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?