Rehearsals (Blog Post 11)

A blog post by: Kelsey Reid

We held rehearsals on Wednesday 20^thMarch in one of the studios in the Electric Press. It was important for the whole team to meet the actors and our key dancer Louis so that we could all get to know one another and for our actors to feel comfortable around us. In addition, this was essential so that when it came to our filming day the actors already know what they are doing and we could go straight into filming.

During the rehearsal we had our translator come in so that the actor playing the role of ‘Sasha’ could learn how to say her lines in Spanish. This was to save us valuable time on our filming day, especially with only having 4 hours to film our scene.

Most of the rehearsal was spent going through the reality scene that was to take place at the café. In the clip seen below, the actor playing the role of the ‘café worker’ played quite an impatient character. There is a line where he tells ‘Leonardo’ the Non-native Spanish speaking boy to speak in 'fucking English'. Obviously a cafe worker wouldn't be able to get away with saying something like that to a customer and the way in which the line was delivered in the first run through was spoken in quite blatant manner. This can be seen below:

Therefore, the note ‘act it out as if your boss is somewhere nearby’ was given to him instead and this caused him to deliver the line more discreetly, almost under his breath, thus making the scene feel far more realistic, as well as revealing the café workers attempt at containing his increasing frustration.

In addition, in some of the run throughs it was clear that some of the actors were struggling to know when to deliver their lines or perform a certain action. This was quickly found to be because some of the lines were in Spanish. Therefore, they became confused whereabouts in the scene when following the script. For example, in the clip shown below the ‘Café worker’ didn’t know when to tell ‘Leonardo’ to move aside. This is evident in the almost  painful silence from when 'Sasha' essentially enters the cafe until when he delivers his line:

Therefore, he was given the cue to deliver his line as soon as he saw ‘Sasha’ walk into the café and was reminded that he is relieved to see another customer due to being fed up with dealing with ‘Leonardo’ for so long. We felt this ultimately brought out a much stronger performance from the ‘Café Worker’ and the scene flowed more fluently.

These are just to name a couple of changes that were made during rehearsal. After we had been through the reality scene enough times all the actors left except for Louis, our dancer, who was kept behind so that he could try on his straightjacket that had arrived and to perform a rough idea of the routine he will be performing on the filming day. This can be seen in the clip shown below.

It is stated that when making screen dance films there is a certain importance about the preparation period, in that it sets the foundation for production (Mitchell, 2016). Therefore, we felt it necessary to see an idea of his dance routine beforehand so that the DOP could start to plan out lighting arrangements and think about certain camera movements. This is also mainly because when it comes to screen dance films, “Carefully designed, choreographed camera movements explore the range of ways that dance can be captured on film” (Porter, 2016). When watching Louis’s dance just one of the camera movements we knew we had to capture was a handheld shot due to intricacy of his movements. It would bring about a more immersive experience, allowing the audience to be fully taken in by the film and the feeling of struggle expressed in his dance, if the camera followed Louis’s body as it danced, trapped inside of this straitjacket.

Additional references:

Rosenberg, D. 2016. Dance with camera (a curator's POV). In: Mitchell, T. The Oxford handbook of screen dance studies. OUP USA: Oxford University Press, pp. 635-656

Rosenberg, D. 2016. Dance with camera (a curator's POV). In: Porter, J. The Oxford handbook of screen dance studies. OUP USA: Oxford University Press, pp. 23-44