It was decided that the final scene where Hamlet and Laertes
die that all other characters will die as well. This led to everyone going off
in pairs to devise an unarmed or armed fight scene. Initially Jodie and I were
to devise a fight between Ophelia and Angelica but found it difficult to
choreograph anything without any character motivation.
Once all of the combat choreography had been devised Graham
watched them all and worked out where to place them within the scene. Fights
between the Zannis occurred during a pause between Hamlet and Laertes sword
fight which helped break up the action and prolonged the inevitable mishaps
that occur in Shakespeare’s writing.
Angelica’s death occurs midway through Laertes taking a
swipe at Hamlet and inadvertently stabs his love. It was important with my character’s
death and all others that the choreography was perfect. I had to ensure that I
was positioned correctly to get “stabbed” otherwise it would have looked messy
and broken the illusion of the death.
As Commedia is tongue-in-cheek it meant that the deaths had
to be over-exaggerated and so any noise we made was multiplied to emphasise the
death. Once a character had died they would join the dead choir and an “aaah”
would be sung out as a dead character joined the chorus.
As a group we had to compose a simple melody that would play
under the final deaths of our performance, and we worked to create an “eerie”
yet “holy” sound with a steady base and a high melodic rhythm.
Once all scenes had been finished we then put the scenes
into their running order for their first time. I found this rehearsal process
very interesting as we had been left to devise the scenes ourselves and it wasn’t
until Monday that we got to see how the scenes fitted together to create “Hamlet”.
Monday was also the first time we worked with a set, our set
was limited to two doorways and one backdrop upstage centre, this was
advantageous as we did not have to worry about complicated scene changes or
entrances but it meant that we had to be especially careful when offstage as we
didn’t have much space in the wings.
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