New Rep Studio - Directing workshop with Bevin and Blocking

Hey everyone,

this morning Bevin came in and did a directing workshop with us. She assigned four of us the role of being the directors and the rest were actors (I was a director). We were given two person scenes that were very neutral in the sense that if you read them over, they would seem like pretty much emotionless. We had many, many jobs as a director. Some of them were to block a scene so we used as much of the stage as possible and set our props (if we decided to use them), set status between the two actors (aka which one had higher status than the other) and help the actors show that status, made a setting for the scene: where the scene took place and was it a specific time of day etc., and helped the actors think about the emotions they wanted to portray to the audience. We had 30 minutes to pull our scenes together and then we presented them to the group. Bevin then gave us feedback and gave us another 15 minutes to put the suggestions she gave us back into our scenes. Well I must say that the scenes were REALLY good. It was also really intersting to get to stand in the same shoes of Suzanne, our director for Les Mis and all of the other directors I'd worked with. It was alot tougher than I thought it was going to be and even directing a one minute scene took alot more time than I thought it was going to take. I'm a bossy person so it was hard for me to direct a scene where the actors also got to share their ideas and use them in the scene, even if it was different than what I had pictured it to be. But there were a couple of times where I was like, wow their idea is much better than what I thought of. It was also cool to see the same scene directed twice. Two of us were given the same scene to direct and the both came out really different. The ideas were so unique and they were in almost in no ways similar. Overall it was really fun and I learned alot about being the different aspects that go into creating a scene.

After the workshop, Suzanne came in and we blocked the fight scenes where all the students die (except for Marius). Although this may sound bizarre, it was awesome getting to fake our deaths. It's was hard reacting to being shot when there are no sound effects, nothing that actually hits you in place of the bullet and sometimes not even an actor that pretends to shoot you. In the part where I die, the person who shoots me is unseen so I have to make it clear to the audience that I'm being shot just by my reaction to the "bullet".

I think that pretty much every girl agrees with me in the fact that we love eachother and this camp so UNBELIEVABLY much. We all have gotten so close and it is soo fun getting to put on this show together, it's going to be AMAZING.

I'll tell you more later!!
-Talia