Halloween Rehearsal 5

Okay, I forgot to do one last time so Lizzy double beats me at blogging. But I’m hoping she’ll forget this time because this was our half term rehearsal! (oooh, commitment) We were using this time to have a quick sneak peek of what is provided by the theatre for our costumes 🙂 I have a top hat to balance on my head and a jacket. Also, for makeup I’m going to be all gaunt and sinister undertaker man 🙂 Aidan has a massive cloak which is cool but I’m not sure if he’s wearing it…  After this we all went down to the Valley Gardens to have a look at where we would be performing and letting the guides fill in the gaps between scenes. Me and Zoe are just improvising it though, so it’s all cool 🙂 The different groups rehearsed their bits (George’s group didn’t show up though 😦 while the guides walked round making up scary things for little kids. We pretty much did this for the whole time we were there but it was pretty fun 🙂 Then we watched Matilda and Jim’s groups perform. They were good, but I didn’t expect the water pistols. Afterwards we had ice cream 🙂 It was nice 🙂

From HD TO HD FOR HYT 🙂

Hugh

Oh Hugh how wrong you are .. this is The Lizzy you’re talking about, I don’t have alzheimers yet 🙂 a sneaky non timetabled unofficial rehersal isn’t going to catch me out 🙂
I’m glad you wrote one before me though I was hoping someone would otherwise I would look silly with 2 blogs in a row lol.
Anyway back to Halloween…the penultimate rehersal, we met at the theatre at 11.00am (I was very tired) and we went to costume to see which extra clothes we need. I am going to wear a black dress with a long black cardigan and black wellies and black netted gloves, I can’t decide weather to wear stripey tights or just plain leggings, don’t want to look too cliche lol. Haha me and Amy wandered down the costume corridor to reminisce and got scared by the HUGE Gruffalo poster in the last dressing room haha we laughed, and then we danced to Sclub 7 classic ‘don’t stop’. When we were all ready we mooched down to the Valley Gardens with the high viz jackets and crossing the roads with the green man 🙂 When we got there we had a little walk around of how the evening would plan out and then split in our groups to practice. But no-one from the George group were there 😮 and I didn’t have Dan but hopefully he’ll be able to fill in the gaps I have, which reminds me I need to write out which bits I’m saying when so it’s all in my head 🙂 The stories all look rather good, when we’re in costume and it’s dark-splendid! I’m glad it didn’t rain and hopefully, everything crossed the crazy wind and rainness will hold off until Sunday brrrr.  After rehersal we went to buy some apple flavour ice cream (it was interesting) and to see ‘Up’ but it was sold out 😦 who reads these blogs?? Come to the Valley Gardens and you can see the master piece.

Lizzy

Halloween Rehearsals 4

The last workshop time for rehearsal before the show oooh.. so we started off with a little bit of breathing excersizes to warm the vocals as you do. We sang songs about how much we love to eat apples and bannanas but then to balance out the diet had a nice chewy lump of toffee and then some top bananas..sounds to me like Hannah’s trying for a healthy eating campaign with subliminal messages lol or not. Anyhow then we split into our groupies again and worked on our master pieces. Dan wasn’t there so I had to use my own imagination, I’m not the scariest of people but I tried to think of a couple of things, we’re thinking probably mostly improvise on the night though depending on how the audiences react and such. And some of the time will be filling with our beautiful singing with our renditions of ‘when the saints go marching in,’ ‘oranges and lemons,’ and ‘London bridge is falling down.’ Rather a good idea if I do say so myself as a usage of noise without speakers to creep the audience. And if they can’t sing in tune..even better haha 🙂 We had a few bits of props and costume today to work with too which meant alot of balloons being popped (ouch my ears)
I’m planning on looking slightly witchy and used the event to get a new dress out of my mum haha 🙂 I wanted it anyway but she wouldn’t buy me it otherwise. Yeah so I think it’s going to be really good, I say that every week but I think it shall 🙂 I don’t want to make anyone cry too much haha but you can guarantee there’ll be a teenybopper trying to be all brave haha 🙂 We’ll have to wrap up fairly warm it will probs be a chilly chilly night. Before I leave .. Hugh my blog is longer than yours AND I beat you haha and this was a fairly late entry for me haha.
L-Bizzle reporting for the H-Wizzle (aka lizzy-halloween)

