Curious Incident: Day 1

Our first day of rehearsals focused strongly upon our opening to the play. Our first task was to wander around the room, saying something related to maths regularly (I chose to say "Pi =3.14") and every time we came face to face with someone me had to raise our arms and turn away very slowly without touching anybody, in a way that someone autistic would behave when coming into contact with people, which I decided to be an "Oh my God, don't touch me" way. After we got to grips with the pace and style of movement we changed our action to burying our heads in our hands and turning away, slowly still, but in a way that indicates our head is overloading and we are in a state of social shut-down. The pace change we used, I believe worked well as we all paced around the room and suddenly froze, before slowly turning, which looked really effective.

We then went for a run through of what we had done. Once we had done our "raised arm" turn 5 times, we moved onto our "head turn" and once we had completed that 5 times each, we curled up into a ball on the floor. Representing the fact the main character in the play, Christopher, is autistic and shuts down in social situations, however, is incredibly talented with maths and numbers, hence the utterance of maths related sentences.

After we had curled up into a ball, we waited for our lead, Christopher, to stand up and type in his phone number in on an imaginary dial pad that was the same size as the user. In a sequence, standing up in fours, we carried out this action, with four people of our group of 13, or so, standing up each time. This took a while or so to perfect without anyone stopping to think of the phone number we were dialling, so once we were clear on what we had to do, we went for a run through, which worked out nicely.

In terms of staging, we decided it would be best to seat the audience in a 3 sided square, almost in the round, but keep the sides very rigid to represent Christopher and his way of thinking, that he likes structure. Also, it will provide a challenge for us as we will be surrounded many times and have to think about staging scenes and really embodying our character(s).  We were given act 1 and our roles by our teacher/director and began to act out the play without any prep at all so we could contribute our own ideas to how the play should run and look.