The Louder team’s newest recruit Sarah Milligan (the show’s assistant director) shares her thoughts on the first day of rehearsals for the 2019 tour:
It was a warm and bright day in Cardiff as we made our way into the rehearsal room – ready to dust off, crack open and peer once again into the production Louder Is Not Always Clearer.
It’s been a year since everyone first sat in the rehearsal room, and, after taking some time to get familiar with the space and getting comfortable in the surroundings, we sat down as a team and held our first production meeting.
I am new to the team this year, but the warm welcome I received and the ease with which I was included in the conversations and plans made me feel like I have been there since the play’s inception. Already, mere minutes of being in the space, the team fit back together as though no time had elapsed, cracking old in-jokes and reminiscing…
Then we got to work.
A key focus of the meeting was building on the feedback from audiences from the tour last year by highlighting any issues of clarity during the performances and any technological improvements which could be made to the visual aids.
We spoke at length about re-recording elements of the production and discussed options for making the projections visually clearer. All the time questioning, what worked? What didn’t work? What is at the heart of this scene? Why are we telling this?
After lunch, we began to jigsaw the shape of the play together; transitioning through the scenes and cues, which we reconstructed from memory and videos. Remembering the physical elements of the play proved challenging at first but once everyone was connecting again with the material, muscle-memory kicked in and the movements became clearer with each repetition.
An important aspect of marking the play through on the first day, was the opportunity to give some elements of the production more attention and consider expanding them.
Now we were asking ourselves: how can we make more of this? How can we take this further? These questions are vital to setting up the rehearsal process for the coming weeks, as they will help to find ways to play with the material and see what possibilities present themselves for developing the story and give even more depth to the emotional and physical elements of the play.
Reconnecting with the outcome of a process which happened a year ago can pose challenges, therefore integral to this rehearsal process is director Gareth’s desire to dig to the very core of each scene and anchor Jonny and the team back into the play’s initial motivation.
A year has passed for the team, now everyone is slightly different and they come back into the space with fresh eyes and new experiences – all of which, over this rehearsal process, will filter into this production and an opportunity is given once again to breathe fresh life back into a story which needs to be told.
Sarah Milligan – Assistant Director
