions and response to the music, during our section. In our section there are a few crescendos, so we naturally held off of our movements until the music broke out, this highlighted our movements the attacking movements.

• The third thing that worked well was my groups motivations in the scene. When we were coming up with our routines we came up with a motivations for our characters for being there. We took on board this when performing as we looked at everyone in a menacing way, and we looked down at everyone.

Things that didn't work from the first recording.

• From watching back the first recording, I felt that it didn't have a enough happening at once as there was only one group on at a time, and didn't show the fast paced, busy streets in the city. I think that just by adding in more people into the scenes, of them just walking around and looking at what's going on. This would help keep the pace and make it look busy.

• What would also work is each groups stories were linked, and then we could have some more reasons to interact with each other. But once we are given our characters we would know of some relationships, and reasons for the characters to interact.

Once we had added in these improvements to our scene, I think it worked really well, and really portrayed the hustle and bustle of the streets and we also added in lots of different levels to the piece and made everything a bigger energy. At the end this tension and energy exploded with us in a pose in the center, with lots of different levels with Mark and Roger in the middle of everyone.

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