What happens in rehearsals?
The actors rehearsing a dance routine.
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I did actually take a dance session on the very first day of rehearsals and we tried things out that were a little bit of the flavour of what was wanted. On the first day, if that works for the director and everybody else, then I can fire away on that theme. So I get ideas just from the way that I know the staging needs to work. You can plan patterning, and it’s good to know numbers too. There are ten people in this performance, so I can plan duets, little partnerships and groupings – it’s quite mathematical in that way.
The masked ball is the major event of the lay that involves dancing. and it’s very exciting to do because it’s so much part of the drama. We worked out an upbeat dance that would start off the party spirit but then that drops down to the smoochy low-key level that happens with the dialogue. In the Globe, it’s always really exciting because there are elements like the actors coming through the yard, so they have to dance through the audience and there’s quite an improvisatory factor there, they never know quite how many people there are going to be or if they’re going to join in or something, so it’s exciting.
