Journal Entry -- 3/15/19:
Last week I began diving deeper into my Director’s Notebook. Since I had had to change my play to The Good Woman of Setzuan by Brecht I began by rereading key passages from the text to refamiliarize myself with the story. One element that I have been very interested in has been the lighting. A few weeks ago I saw the play American Junkie, and was intrigued by how they used different colored lights to show the changes in time and location. With this as inspiration, I decided that I wanted to use different colored lights to show the change between when Shen Teh is dressed like herself and when she is dressed as her “male cousin” Shui Ta. I chose to make color palettes for each of the characters, with Shen Teh using warm tones as she is often described as a loving and caring individual, while Shui Ta uses cold colors to show his often uncaring nature and his emotional distance from the plights of others. While I thought that these color schemes could also be incorporated into their clothing, I decided to have them in the same colored clothing to make it abundantly obvious to the audience that they are in fact the same person. (I attatched the color palette images below). Another one of the elements that I have been putting a lot of focus on right now has been the costuming. Since I am not familiar with Chinese clothing, I have been looking into the different fashion trends in pre-communist China, which is when the play is set. With this parameter, I have been able to find a wide variety of different examples of clothing, which I will be using for the costuming of the main character Shen Teh/Shui Ta. I have been taking into account the different economic statuses of the characters in the play as to have them wearing clothing that would be within their price range, and not simply lavish for the aesthetic of the fabric or colors, which has been difficult as many of the pictures from the 1940s and earlier are from more elaborate outfits. In the coming weeks, I am going to put a greater focus on chosing the two moments that I am going to illustrate. Journal Entry -- 3/5/19:
Last week we had both the dress rehearsal and the final performance of the Solo Projects. Since two of the students I have been mentoring were absent for the week, I only worked with Olivia, for whom I ran lights and sound. In an attempt to get the timing right for when I would restart the music and change the lights back to normal, Olivia and I worked out a signal where she would stop fidgeting with her ring when I was to hit play. This worked out fairly sucessfully, although it was a bit difficult to see through the audience members to see her hands from where I was sitting. We also made a note of where Olivia should stand so that the lights would continue to be on her. Working on this project was a fairly new experience for me, since while I've run both lights and sound before, I have never had to have cues happening simultaneously. I was happy that I was able to figure out a new lighting technique that would isolate a few colder lights on Olivia during her pauses rather than just depending on the lack of sound to show alienation. I also ran lights for Joe's piece, which was not difficult since it was only fading them up at the beginning and then back down again at the end after he exited. Journal Entry -- 2/25/19: This last week I worked on working with my assigned students for whom I’ve been helping guide through the Solo Project. I will be working on sound and lighting for all of their performances, so it was very important that we start to work in the commons to get used to the stage. One thing that I’m slightly worried about is how in Olivia’s piece, I will need to be simultaneously pausing the sound and changing the lights. While I hadn’t had trouble with running the sound by itself, I am going to need to practice more in order to get the hang of pausing the music with one hand and isolating the lights with the other hand. As the other two of my students weren’t able to make it to the workday last week, I will need to spend more time with them figuring out what they want done with lights and sound since we haven’t been able to run them fully. This project has been interesting for me to work on as an SL student giving feedback and advice, especially since the HL students have spent more time looking into their chosen theatre practitioner and their methods. However, I think that I’ve been able to give relevant feedback based off of my understanding of what they are trying to impress on the audience. Journal Entry -- 2/11/19: This last week in theatre, I worked more with the juniors on their Commedia piece. We worked primarily on getting the team members that had been absent for the last few rehearsals all caught up in terms of blocking and storyline development. This was difficult for us since we were still missing one member of our team and as such, weren’t able to fully show how the blocking should happen. Some team members had a lot of difficulty with remembering the order of the moments in the piece, which had been modified slightly as more team members began to show up at the rehearsals throughout the weeks. We also began to work on standardizing our Grammelot. This was a very difficult of the process for us since a few of the group members had a very definitive tendency for certain sounds and letters, and weren’t fully able to expand into other sounds. However, we worked to incorporate these sounds into the standardized Grammelot. In order to do this, we practiced having different types of conversations and taking key words from what we heard others speaking. This was useful for us to begin to understand how we could make our Grammelots sound more similar even if they had slight differences. Journal Entry -- 1/29/19: I am currently in the process of reading three different translations of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, since I had noticed that the translator of the version that I first read had made very significant changes to the introduction. I hope that by comparing and contrasting these different versions that I will be able to