Theatre Rehearsal Research Articles

Moving from informal talk to performance: The use of musical prompting as an interaction device for resuming practice in musical theatre rehearsals

In research on communication in music lessons, masterclasses, and rehearsals, there is a growing focus on multimodal interaction using conversation analysis (CA), where the combination of talk and embodied actions (e.g., using musical instruments, gestures, voice, and score) provides the opportunity to study this complex area in microscopic detail and the potential for findings to inform practice. A methodological approach informed by CA was used to explore processes in peer-led musical theatre rehearsals in a university, where students adopted the roles of both musical director and performer. The data consisted of 12 hr of video-recordings of rehearsals that took place over the course of 5 weeks and involved 24 participants; the data were analyzed to identify patterns in relation to informal interruptions (talking that did not relate to the task at hand) that occurred during the rehearsals, and how they were managed by the student director so that rehearsing could be resumed. Management often involved musical prompting as part of a three-stage sequence: (1) orienting to the piano, (2) giving directives, and (3) initiating performance. The directors’ prompts included vocalizing, playing the piano accompaniment, and making bodily movements. These actions served to capture the performers’ attention, interrupt the informal talk, bring the focus back to performing, and indicate performers’ starting notes. The director completed the sequence by initiating a run-through of the previously rehearsed segment of the performance. The findings not only have implications for students’ management of rehearsals but also highlight the value of studying multimodal rehearsal interactions and techniques generally to ensure effective and efficient delivery in typically time-constrained rehearsal periods.

Cueing in Theatre: Timing and Temporal Variance in Rehearsals of Scene Transitions

This video-ethnographic study explores how professional actors and a director at the end of a theatrical rehearsal process coordinate transitions between rehearsed scenes. This is done through the development and use of cues, that is, ‘signals for action’. The aim is to understand how cues are developed and how timing in transitions is achieved by using the designed cues. Work on three different scene transitions is analysed using multimodal Conversation Analysis. The results show that cueing is a central tool for developing well-timed transitions, and how cues serve different purposes in the developing performance. There is no prior plan for how to achieve timely transitions. In all the analysed examples, it is an actor who must produce or act on the given cue who insists on its precise definition, followed by a negotiation on candidate cues, confirmation and specifying the cue. It is also actors who are primarily responsible for the timing of transitions, and the timing is solved through an interplay of clear-cut and embodied actions that allow for temporal variance. Cues are reflexively linked to actors’ observation and interpretation of other actors’ actions, which prevents a mechanical determination of timing in scene transition.

Overcoming Blanking: Verbal and Visual Features of Prompting in Theatre Rehearsals

In theatre rehearsals, actors can occasionally be seen getting stuck in the play text, which is called blanking. To overcome such textual difficulties and continue with the given text, a prompter can verbalize the line in question, thus contributing to an actor’s word search by prompting. The paper focuses on interactional practices by which prompters and actors interactionally resolve blanking situations. This study’s data comprises a case collection of 67 prompting situations, which are taken from a 200-h video corpus of a rehearsal process at a professional theatre. These cases demonstrate how theatre professionals organize prompting situations and how they negotiate/sanction prompting actions such as when there was no blanking but a dramatic pause or when the dramatic performance is interrupted due to a missing prompt. In addition to the audiovisual recordings, eye tracking data of the person prompting is also used to describe the coordination of the visual resources in the context of multimodal interaction analysis. The analysis suggests that prompting and blanking persons interactively resolve blankings with the help of verbal and visual markers.

Knowledge Accumulation in Theatre Rehearsals: The Emergence of a Gesture as a Solution for Embodying a Certain Aesthetic Concept

