Twelfth Night PSC rehearsal in Year 4

This week Year 4 had their first rehearsal with our director Barry!

We began by warming up and learning how to move together as a whole group. For our warm up we needed to balance the space in the hall and listen to instructions carefully. Barry gave commands such as clap, jump, stop and start as well as some stage directions such as sky, centre, audience and sides so we could practice moving around our working space like a real company of actors on a stage!

It was good to jog our memories of the characters in Twelfth Night by acting out some their most famous lines such as Lady Olivia’s ‘Ay, me!’ and Sir Toby Belch’s ‘a plague upon these pickled herrings!’.

The class was excited to find out more about which part of Twelfth Night we will be performing (we’ll keep this under wraps for now!). We practiced some more group work using the events of Act 1 to get us thinking about how we can use movement and facial expressions to convey emotion.

As Twelfth Night begins on a ship during a storm, we thought of some jobs that people have on ships such as a captain, sailors, cooks, cleaners and navigators. The children were then assigned a ship-job and were tasked with coming up with a repetitive movement and a sound for their role to perform as a group. It was lots of fun experimenting with different sound effects and finding the right action for our characters!

A while later we pieced all of the groups together to create a whole class scene of the ship which included a soundscape. Each group of workers entered the ship and in role began to perform their jobs. Once all of the groups had entered, our hall felt just like a real ship sailing past Illyria with all of the different workers interacting together. Suddenly, just like in the play, our ship was caught in a storm. Using techniques such as slow motion and freeze frames, we improvised the ship being tossed in the waves and eventually breaking in half.

For our second part of the rehearsal, we looked at some lines from the play. Although Shakespearean English may sound quite different to how we speak today, we worked out the meaning of the lines very quickly. We took turns to read about Viola’s twin brother Sebastian discovering that he had washed up in Illyria which is ruled by Duke Orsino and making a new friend called Antonio. We thought carefully about the lines and how we could decode them using what we already know about the play.

It was a very interesting first rehearsal!

We are excited to begin work on our act of the play next week which involves some famous speeches by Malvolio and Lady Olivia!

What are you most excited for in our Primary Shakespeare Company project?