Rehearsal
Welcome to an insider's view of the rehearsal process for the making of Heartfield. Here, you may view video excerpts of rehearsals, week-by-week, and read short explanations by the director, Kate Chisholm.
Week 1 - Read-through
"During a read-through, the actors sit around a table and read the script aloud together. This is a good way for everyone to hear the text in its simplest form. Directors often prefer that the actors don't 'act' too much during a first read-through. The first read-through usually raises important questions and generates a good discussion about the show. For Heartfield, after we read the script aloud for the first time, I gave the actors a minute to write down everything they could remember about the show-- text, images, ideas. We went through a list of nearly two-hundred words they had come up with and found that they encompassed everything that the show was about. This helped us all to see that the show isn't just about the personal story of John Heartfield; it is really about the larger political and social issues of the twentieth century."
Week 2 - Learning music
"Because of our short rehearsal schedule, Peter Foley, the music director, began teaching music to some actors even before the show had been fully cast. The first week of rehearsal, he taught the rest of the solo music and by the second week he taught all the group numbers. He continued to supervise and refine the music through the run of the show."
Watch the music director teaching the song,
"We're Not Getting Any Younger."
Week 2 - Discussion
"Because the issues contained in Heartfield are issues which are still relevant today, I wanted the actors to bring their understanding of recent and current events to their work on the piece. I asked them to follow current events and bring in newspaper clippings and pictures, and to jot down stories from the radio and television which were relevant to any aspect of Heartfield. They brought in their news items and we had a 45-minute discussion which touched on recent events in Yugoslavia, East Timor, Cambodia, and Sierra Leone and brought up disussion and debate about issues such as: war reparations; refugee crises; mass genocides; hate crimes; and art censorship-- in particular, the recent efforts of Mayor Guiliani of New York to pull city funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art because of particular artwork in their 'Sensation' exhibit which he found to be offensive."
talking about refugee crises.
Week 3 - Staging
"I prefer to 'work through' almost all the scenes in a show before staging, or blocking them. This gives the actors time to explore various approaches to the scene with me before I set blocking-- and therefore the visual means of storytelling-- for the scene. For musical numbers, on the other hand, it is often more helpful to stage them as soon as the music has been learned, to give the actors plenty of time to grow in the blocking that they have been given."
staging a section of the song "Dada."
Week 4 - Stumbling through scenes and choreography
"A 'stumble-through' is the first time the actors try to run the scenes in sucession, with as few stops as possible. It is appropriately named, because often there are still elements missing, from props to blocking, and they must try to get through as best as possible. A stumble-through helps the director, choreographer, music director and stage manager to see what is still missing or needs the most work, and make work lists. It is also often the first time actors are running the show off-book (without scripts or music)."
for "Say No to Fascism."
Week 5 - Run-throughs
"I like to start running the show at least a week or ten days before tech. We continue working on all the specifics, but there are certain things that cannot be discovered by the actors, the director, the writer, and everyone else, until the actors are running the show with as few stops as possible."
impersonating Dr. Joseph Goebbels in the Act II Prologue.
The Director's Process