Theater rehearsals are (usually) confronted with the problem of having to transform a written text into an audio-visual, situated and temporal performance. Our contribution focuses on the emergence and stabilization of a gestural form as a solution for embodying a certain aesthetic concept which is derived from the script. This process involves instructions and negotiations, making the process of stabilization publicly and thus intersubjectively accessible. As scenes are repeatedly rehearsed, rehearsals are perspicuous settings for tracking interactional histories. Based on videotaped professional theatre interactions in Germany, we focus on consecutive instances of rehearsing the same scene and trace the interactional history of a particular gesture. This gesture is used by the director to instruct the actors to play a particular aspect of a scene adopting a certain aesthetic concept. Stabilization requires the emergence of shared knowledge. We will show the practices by which shared knowledge is established over time during the rehearsal process and, in turn, how the accumulation of knowledge contributes to a change in the interactional practices themselves. Specifically, we show how a gesture emerges in the process of developing and embodying an aesthetic concept, and how this gesture eventually becomes a sign that refers to and evokes accumulated knowledge. At the same time, we show how this accumulated knowledge changes the instructional activities in the rehearsal process. Our study contributes to the overall understanding of knowledge accumulation in interaction in general and in theater rehearsals in particular. At the same time, it is devoted to the central importance of gestures in theater, which are both a means and a product of theatrical staging.

Psychoeducational Learning Enhancement through Extracurricular Theatre Rehearsal: Case Study of EFL Students at the Higher School of Teachers (ENS Assia Djebar Constantine)

This article tackles the psychoeducational learning milieu where the researcher, lecturer of literature, dealt with challenges EFL students are facing in class and how through extra-curricular activities she could manage to incite them on a theater stage and break the ice between them and literature. The aim of the article is to discuss the difficulties of EFL students in grasping literature lectures and to present an attempt from the part of the researcher as a lecturer to improve the students’ learning process and performances through theatre rehearsal. The paper describes mainly an experience with my students from the ENSC Assia Djebar and demonstrate the psychological effects as art on stage tantalized their inner child and enhanced notably their educational performance. The descriptive analysis of these effects is based on two questionnaires that unveil how the inner child was emerging through rehearsals and how art was helping students transcend their fears and shyness. Observation also served deeply to witness the progress of the students as art on stage cured their inner child after its disinhibition. The outcome of the theatrical experience shows that theatre is a real ice breaker in classes as it copes with the inner child of students that cherished role plays when young. Art heals the inner child of the students and this enhances educational performance in class.

Thought Bubble Theatre Festival

Alli St. John shares her experience implementing her suggestions for building a culture of consent in educational theatre rehearsals situated within a larger Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) theatre festival. Thought Bubble Theatre Festival served as a case study of three TYA productions that toured to four local parks in Tempe, AZ in March 2022. Alli documents her own creative practice working with student-actors and how consent-based techniques impacted the process, as well as shares qualitative research data that supports the importance and value of consent in an educational theatre process.

The acoustical design of the Imig Music Building addition—An end user’s perspective and an acoustician’s perspective

The design of the Imig Music Building addition at the University of Colorado/Boulder, which started in 2017, culminated in a building opening in Spring 2021. The facility includes a dedicated recital hall, a large ensemble rehearsal room with flexibility to double as a recital hall, a choral rehearsal room, theatre rehearsal room, and dance rehearsal studio along with many music teaching studios, practice rooms, and other acoustically sensitive spaces to support the College of Music’s program. The footprint of the building addition was very limited, resulting in an unusually large number of acoustically critical horizontal and vertical adjacencies. Perspectives on the design process and the successful resulting building will be presented by the end user and the acoustician. One goal of this presentation is to help attendees understand how to translate end user goals into acoustic design criteria and communicate those criteria to the other design team members (architects, engineers, and other specialty consultants such as theatre consultants).

The aesthetic work of theatrical rehearsal and its directing applications "Taqasim on Al-Hayat Play as a model"

يستعرض هذا البحث المتغيرات الجمالية التي تأسست على وفقها (البروفة المسرحية) بوصفها أحد أهم الركائز التي تقوم العملية المسرحية عليها، لما لها من ضرورة في تطوير الفن المسرحي على مستويات عدة ساعدت المخرج المسرحي في تنظيم عمله، وقد اتضح ذلك عبر فصول البحث متمثلة بالفصل الأول (الإطار المنهجي) والفصل الثاني والذي تكون من المبحث الأول (ثنائية الفرجة/البروفة) والمبحث الثاني (تطبيقات البروفة المسرحية في التجارب المسرحية)،وصولا إلى الفصل الثالث (إجراءات البحث) والذي تضمن تحليل بروفات مسرحية (تقاسم على الحياة)، والفصل الرابع (النتائج والاستنتاجات) ونذكر بعضها:1- للزمن حضور فاعل في البروفة المسرحية، إذ عمل المخرج على تقسيم البروفات إلى مراحل ترتبط كل منها بمدة زمنية محددة.2- كشف اشتغال المخرجين في البروفة عن مستويات مختلفة من الأهداف التي يسعى المخرج إلى تحقيقها، فذهب بعضهم إلى تفسير البروفة المسرحية بوصفها المكان الذي يتم فيه تنفيذ أفكاره ومخططاته، واعتبرها البعض الآخر مختبر للبحث والاكتشاف

