Babysteps of the big production

Description:

This week we finished the first sketch of scene 5, which is the scene of the banquet. This scene is HUGE, so we need special focus to make it dynamic and entertaining.

Analysis:

In order to make this scene dynamic and avoid it to be eternal, we need to solve some of these problems:

• Actors don't know their lines----> don't know when to enter---> energy is lost

• As we are dividing the scene in both parts of the counterpoint, joining it is becoming difficult

• Actors forget the actions we marked on the last rehearsal

This is making me realise that this process is about commitment. If people show some commitment, this scene will be awesome. However, we also need to provide them with things such as the texts, remind them to read them and learn their entries and be more strict in the time of rehearsing.

One of the things that bothers me about this scene are the relationships. For example, Redwood and Mrs. Redwood need to have a relationship full of passion and partnership. The audience needs to understand that they are  parters in crime. That they are willing to do everything to succeed as long as they are together. I understand that the relationship between the actors must be forced, but they need to understand that in the moment they enter the stage, they are not themselves, they are characters. This will require actors to break personal issues and leave them aside, in ALL the cases, this is just an example. 

As a solution, we need to work more in their characterisation, or remind them to do it. This is why we need to have a clear process. I propose to use the normal acting process:

We need to make the actors ANALYSE the role. In order to do this, they need the script to determine some information about the character, and the other information must be created by themselves. Also, he must understand the RELATIONSHIPS with other character and define the character's OBJECTIVES for each scene. There is always an INTENTION, PURPOSE and SUBTEXT behind everything a character says on stage. In the case of character RELATIONSHIPS, the most important objective will be the use of SUBTEXT, as it is important to explore what each character us saying under the lines. This will work as long as the intonation changes, and it is used to indirectly establish a relationship between two characters. The use of SUBTEXT will rely upon unspoken thoughts going through the mind of the character  showing  the underlying emotional motivations for actions that could be psychological and emotional motivations.

It is also useful to determine the role in the whole play. For example, Joaquin's role throughout the whole play is to be the comic relief in every scene he appears as his character itself is funny. 

Connections:

Robert Cohen's theories:  Robert uses the term "relacom," referring to "relationship communication."He states that all communication has at least two dimensions: the content dimension of the message and the relationship dimension of the message. He refers to the fact that we not only say things, but we say them in particular ways and the WAY we say things often tends to develop, clarify, redefine a relationship. So, it is very important to explore different SUBTEXTS under the lines

Past school plays rehearsals: We can see that in last school plays we had never applied properly the process of acting, but we just rather let the actors characterise by their own. This has sense as they have already learned how to do characterisation, but if they know, why do we keep repeating the same things?

Reflections:

This makes me reflect upon the factor of EFFORT and COMMITMENT. Another thing that is annoying me VERY MUCH is the fact that there are actors missing rehearsals. I think that that is always an issue in the school play, and I understand but it is a BIG disadvantage as I realise that a scene doesn't work if all the actor are not present. The energy is lost, people are lost and don't know when to enter. However, apparently there is nothing we can do about it.  I just don't understand why is people not coming to rehearsals if they commit to come...

This leads me to question, until what extend its the actors commitment important for the play to be successful? and if they commit to assist the rehearsal, why they don't comply either with coming or learning the things we did when they were not here?

Reflecting...

Description

This past 2 weeks during rehearsal, I started to reflect upon how I am using my knowledge from last year to direct the School Play. I directed 2 scenes specifically, the scene of the witches, and the banquet scene.

Analysis

In scene 1 and scene 3, the idea was to create a creepy atmosphere. This is going to be useful as scene 1 is like a prologue that opens the play and scene 3 is the first direct contact between the witches and redwood. We are also trying to maintain the witches presence in some scenes to show that they are "controlling" the evilness.

The problems with this scene is that they still are too human to be witches. We started by giving them a base stimuli and working on their actions and gibberish, but I really think they don´t look as supernatural people. Well, most of them have a great physicality, but none of them has the face expression I hoped to see on the witches. The problem of them varying the body characterisation is that if one of them loses their characterisation, the whole energy and rhythm will be affected as the image you get from the scene will be misbalanced and will no longer give the effect we wanted to create.

In the case of the banquet, we practiced the parts of miming. At the beginning they didn´t know what actions to do and didn´t balance the space appropriately, so we needed to do an exercise were we dictated which actions to do separated in 3 different spaces. After this, they started to do more actions and balance the space, so the scene had much more dynamism.

However, when we told them they needed to start talking, they didn´t had much to say. I don´t know if they don´t understand what is the purpose of the scene and their character in that moment or if they just don´t have creativity to create lines. I think next rehearsal we should bring a bunch of possible lines and annotate what they create using the new lines as stimulus.

Connections

LAST YEAR´S SCHOOL PLAY: I remember my frustration while directing scene 5, we had the same problem of not having rhythm and lines were not said in a dynamic way. So, maybe I need to recap in my older posts and see how did I managed to solve those problems, as I concluded that last year´s knowledge will be reflected upon every director action I do in the school play.

OAP: In the OAP it was the same thing. We needed to do one scene each rehearsal so that the director could specifically work on our different problems. The main problem was our energy and how this changed. One day the energy was very high, other very low.

Reflections

I think that generally we are advancing in a great rhythm. We are just drafting scenes to adjust them later, but I still wonder....do we create the actors?

When I was reflecting upon my learning, I got to the conclusion that as normally directors in the school play give them a way of walking, a way of talking, actions, things to say, state their personality...then, who is the one who creates the character, the director or the actor?

if this is true, is it like this in every play? or just in school because we have different ages? are the actors just in charged of applying the character the director gives to them? to what extent do an actor explores by themselves? do actors are supposed to propose things for their character? or it is mandatory for the director to give something solid? or does it depends?

