Even though the year has not ended yet, next week we will have to present a type of mock orals that will act as our final exam for the theatre course and will be 10 minutes shorter than the real thing. So in order to prepare myself for this I will start to reflect on everything we did this year on the theatre course. I will post the first part today and the second part next sunday. Today I will reflect on the two plays we did this year and some of the plays we watched and what I learned from them.
The first thing I have to say is that this year has taken everything I thought I knew about theatre and destroyed it in order to rebuild it in a better way, it is clear that what I thought I knew is nothing compared to what I know now and what I know now is nothing compared to what I will probably learn in the future and what I can learn someday. First of all I learned something that I have yet to put in practice and that is not to leave anything to the last minute, because this I am doing at the last minute and I thoroughly regret it. Now on a serious matter starting with Shadow Queendom I have to say that in past plays I have not felt as pressured to do something as in Shadow Queendom, its mostly because in previous plays I was not in charge of much apart from knowing my lines and maybe helping one or twice with production. Apart from the fact that Shadow Queendom was our first real production job and it was also very production heavy, masks had to be made as well as puppets and for that we had the help of Martin, whose last name I cant remember right now, but he helped us with the making of the puppets. Before Shadow Queendom I knew that production was not a walk in the park but what I realized in the school play is that we are set free and we are supposed to do it all ourselves, something that apparently none of us realized because we just couldn't get things ready. I have to confess that I am no proud of my work in the school play because I know I could have done better and even though I did do a couple of masks and puppets, my job was doing the scenery and I did not give it as much attention as I should. From that I learned that when working on a play in the way we did, you should help with as much as you can but never take your head out of what you are supposed to be really doing, my focus was supposed to be scenery and in the end it looked like it was masks or puppets.
After Shadow Queendom we had the one act play, that is where it all fell apart, we lost a man out there, it was not a good time to be part of theatre. With the one act play we were told that we had to do it all ourselves. I got costumes and it was stressing to say the least, doing costumes I spent two full days from 9 am to 7pm working on the one act play. Waking up on a saturday at 8 to go to Gamarra in order to buy half of the clothes because you spent about one hour getting there and you need to get back to school at 3:30 to rehearse with the costumes that you dont have is not something that calms you down. I believe that I probably redeemed myself because I worked hard on costumes in the one act play, doing the designs and running to buy everything and getting the right colors for the cloth on the table and the clothes and all at a reasonable price, I guess I did a good job even though I was supposed to have a parter who really did the least possible to help me.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
Week #19 Stand up Comedy
Last week in class a question popped up, "can standup comedy be considered a type theatre?" it was a question that we could not formally develop because it would take us more than the whole class to do so. Fortunately yesterday I had my first stand up comedy workshop and I learned a whole lot of things about the matter that will get us closer to answering that question.
Lets start by naming the parts of a Stand up act:
- The Comedian
- The Text
- The Audience
These are the 3 essential things you need to have in order to have for stand up comedy to be stand up comedy. This was the first thing Walter Chullo (who is leading the workshop) told us about stand up comedy; he then proceeded to tell us about the history of stand up comedy, which is not very relevant to the question, but it would be helpful to say that stand up comedy may have derived from theatre traditions like Commedia Dell'arte. The next thing we did was an analysis of comedy:
1) What do we laugh at? What makes us laugh?
- Mundane Situations
- Mundane Characters of life
- Stereotypes
- Disgraces/mistakes
- defects/gestures
- the physical/Physical aspects
- Jokes
- Nicknames
- The unexpected
- Words
- Tabu
- Old words/play on words
- double meaning
- misunderstanding
2) What don't we laugh at? What doesn't make us laugh?
- Sensible topics
3)Elements of comedy
The elements of comedy is in a way the structure of a bit.
- A Truth(a true starting point)
- That identifies/mundane(an absolute truth)
- Loss of status(with a higher status the funnier the loss of it)
Exercise #1: Say a truth that identifies and looses status
For example we could say something like: We have all been in the same situation, we have all been in the bathroom an realized that there is no toilet paper, and we have had to walk out an look for it with our pants down.
