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?