Shape of Clouds

The Last couple of months gave me the opportunity to improve my stage management skills. Shape of Clouds directed by Laura Watson was given a bursary of £1000 to be put on at the Oval House Theatre in the 33% Festival. I was asked to stage manage and DSM the show which was going to be a challenge as previously in the show I had only worked on costume. Throughout this show I came across many problems and had to learn how to overcome them.

The Rehearsal Process
    The rehearsal process was something I wasn't used to as it was a devised piece. During the rehearsal process I had to put together the book getting all the blocking down so the end product would be me being able to cue the show. Like I just wrote, the show being a devised movement piece there was constant change.This meant I would only get the blocking done once a scene was finalised which meant some scenes I didn't get until very late. I thought that this would cause a massive problem. With a week to go to the show I still didn’t have certain scenes as they weren’t finished. However, it turned out it was fine. With the nature of the piece these scenes needed to be worked on this much.  For future shows however, I will be thinking about setting a guide line for when scenes need to be finished by. Obviously I say a guide line because some scenes just can’t work like this. To be honest time was a major issue throughout this whole process. It was so hard to get the actors and tech team in at the same time. So we had to make sure that when we did manage to get together our time had to be used productively so that no time was wasted. However, due to the fact that the actors could not make it in, all of them together for a very long time due to work commitments, that time was not productive and this is why I believe that stricter time limits needed to be set. If the tech team have nothing to work with they cannot design the show.

The Actors
Shape of clouds has been put on three times now and each time we have used the same actors. This provided some obstacles as most of them had been in the year above at St Mary's and some of them found it hard to take direction from those younger than them. This was a great test for me as I had to work on skill of 'how to get them to listen to me'. My way around it was making everything easy for them. Making sure that every piece of information was given to them (sometimes in more than one form) being firm in rehearsals trying to encourage focus for Laura. It seemed to work and the job got done. But to this day I still wonder, if an actress refuses to wear a costume despite being told to wear it by several people including their director how do you handle that? I hope with further work experience and maybe a chat with Tina I may find out this answer!

Run up to the Show
In the run up to the show I really learnt to understand that time doesn't necasarily exist. The get in the plot tech and dress were all scheduled in

Sunday the 16: Get in
Monday 17th: Plot and Tech
Tuesday: Dress
Wednesday 18th: 1st run of show

This to me seems like an ideal timetable for a tech week. Enough time you’re not rushed and it is simple.... how wrong I was! Sunday came around and we had a very successful get in all the Lights were up and ready to be focussed the next day. I was flitting in and out as I was overseeing rehearsals as well. The get in was successful the only problem being some lights and legs  still needed to be delivered and were not going to get there until Tuesday which was supposed to be our dress day. This caused a big hold up in the process however we managed it.
The day the delivery was made it was an hour late so we were very behind and once everything was in and ready it turned out that the set design did not look what it should look like. We were using legs to create wings to hide the furniture and props etc. But it did not look like this. It looked like we were attempting to 'hide' them and failing. It was obvious what needed to be done we either had to completely hide the props and set or make it clear that we wanted it to be seen. After talking to Laura we decided everything needed to be exposed. This was a major setback as we had to take down the legs move the gauzes, exspose the booms make everything visible look god! Finally with all this sorted we could finish the tech we need to pick up the pace massively though. There was not going to be time for a dress that day Therefore I decided that there dress would be the next day then the opening show in the evening. I didn’t want to stay too late also as the actors would not be ready/awake enough to do a dress and the show that evening. Everyone went home that night very tired and stressed but positive which was important so we could achieve what we wanted the next day.