Don Quixote update

As we continue to workshop our devised production of Don Quixote, we’ll post some photos from time to time.  Here’s a couple from the first week of October – our process is to break the story down into shorter parts (sometimes a couple of the 125 chapters at a time) and do a quick “bad first draft”, staging it in just a few minutes.  We video the draft, then watch it back and make decisions about what we could do better, or differently, or more interestingly, then get back up, re-stage it, film it and watch it again.  After multiple passes, we end up with a stronger (yet still rough) draft of the scene.  Over the next month, we’ll take these rough scenes and work through them until we put them down in script form, to tighten the action and clean up the dialogue.

Theo and Adrian doing a rough draft of a scene from Don Quixote for the camera (while Mac and Lydia hide)

In a working rehearsal of the devised production of Don Quixote, we never know what we’ll create

Playing with lighting effects and shadows during a working rehearsal for Don Quixote

early rehearsal for Don Quixote

One of our productions for this semester is a devised theatre work based on the novel Don Quixote – which will be in production in November.  Devised theatre is a process of creating a play as an ensemble, and the early part of rehearsing is largely about learning to create together, and establishing an environment where we all feel comfortable sharing ideas and allowing each other to respond and expand those ideas.

Here’s a couple of quick photos of our first rehearsal this week – learning Viewpoints and getting to play with some props and lighting effects.