Emotional Connections

Production: Spring Awakening
Rehearsal Wk 2
by Helen Hart (Wendla)

Another week of intensive rehearsals has begun. Today was difficult. We rehearsed a scene in which a funeral is held and a touching ballad accompanies it. We were asked by our director (Andrew Panton) to explore our characters and their reactions to the death by speaking directly to the character we had lost (I'm not going to name them incase you don't know the show!) and telling them something we should have told them before they died.

Each person in the group took it in turns to say how they felt and naturally, the exercise resulted in alot of tears! The dialogue was completely unscripted and genuine and it meant that each of us were pushed into putting ourselves in the position of our character and imagining how they might feel.

The difficulty many of us encountered seemed to be the struggle to connect with the emotion of our character without connecting TOO strongly to our own emotions as an actor; something very difficult to achieve.

I think to be honest, many of us found ourselves standing there crying about people we have lost or people that we worry we may lose. However, this was not a bad thing. It was really useful in that it assisted us in understanding our character's emotions and better informed us as actors. I'm biased but I think it put us in a position where we could have a really strong scene. In my opinion, a 'Funeral Scene' can be cheesy & cliche or it can be beautiful & powerful... I'm excited at the thought that ours may well be the latter!