Here we have a truth (we all go to the bathroom) that identifies (we have all been in that situation) and loses status (having to walk out)
We then went on to learning how to choose our theme:
- Personal Context
- Physical characteristics
- psychological characteristics
- Fears
- Hates
- Social Context
- A place
- historical moment
- the new and/or nostalgic
- any other theme
Homework #1:
Develop three themes for each point mentioned above.
I will have to do this for the next class and for example something I could do could be talk about my size(Physical characteristics) or talk about public restrooms (A place)
After knowing how to choose a theme we then went on how to structure a monologue, the techniques on how to write.
1) Setup Punch
1.1 - setup, the previous part, build the situation, the absolute truth that identifies, not necessarily makes you laugh. the setup has to be written in the same way as you speak
1.2 - The Punch; the funny part, surprising, short, efective, unexpected, may be obvious, has to be funny
1.3 - Comedy's magic number is three
1.4 - Punch over the Punch - a technique where you continue to do punchlines over your original punchline.
2) Comparisons:
Comparisons have to be proportional
- "while you ... I ...." or "before it was like... now it is like..."
3) Representations
- scenes/dialogues
- present characters
- create atmosphere
- presents yourself as you are
- mime
4) Classification
- classificate any situations that causes laughter or develops content: for example, things that happen when you use the combi "there is always a woman that thinks she knows more than the driver...(use the representations) there is always a man that comes in and says ...."
5)Lists
- Making lists going from the most obvious to the most funny: for example, things not to do on a first date "ask her to pay, make unfunny jokes, tell her about the dead hooker in the trunk of your car"
6) Contrast attitude
- take the theme one way and surprise with the punch
7) Audiovisuals
- a video, picture or song
8)Props
9)The Callback
- something that worked before and is used again
10)The absurd
- start with something real and DEGENERATE it into something absurd
Homework #2:
Choose 3 of the themes in HW #1 and develop 1 using the previous "tools"
Tips to write standup comedy:
- write in the first person
- write how you speak
- structure of the monologue
- present yourself
- present the theme
- develop the theme
- leave
- use punctuation
- write in a group
That is all we learned the first day and as far as I know it is not as close to theatre as i thought it was and even though it has some elements of theatre there is no direct connection to it. I think that as the course goes on I will find more connections to theatre.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Week #18 Life and Death
Last week I did a review (to put it that way) of the production of the one act play; this week I want to go a little bit deeper into the whole story and try to take out as much as I can from the play. The main reason I am doing this is because the form IV students had to do their reviews for last week and I think it was monday or tuesday when I got spammed by them with questions like "what was the concept" or "what was the theme" and even though I did know the concept was "Death is at the center and Life is on top" I really did not have much to say about our theme, was it Death or Life and Death or What happens after death.
I dont want to make this entry emotional and what follows may not be very relevant to the course but I really want to write about what I think about death at least a little bit. I dont know if I am afraid to die or not, I am an atheist so I dont believe there will be much after death, as a matter of fact I dont believe there will be a thing after I die, that does scare me a little bit because if you think about it after you die there is nothing, but how can there be nothing if there is so much here. There is never a moment ever where nothing is going on, right now you could stop reading, close your eyes and try to think about nothing...you cant, nothing is something and there is nothing you can do to make nothing nothing. We think about something every second of our life so how can that be turned into nothing when you die, where do all those thoughts go, what do you do, does everything go black and thats it? do you know when you die or is it just something that you never notice. I would really like to write more about this but this blog is not for me to write about my thoughts its for me to write about what I learn in the course so I will probably write about this somewhere else.
Death is something that I believe is seen differently by everyone because everyone lives a different life, because of this people might have gotten different ideas from our plays theme. In poems there is always what the author wanted to say and what the reader thought the author wanted to say, I believe that no interpretation of anything is ever wrong because if there is one thing I think that no one can be wrong about is an opinion, there may be opinions that are stronger or better or more coherent than others but that does not make lesser opinions wrong. Where I am trying to get is that if we were to thoroughly analise everything to do with death in our play we can get many different opinions and different interpretations of it.