decide on the version that makes the most sense and is more analytically interesting for my Director’s Notebook. I practiced with the juniors on their Commedia dell’Arte piece for the first time on Monday, which we will present at the end of class on Wednesday. While neither Max nor I have the most interesting characters in terms of body language and physicality, as the young lovers, we have been working to make sure that our performance maintains the innocent attitude of the couple. We experimented with using grammelot in one of our run-throughs which seemed very successful, but ultimately our use of it will be based on the opinions of the juniors, half of whom hadn’t been at the last rehearsal. We will ultimately decide on these factors on Wednesday as we do our final run throughs. In terms of my solo project mentees, I have been seeing great progress from everyone. Wyatt and I went to the Seattle Art Museum on Saturday so that he could observe his target age group in a natural setting. This allowed for him to gain a strong base from which he can form his character’s physicality and actions. Olivia has been working on writing her interruptions for the song which she will be performing, which seems to be progressing very well. I gave her a few notes on a few edits or questions that she could make in terms of her interruptions, which she acknowledged. Trinity has been largely working on the writing of her scene, which I will be able to give more feedback on once it is finished. Journal Entry -- Commedia dell'Arte 12/17/18: This last week Max and I have been teaching the juniors about Commedia dell’Arte. We did several of the exercises from the National Theatre Company revolving around character and physicality. We went over the unique parts of the body that the characters led with and how they moved, together. We all practiced becoming the characters and moving around the room like them, and then had the juniors walk in a circle while switching characters. We also had them do a variation of Stand, Sit, Lie Down, with different Commedia characters as was suggested by Gretchen. Once we had finished exploring the physicality of the stock characters, we moved onto Grammelot with another of the National Theatre Company videos. Once we finished watching the video, Max and I shared some of our personal experiences with using Grammelot, with how we hadn’t standardized our Grammelot. With this in mind, we ran them through a few exercises with communicating in Grammelot while imitating the same sound types, which ended up being very successful. They were able to use a variety of sound types, from Germanic, Slavic, and Romantic language sounds. During our last class period that week, we began watching a videoed adaption of A Servant of Two Masters. This was interesting to see how stock characters were used in their interactions with one another. (While I had the basic knowledge of how their relationships functioned, I had never seen a complete Commedia piece before.) Something that really sparked my interest, was how there were little asides given by the actors, in a way that seemed exceedingly similar to Brecht’s Theory of Alienation. It was very interesting to see how different types of theatre traditions from around the world can be considered similar and influential to each other, even when they appear to be very different in origin and intention. Journal Entry -- Brecht Gestus 12/9/18: Last class session, I examined gestus (social physicality) through Brecht’s theatre. In my studies of gestus, I watched video of a Messingkauf workshop on Brecht, and adapted an exercise on body language in relation to class. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLWFSSuzTO0) While in the original exercise, the actors donned different types of clothing and then emulated the body language that they associated with that type of clothing. This had a strong class association since people wearing more formal clothing were typically more upright in posture and looked down on the other characters, while people wearing dirtier clothing tended to act with a slightly distrustful manner. I adapted this exercise to have a slideshow with different outfits, so that I wouldn’t have to assemble a series of outfits and have all of the students change in and out of them. I think that this will be beneficial as a way to see how clothing plays into personal biases relating to class levels. One of the difficulties that I’ve found with researching the theories of Brecht is how they all appear to be interconnected with either gestus and alienation. This proved difficult for our class to find different exercises for different theories, and resulted in most of us finding exercises on gestus. Journal Entry -- Solo Project 12/5/18: In the example done in the Stanislavski method, I found the pace to be really slow, and as such, my attention wasn’t as focused as it was on several of the other examples. With this lack of attention also came a lack of emotional connection for me, which seemed odd since the Stanislavski method is meant to use and evoke real emotions. In the example of Peter Brook’s theory, I thought that the element of sound was particularly moving. The ticking of the wristwatch helped to establish Ophelia’s mental state as an emotional wreck. I think that if I were doing the solo project on Brook’s theory, I would have chosen sound as one of the major elements to explore, along with the emotional states associated with different sounds. I felt that while the example of Brecht was very obviously different and easy to understand the motivations behind the changes, that it was also the least moving personally for me. While the actress went through all of the motions (with a few extra ones added such as Ophelia taking her father’s money from his wallet), there was absolutely no emotion in her portrayal. I think that this extreme version of Brecht’s theory wouldn’t be the most interesting for an audience, so I think that choosing one aspect to focus on would be the best in this case. Within Artaud’s theory, I felt that there was an extreme disconnect between the emotions of Ophelia and