Theatrical games in the Greek theatrical rehearsal (Η λειτουργία των παιχνιδιών στην ελληνική θεατρική πρόβα)

Theatrical games in the Greek theatrical rehearsal (Η λειτουργία των παιχνιδιών στην ελληνική θεατρική πρόβα)

Doing notes

This study explores the use of inscribed objects developed during theatre rehearsals and used as a resource in the structuring of one particular diagnostic activity in the theatre, known to practitioners as ‘doing notes’. This activity denotes diagnostic discussions in theatre rehearsals where members gather to reflect on their staging, and come to an agreement on future courses of action. Observing how directors use annotated play-scripts and notepads as tools for coordinating the performers’ engagement in the analysis and discussions of the staged action, the study asks what role these inscribed objects have as resources for coordinating the interaction during these activities. The study uses a longitudinal data set of video-recorded theatre rehearsals, here concerning two theatre companies as they prepare to stage naturalistic dramas, both working from play-scripts. The analysis explores how members of the ensemble use the artefacts to identify the particular staged sequence and action that is being topicalized and adopt the relevant participation framework for attending to the feedback item; how the artefacts are used in occasioning transitions between different items of feedback; and how the director also uses the objects as a means to mitigate for the socially sensitive act of critiquing colleagues’ performance in a public arena. The findings demonstrate how members orient to such locally produced inscribed objects as relevant resources for the carrying out of diagnostic activities at the heart of the collaborative theatre project.

Erzählen inszenieren:

Narrating is a crucial activity in theatre rehearsals. Through this activity, narratives are performed, expanded, reinterpreted, or even completely improvised. The communicative practices used by theatre professionals to develop a play as a theatrical narrative have rarely been researched, both in linguistics and theatre studies. Therefore, this paper addresses how actors, directors, and other members of a theatre production collectively develop monologues as self-contained narratives within a play. The research focuses on how narrators and listeners, as an interactional ensemble, use multimodal actions to realize such monologues. Surprisingly, the co-narrators don’t appear to imagine their future audience but construct the narrations in situ with and for the present members. This observation especially becomes evident when mobile eye-tracking glasses measure the co-narrators’ gaze behavior. It shows that members of a theatre rehearsal perform different activities (e. g., improvising, reading, prompting, instructing, discussing, monitoring) with regard to local interactional requirements. This paper illustrates the procedures with which theatre-makers produce monologues as multimodal narratives and highlights the differences that distinguish such narratives in theatre from spontaneous everyday storytellings.

Translaboration in the rehearsal room

Abstract This article explores the role of translaboration in an area where collaborative translation and co-creative processes intertwine: a bilingual devised theatre rehearsal room. Scholarship has tended to focus on translated plays as cultural products and on the difficulty associated with making bilingual theatrical products accessible to unilingual audiences. Here, however, our focus is on translation within the creative process. We use two bilingual projects as examples. Each project brought together participants from two cultural backgrounds: in one case, German and Czech young people; in the other, deaf and hearing people from the UK. Possessing varying bilingual competencies, these participants employed their shared communicative repertoire to ensure the collaborative creation of new, bilingual theatrical material. Their diverse communication strategies can be regarded as translanguaging: a fluid, non-hierarchical practice that challenges the notion of uni-directional translation from a source text. We argue that in this setting, translanguaging is the practice that enables translaboration. This practice is compromised by the imposition of top-down structures that inhibit the organic development of democratic and potentially transformative environments in which problematic power relationships can be reworked. Such transformativity relies on collaboration in both devising and translation, co-creation and translaboration, and the two are mutually interdependent.