Lets just focus on death in each of the characters for the moment, because one of the ways that you can interpret the characters in the play is that none of the characters was really alive ever. Starting with the boy, this character is dead because it is always connected to his technology and never takes part in what goes around him, he is socially dead. We have the farmer and his wife, he is dead because all he thinks about is his farm, another character that may be considered socially dead. His wife the mother in law appears twice and then dies just like the grandmother that only appears once and dies, but even though these two characters were very energetic they can be considered dead because they were never developed as a part of the play, no one really cared about them when they were there because the only one who cares about the mother in law is the father in law and her daughter and they are never there with her, the same with the grandmother, the only one that would have cared about her was McRobbie but he is dead; these characters are not really "dead" but they alone and when you die you die alone and going back to what I believe about death, they were alone with nothing around them so maybe they were very alive but their surroundings made them in a way "dead" because they were alone. The doctor does not care if they all die because he is already dead inside he also looks dead and does not know what is right and what is wrong, he is morally dead. Then we have the lawyer and the administrator, they both seem to hate their jobs and cant stand anyone but themselves at the end they can be considered the ones that are alive out of all the characters because they leave together but that was something that was done in a rush at the end of the production process. The administrator can also be considered morally dead because she does not care about the dead in the same way as the doctor, and that can be seen when she bangs the corpse with a hammer. Both nurses are dead because of the same reasons as the grandmother and the mother in law, because they can never be together, they are dead because of separation and they may only be considered alive if they are together which they never are. The Ex-wife is the one that feels the loss of the husband so she is dead when he dies because she really loved him and his death "killed" her, she cant be with him so she is emotionally dead. The priest and the new wife are both dead because of greed, their greed cant make them live a normal life because they just think about money, the new wife just wants to open un her husband and get whatever is inside so she can get the money from the insurance company. The lawyer also wants this and the priest too so the three of them can be considered blinded by greed and in a way also dead.
The character that is really dead is McRobbie and because he is dead he has been freed from everything that makes the others dead, separation, greed, emotions etc. so in a way apart from the fact that he is already dead he can be considered the only one that is really alive.
I dont want to make this entry emotional and what follows may not be very relevant to the course but I really want to write about what I think about death at least a little bit. I dont know if I am afraid to die or not, I am an atheist so I dont believe there will be much after death, as a matter of fact I dont believe there will be a thing after I die, that does scare me a little bit because if you think about it after you die there is nothing, but how can there be nothing if there is so much here. There is never a moment ever where nothing is going on, right now you could stop reading, close your eyes and try to think about nothing...you cant, nothing is something and there is nothing you can do to make nothing nothing. We think about something every second of our life so how can that be turned into nothing when you die, where do all those thoughts go, what do you do, does everything go black and thats it? do you know when you die or is it just something that you never notice. I would really like to write more about this but this blog is not for me to write about my thoughts its for me to write about what I learn in the course so I will probably write about this somewhere else.
Death is something that I believe is seen differently by everyone because everyone lives a different life, because of this people might have gotten different ideas from our plays theme. In poems there is always what the author wanted to say and what the reader thought the author wanted to say, I believe that no interpretation of anything is ever wrong because if there is one thing I think that no one can be wrong about is an opinion, there may be opinions that are stronger or better or more coherent than others but that does not make lesser opinions wrong. Where I am trying to get is that if we were to thoroughly analise everything to do with death in our play we can get many different opinions and different interpretations of it.
Lets just focus on death in each of the characters for the moment, because one of the ways that you can interpret the characters in the play is that none of the characters was really alive ever. Starting with the boy, this character is dead because it is always connected to his technology and never takes part in what goes around him, he is socially dead. We have the farmer and his wife, he is dead because all he thinks about is his farm, another character that may be considered socially dead. His wife the mother in law appears twice and then dies just like the grandmother that only appears once and dies, but even though these two characters were very energetic they can be considered dead because they were never developed as a part of the play, no one really cared about them when they were there because the only one who cares about the mother in law is the father in law and her daughter and they are never there with her, the same with the grandmother, the only one that would have cared about her was McRobbie but he is dead; these characters are not really "dead" but they alone and when you die you die alone and going back to what I believe about death, they were alone with nothing around them so maybe they were very alive but their surroundings made them in a way "dead" because they were alone. The doctor does not care if they all die because he is already dead inside he also looks dead and does not know what is right and what is wrong, he is morally dead. Then we have the lawyer and the administrator, they both seem to hate their jobs and cant stand anyone but themselves at the end they can be considered the ones that are alive out of all the characters because they leave together but that was something that was done in a rush at the end of the production process. The administrator can also be considered morally dead because she does not care about the dead in the same way as the doctor, and that can be seen when she bangs the corpse with a hammer. Both nurses are dead because of the same reasons as the grandmother and the mother in law, because they can never be together, they are dead because of separation and they may only be considered alive if they are together which they never are. The Ex-wife is the one that feels the loss of the husband so she is dead when he dies because she really loved him and his death "killed" her, she cant be with him so she is emotionally dead. The priest and the new wife are both dead because of greed, their greed cant make them live a normal life because they just think about money, the new wife just wants to open un her husband and get whatever is inside so she can get the money from the insurance company. The lawyer also wants this and the priest too so the three of them can be considered blinded by greed and in a way also dead.