any of sort of reaction that I’ve had with grief. With weird facial expressions and strange camera angles, this type of theory seemed to serve to make the audience uncomfortable, which is generally not my primary goal in theatre, especially when it detracts from the general emotional message of the original piece. With Jerzy Grotowski’s method, I found the greatest relatable emotional connections. Within his theory, I saw a sort of mindless grief that completely limited rational thought, in its violent portrayal. I think that the muffled audio effect also had an impact on this sort of out-of body experience, which while would be difficult to emulate on-stage, could be achieved through the use of other types of sound effects. Journal Entry 9/17/18: For the past couple of weeks, the second year IB Theatre students in my class have been working on revising our World Theatre Presentations. In the beginning of this process, we paired up with on another to find a “student mentor” to watch through a recorded version of our presentations and to help point out flaws and points that could be improved. In my presentation, I realized that I needed to put a stronger focus on my process, since while I mentioned that I had watched videos of performers, I neglected to mention any of those who I watched. I also became aware of the fact that I needed to have pictures of me practicing in the mirror, since this had been a very important tool for me in becoming familiarized with my props. The most important change that I made was centered in my reflections slide. Originally, I had related Rakugo to several different World Theatre Traditions and in different concentrations than the “Gestures and Movements in Relation to Props” which I focused on in my presentation. With this in mind, I was able to discard the irrelevant comparisons, such as those revolving around different stock characters, and replaced them with a comparison to Thai Hun lakhon lek puppetry, which in which the operators utilize the puppets (the props) with group movements. This more clearly relates to my examined topic, and will help ensure that my conclusion is streamlined and doesn't introduce any new ideas that I didn't elaborate on. Journal Entry 9/13/18: For this week’s journal assignment, I read the article “Theatre, Performance and Society” from ThoughtEconomics. (https://thoughteconomics.com/theatre-performance-and-society/) This article addressed many different themes relating to theatre, but the passages that I primarily focused on were in relation to the origin of theatre and its value to an audience. Gilles Ste-Croix, co-founder of Cirque du Soleil, impressed the idea that theatre has been around for thousands of years and began as a primitive form of personal storytelling without a stage, which has evolved to what we now consider to be theatre. In this regard, he considered theatre to be an intrinsic part of the human experience, which is a sentiment that I fully agree with. While some people may question to true origins of theatre, due to the fact that early storytelling was so different from how we currently consider theatre, I believe that storytelling can be considered theatre. A comparison can be made between early storytelling and modern one man shows. In a show that I saw earlier this year (The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), the single actor on stage was able to clearly depict scenes and conversations between characters in a way that makes the question of “can theatre with only one actor be considered theatre?” indisputable. Later on in the article, Sir Howard Panter, Founder of the Ambassador Theatre Group, approaches the idea of the purpose of theatre from the perspective that its aim should be to "enlighten the audience, and give them an experience which is different to their lives when they came into the performance.” Again, this is an idea that I completely agree with. For theatre to be meaningful and to leave a lasting impact on an audience, it must be something outside of one’s comfort zone or within one’s range of experiences. This idea can relate to the economic value of theatre, in that the tourism industry around seeing theatre in foreign countries is a overwhelmingly popular choice activity. For tourists, viewing theatre from a different culture provides insight into a completely foreign culture, and grants them an abridged experience that they can easily witness. Journal Entry 5/2/18: The world theatre tradition that I am looking at for my final presentation is Rakugo. There are two distinct branches of Rakugo theatre, the Osaka variation and the Tokyo (or Edo) variation, with the Osaka branch incorporating more elements like sound effects and thematic music and the Tokyo branch being more of a minimalist version, with all attention on the speaker and no exterior distractions. For the purpose of this presentation, I will be focusing on the Tokyo branch, with there being more information readily available than with that of Osaka. When starting out this project, I was intrigued by Rakugo due to its nature of comedic storytelling with only one actor. While I typically don't like to perform in theatrical productions, I do enjoy telling funny stories, so Rakugo seemed to be a happy medium between what I am currently comfortable with performing and what I'm still working on developing. After I had determined Rakugo to be my theatre tradition, I began looking into finding English scripts and adaptions to gain a glimpse of what a Rakugo production was really like. This was one of the more difficult parts in the beginning, since many of the videos that I found were unable to capture the wordplay and humor apparent in traditional Japanese Rakugo. I was able to find a middle ground however, by looking into some English versions (such as those by Katsura Sunshine and professors of Japanese theatre in the US) and by finding videos of Japanese Rakugo with English subtitles and explanations of the wordplay. By doing this, I was able to identify the main theatre conventions, including the physical movements used to express different characters, the voice changes that