Session 9 - 20 May 2009

Wednesday night and we know the drill by now. Come in and we’re straight down to our stretches or as the company know them Vik’s torture time… Though I’d like to think that we’re getting better at them each session! Once that was over we went straight in to one of our first big numbers, Kate Nash’s Mouthwash. In the play just before Mouthwash there is going to be this big Bollywood number with the whole cast dancing and all that, something I am very excited about! Because of this Vik wanted the staging of Mouthwash to be quite minimal and a lot of the song is positions and other quite static movements. After a long time making sure we had our turns exact and our walking direct Vik was happy to leave it there for the week. It’s looking really good and our singing is improving all the time! By July we actually will be looking professional, I’ve no doubt!

After our break Vik wanted to meet people individually to go through characterisation, he took off various different people and spent around 20minutes with each of them. I was one of the people taken off and it was a really helpful session. We looked at my monologue and found ways to make my learning of the lines exact; generally it helped us to get in to our characters more through the understanding of the words. While people were taken of individually the rest of the group were up in the greenroom singing along to I pods and drinking proper ‘good’ hot chocolate, sorry, I mean we were all hard at work learning our lines!

I can’t wait to see how the rest of Or Nearest Offer is staged; it’s such an exciting process to be part of. Bring on July!

MK

Session 8 - 17 May 2009

Today we had a long physical warm-up to get ourselves ready for an intensive vocal session and the rest of the day.

10am is an early start for most teenagers so you can kind of guess we were tired. However, the warm-up seemed to have helped. We stretched out and all gathered around the piano to begin our vocal warm-ups. After the warm-ups we sang the script’s song Chasing Cars. Then after that I went over my song.

Yasemin Ergun

Session 7 - 13 May 2009

Wednesday’s lab was full excitement and a lot of learning. We started off by going though ‘Kate Nash’s’ ‘Mouthwash’ which was of course extremely interesting to watch, bubbling with fun and topped off with a great sound from the company as a whole. We worked on our staging with Vik. Under Vik’s expertise our fantastic director we were able to produce a brilliant sound boldly supported by strong threatening heal popping movement’s right in your face.


The experience then turned even more exciting as we were sent upstairs to the green room to learn our scripts under the conscientious eyes of Jane our assistant director. We were sent down one by one to work separately with Vik on our characters in some parts of our scripts. Meanwhile upstairs we were bustling with enthusiasm as Chloe and I played spin the bottle to ascertain who was to be tested next with lines. I was loosing so I thought it’s the bottle so we borrowed Ayesha’s bottle without noticing that it looked exactly the same as the one we already had which was Layla’s. Then came the challenge of telling which was which before she returned. We were slow, she returned, and there was a selection of only two words we could say - sorry or oops.

We then got on with it until we heard some foot steps. It was no one else but Naomi and Eliza doing their thing on the dance floor. It was wonderful, more than you can imagine.
This week personally was by far the most exciting because it was really nice to see our performance coming together. FANTASTIC.

Pius Abitegeka

Session 6 - 10 May 2009

Sunday’s Lab was full of excitement. We had visitors - one of which was a gorgeous
little girl named Charlotte - I must say we did get a bit distracted but we were soon put into working gear with Harry our vocal coach. Harry was there with Vik and the rest of the team. We managed to put a nice first gloss over the last few pages of the play. In addition we worked on the middle of the play where we have other musical pieces. Let’s just say that everything is slowly but surely falling into place. To accompany the songs we worked on our staging with Vik. It was fun to position ourselves as if we were on the stage. This show is going to be brilliant.

Desara Bosnja

Session 5 - 6 May 2009

It's all about the music!! Today we focused on the singing aspect of our performance and it was soooo much fun! Our musical director Harry (who we were introduced to two sessions before) started us of with some very catchy warm up songs like, "Ave Maria," "Pa Pa had a head like a ping pong ball," and, "This old freedom train," my personal favourite. Once we had warmed up our voices we began our singing session which challenged our concentration and memory skills. Our three main songs being some of the well known pop songs of our time, such as Kate Nash’s "Mouthwash," "Chasing Cars," by Snow Patrol, and "Home town Glory," by Adele. Our basic aim for this session was to catch our bearings with each of these songs and learn to sing as a group instead of individually, because although most of us knew the songs we had never sung them together in front of a paying audience (which is slightly different from singing in front of the mirror with your hair brush!) It was doubly important to make sure people were singing the right notes to make our cast sound and look professional and confident. Apart from having some difficulty with Kate Nash (there’s always one *tut tut) we became quite confident with the songs and Harry helped us introduce yet another group skill to our cast which will be shared with the our audience come July!

Thanks Harry! ... and the LAB of course.

lol

CHEERIO!

Naomi Ackie

Session 4 - 29 April 2009

This session, we split off into three groups to develop our roles in Our Nearest Offer. First, we went to the green room with Anne to work on vocals. This was basically lying down and humming. Then we went to work on our characters. We made timelines, mapping out the key moments in our characters' lives.