During this session on November 5 2019, we blocked out Act 4 Scene 9 and Act 5 Scene 2. Both scenes contained a fight scene, between soldiers and the Merry Men. As a soldier, I had to work with an actor part of the Merry Men to create a ten step fight scene; Act 4 Scene 9 ended in my victory while Act 5 Scene 2 ended in hers.
We worked together before in the beginning scene of the play, so it was easier to collaborate in the sense that we knew each other slightly and it was less awkward. I think we both learned from our previous experience of creating the movement piece in Act 1 Scene 1 that we couldn’t spend a lot of time talking about what we wanted to do, so we both started doing actions and rolled with it; similar experiences got us on the same page.
One obstacle we faced was that we didn’t reach ten actions as Ms Bye wanted. At most, we had around eight. This was because in between most of our moves we needed time to react or get into position. For example, there is one where I am “kicked”. In between the kick and the next action, I have to fall down and get back up into a position that transitions into the next action.
We didn’t manage to solve this in the Act 4, but our sequence ran long enough that it didn’t matter. In fact, if we had gone on to create up to ten actions, we would’ve made our sequence too long.
For Act 5, we ran into the same problem but this time we ran short, mainly because we didn’t have as much movement in between actions. We quickly came up with a different way to end the fight by adding a few more actions (another punch and then a final kick). We had to spend a bit more time refining it to make the full sequence work fluidly, but we managed to get it to a sufficient time period; although it still wasn’t up to ten actions.
However, it didn’t need to be and we filled up the proper amount of time, so we didn’t add any more actions.
For collaboration, we essentially gave free reign of what to do when it came to our own character. I would decide what my character, the soldier, would do to attack and my partner would decide how her character, a Merry Man, would react and retaliate; and vice versa. However, we would occasionally give some input as to how we could make transitions smoother or how to make the fight scene more interesting or dynamic. We also didn’t argue a lot, so the creation process was very peaceful and done very quickly. Collaboration was necessary to create the sequence and to make the process cordial and efficient.
