Behind closed doors: what really happens in the rehearsal room

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/13/rehearsals-rambert-king-john-a-damsel-in-distress

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A martinet director barking at chorines in 42nd Street. An imperious ballet impresario in The Red Shoes. Philip Seymour Hoffman, full of avant-garde angst in Synecdoche, New York … I have images of rehearsals in my head and they are probably all misleading. Rehearsal is the work that the public never sees. So what does take place behind closed doors? And how much does genre make a difference? I lurked in the corner of three rehearsal rooms – for a new dance piece, a rare Shakespeare play and a light-hearted musical comedy – to taste the atmospheres and compare the conversations.

From what I saw, the most accurate fictional portrayal of the process may be Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. Not for the amorous misunderstandings, slapstick mishaps and screwball sense of doom – but because most of the discussion I hear isn’t about the grand themes of the art, it’s about how to make the work … work. As Frayn’s director sighs while his befuddled star blunders around with a plate of toast, it’s about “getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off”.

The performing arts are precious, but pragmatic. Whether it is a knotty classic text, a wordless dance piece or a song-studded musical, it must work on stage, in front of an audience. Everyone is ferocious about detail in the rehearsals I see, but there are still big differences between the atmospheres in each. How much paper is in the room and how many people watch you at work? Who makes the decisions, and how? These are three random afternoons, three fly-on-the-wall glimpses of processes that are rarely seen.

Rambert – the dance rehearsal

Mark Baldwin, disappointingly, doesn’t employ the techniques so memorably showcased by Vincent Cassel’s artistic director in Black Swan. He doesn’t holler or humiliate. He doesn’t snog the dancers or suggest they masturbate to add passion to their performances. In fact, with a lanyard over his T-shirt and in purple socks with yellow toes, he’s a benignly self-effacing figure. “I just stand and wave my arms,” he says.

Baldwin is artistic director of Rambert, and is preparing his new piece, Dark Arteries, which marks the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike. Margaret Thatcher or Arthur Scargill won’t be portrayed onstage, but Dark Arteries is nonetheless informed by reality, and the team has done their research. Even so, the room is bare of research material. One or two people carry notebooks, but no one seems to refer to them, and no dancers take notes. The piece takes shape in a collective mind meld.

If you want to know what busy looks like, come to a dance rehearsal. The sunlit studio of whites and soft greys in Rambert’s building on London’s South Bank is unremittingly active and cheerfully pragmatic. Lolling around risks muscles getting cold, so no one stays still for long. A bearded guy in a yellow singlet lunges in one corner, and one dreadlocked dancer checks out his sideways jump in the mirrored back wall.

In the third week of rehearsals, nearly everyone has the material down. Dancers’ memories are astonishing – their training accustoms them to drilling chains of movement into brains and bodies. You wouldn’t recite a paragraph and immediately demand an actor to repeat it – but you can expect a professional dancer to reproduce a movement sequence with the sketchiest preparation. It’s phenomenal.

Doing stuff in unison is an essential part of a dancer’s toolkit. Every time two or more dancers arrive at the same time, to the same music, chances are you’ll want their limbs to carve identical lines through the air. An awful lot of information must be exchanged. The women, hair tied back, follow a colleague’s sequence, while the rehearsal director shouts the counts (“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8”) over a recording of the clamorous score. Six counts of eight are over in mere seconds, but packed with intricate surges and combinations of movement.

Some things are still in flux, Baldwin says. “Don’t forget, this is a choreographic process.” Between sections, bare-footed dancers become a flurry of questions – to each other or the rehearsal directors. Oddly, they don’t often question Baldwin: dance troupes tend to be youthful, which inevitably inflects the sense of hierarchy. Only one woman asks Baldwin a direct question (should they be jumping?) and he answers, vaguely, “Whatever you did yesterday is great.” And then, sweetly bemused, mutters to himself, “Jumping? Jumping?” He applauds his company at the end of the session. “Give yourselves a pat on the back,” he tells them, softly. “I’ve got stuff to think about.”

King John – the Shakespeare rehearsal

They didn’t stint on the action at King John – in a single afternoon I saw a battle, an anthem, a coronation and the tense lead-up to an assassination. Ten days later, Shakespeare’s rarely performed play would greet a paying public, in the first of a series of medieval churches (in London, Northampton and Salisbury), before reaching Shakespeare’s Globe. Not long to go, then – but the atmosphere remains calm and exploratory, the supportive direction by James Dacre a matter of soft-voiced questioning.

Jo Stone-Fewings, in the title role, tells me how tricky it is to keep four different performance spaces in your head. The walls are decorated with floorplans of the various churches, plus images of medieval weddings and coronations. Candlelit churches would heighten the ritual, but even in this bright south London studio, Orlando Gough’s music raises goosebumps. “Mad world! Mad king!” holler actors from a semicircle of plastic chairs. “This is definitely the single, isn’t it?” says Gough. “Pity it only lasts 30 seconds.”

