{"id":1482,"date":"2019-09-09T14:43:02","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T18:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/?p=1482"},"modified":"2019-09-17T12:03:47","modified_gmt":"2019-09-17T16:03:47","slug":"twelfth-night-fall-2019-tour-entry-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/twelfth-night-fall-2019-tour-entry-6\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cTwelfth Night\u201d Fall 2019 Tour: Entry #6"},"content":{"rendered":"

Week Six: Notre Dame, Indiana<\/strong>
\nBy Kaffe Keating<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat country, friends, is this?\u201d<\/em>
\n– Viola, Act 1 Scene 2.<\/p>\n

We are, ostensibly, in America. We all met at Heathrow, put the suitcase with our show in it onto a plane, and flew it to the other side of the world. I\u2019m certain that this definitely happened, but I still don\u2019t quite feel like we\u2019ve landed yet.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, we\u2019ve been made to feel very welcome. As I write this I\u2019m wearing one of the extraordinarily comfortable Notre Dame jumpers, which our brilliant Company Manager Deb had very kindly left waiting to welcome us in our hotel rooms on the day we arrived. It\u2019s been lovely meeting the Notre Dame team and finally putting email addresses to faces.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more to do with the fact that we\u2019ve basically picked up this fun, silly, and progressively bizarre bubble the five of us have been bouncing around in while making this show, and simply plonked it down somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Despite being almost 4,000 miles away from London, our daily routine hasn\u2019t really changed that much: get up, shower, eat breakfast, go to rehearsal, play foursquare, muck around with a four-hundred year old play for a bit, go to the pub, go to bed, repeat. Except breakfast is waffles which you cook yourself in a waffle iron (I, erm, struggled slightly with this\u2026) and the pub isn\u2019t really a pub but an Irish themed bar where everyone who works there wears matching uniforms, and all the veggie options come with extra chicken if you want. And instead of getting the tube to rehearsals, we all pile in to the BIGGEST CAR I HAVE EVER SEEN, drive through the beautiful Notre Dame campus to our space in Washington Hall, and then spend twenty minutes trying to park the thing.<\/p>\n

The car is a perfect metaphor for what\u2019s really struck me as one of the differences between the US and UK, by the way: similar, but everything is bigger and if something can be automatic, it is. Apart from the waffle iron. For that, you\u2019re on your own. Here\u2019s me trying to figure it out. If you don\u2019t know, the waffles are definitely not supposed to be burnt to the top of the iron like that\u2026<\/p>\n

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Despite these new experiences however, the full realisation that I am actually here continues to elude me. I\u2019m sure there will be a moment, maybe next week when there should be a bit more time to breathe, when something will finally drop in and I\u2019ll suddenly find myself yelling “The Star Spangled Banner” in the middle of a 7\/11.<\/p>\n

Rehearsals have continued to be fun, interesting, and tricky. It\u2019s a bit like putting up a tent in a
\nrainstorm; as soon as it feels like one section is pulled tight and pegged down, something else we\u2019ve neglected starts flapping about wildly in the wind. We\u2019re definitely making good progress though, and the show is at the stages where it requires its final bits of finessing. We performed the show for our American associates (still a relatively nerve-wracking experience, but with generally less scribbling than the London associates\u2019 showing) and, again, received a hunk of useful notes afterwards.<\/p>\n

Something we hadn\u2019t even considered was what Scott Jackson, our resident AFTLS guru, referred to as the \u2018atmosphere\u2019 of each scene. What are the sights, smells, sounds of each place? What\u2019s just happened there? What might be about to happen? Is there danger? These aren\u2019t things that need to be made clear to an audience necessarily \u2013 they\u2019re not something you as an actor can actually play most of the time \u2013 but they are vital when attempting to make sure that everyone on stage feels like they\u2019re in the same place. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally too. In a regular production, this stuff is usually all decided for you ahead of time by the designer and director, but with this work we need to find the varying atmospheres of the many parts of Illyria which the play visits ourselves.<\/p>\n

\u2018So, where actually are we then?\u2019 That\u2019s a question we\u2019re asking ourselves both in and out of the rehearsal room for the next few days. Hopefully by opening night next week, we\u2019ll have a clearer idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Week Six: Notre Dame, Indiana By Kaffe Keating \u201cWhat country, friends, is this?\u201d – Viola, Act 1 Scene 2. We are, ostensibly, in America. We all met at Heathrow, put the suitcase with our show in it onto a plane, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2812,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47489,361299],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actors-from-the-london-stage","category-twelfth-night-fall-2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2812"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1482"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1485,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions\/1485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}