A day in rehearsals with Choir Boy

We asked Tatenda Shamiso, Choir Boy’s Associate Director, to give us a taste of what a typical day in rehearsals is like. He didn’t disappoint!

This isn’t the type of rehearsal room where you have to leave your real self at the door to get the work done. 

In Nancy Medina’s room, the whole company is invited to join her in a “brave space” and bring aspects of their own lived experience, heritage, and imagination to inform the work. 

Each member of the cast, production and creative team hold each other and the material in a joyful, loving and compassionate atmosphere. 

After a brief check-in, warmup, and some scene work, a member of the creative team often visits to stay in touch with the goings-on of the process and offers their expertise to help thread pieces of the story together.

Music and movement are especially important to this show because of the many live spirituals incorporated into the text. Our room is lifted into soulful song on a very regular basis.

Invariably in every rehearsal, something in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s writing, Nancy Medina’s direction and the inquisitive, generous voices in the room tend to spark massive chats about the many issues this play touches, and the ways they touch our lives today. 

Choir Boy very compassionately considers intersections between race, class, religion, education and sexuality through the eyes of a group of young Black boys, which in turn leads our team to do the same. Drama therapist Samantha Adams said, “this play is medicine,” and that sentiment is felt by the company in every rehearsal. 

By the end of the day we’re recapping larger sections of the play. It’s often in moving through these larger chunks of the text that we discover new things, ask more questions, arrive at more nuance, rhythm and texture, and get very excited to come back and do it all over again tomorrow!