First rehearsal

For our first rehearsal, we immediately started on the blocking of our play in chronological order but we had a read through of the play first to get a feel for it, know what our lines meant and how to pronounce words we were unsure of.

I'm the master of the ship and I'm in the first scene of the play. I also have the first line of the play. In the first scene of the play it is the ship crew on the ship in the sea storm about to crash and we blocked the scene and the opening.
For the opening the whole cast is on stage doing four repetitive movements on the spot according to what their character would be doing at that current moment in time, for example: I as the captain am steering the boat, reaching down to get my bottle of whisky, pointing and shouting (mouthing) orders at other people and shielding my face from the waves. Others on the ship are attending to the ship, praying, vomiting, crying, that kind of thing. Those on the island are watching what is going on and prospero is there  with his stick conjuring up his spells. If there are two actors for one character, they come up with movements together and mirror each other so that the audience understand that there are two of them. After a minute, the people who aren't in the scene go offstage and the scene begins.

We are just blocking the whole play because we don't have much time left and will go over it properly when we finish blocking. For my scene I feel the blocking was effective because instead of being bland on stage, walking from A to B and saying our lines then sitting at the side for ages we went all out with a lot of energy and we went over it a few times to be sure of what we are doing.
In the scene, there will be loud sea storm noises playing so everyone will have to really shout to be heard, it will seem quite realistic in that manner but we can't make the ground shake so we have to fall from side to side regularly. I will have a whistle so after I've said my line, I go around ordering people, blowing my whistle, attempting to keep spirits up by shouting "Bestir"or " Come on", things like that. I have to be full of energy and very loud for this bit, but I have to be mindful as to when other people are saying their lines because if I shout endlessly whilst others are saying their lines, I'm being unnecessarily difficult.