INCENDIOS

Description:

Last Sunday we went to the theatre to watch a play called "Incendios". The play included violent scenes and strong war-related themes that left us shaking until the next day. In this entry I would like to comment about this play´s scenery, lighting and sound effects. 

Analysis:

In this play, we could see an effective use of scenery. The scenery had four levels that were used in different moments of the play. I found really effective the fact that there were many doors and entries that help added rhythm to the play as actors could appear from different levels and different parts of the stage, which created dynamism. Also, the use of levels also helped to represent parallel scenes with the help of lighting, as there was needed to have a clear difference between the past and the present. Moreover, what of the most interesting things about this scenery is that it does´t have mayor changes, but rather use the same scenery to represent different settings. This was useful, as I want to achieve the same thing with the scenery of the school play, and it was good to see how the setting in this case, depended on the actors dialogues or the atmosphere created by the lights and sound effects. 

I also thought that the lighting and the sound effects were very effective as the lights could clearly represent what was happening at the present and what at the past by changing their colours. This is essential as there is a fluent change of time in this play as it revolves around Nawal Marwan´s story, and how their children try to make her last will after she died. This means lighting was useful as it helped the audience understand this aspect of the story in more detail. Also, the colours selected for the lights also helped. As the past had an opaque yellow colour and the present was more clear and white. Furthermore, the sound effects were also very effective throughout this play. As this play have various moments of war and accidents, the sound effects helped creating a mood of death and tragedy I´ve never felt before in a play. We could also see that although the visual images of the tragedies were terrible enough, the sound reinforced them and created an effect of strongness and fear to the audience.

Connections:

Proyeccion Privada: I can conect Incendios to Proyeccion Privada as the also had this change of lightning but between the scenes of reality and dreamlike scenes. Also, they had the same idea of having the same scenery all the time, just using the essential.

Falsarios: In this play we also had deaths and violent scenes, so I connect both plays in the area of themes. Also, both of them used the same type of acting as they had character decided to do something with an specific intention and goal. 

Grotowsky´s scenery: I think that as the scenery didn´t change and was used to represent many setting it could be connected to what grotowski says about theatre. However, the other elements were much more elaborated and didn´t follow this conventions, but I think that in the terms of scenery and lighting, this play will help us as another stimuli for the school play.

Reflections:

This play made me reflect on my own identity. It made me think about what mi ancestor may have been through and how sometimes you can judge the people of your own family without knowing their past. Also, I start thinking about the fact that sometimes it is necessary to include design elements in a play. This made me reflect upon the purpose for these conventions to be there. 

Until what extent does theatre works without design elements? Is it a convention that just helps the audience? Or does the actors feel different when having these elements around? How do you fully characterise your character without costumes or makeup? Does it depends on the actor? On how the director trains you? Why do theatre have different ways of being represented? Would it be more effective to have just one way? Or is it that what creates theatre itself?

IB Theatre Year Two, HERE WE GO!

Description

First of all, I have to confess. I did miss writing my learnings on theatre, I have not done it since last september (very irresponsible btw). However, I think I started with a pretty good attitude this year. So, this week we worked on the theatre practice we want to apply to this year´s school play, which is the poor theatre of Jerzy Grotowski. We did 2 sessions on practical exploration, and we individually read about his conventions and ideas in a worksheet miss alicia gave us. 

Analysis

The most important thing about this theatre practice is to know that grotowski placed the actor as a private individual, and that he tried to explore the actor´s relationship with the theatre in a new level. As he placed the actor of the core of the theatre practice, it was very important that each actor receives a training in which they can discover their physicality again, what he calls the memory of the body. Also, he had lots of corporals that help him with his concept of using your body until the point of exhaustion, 

but continue until you can´t longer feel it. 

Personally, the experience of having a personal training for this practice was a very unique and useful experience. Not only because it will help us to direct and show how things should be done in this theatre practice while directing the school play, but because it was more easy to understand Grotowski´s concepts once the practical work was done. I think that we achieve some of grotowski´s goals, as we connected with our bodies and found our limitations. Of course we didn´t have enough time to break them, but at least realising that in just two sessions was amazing. Also, we managed to work with some of his concepts, such as oppositions and contrasting movements. I really think that the most important learning outcome from this was how to connect with your body in a different way that allows you more control over it and more mental connection. 

Connections

Grotowski´s concepts: We worked a lot with the contrasting movements during the training. Also, we did some of his most famous positions such as the baby and the cat. Moreover, we worked as individuals, one of the main things on his concepts.

Previous physical trainings: This training was very similar to german expressionism. This is because both depended very much on the expulsion of things in order to act. Also, both depended in physical work that exhaust you. 

YOGA: Grotowski´s trainings connect with yoga as you connect with your body mentally and physically. I think it is amazing how these two things can help you to have that much control over your body, or at least help you to find the capacity of it.

Reflection

Grotowski asked himself a lot: what makes theatre unique? an he thought of his own answer; THE ACTOR, as he thought he was the only one who can give us the spiritual and mythic experiences we seek. This make me think; is not just the fact that theatre itself is unique, but that every theatre practice is unique too. Even if they come from another practice, every single them have their uniqueness.

Which makes me wonder,

Is theatre unique for everyone? does every director have a diferent opinion on theatre? why? If all directors asked themselves about it, will everyone state the actor as the core? or will someone say something is more important? is it really necessary to have a real person acting to call it theatre? why different theatre practices test different conventions? why is theatre not the same thing globally? why does each person give it a different meaning? does theatre has a meaning? do you need to understand theatre to define it? could an outside perspective be the same as an internal perspective? or does experience limits you less?