To begin today's lesson we ran "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" into "The Contest", as we Dan in and we hadn't shown our teacher this yet and she wanted to see what we had been up to! We're glad that we went over this as we worked out what we had left to do for this song - some of us still need to learn the lyrics fully and get used to Dan so we don't laugh at him!
We then decided that we should work on songs/scenes we haven't touched yet - we decided that we would workshop "A Little Priest". This is the number where Lovett has the idea of putting people into pies and Todd loves it! The first way we tried this song was to have us both singing to each other and me getting out different pies on the counter to reference. This was okay but we felt we could be more inventive. We then tried us pointing out members of the audience whilst singing, but again this felt a little bit basic.
Dead Body: Our favourite idea, and what we are actually using, is having a dead body on stage to interact with. We thought carefully about who we could use. Our first thought was James, as he is supposed to be asleep at this point in the salon, but we decided against him as he is in the next scene. We then considered using Henri from the year below, as he has a dancer's core strength and flexibility - meaning that we could do a lot with him... but then we realised we could use Dan! As Dan is Pirelli, and is the character that Todd and Lovett are actually singing about in the first scene, we realised that we could just use him - and he is a dancer too.
Dead Body's Entrance: Our first question was how we were going to get Dan down on to the floor of Lovett's pie shop, as he was last in Todd's parlour. Our first thought was to try and carry him down the stairs, but we realised that this would be quite dangerous and also look a bit messy. We therefore decided that Dan could go down the hatch under the stage and be in the "cellar" as it were, which we could bring Dan up out of. This is a lot safer this way as we would be bringing him up a couple of stairs, rather than trying to get him to manoeuvre down stairs. We also debated on whether he should be on a counter or on the floor. We quickly realised that it would be best if he was on the floor, as he would then have more room to move about and there are less hazards.
Dead Dan Dances: Dan starts on the floor and Rob seated on a chair stage right. I stand with Rob. We agreed from the start that it doesn't matter for Dan to move himself, rather than be completely limp and us moving him, as it makes the piece cleaner and the audience would just accept it. We first tried having Dan just be moved to a chair and sat down to be re-positioned in different poses and different items of clothing and props to portray the different types of people we were singing about. This worked quite well but we wanted to be a bit more abstract with it. We then got Dan to sit up, slouched over, but when we push him backwards his legs would be in the air (i.e. he was always in a 90 degree position when on the floor). As I then pushed Dan backwards and his legs came up straight, I then rested my arm on his feet and leaned on him - this automatically created the comedy for this piece. ///// As Dan is a very able dancer, we then spent some time experimenting with different ways we could move Dan, and soon realised that he can do backward and forward rolls from practically any position! We decided that we would definitely include some of these. We then experimented with what else Dan was capable of and so what we could include. We wanted to include some dancing with Dan at some point as this would be very comical (as nearer the beginning of the piece Sweeney and I do a little dance together as it is iconic for this number). We tried doing a can-can together, with Dan in the middle of us two, but it looked a little bit strange that Dan was moving so well by himself when he was supposed to be dead. We liked this idea though but knew that we would have to alter it slightly. Therefore, Rob and I put our hands closest to Dan on the back of his thigh and moved his legs up alternatively. After this I joked that he could then do both legs at the same time, but then we thought we could actually try this and see what would happen. The results were hilarious! It actually worked really well as Dan put his weight on us both. To finish the piece, Rob and I let go of Dan and step forwards to sing our last note together - meanwhile Dan drops to the floor as he is unsupported. ///// We did experiment using props during the song to show pies with labels and meat cleavers (etcetera) but decided that this would be too much visual - as the audience would then get too distracted by the visual that they are not focusing on the lyrics. We shall include some movements with pies, but I think that we could just mime the pies - as this is quite abstract, is representational, means we don't need to overload ourselves with props and still conveys what we want to convey.
Filming: We filmed some of what we had come up with earlier on in the lesson. We were happy with the results (despite it being an early attempt and by no means the polished song), but watching it back we realised that Rob and I look down at Dan too much, thus drawing the attention away from ourselves and towards him instead. Therefore, we shall interact with each other more.
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