Warm Up, my arse

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Rehearsals start in just over two weeks and I will definitely be attending the first few. Which got me thinking about on an approach to the rehearsal process which some directors insist on and I hate, which got me ranting, which got my husband insisting I change names to protect the innocent and cut out half this post, which made me hold back, just a little, just a little bit more. Here’s what’s left of it:

One thing I hate about rehearsals and workshops is the warm up. Not everyone makes you do it or join in but you know it’s coming when you are told to stand in a circle and wriggle your limbs about and breathe deeply. Breathe deeply, the warm up makes me feel the need to breathe into a paper bag.

Listen closely theatre folk, writers have highly developed embarrassment genes and we hate warm ups and yet we cannot opt out without looking churlish at best. I do not want to play knobby trust games, I don’t like looking people in the face at the best of times let alone walking towards them ‘as if you have the hots for them’. There’s a time and a place for looking at people you’ve got the hots for, it’s private and it’s called the internet. I also have no desire to throw giant balls, bean bags or play the Farmer’s In his Den’ or pretend a belt is a snake, or have an imaginary tea party like a demented Brooke Bond chimp, or any of the other stuff I’ve had to do over the years in the name of the dreaded warm up and bonding.

It doesn’t warm me up, it leaves me cold. It doesn’t make me bond, it makes me embarrassed, awkward, resentful and annoyed.

Don’t actor types get it? Writers spend the vast majority of their time in rooms on their own and live through the worlds they create but don’t have the guts to inhabit. Please don’t drag us in to your warm up with thinly disguised, low level bullying. That forced laugh and smile you see and hear as I jump to your tune is masking a desire to detonate an explosive.

Psyche’s warm ups are quite tame and not too hideous yet they make me come out in a cold sweat remembering more painful times. The company which specialized in physical theatre and the sort of plays where actors wear white masks and stand on wooden blocks doing a sort of robotic dance instead of a prologue, made me join in warm ups for plays I had nothing to do with. They made me hop and skip and play frigging badminton every time I set foot in the place. I remember one particularly humiliating morning spent lying on the floor with a scrap of fur on my head being a polar bear, then the North Pole.

Their horrific warm ups which were extended if they hadn’t had time to go to aerobics in the local village hall and then ‘physical exploration and expression’ in reality, ‘let’s burn off that second bacon butty, Mavis’, took up most of the morning. I am surprised they never made us strip down to our vest and pants and run round the room pretending to be a leaf that had blown off a tree AKA 1970s primary school PE lessons.

There have been other times and other places when I have been made to crawl, skip, prance and mime and sing in close harmony. I’ve had to do the Gay Gordon, musical chairs, grasshopper leaps and cloth wafting and grabbing. I hated it all and hated myself more for putting up with it. Instead of politely saying ‘No, I would rather jab out my eyeballs with this stubby pencil,’ I spinelessly leap along giving high kicks, doings spastic versions of the hokey coky and animal squeals on demand.

So this is a heartfelt plea to all directors inclined to indulge in the inclusive and intrusive warm up: Let the writers sit it out. You know it makes sense.

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Tags: humiliation of writers, physical theatre, plays, reheasal, warm up, writers, writing