13 Process Journal

Week 1 & 2 (Easter Holidays) : 

During these two weeks I focused on reading the script, finding out about 13, its composer, history, etc. Listened to a few songs, started researching my character and the show as a whole. I also worked on the marketing aspect of the show and came up with the marketing plan.

Week 3:

During the first week of rehearsals, we have worked on "13" which is the opening number of the show. We learned the melody and rythm and were given different parts, I personally was on the lower one. The song is really upbeat which to me really reflects life as a 13 years old kid. The lyrics and the whole atmosphere of the song really helped me getting into character.
We also learnt all Hail the Brain and A little More Homework, I was singing bottom part for both of them. I find A Little More homework really interesting as it is much slower than the rest of the group songs, to me it shows how the kids evolved to young teenagers, a bit more calm, a bit more rational. The song is all about "trying to find myself", they're all experimenting life and discovering themselves, which I found really interesting.

Week 4:

This week we started to learn the choreography for 13. It went really well, mostly everyone learned the choreography really quickly which was surprising as it is such a long song with a lot of parts in between. But the choreography was really nicely put together, was really dynamic, I personally tend to struggle with movement memory but I managed to learn it during the first rehearsal and was very happy with that. This week we also started working on the singing for Hey Kendra and Bad News. Bad news happens when Lucy and Brett start dating, I really enjoy working on it as it has a very jazzy, bluesie melody to it, it is a really ironic song, but it is so serious to them I loved getting to play around with it.

Week 5:

This week, all the songs were learnt. We also finished learningsome choreography for All Hail The Brain, Hey Kendra and Give me what I need. During give me what I need, we had to carry Kendra towards the center of the stage, which reflected Archie's dream. We also started blocking some scenes one by one, while people weren't learning choreography they were blocking the scenes.

Week 6:

During this week we started slowly doing run of the shows, putting in practice all the blocking that had been learnt during the last week. We did had to stop a few times but I thought overall the process was quite good. Most of the problems were coming from moving the platforms which weren't ready to be used so it was a bit tricky to understand what to do without actually doing it. By the end of the week everyone was off book. It got easier to see where the show was going while we were running it but to me, I felt like it wouldn't be ready on time, and really started doubting the final result.

Week 7:

This week was the last week of rehearsals. We didn't get to rehearse on Tuesday as we were rehearsing for the dance showcase, and Marta got injured that day which made us abandon most of the staging we had planned. We cut the stage short as well as one platform, changed some of the blocking to only work with one platform. Not everyone was positive about this, but I personally thought it was exacatly what we needed. It made the show much more clearer and smooth and I thought it couldn't have gone better. Everyone knew what they were doing, and appart from a few mistakes, everything went according to plan.