A Tale of Snow White : Rehearsals

    Almost four weeks into the production and everything is coming together. Rehearsals this week were incredible. All the kids came in memorized and ready to work. Due to their speedy brains we were able to jump right into character building this week.
    My duties as a stage manager for an STC show is much different than stage managing any other show. I still have to send emails and keep us on schedule, but with so many kids we have to split them up, so no one is sitting in the house for two hours bored to death. This means I don't have to sit in the house and write down all the blocking.
    We have established a system of sorts. At least for all of the blocking rehearsals, Kiersten will call whoever she needs to stage a certain scene. Then, I will pick a group of characters to work with, out of the cast left in the house. Often since they have all ready blocked the scene with the director, we will go out into the lobby, run the scene and then break it into smaller chunks and really clarify the action. Other times we will sit down and focus on the words and beats. My favorite times though are when I get to take all of the remaining cast out to the lobby and work on activities that will benefit everybody in the cast. We will play games that help them to understand the potential in their voices,
or, how listening well can change the entire show in a great way. It's amazing to see how fast they apply the skills learned in a game to their scenes.
   

A Tale of Snow White: First Week of Rehearsal

      We decided quite some time back that we wanted to use lots of rhythm and body percussion for this production. Not only does the script lend itself to this, with all it's raps and limericks, but it would also be a great way to force the kids to work together.
      Before we even had a blocking rehearsal we started teaching them some of the rhythms we had appropriated from various YouTube videos. We hoped this would get them into the world of the play together, rather than having them slowly seep in one at a time as we blocked their various scenes. It seemed to work. Most of them picked up on it very well. If one of them didn't, the rest of the group was more than willing to jump in and assist.
      Besides rhythm we also worked on our animals for the show. In one of the scenes, Snow White, flees from the huntsman through the forest following the advice of some clever animals. There are only five animals we needed to create but we figured it best to have the whole ensemble brainstorm which creatures would be the best. After a while we had them get up and try some of these animals out and then we pulled the best ones and had them explain how they were doing it to the rest of the cast.
      During the next rehearsal, I worked separately with just the five kids who were cast as animals. Having selected what animals they would like to be we started building these animals layer by layer. The first layer we called "safe and curious". Humans get from point A to B (most the time) in the most direct way we can. Animals on the other hand seem to take the most inefficient route sometimes, stopping, backing up, walking in circles. The kids and I decided the animals weren't inefficient at all but rather distracted by their great senses of smell, sight, and hearing, which could tell them if the thing they were approaching was safe or not. After experimenting with this layer we were out of time for that day but I told them all to go home and watch videos of their animals so we decide how each one individually moves next time.
       It felt really great to see all the kids come together over creating animals and stomping their feet. And unlike the last show I was involved in, it feels like their is always something that every kid can contribute. Even if it's just them watching their fellow cast mates and saying "Hey, that looks like my dog!"

Story Theatre Company : A Tale of Snow White

I should have explained what exactly my internship is before I posted my first blog.
  Over the course of the next semester I will be doing an internship for Story Theatre Company, a children's theater based here in Ames. I will be the stage manager and instructor for their production of A Tale of Snow White, an very loose adaptation of the original Grimm brother story, aimed at kids.
    As a stage manager for a children's production I have all the duties of a regular stage manager but also the added responsibility of being the babysitter of almost forty kids for two hours. My main goal in this project is to improve my communication skills in a theatrical setting.
I'll keep everyone updated!

A Tale of Snow White : AUDITIONS & CALL BACKS

Auditioning kids may be the saddest thing I've ever done. When considering who is to play Snow white or the Mirror, it does not matter if they tried “really hard” or if they are adorable. If they can’t project or won’t participate in the creature walk it won’t work out.

 "Will we all get parts?” asked one little girl after a round of monologues. “I’m afraid we don’t have enough parts for everybody” I said, trying not to give anything away in my voice concerning the decision we had made about her. “Oh.”

             You have to pay attention to many different things when going through a call back process with kids. First, you have to ignore your own self reasoning out why one kid isn’t as good as another. Nobody has ever tried to teach them better, or, they did try really hard. What if they really need this?

Secondly, you must pay attention to how you structure the little time you have because you don’t want to give away your casting before the cast list goes out. For instance, you can’t keep calling one person up to read as the evil queen , even if you’re doing the scene for the purpose of finding the right boy to play the Mirror.

Another thing to consider is how conversational you are with the kids, I know some of the kids from other productions but I don’t want to seem like I’m favoring them, even if I am just catching up because it won’t seem that way to the kids you don’t know, or their parents who are watching like a hawk from the back of the theatre.

About kids “from other productions”, you have to use knowledge you've gained about the kids from past productions in your decisions. We have a few kids who are returning after two or three shows with STC. They may be really talented, as most of the kids are but they are also rude, sassy, constantly upstaging, and bad at taking direction. Truly, they did add something to the production but if they were hard to handle, was it worth it?

These are the things Kiersten and I had to consider as we tried to find a cast of 38 out of the 50 talented kids that auditioned.