went along with the different characters, and their use of props which consist of a fan and a napkin. In our last work session, I was able to find a potential scene to perform in the style of Rakugo: The Two Bakers from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Bertolt Brecht. I chose this scene because while the subject matter is still somewhat serious due to the nature of the play, it continues the idea of humor and seemingly ridiculous situations seen in Rakugo pieces. I will be able to embody the two characters using body language and physical movements. Since in traditional Rakugo, when multiple characters are interacting, the Rakugo-ka looks in different directions and changes posture and voice, that will be what I will attempt to portray with my scene performance. Journal Entry 12/11/17: Last week our class finished reading the play, The Rivals, a Restoration drama set in England surrounding a "love triangle" (albeit, with more than three people) that results in an almost shoot-off between the rivaling admirers of Lydia, Captain Absolute and Lucius O'Trigger. Our class split up into two different groups and each chose a different scene to perform from the play. My group is comprised of Max as Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Andy as Fag, and myself as Lucy and will be performing Scene 2 Act 2, where Lucy meets O'Trigger to give him the letter from Delia, who, unbeknownst to him, is actually Mrs. Malaprop. We chose our scene because we felt like it showed an interesting character dynamic between the three characters, where each person thinks that they are the smartest person in each of their interactions, but all except Fag are revealed to be ignorant of large plot twists, such as O'Trigger being unaware of Mrs. Malaprop and Lucy being unaware that Beverley is Captain Absolute. While working on the scene, we worked through a couple different changes in intention in regards to our emotional state during the conversations. We also tried out several different accents to see what we wanted to do in regards to speech, and decided on doing slight British accents. We also read an article on Restoration Acting that helped us to develop our characters and interactions with one another, as we hadn't been using bows or curtseys prior to the reading, which would have been inacurate of the style. I personally gained some new understanding of the posture expected of the characters, as well as the avoidance of physical comedy that was instead replaced by carefully crafted language stated slow enough that the audience would understand. Journal Entry 11/21/17: During the second week of work on our commedia piece, we moved on from the complete improv that we had started with and made an outline of the story to make sure that we were all on the same page about the sequence of events. After we had the basic structure of the piece down, we started integrating lazzi into our scene after watching a couple skits on Youtube. We continued to work on the development of our characters and talked about our character's intentions, which led several of us to change how we approached certain parts of the scene. One exercise that we did that I found to be useful was a runthrough of the scene with each of us giving a spoken description of our actions in English. I think that that helped us gain a better understanding of both our characters and the characters that we were interacting with. On the last day of our rehersal, we decided to add a few new parts to our scene to flesh out the part of the scene that occured before the lazzi with the switching of the chairs, two of which were the tack on the chair gag and the Young Lover impersonating Harlequino. I think that while the first week was an important part of the process for our piece, that the second week was the most important regarding the permanent decisions and changes we made to our piece. Journal Entry 11/20/17: For my HowlRound article, I analysed "Dramatizing Dystopia" which was written by Jonathan Mandell. In this article, Mandell approaches several recently produced plays about dystopian societies and questions why they are so popular among audiences when the play adaptions are less in-depth than the books. He came to the conclusion that people watch these sort of plays because oftentimes, there are parallels that can be drawn between the future societies portratyed and the society of today, which gives the plays the sense of "heightened reality" rather than completely out of the ordinary and new material. When I was younger, I was an avid reader of all books dystopian, and as I reflect on them now after reading the article, can now see erie parallels between them and the society of today. I think that for some, watching a play about a dramatized future society that seems to be far removed from what we experience today may shed light on the incidents and situations that are dismissed today. An example that Mandell used was of Kellyanne Conway and her idea of "alternative facts," to which he compared to the ideas expressed by Orwell in his books. http://howlround.com/dramatizing-dystopia Journal Entry 11/17/17: Today, my group presented our commedia piece for the rest of the class and our teacher. Overall, I think that it went pretty well in terms of sticking to our storyline, but was also revealed to have many flaws that were seen through our audience’s reactions to the piece. I think that our biggest problem that was revealed to us was that the Grammelot of each of the actors appeared to be from different languages with very little linguistic similarities. I think that this issue stemmed from the fact that many of us took influence from our second languages in how we pronounced our words and formed our sentences, with a few exceptions (every once in a while, my Grammelot took a Scandinavian spin). There were also a few gags that we had put in the piece that were misunderstood by our audience; for example: when the Young Lover bribed Harlequino to take his place and then chose to imitate him while trying to reach the other Lover. While all of us who had been involved with the process had understood