Rehearsing without a Room

Who says you can't rehearse without a room?

or

Necessity is the mother of invention.

After the panic from last nights chaotic chase scene rehearsal, I came back home and spent 2 hours writing up the chase scene choreography in great detail, complete with correct use of stage area terminology (hastily looked up on Ask.com)  such as upstage centre and centre stage left and so forth.  Which for a person who struggles with left and right, was quite a feat.

Today, with two of the characters in the chase scene, I printed a sheet of paper with a row of upside down faces, representing the audience, and some different shaped and coloured counters representing the characters and the prop (a large black box, kindly made by Nemo's dad)

The 'stage' and the 'characters' were all laminated, so that they could be moved around lots without being damaged, and then placed into their starting positions.

The counters could then be moved around, in such a way as to show how the characters would move during the performance, giving the actors, and the director (me), a 2d moving image, that we could translate into an image of the actual chase scene.  Thus, in a space as small as a coffee table, we managed to rehearse a very complicated chase scene, with 5 characters in it, in about half an hour.

                                   

 It was great fun rehearsing this way, and by adding character voices (a bit squeaky) and funny faces, we managed to enter the ridiculous and slapstick spirit of the show.

So on Monday, when we have our next and final rehearsal of the chase scene, we should all have a very good idea of what is going on.  Phew!