With such a busy schedule as ours, it wasn’t always guaranteed that movement rehearsals would follow one another. Sometimes there would be several rehearsals in between teaching choreography for the same scene. With this in mind, I decided that at the end of each movement rehearsal the movement that had been created would be filmed and posted on our private Theatre Company page. This enabled the ensemble to have easy access to the video that they could look over in their spare time, so as to not forget any choreography I have taught them, and to enable a smooth transition from one movement rehearsal to the next. In addition to this, it was also an extremely useful way for me to take an outside perspective on the movement that I had created. The inspiration to film any created material came from Frantic Assembly’s video camera in rehearsal technique. Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett explain how “the video camera is not just for capturing and documenting what you know is there. It is also for capturing all the possibilities that emerge by accident” (2014, 26). As I was in most of the movement sequences, this was an opportunity for me to see what it actually looked like, whilst still being able to rehearse with my peers. If there was anything that needed adapting, filming the sequence meant I was able to pinpoint these moments, and allows me to see how I could change material in order to improve the quality.
L.R.
Works Cited
Graham, S. and Hoggett, S. (2014) The Frantic Assembly book of devising theatre (Second Edition) New York: Routledge.