Location: London, UK
COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak
Lockdown
Love & Information - part 1
Dress Rehearsal Day!
Tonight was our final dress rehearsal for the one and only Zoom performance of Love & Information by Caryl Churchill.
Had we not had the Covid-19 outbreak, it would have been the dress rehearsal as well, but in a theatre and with a cast who had all met each other in real life and stood within a 2 meter distance of one another.
However, we didn't want to let a little thing like a global pandemic stop us, so we rehearsed weekly between 1-3 times, depending on the scenes and all learnt our lines as we would have done normally.
The beauty of this particular play (50 short scenes) is that it really lends itself to being broadcast. If you don't know the play, it's a bit like eavesdropping in on conversations between people - like you've just dropped into their bathroom, joined them while they are out for a walk or at a dinner party or in the playground. Most scenes have 2-3 characters (although the playwright doesn't specify anything) and they are all about the relationships.
Relationships and backstory always matter, but if you have a scene that is 5 lines long, you have to know who you are, why you're there and why you are saying those words with absolute clarity. You don't have half a play to define who you are, you have to do it immediately.
The staging differences in this instance were working out how best to use the format we had, which was single camera and Zoom, to the best of it's capabilities. We had to learn to look directly into the camera and not at ourselves on the screen (deceptively difficult), light ourselves, have microphones in the most advantageous spot and that iPads are a bit crap as a performance tool.
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