First Half Blocking

Saturday afternoon we "glued" all the 1st half scenes of our Easter drama together. While we block all of our scenes individually, at these Saturday blockings we piece these scenes together to double check everything. Last week we blocked the 1st half scenes individually, then Saturday we pieced all those scenes together. This week we'll block all of the second half scenes individually, and this coming Saturday we'll piece them all together.

These Saturday first and second half blockings generally last 2 - 3 hours, and our folks have the patience of saints as we sometimes have to rehearse things several times, or we have to huddle together to figure things out. We constantly have to remind ourselves that these are simply blocking rehearsals. It's easy to expect too much out of these rehearsals, and then be discouraged afterwards. These really aren't "rehearsals" as such...no lines are memorized, there are no lights or microphones...but rather simply times to figure out who stands where and how much time do they have to get there.

In these first and second half blockings we check ourselves on several things: flow of scenes, entrance and exit flow, how to get characters from one scene to another, how to get the choir on and off the stage. Our lighting team also sits through these rehearsals to get a feel for where lighting is going to be needed.

During these blockings I get to try out underscore music, which is the instrumental music that is played underneath dialouge or action. I never really know how this music is going to work until these rehearsals. Sometimes it's horrible, sometimes it fits perfectly, sometimes I just have to tweak it, sometimes I have to trash it and start from scratch.