Way back in the fall, one of our professors made an off-handed comment about matching actor energies with character energies, and used an example of casting one of us in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
As many of you may know, I love the hypothetical casting game. Plays, Disney characters, animals, doesn't matter. Give me a group of people and roles to cast them in and I will have a blast.
Therefore, I stopped paying attention to the lecture (Sorry Peppy) and proceeded to cast our cohort in the roles of Midsummer. It worked out amazingly well. So well in fact, that I started brewing an idea of how we could actually put on this show, as a bit of an experiment.
Long story short, I got all 11 others on bored, secured space for us to rehearse over winter break, and we created our own version of the show.
A bit different from your usual Midsummer...
Oberon (me) and Titania (Rowan)
We wanted to use the well-known text and ensemble nature of the show to put into practice things we'd been learning so far in our program.
We cut about half the text, keeping only what was necessary, and focusing on how we could tell the story physically.
First example of a pretty major cut to the script: Egeus. He's gone. Well, not really. He takes the form of a letter:
Lysander (Robbie), Hermia (Nicole), and Demetrius (Jared) with letter
We were divided more-or-less into three groups, Lover, Fairies, Mechanicals (players). Each group focused on a particular movement vocabulary as a starting point for staging.
The lovers used a combination of stage combat (fight directed by Rowan):
Demetrius and Lysander
and contact improvisation...
Helena (Chloe) and Demetrius
The lovers also took a really realistic, youthful and raw approach to the characters.
And there was lots of fighting. It was awesome.
Lysander and Demetrius
Everyone got involved:
Hermia tries to fly!!
The Fairies took an acrobatic approach:
Puck (Mickey) and Oberon
Also, since there are only 12 of us, the fairies became four actors: Oberon, Titania, Puck, and Fairy/Peaseblossom/Cobweb/Moth/Mustardseed/allrolledintooneschizophrenicfairy.
Puck and Fairy (Sophie)
There was a lot of climbing on each other and upside-down stuff
*Are you looking closely? Some of these photos were taken at our dress rehearsal, and some during our performance, so costumes and tattoos change a bit :-P
We also condensed the mechanicals from 6 people to 4. They started their work from a slapstick approach:
Quince (Scotty), Flute (Taylan), Bottom (Francesca), Starveling (Renia)
Notice, an actual slapstick.
Flute and Quince
We really wanted to (and had to) keep design elements simple, so we got creative with costume accents and props
Bottom [as ass] and Starveling
The mechanicals were ridiculous. And hilarious!
Flute and Bottom, with Starveling behind
Some of the most exciting parts were when character from different worlds (and thus, different movement vocabularies) interacted. This lead to bizarre fusions like acrobatic-combat or acrobatic-slapstick:
Bottom [as ass] and Titania, one of my favorite photos!
Since we put the whole show together in about 2 weeks, it wasn't perfect, but it was a really great experiment, and I think we were all pretty pleased with what we came up with :)
If you're interested in watching the whole show, you can! It's all online, thanks to G. Ben Fred's cinematic skills.
Speaking of skills, a big thanks to Katie Dingle for taking all of these photos!
Wow, this suddenly became a closing night speech. I should wrap up. I will leave you with one last photo of Lysander and Demetrius. But mainly Lysander:
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