New Changes
The first collaborative rehearsal revealed a lot to us. First and foremost was the difficulty of articulating a clear narrative – how do you tell the story in a way that is clear to the audience? We found it difficult to do this with just dialogue-free puppetry, and the performance came out as a muddled mess. After a productive meeting, we decided to add narration and dialogue to strengthen the narrative.
In the evening, I urgently penned a clear version of the voice-over script, in which the dialogue makes the story more detailed and the characters more three-dimensional, which I think is a very necessary action. I made plans to dub it with Hongpei, with him tackling the narrator’s part and me handling the dialogue for the small fish.
In addition, we have made new changes to the set-up —- The small ice screen in front of the big screen has been moved to the west, echoing the screen in the entrance corridor, symmetrically on either side of the big screen.
One important change: we decided to put the projector behind the screen so that it wouldn’t get in the way of the audience’s experience in the centre of the stage, but also so that it could be a source of light that came for the shadow puppetry.
Here I have prioritised the actions to improve:
- Script for voiceover and dialogue.
- dubbing (filmmaking)
- Make a detailed list of the entire performance, down to the second-by-second details of who should come on, what should be performed, what lines should be said, etc.
- subtitle the projected video.
- Practising pupperty playing
- Schedule the next rehearsal time (which is on the day after tommorrow) try to ensure that the performance can flow during the second rehearsal. I hope that the outcome of the second rehearsal will be a clear line of movement for the actors.
- set up props making, explore more set forms.
Finally, this very initial rehearsal allowed me to see clearly for the first time how the whole performance was working and to have a clearer idea of what needs to be improved, I’m excited to be able to evaluate and reflect on this invaluable information, which will go a long way to improving the quality of our final performance.
