The Nerd Nag

Okay, so rehearsals. I honestly haven't done a rehearsal since my last recital for my dance classes that I used to take. In fact, surprisingly doing those recitals was extremely insightful for what was to come for doing theater. So awesome, I am NOT going into this COMPLETELY like a deer stuck in headlights. That was atleast somewhat comforting.

The first night of rehearsals was pretty much one of those, "Hi my name is Bob, I am 32, and I've never acted a day in my life." sort of dealies. And then we sat there and read through the entire script, which was oodles of fun for any of the girls playing the courtesans. Only one of us has a grand total of "one" line in the entire production. As I said earlier the courtesans do the most dancing, we're dancers...not speakers what do you expect from us?! Ha.

The nights that were to come were spent working on all the group musical numbers one night, blocking certain scenes another night, group choreography another night. Everything was divided so that we were concetrating on one major thing per night. I assumed this was in an effort to not make all our heads explode by feeding us too many different things in only 3 hours.
Probably the nights that I looked forward to the most, were the nights where we got to learn choreography. I miss dancing I really do. So sliding my ballet shoes back on, and getting to dance (whether it be level 3 and 4 moves or not) in an official room designed FOR dancing, was most certainly a rewarding element to being apart of the production.

And for a group of people that only 30% of have had previous dance experience, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly everyone was able to catch onto the movements, and piecing them all together...it came along nicely, and ended up looking absolutely gorgeous for the stage. Teamwork!!

It was no surprise to me that the people that I bonded to quickly and mostly (aside from my voice teacher who I already knew I was going to talk up a storm with), were the other gals playing the courtesans. Its no wonder, considering that the 6 of us pretty much do EVERYTHING together in the show. The only time where we are individually doing our own thing is when we are each being introduced and doing each of our dances. But even that number we end up working in unison with one another. So I just feel insanely fortunate that the 6 of us get along so well, and we're not a group full of "Get out of my spotlight, bitch!" type...of women. Well...most of us anyway.

So my role...the role of the Gemini. Is of course shared with another individual. It was quite an arduous process putting together our dance. And all together frustrating, and disappointing. Not only did our dance get changed several times, but we also have THE shortest dance out of all of the courtesans. We clock in at roughly 27 seconds, where as everyone else has atleast a minute to do their thing, if not more. At one point we were doing this complicated looking, but cool looking lift to one another...and they decided that we couldn't handle it and scrapped it. Which lead into a series of movements that in a barring all pleasantries sort of way...that more then resembled lesbian like tendencies. Don't get us wrong...its hot, and I am sure it'll make some people very very happy in the audience, but for two gals that have plenty of dance experience behind them...couldn't blame them for wanting to actually, show off that time, hard work and money they put INTO the lessons...but anyway. We got over it, and just decided to work on selling ourselves as a novelty to the audience.

When we actually got to move our rehearsals to the stage, I think that just made the experience that much more enjoyable. I loved being on stage for my dance recitals, and the sights from the wings, the smells, the secret passages to get to one part of the stage to another...was all too familiar and was getting me pumped to actually all out perform the production for a live audience.

There's only one other person in the production that has never done a play before, and he's 15 years old...so it of course makes me feel a little outnumbered and a little vulnerable to some of the more intimidating members of the cast, but there are so many more people that are willing to let me crouch underneath their wing as I learn and I've appreciated it immensely. I guess its just been boggling my mind how many of these people are even several years younger then I am and have done soooo much theater work.

I mean yes, I've done a lot of film work. But theater productions take SO much time to pull together. I mean a feature film will take months to pull together sure, but I am not at the stage yet where I've had the pleasure of working on something like that. Short films, take maybe tops...a couple weeks to complete. So this whole rehearsing 5 nights a week for 3 hours a night, and then performing it 9 times, and having 3 pick up rehearsals in between that time...thing? Yeah wow, can we all say time consuming? Its been pretty exhausting, but fun as hell. So I guess it just blows my mind how many plays others have done, given the knowledge of how much time it consumes.