blog 7

7.) How are your rehearsals going with your partner? What has successful has your collaboration been? What have you done to contribute to the success or failure of your collaboration?

Overall I would say that our rehearsals have went quite well.  I truly feel that Aaron and I are going to be able to give a good performance.  Collaborating with other students was actually very helpful.  There were certain parts of our script that I wasn’t completely sure of how to act out, and my classmates were able to help us out with those parts just by witnessing how we were doing them, and then told us how we could improve it.  Louis was particularly helpful.  For the part of our scene where Aaron takes our dad’s box of ashes and threatens to dump them out in the lobby, I never really knew how to react to that.  Mostly because I’ve never been in that situation myself.  At first, I just shot up out of my seat and shouted, “Put him down!” while Aaron stood several feet away from me.  Louis made a good point that if I really wanted those ashes, I would be trying to get those ashes from Aaron, and Aaron would be trying to keep me from getting the box of ashes as well.  It was pretty much like playing keep away when you’re a kid.  It helped that Aaron is taller than me, too.  Louis also gave Aaron some advice on maintaining eye contact with me during out scene.  I understand eye contact can be weird, I can barely hold it myself typically for more than a few seconds.  Louis said the trick to appearing to keep eye contact is to look at the bridge of my glasses.  That way, we don’t feel awkward, and to the audience, it still looks like we’re maintaining eye contact.  Witnessing other group’s presentation rehearsals was interesting, too.  It kind of made me realise how much more prepared Aaron and I were compared to everyone else we witnessed, and that we had a skit relatively shorter than most of the other groups, too.  Carlos and David’s rehearsal showed that they needed to memorize their lines better, but they did have a lot of lines in paragraphs, and a lot more of them than do Aaron and I.  Overall, I think Monday’s performances will be on point.