From Anxious to Awesome

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In my early days as a conductor I had no idea how to plan a rehearsal (or to rehearse, for that matter!). My rehearsal plans were just a skeleton. I had just the title of the piece, the time I’d do it, and how long I’d spend.

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It looked something like this:

3.00pm - Warm Up - 15 mins

3.15pm - Motordom - Jennifer Jolley - 20 mins

3.35pm - Letter from Sado - Jodie Blackshaw - 30 mins

4.05pm - Through Healer’s Eyes - Cathy Likhuta - 25 mins

This is what my rehearsal plans still look like if I haven’t planned properly. Oops!

When I rehearse like this I feel anxious and wayward. I don’t know what I’m trying to achieve or accomplish. I start at the beginning of the piece and fumble my way through, stopping at the first sign of trouble. It’s haphazard, messy and afterwards I feel unproductive. I know we could have achieved so much more. 

On the other hand when I plan a rehearsal with more detail I feel completely different, and so does the ensemble. So how do we get from a skeleton to a more detailed rehearsal plan?

It’s simply a case of putting some meat on the bones. 

In general:

Clarity of rehearsal goals = Level of Productivity

Clarifying the what, how and when of our rehearsal transforms “3pm - Rehearse Petite Suite Beautiful Flowers” into something much more nuanced and productive. 

The perfect rehearsal plan has 3 key ingredients:

• What. Learning objectives and success criteria
• How. The rehearsal techniques and structures we’ll use
• When. The order of events within the rehearsal
  
  

For each Warm Up, Activity and Piece scheduled, answer the following questions:

What

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• What is the learning objective for each particular segment of the rehearsal?
• What will students be able to achieve by the end of that rehearsal segment?
  

How

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• How will you structure each learning segment?
• How will you vary the pace during and between segments?
• How will you connect each segment to the others? For example, connecting warm up concepts to repertoire*
• How will you make those connections explicit to the ensemble members?
  

When*

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• How do you want the ensemble members to feel at different points throughout the rehearsal?
• When will you place each segment within the rehearsal for optimum pacing?
• Is the order of repertoire different from the previous rehearsal?

Record your answers in your rehearsal plan.

At the end, you should end up with something like this (hopefully with better handwriting!)

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Can you imagine how much calmer you’d feel if you had this level of detail to work from?

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This is what’s possible when we choose to invest time planning up front - better rehearsals, less stress, more enjoyment.

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This is an edited extract from my book Planning Effective Rehearsals: Tools to Boost Learning & Engagement, available now as a print or eBook. In it, you’ll learn step-by-step how to plan from long to short term, how to select repertoire that meets your ensembles learning needs, plus get access to templates like this to simplify your planning process.

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