This week we worked hard on the rehearsals for the play, were not only getting results on the production side, in terms of the puppets which are well under-way, but also in terms of the actin itself. For the first time I think we have almost finished a scene.

While doing scene 9, which is basically Deborah's conscience coming to haunt her, we decided to make a big choreography with 10 actresses which would represent her conscience. At first it was challenging to get the actresses to perform group actions and concentrate. The biggest problem I actually encountered was working with such a large group of people to do the same thing.

Firstly I struggled in terms of what was to be done, i knew the outline of the scene but didnt really have a vision. Would Deborah's conscience be totally against her? would there be a split personality game going on? So the first few sessions were quite disastrous because I just tried incorporating choreographies without any type of coherence to the overall sense of the scene.

Usually when directing people I picked out characters individually and tried to make them explore the possibilities of their characters, be it physical or voice. But when dealing with such a large group things change. When establishing a certain type of movement or a way for them to speak, issues emerge. First of all they cant all do the movements in the same way, some do it faster, some stronger, some use different levels, so its hard to get an even scene.

Once I realized that homogeneous movements just weren't going to work due to the variety of different commitment and energy levels from the actresses, then having each one have her own way of moving inside certain parameters seemed to work much better. So after a few sessions of trying to establish a regular motion for them to work within, the work became much easier to cope with. After that, only small details had to be tweaked in order for the scene to be nearly finished.

Now I realize how in a scene such as this one, where a lot of motion is involved, if it is well coordinated, then the text becomes secondary. The thrill of the scene is on the movement itself, on the differnet levels and the motion of the group as a whole.

In order to establish certain control of the actors on scene, I found that being empathic towards the actors as a director isnt very effective. Yet im unsure whether being totally dominant and not letting the actors have any creative freedom reflects positively towards their motivation. Is there a balance between the two?