michaelbeigel:

So over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been flying! As part of preparations for Quartz’s - Theatre in the Quarter’s Young Company for ages 12-20 - upcoming show Before a Fall we have been doing a lot of movement work. For those of you looking forward to seeing the fruits of our labour the performance dates are 8th, 9th and 10th of January at St Mary’s Creative Space, tickets will be available soon!

The movement work we have been doing has been serving a number of different purposes as part of the storytelling for this piece. We are embracing the Greek chorus style and are telling a lot of the story through ensemble movement work. This of course does not happen over night and we have been workshopping about building trust and confidence between the performers, ensemble improvisations and sculptural work.

We also got out a load of string last week and got in a good old tangle! String is a bit of a theme for this piece and I hope it will all become clear. But here’s us having a bit of play.

The other thing we have been working hard on is getting people flying. I was a touch nervous about this going into rehearsal and actually after the running the warm up I was concerned that it was going to be a step too far. However, after a bit of a chat and a massive improvement in concentration these young actors pulled it out of the bag, engaging in the preliminary contact improvisations and proving to me they were ready to take off. And, well see for yourself!

It’s all starting to come together and this week we’re going to attempt a stagger through of the entire play. It’s been a while since we’ve done bits of the play, and some bits we’ve not yet looked at. But I’m hoping things will slot together nicely and we can begin to polish and finesse from there! We shall see…