Our House - Independent Blocking - starting full runs

After spending around 3 weeks blocking the entirety of 'Our House'. We now decided to try out a full run of the show including songs as best as we could.

We only got around half of the play done as we blocked more of some scenes and added in background characters to fill out the space. For example, we added in background paired dancers at the very beginning as it is supposed to portray a dance competition. Personally, I thought this went well as we initially have only been through each scene once and to have gotten half-way through from memory only correcting minor things is an achievement we should be proud of. I feel as a group we are understanding the flow of the performance a lot better, and therefore are understanding the narrative that we had previously.


(An Aside WWW.)
I also feel as though the extra lessons on characterisation has helped people in different ways. For example, for myself I am more confident in my role and am trying to experiment with different pitchs/tones and am interacting with other characters as I am understanding relationships between them better.

WWW.
As a group we are experimenting more with space. From previous rehearsals we all have it in our heads to not be in lines when we are filling the space when we don't speak. Therefore, some of us are gathering in half closed groups, some of us are waking upstage and downstage in order to visually change proxemics.
Another thing that went well were peoples approaches to character. Everyone started to think about the physicality of their character and how they would sit/stand. This means that we are deeply exploring our characters in order to portray a convincing performance.

EBI.
There was a particular issue we witnessed early which was the choreography of 'Baggy Trousers' we had previously done doesn't fit with the music we have in our scripts. Therefore, I think to fix this we need to record the instrumental music with vocals and see how much of the original choreography fits with the music we have for the show. Rather than keep doing full runs and messing up/pausing when we come to a piece of music we don't recognise or if something gets cut out.
Then the next priority is line learning. This will make rehearsals run smoother as well as getting rough timings for scenes/costume changes and how to pace certain moments.