Second Workshop With Director

My Target: To find libretto that could link our songs and scenes together.

In the second workshop when working with a director we sat down and chose all of the libretto needed in order to link together all of our chosen scenes. We felt that the dialogue is extremely important as it allows the audience to see what each character’s personality is like and what their relationships are with other characters. Grease is very character driven and because of this we had to learn the differences each character had. To do this we stood in a circle and performed an exercise where we could improve upon our characterisation skills. When the director counted down from 3 we had to pose as a given character. This helped as it made us thing about posture, body language, facial expression and levels. It made us embody certain characters, which also made us think about how they would react with other characters on stage. 


After performing this exercise we took the beginning of our script and started staging it keeping in mind our characters proxemics with other characters. It was decided by the director that the boys would be on one side and the girls would be on the other to create the effect of crosscutting on the stage. This effect would then carry on into our first song ‘Summer Nights’. We were hopeful that this planned staging would allow us to have something to start rehearsing with, but also could be a theme that carries through the whole performance. Grease is an extremely apparent Boys Vs Girls Musical, and their groups of friends are  important to them.  So having almost a boy’s side and a girl’s side of the stage helps to create this sense of ownership between the friends.

I felt that although we started looking at libretto we still don’t have enough in order to link together all of our narrative. The target for my next workshop would be to continue with characterisation work for half the workshop and then carry on trying to find pieces of script that we can add within scenes in order for our condensed version of grease to still make sense to the audience.