The Rover - First Rehearsal

When we first started looking at the rover we did a quick read through of the script in order to start getting a handle on the language and what our scene is about. 

In our scene, my character Florinda has been told in her father's will that she must marry a man called Don Vincentio, an old Indian man. However Florinda's brother (Don Pedro) wants her to marry his best friend Don Antonio. But Florinda is madly in love with a British man who saved her in siege of Pampalone called Belvile. At the same time, Florinda's younger sister (Helena) has been told by her brother Pedro that she must become a nun and Helena is very annoyed with both her's and her sister's situation. At the end of the scene both Helena and Florinda decided to escape their apartment and go in disguise to the carnival in order to have some freedom before they are both tied down. 

After looking at the scene we then decided to do a movement workshop that would help us discover the social etiquette of this era. In the exercise we all had to walk around the room as if we were our characters from the rover. We had to stand correctly like we were wearing corsets and we had to try to glide across the floor. I found this quite hard as I was in a pair of large boots so gliding did not come naturally to me. We then had to improvise a party scene where in which me and Katrina were the party hosts and we had to make conversation with people in the same way in which they would have in that era. I found this helpful as we had music in the background that gave the mood of the era but also once we knew some of the mannerisms with the fans, I felt that I could start to see the character coming to life.

Then we went back to our original scenes and started to block the scenes whilst adding more to our characters. We decided to stage our play with a desk in the centre stage at which Florinda would sit at. We had a chaise lounge put on stage left in which Helena would rest on but she mainly was standing in stage left. And on stage left we had a chair that Pedro would sit on it but he also mainly stands in the scene. We then added some more of our characterisation to our characters. For example Florinda gets very anxious when her brother and sister are arguing so i tried to use the fan as a shield to hide behind. Helena also gets very angry and flustered so she uses the fan to cool herself down after she has worked herself up.