The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe- Week Four: Lucy looks into a Wardrobe

It's WOW weekend! For those unaware, WOW (the 'Women of the World' festival) is a celebration of women's and girl's achievements, past and present. In recognition of this wonderful festival we wanted to celebrate all of the amazing fierce, funny and fabulous girls and women in our Chameleon cast and team! These girls are incredible and it's through them that one day there will be equality throughout society. They inspire us all.

We got straight into things this week with a favourite acting warm up of ours. 'What's in the box?' is a great game in which the group can ease themselves into acting and warm up their imagination and improvisation skills. The game involves passing around an imaginary box, one by one someone will open the box and take out a item; the rest of the group then has to guess what the item is from the action that person shows. We always have a wide variety of objects that emerge from Amazon Alexas to kittens.

We then played a game of buzzy bees. In this game the group walk around the room and have to become objects from a certain category. In some versions, the leader would say a letter and everyone would have to become a shape beginning with that letter. However, we prefer a more topical approach to see what ideas the group can come up with. The topics this week included what you might find in a lunchbox, a school and a museum. We had some great responses, such as breadcrumbs, angry headteachers and dinosaur skeletons.

We then split the group. One team went with Ben to work on the dialogue for the opening scene of the play. Group two stayed behind to create our opening train sequence- which we had started in week two, but were revisiting now everyone had their characters. Ben's team saw Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund arrive at the train station to be greeted by the mean Mrs Macready. They focused on character here, looking at how they stand and move and talk. In particular, they focused on how to make the housekeeper come across as strict through the use of physical actions, as well s words.

Meanwhile the two Chorus groups were paired up as parents and children. In these pairs they brought to life a train station scene filled with people. Our conductor then emerges to announce that the train is leaving and from there we created a physical theatre sequence to show the children travelling through to the country.

This term we have loads of birthdays; today we celebrated another two! As per usual, we celebrated as a group and there was cake...well, Swiss roll, but that counts, right? The celebration was a much needed break from working on the scenes as we had spent a while working on all the different bits. Plus it's always great when there is cake involved.

To finish we came together again as a group and showed each other what work we had created. The two parts of the scene were put together and the end result was a rather nice looking first scene! It was great seeing the work from both groups come together and we're excited for next week when the adventure through the wardrobe really begins!

Another fun week for everyone; these guys produce some fantastic work and are really beginning to get the hang of working together as a large group. Next week we will be looking at more scenes. The adventure continues!

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe- Week Three: Chorus & Characters

Week three! This morning was certainly an exciting one- as long time Chameleons know we traditionally reveal our casting decisions on the third week of a project. This term was no different; the team spent many hours together and apart brainstorming and discussing who should play who, and with such a large cast it certainly took a while. Whilst arguably that was the most anticipated event of the week- this was still a rehearsal and so there was still work to be done. The focus of the week was, as you may have gathered, the Chorus. 

Being very passionate fans of Ancient Greek theatre, we adore the use of a Chorus (done well). Last term we featured a Chorus in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and wanted to bring it back again. The story of Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy is a long one with many different characters appearing throughout. Large as our cast is it would be hard (and pretty boring we reckon) to just have everyone playing a single part. The addition of a Chorus means there is more opportunity to play around with physical theatre- which our cast are particularly good at. 

Originally, in Ancient Greece, the inclusion of a Chorus was usually to represent the people of a city of place. They worked together as one unit; so we started the session off with some activities which would help the cast to begin working cohesively to achieve a goal on stage. We began with the shape game- creating individual shapes first alone and then in small groups- to get everyone focusing on how they could use their bodies in different ways. 

As this game progressed and the groups got bigger, we asked everyone to think about how they could use everyone in their group to create the desired shape, in this way getting them to essentially act as one unit to achieve their goals. There were some lovely ideas and our Chameleon teams did a fantastic job of creating creatures that could move and make sound (even using levels as well). 

The game we played next was also targeted towards Chorus work. Often, in physical theatre, the Chorus must move as one unit. To get the Chameleons thinking about this we had everyone stand in a circle around one person and copy what they did. Building on that, we then got the cast into pairs and had them copy each other. Everyone had such amazing concentration in this part of the rehearsal that you could hear a pin drop. The Chameleons this term are definitely made for Chorus work! 

After a well deserved break we sat down and looked at our character list. Normally we tell everyone their roles at the end of the session. However, this term we decided to tell everyone individually- wanting to have some one-on-one time to discuss each character and ensure every cast member was familiar with what they were doing. 

Whilst this went on, the rest of the team focused on character work. How does a character move? What kind of creatures live in Narnia? What traits do these characters have? There are a number of named and unnamed animals which feature in the story so this was a great way to get everyone thinking about what kind of creatures they might want to feature in the performance. 

Once everyone had been told their characters we finally sat down together as a cast and revealed who was playing who. Everyone was very excited to share their characters with each other and receive their scripts. With that, the preparation work concludes and, starting next week, we begin work on the show! The first few weeks feel like they have flown by and we cannot wait to get the ball rolling next week. Until then!