Cultivation of a deceiver – The emergence of a stage character in a student theatre production

The collaborative cultivation of a stage character is explored through the interactional dynamics in a theatre production at an upper secondary school in Sweden. With a departure in sociocultural and dialogical approaches to meaning making, learning and creativity this study attends to how cultural resources are used and how social situations are managed in theatre rehearsals. By using the analytical tools of framing and footing in an ample set of videos I conclude how the participants are able to manage extraordinary complexity of framings, in ways productive for the situated collaborative learning of the character of the character.

To stage an overlap – The longitudinal, collaborative and embodied process of staging eight lines in a professional theatre rehearsal process

The theatrical rehearsal is to date a scarcely investigated institutional setting. This longitudinal, video-ethnographic study follows two actors' work with eight lines in a quarrel scene, from the first day of rehearsals to opening night. The rehearsal is regarded as a transformation process in which the production team laminate (Goodwin, 2018) the script with multimodal resources (Mondada, 2014). The script contains conventional signs for marking overlapping and loudness, and the aim of this study is to document longitudinally how the actors develop, use and coordinate these and other multimodal resources during the rehearsal process. The analysis shows that the actors laminate the script from the first day, and that overlapping and loudness function as mutually developing resources in the performance. Also, different kinds of resources are prominent at different stages of the process: overlap and loudness first increase during the process, but decrease later, as additional embodied resources become more prominent. The transformation process is thus not a linear development. The micro-analysis also shows that the performance on opening night is an emergent interaction, that is, a process. The data and the results challenge dominant theoretical models of participation in fictional discourse.

A pilot study in using virtual reality during theatre rehearsal

In this paper, we discuss a case study in the use of virtual reality (VR) as a tool for actors during the rehearsal process. A treatment group of actors was permitted to explore and practice their ...

Reading and embodying the script during the theatrical rehearsal

Abstract The paper develops an ethnomethodological, conversation-analytic and multimodal approach of the theatrical rehearsal, examining how participants collaboratively read, understand and embody the script. After examining the spatial organization of the setting, the paper focuses on the following interactional practices: (1) from the participants’ perspective, the script appears as a written sequence of lines to connect with their knowledge of social interaction; (2) participants understand the script through their sequential and contextual readings; (3) they collaboratively connect the utterance of written lines with embodied behavior through the check-reading, and (4) by coordinating the lines with pauses and gaze directions. The analysis relies on video-recordings in French and Japanese collected at an Art center in Japan.

Capacity for character: fiction, ethics and the anthropology of conduct

Method acting is one of the most popular theatrical rehearsal systems, according to which actors seek intense identification with characters. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with a professional contemporary German theatre to suggest an alternative view. Rather than training to merge with characters, actors understand characters as a ‘repertoire of fiction’ they freely draw upon to compose themselves. Training for characters thus facilitates the to detach and appropriate traits of different, imagined and real, persons. It is thus an active and reflected stance that minds the gap between actor and character, rather than a passive and predominantly embodied taking on by actors of fictional characters and their traits. Informed by discussions on the notion of conduct in the anthropology of ethics, this article investigates how training the ‘capacity for character’ can inform anthropological understandings of detachment, reflexivity and personhood.

Formatting the imagination: A reflection on screenwriting as a creative practice

Abstract In this article I foreground screenwriting as a creative writing practice, and argue that there are significant aspects of the genesis of screenplays that are not sufficiently acknowledged in the development field. In that field it is common practice that screenwriters produce formatted prose documents, predicting their screen stories in detail before the writing of a first draft is initiated. A pre-formatted approach – defined here as the Set Stage Chronology of Documents (SSCD) – has been institutionalized in European and American script culture, manifesting itself in schools, funding institutions and contract formulas. This practice implies that one specific writing method is universal and de-emphasizes such aspects of creativity as improvisation, free association and the accessing of subconscious resources – all widely assumed to be significant in creative work. Drawing upon a case study – the writing of my screenplay September during a fellowship at the Norwegian Film School – I ask how principles of improvisation can be adapted and applied to the writing of the first draft screenplay. Informed by the Russian stage director Konstantin Stanislavsky’s model for improvisation in theatre rehearsals, and the associative method practiced by screenwriter J. C. Carrière in his workshops, I suggest specific tools for ‘structured improvisation’ as used in the writing of September.