Halloween Rehearsals 3

Today we went through the stories in our groups reading them out loud and adding different things for each story playing around with the words and working on chorus work. We added sounds effects we thought would be good, repeated interesting words and whispered the first and last words in each sentence. This helped to see what would work and what wouldn’t.
Then we split into our groups and worked on our pieces. Me and the other self named ‘tour guides’ tried to plan out a structure of bits of stories and things to say and do when we were leading the groups. There was a rather scary gas mask lurking around which me of Dan aren’t planning on using but we have a couple of ideas 😀 It’s going to be a spooky night haha.

Lizzy.

Well, following on from last week we did our traditional warm ups which were even more fun than usual for some reason. Maybe because everybody was really up for it this week 🙂 Then we sang happy birthday to Josh, who has reached the grand old age of fourteen today. We all got out our scripts then, (those of us who had remembered to bring them) and read them out in different ways, one group as if they were sharing gossip, while everybody else did sound effects, one group as if they were embarassed about saying it, while everybody else picked out words they liked and gently repeated them, and another group sang theirs to the tune of “When The Saints” while everbody else whispered the first and last word on every line.
The idea of this was to create different atmospheres and experiment with different ways of saying things to make them spooky in preparation for our Halloween show. After Hannah gave us a little talk, we split off into groups and worked on each scene we had been given. I’m in the group guiding the audience round so I would have been discussing ideas with my partner Zoë but she was ill 😦 but it’s all cool because we talk socially anyway out of HYT so I’ll just talk to her about it then. I kind of helped out other people with their ideas and played with the gas mask brought in by Lucy, who’s helping Hannah. That gas mask was scary. A lick of black and silver spray paint and it’ll be terrifying litle kids in no time. HYT has become the high point of my week, I think.
I’ve got some more ideas for the characters me and the lovely Zoë are playing. My character’s an undertaker from London, and I’m contemplating having a noose hung around his neck as if he’s been recently hanged… Either way Halloween’s going to be a fun night 🙂

Hugh.

Halloween Rehearsals 2

We started the workshop in the Studio in pitch black – pretty scary stuff on its’ own, nevermind what happened next. Then we all played around with sounds we could make to build and create tension. And created a rather loud sound scape with all these noises to see what things would work and be effective and where we could use them throughout the performance. For the rest of the workshop we were put into the groups we would be working in for the Halloween night; the people for Matilda, the people for George, the people for Jim and the improvisation people when moving the groups from story to story. We worked together to stage our own performances and list all of our ideas. We talked about the different characters that could be used, props and cotsume. It’s all very exciting. I think everyone is looking forward to it. 🙂

Lizzy

Halloween Rehearsals 1

Our 14- 18yrs  Youth Theatre members are currently rehearsing for a performance in aid of Henshaws on Halloween in the Valley Gardens. They will be performing a promendade-style devised piece based upon three of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. Here some of our members blog about the rehearsal process so far…

Week 1

The first week back from what seemed like a very long summer holiday we were all very excitable and eager to get back into drama. So we did. We got straight on with reading through the children’s stories for Halloween. We introduced ourselves to the new faces in the group and then took it in turns to read a line each of each of the 3 stories; Matilda, Jim and George.
We split into groups and played around taking the stories from page to stage and performed them with our ideas we had so far, we tried out different ways we could make them interesting and spooky for our audience including where the audience might stand. There were some creative ideas with some rap, physical theatre and lots of spooky stuff.
Lizzy.