WEEK 1: Taming Rehearsals

BY KATRINA SPREYER

Hi I’m Katrina and I’ll be writing a weekly blog for Arts beats new show for 2011; The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. For my first blog I’ll be writing about my experiences with Arts Beat’s first ever show for 2011. The first rehearsal introduced us to the play, familiarising our understanding of the play and its characters. Throwing ourselves straight into the text we were encouraged to view our own ideas of Shakespeare’s classic. Our first grapple with the story was through physically conveying the synopsis. As we each read a segment of the synopsis, we chose each other to physicalize the different characters, which not only helped us to visually understand the plot but also gave me a sense of ensemble work that was being created. It was this ensemble work that really brought us together as a group allowing us to have fun with the text and bounce ideas off one another.my initial first rehearsal jitters were replaced by excitement of what was to come in the following rehearsals.

Rehearsal two found our first interaction with the text. Focusing on the part of the text that refers to a wasp’s sting between Petruchio and Katharina, we were asked to convey the meanings within the text. My initial understanding of the text was rather perverse as I focused on the sexual undertones within the text. In doing so the delivery of the text became one dimensional and lacked depth to the characters. However when guided by the director, Filiz, I became aware of other interpretations.
The interpretation me and my colleague took on for example, was that Petruchio was teasing
Katharina, making her even more mad and fiery in her temperament which we found was great fun to perform, discovering different ways to convey teasing and to show frustration. In watching other performances I was enlightened by the range of interpretations within the text; from conveying Katharina as an angry wretch to a woman who flirted back, and conveying Petruchio as a persistent flirt to a gentleman. The next exercise found us working closer as an ensemble. Split into categorises of Katharina and Petruchio we were instructed to deliver the lines to express particular feelings. I found working in an ensemble particularly with people I have never worked with before enable us to bounce ideas off one another. Being a Katharina I found myself invoking a Katharina that was full of zest. Full of attitude the Katharina’s brushed off Petruchio approaches with a flick of the hand similar to a move found in a Beyoncé music video. It just shows there is always something that can bring new resonance to Shakespeare’s text. The ensemble work creates a unit, allowing everyone to have their own stance and ideas of the text. This rehearsal has shown me that there is always scope to develop and change the text in any manner that doesn’t necessarily conform to stereotype ideas on how to perform Shakespeare. It’d be interesting to see in the following rehearsals whether a particular style manifests itself or not.