the exchange, the audience wasn’t able to see the transaction occurring and as such, were confused about what was going on. We could fix these issues with more obvious gestures, somewhat like how Pantalone bribed the servants throughout the scene. Journal Entry 11/7/17: The inspiration behind our commedia dell’arte piece came from thinking about middle school social and relationship dynamics. We started out by picking a setting for our piece and casting all of the actors into roles which would enhance the piece. Then, we started working on how the physical characteristics of each character and began figuring out how our characters move and behave. I think that both the hardest and easiest part of our piece was speaking in Grammelot. While it was hard for us to start using it, once we got into the swing of the scene, it became noticeably easier for us to use Grammelot instead of having to memorize lines. We decided on a few key aspects that we would like to incorporate in our piece before we started acting through it (Brighella and Harlequino would lead Doctore and Pantalone into the room where Magnifico and the young lovers would be standing around a table, Harlequino would accidentally pull the chair out from under Pantalone, and at one point the Second Actor and Actress would dive across the table while reaching for one another), but kept the grand majority of the piece open for actors’ interpretation and as such, it ended differently each time. Journal Entry 11/6/17: I believe that the answer to the question of "To what extent is imagination a fundamental requirement for participation in theatre?" is dependent on the role of the person participating. For instance, I think that for the roles of set designer, props mistress, and actors, imagination is absolutely necessary in order to give a unique an individual interpretation of the text. However, I think that some roles involved with theatre require much less imagination, such as lighting directors and sound directors. I mean this in the sense of those who are told exactly what the director is wanting for a production and have no freedom over which sounds to chose (if they are purchased from an official soundtrack rather than having to research and chose the best sound effects) or which color of gels to use in the lights. I think that for the majority of the roles in a theatre production, imagination is a necessity that cannot be replaced by simple directions, but must used to decide things for ones' self, yet there are roles within theatre that are much less imagination-heavy that are more reliant on direction rather than personal interpretation. Journal Entry 10/16/17: I believe that the social function of theatre is to allow the audience to witness the telling of stories in a way that is different from simply spoken word or physical movement. Along with the creation of theatre, came a way for actors to physically embody a story, drawing the audience into the story as was not experienced in simple verbal storytelling. By doing so, plays are able to broaden the discussion of serious issues witnessed in plays, so that they are not restrained to just the literate or those who are well informed on current or past events. With the creation of theatre, there came an introduction of a form of entertainment that was for everyone, that did not require any prior knowledge, other than the same base language. I believe that the time and place that I set Lysistrata in for my practice director’s notebook embodies this idea, as not many people (at least to my knowledge) are that knowledgeable about the role of women in France in World War II, so my setting will allow for the audience to gain insight into the event with no prior knowledge of the time needed. Journal Entry 9/25/17: In the past week our class has been looking at the play Lysistrata, written by Greek playwright Aristophanes on the subject of the Peloponnesian War. While my gut instinct with this project was to look at how this play could either be set in World War I or World War II in America, I realized that using the USA as the setting for the play would violate the "can travel to in 24 hours rule" that was apparent in many plays in Ancient Greece. It was while following this line of thought that I began looking into the possibility setting Lysistrata in would be France during World War I. When researching WWI, I found out that in France, women were being encouraged to have children due to the low birthrate that was apparent when a large portion of their men were away at war. I believe that this could be used within the play Lysistrata because while the actual act of holding sex back from men may not seem as serious nowadays as it may have in Ancient Greece, that with the pressure to have children in order to increase the population , it gives the women of France a certain amount of power over the government that they might have not otherwise had. Journal Entry 9/18/17: Last week when our class was learning about the history of theatre within different countries and cultures, I became interested in how the Romans flooded the coliseum to have mock sea battles called “naumachiae.” Said battles were created to create a spectacle surrounding the success of military naval battles, such as Julius Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and Egypt. Naumachiae became popularized during the rule of the Roman Emperor Titus, which brought about the creation of flat-bottomed ships that were smaller versions of Roman warships. Many of these reenactments were dramatized depictions of the battle between Athens and Syracuse, in which they would create an artificial island in the center of the flooded arena for the land battles that would take place during the naumachiae. The walls that are currently in the “performing area” were only added once the mock naval battles had lost popularity and had come to a halt during the rule of Domitian. I found it interesting that while there was no physical evidence of these battles nor any artistic renditions from the time, that we were able to know about them due to a few writers that mentioned it in their works. |