Everyone wears serious trainers. You need a solid foothold for the fight rehearsal, which is all about looking wild but staying safe. Here, Dacre notes, the text’s violent language is made literal, and fight director Rachel Bown-Williams, an epee tattooed on her forearm, reminds actors not to put a sword through anyone’s head. “Give him a bosh on the shield!” she shouts. “I’ve not seen so much testosterone in one room before,” Dacre remarks.

Intimate scenes are exposing for actors, so I’m also grateful to catch a complex duologue in which King John’s young nephew, Arthur (Laurence Belcher), is to be assassinated by reluctant servant Hubert (Mark Meadows). The room clears – only Tanya Moodie hunkers over her script in a corner. “We’re just going to go back to the psychology,” Dacre suggests.

He asks the actors to define their characters’ aims in each line. “I have to remind him of the relationship we have,” Belcher suggests. “Hmmm. Puppy eyes aren’t working.” Dacre, text on the music stand beside him, urges them to resist the verse’s lulling seduction, to remain focused. The actors work at slightly different speeds – Belcher races puppyishly ahead; Meadows frowns, digs his heels in until he’s certain.

As a directorial style, Dacre’s couldn’t be gentler. “Is that fair?” he’ll ask, after making a suggestion. The sticking points during the afternoon are often knubbly little moves (how does the queen mother manipulate her long dress? How does a big guy hit the floor? Should someone kneel on one or both knees?), but the wider questions all concern communicating the play as deftly as possible to an audience. The 12 actors range in age from their 20s to their 60s, and there’s a lot of talk – everyone has a voice and a right to intervene, and a stake in the ensemble. As Dacre puts it, “everyone’s a leading player in this jazz band”.

A Damsel in Distress – the musical rehearsal

Rehearsals are not solely for the performers’ benefit. I’m parked by the stage management desk as the musical A Damsel in Distress takes shape. Piled with ring binders, monster rolls of sticky tape and enough Post-it notes to tile the building, it’s the desk of detail. There’s a constant susurration of lists, notes about who enters from where, where the props should be. Rehearsals help this team make a busy show run smoothly.

A show about rehearsals spinning off the rails has a certain piquancy. A Damsel in Distress is a musical-within-a-musical – a PG Wodehouse story about a disgruntled Broadway composer, with Gershwin melodies and lashings of tap dance. It will play the wide stage of the Chichester Festival theatre, but this post bank-holiday rehearsal takes place in an arch-ceilinged studio in north London.

No room where most people wear tap shoes can be hushed. Actors tap ruminatively in corners of the room, clattering through phrases of movement. It’s a cheerful sound, and the performers grin from ear to ear while trilling “Things are looking up!” – but it’s tricky, too. Between scenes, people stare down at their feet and polish the rhythms. Sally Ann Triplett, playing one of the show’s big roles, even has a white shoe on her right foot, a black one on her left – perhaps to simplify the fiddly sequences? Or maybe she just dressed in a hurry.

Compared with the mild-mannered Dacre and Baldwin, A Damsel in Distress comes as a shock. Rob Ashford, the director, is running this rehearsal. A stocky, bullish figure in olive trousers, pacing forward on thick rubber soles, he doesn’t question or suggest – he strides into the throng and gives direction. Ben Delfont, the company manager, approvingly remarks that Ashford (due to co-direct several of Kenneth Branagh’s forthcoming West End shows) is more decisive than most directors of musicals he has experienced. “It’s because he’s a choreographer as well as a director,” he suggests.

While Dacre teases out ambiguity, Ashford locks it down. Musical comedy demands strong outlines, and all his notes are about clarifying moves and motives. “It’s a little mushy,” he says after watching a scene. “We need more front-footed energy. More primary-coloured response.”

With its tuneful piano accompaniment, it’s another good-humoured room, but you sense an underlying hierarchy through the way Ashford addresses people. Leading players are called by their first name; supporting cast by the names of their characters; the women of the chorus are “ladies”. Comedy is especially disconcerting – I giggle at the Wodehousian poppet, harridan and silly-ass, but everyone else has heard their lines far too often. People applaud a rousing duet – you’d have to be dead not to respond to romantic dollops of Gershwin – but the banter demands an audience response.

Getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off. Most of the discussion at these rehearsals is technical, pragmatic, marshalling a dizzying level of detail. With a last tinkle of Gershwin, the rehearsal reaches a break. Ashford stands up: “Let’s take our tea.”

• Rambert are at Sadler’s Wells, London, until 16 May, then touring.

• King John is at Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Northampton, until 16 May. Then touring until 27 June.

• A Damsel in Distress is at Chichester Festival theatre, from 30 May to 27 June.