BALANCING ACTS

3 R B A L A N C I N G A C T S N I C H O L A S H Y T N E R In a National Theatre rehearsal room, Michael Gambon has been wrestling for three days with Alan Bennett’s new play The Habit of Art. Michael has given many prodigious performances at the National, most recently as Falsta√ in Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays, though there were occasional memory lapses which he covered with Elizabethan rhubarb. I had a couple of letters complaining that my production had made Sir Michael incomprehensible, to which I replied politely, although he’s a famous hoaxer so he may have written them himself. One of them compared him with suspicious pomposity to that admirable Shakespearean and model of clarity, Simon Russell Beale. He now seems much less confident than he was as Falsta√. He’s playing an old actor who is struggling with the part of the poet W. H. Auden to Alex Jennings’s Benjamin Britten in a play about Auden and Britten within a play about a theater company putting on the same play. Alex has an almost mystical faith in the great tradition of British acting, so he’s urging Michael on. With them onstage is Frances de la Tour, who in the face of life’s absurdities has an eyebrow permanently raised and a voice permanently tuned to deadpan. She’s playing a stage manager, and I’m sure that she can nurse Michael through anything that goes o√-piste. 4 H Y T N E R Y But at the moment he can barely get to the end of a sentence. And then, suddenly, the blood drains from him. He staggers, and falls into a chair. We call for help, an oxygen tank is hurried into the room, then a stretcher. Michael is wheeled out, the oxygen mask over his face. One of the stage managers goes with him in the ambulance to St. Thomas’s Hospital. As he’s carried into the A&E [Accidents and Emergencies], she asks him whether there’s any message he’d like her to take back to the rehearsal room. ‘‘Don’t worry about those bastards,’’ he says. ‘‘They’re already on the phone to Simon Russell Beale.’’ And as he speaks, I’m with Alan Bennett and the rest of the company recasting the part. Simon Russell Beale is doing something else, probably making a documentary about Renaissance choral music: he is as erudite as he is audible. So he’s not in the running. But once we know that nothing serious has happened to Michael, we barely have a thought for him. We’re in the canteen, overlooking the river. Tourist boats glide under Waterloo Bridge, and glum o≈ce workers stare at computer screens in the building next door, while we make a list of actors who are available for the part, all of them distinguished, none of them immune to our brutal assessments of their suitability. By the end of the day, Michael has been advised to withdraw from the play, and I’ve called Richard Gri≈ths, an actor renowned for his delicacy and wit, but also for his immense girth. Alan has already written lines to justify the casting of a fat actor in the part of Auden, who, although dissolute, was not even plump. You start with a vision, and you deliver a compromise. And you’re pulled constantly in di√erent directions. So although you want the actor who plays W. H. Auden to be as much like W. H. Auden as possible, you know that the play will work best with an actor who can remember what the playwright wrote. You know that what works generally trumps all other considerations , and you also know that if you care only about what works, you’ll end up with something slick but meretricious. You want a play to be challenging, ambitious, nuanced, and complicated. You also want it to sell tickets. You want playwrights to write exactly the plays they want to write. You also want what they write to reflect your own image of what...

Rehearsing Detachment: Refugee Theatre and Dialectical Fiction

This article responds to Nicolas Bourriaud’s account of the poetic function of relational art, which for him “consists in re-forming worlds of subjectivization” (2002 [1998]: 104). I challenge and complement his account of how such reforming takes place in relational art by providing an ethnographic description of what I term ‘dialectical fiction’. This notion describes actors’ cultivation of detachment and reappropriation of subjectivity during theatre rehearsals by building up fictional characters. The ethnographic source for this analysis is a long-term study of the rehearsal processes for a site-specific and participatory refugee theatre and art project in an abandoned post-industrial refugee camp in the German Ruhr valley. By inviting refugee actors to introduce abstract and fictitious characters into their reflections on acting and cultivation of an acting conduct, this project aspired to what its director called theatre’s “impossible political utopia”: a situation in which refugees are not framed as vulnerable victims “acting themselves”, but as creative agents capable of playfully negotiating their political subjectivities.