Watership Down Rehearsal Diary – Week Two

31 May 2016

As we come to the end of week two, we’ve almost blocked the whole script!  By ‘blocked’ I mean worked out each character’s physical journey on stage.  We’ve been using a rehearsal room with the rough dimensions of our set marked out on the floor with tape.  This is so we get an idea of the space we’ll be working in when we get into the theatre.  It feels like you’re playing on a giant road map rug for adults, but it prevents us having to adjust all the blocking to fit the size of the stage.  In week five we get into the theatre and can start using the real set.

We’ve focused a lot on movement this week.  Although we’re telling the story of a group of rabbits, Naomi Said, our Movement Director, doesn’t want us to physically mimic a group of rabbits.  Instead, she’s created seamless moments in the play where we see glimpses of a rabbit’s physical behaviour without having to act the entire play as rabbits.  This means that the story can still be told with truth and poignancy, which was one of our director’s main priorities. We were also given a very important part of our costume… our ears!!  They will act as a visual in communicating that we’re playing rabbits without needing to literally hop around or thump the ground with our feet.
We do a ‘bootcamp’ warm up every morning with Naomi to make sure we’re fit and strong for when we start performances.  Due to the nature of a small animals’ movement, we’ve been working on a very contained and controlled type of movement to make sure we can dart, twitch and jump just like rabbits but in our human form.  This requires a lot of strength and agility, especially when we’re all sharing a small stage, so all those squats and sit-ups definitely won’t be in vain!

Most of the movement has been devised through improvising and work-shopping ideas as a group.  It’s a very creative way of working which has produced lots of exciting and stylistic movement sections.  Now we just need to add music and we’ll be well on our way to creating the cinematic atmosphere that will complete these moments of action…

See you next week!

Scarlet Wilderink

Scarlet is playing Hyzenthlay in Watership Down at The Watermill from Thursday 16 June to Saturday 23 July.
Find out more and buy tickets.