The character that is really dead is McRobbie and because he is dead he has been freed from everything that makes the others dead, separation, greed, emotions etc. so in a way apart from the fact that he is already dead he can be considered the only one that is really alive.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Week# 17 One Act Play
Its finally over, we are done with the one act play and even though there were some mistakes and some things that could have been better it all went better than expected. The things that needed to be changed were not part of the final product, our play was good and the audience liked it so I feel that in the end it was more than what we were expecting. As far as the production goes, there are many things that I learned:
1) Dont do tomorrow what you could have done 2 days ago: never leave anything for the last day because then it will screw you up. There was one mistake in the play and that was that one of Stefano's breasts fell and that was because the decision to deflate one of the balls was made just when we were leaving for Hiram Bingham so we never got to actually rehearse with the new "Implants" so even though Stefano did a good job fixing it on stage when the breast fell, it is something that didn't need to happen. Also I think I should have gone to gamarra to buy everything before because we had many rehearsals where the costumes were not 100% ready so we couldn't know how it would all look like and in my case I didnt know how uncomfortable the doctors clothes really were until I actually tried them on 2 days before the play.
2)Don't be lazy: I admit that because of our laziness the designs for the costumes had to be done 4 or 5 times because we presented things that were either not done correctly or done very badly and because of that the process was stalled a bit.
3) Work Fast: if you dont work fast you loose time and with a thing like this time is very important because we actually had very little time to do everything and we did not realize that until it was too late and then we had to stay in school rehearsing until 7 pm
4) Learn your lines: that one is self explanatory
5) Work as a team: Many things happened throughout the whole process of doing the play that made us loose time, starting with the designs for the costumes, because of the costume team (Nicolas and I) we lost a couple of classes redoing everything and we could not go on with the makeup, sound, props and scenery. Also without mentioning names some people (including myself) did things or didn't do things that made everything go slower and made all of us loose time.
Apart from all these things I believe that our play came out very good, with people saying that "It was the best one act play of the bunch" "It was the best one act play ever" and "Mejor Obra que he visto a lo que EVER! Felicitaciones!" so yeah it went better than expected.
P.S. I went to watch the other plays the next day and they were not all very good. The one from Markham was about 7 jewish kids, it was slow and boring, its game consisted mainly of projecting an image on a piece of scenery but it did not work. Maruf the Cobbler from St. Georges was a kids play so it was fine, it was cute and the little kids did a good job, a little bit too long though. The Gilded Bat from San Silvestre was good time but not necessarily good, aesthetically I really liked its gloomy look because it had a Tim Burton-ish feel and I believe they were going for something like that also because of the way they moved and the makeup helped the look very much. The only problem with this one is that it was fun at first but after the first few minutes it died down very quick and did not pick up so after 7 or 8 minutes I already wanted it to finish, it was the best out of the 4 though. The last one was from Hiram Bingham, it was simple and some of the acting was fun but apart from that it was dull and repetitive, I was really looking forward to this one and maybe that is why I disliked it so much; it had funny lines but it was an already scripted play so no props can be given to the school for that :/.
P.P.S. Hiram Binghams head master congratulated us for our play the second day saying that it was "the only play written and produced by the students" but we all know he meant "It was the only play worth paying for"
1) Dont do tomorrow what you could have done 2 days ago: never leave anything for the last day because then it will screw you up. There was one mistake in the play and that was that one of Stefano's breasts fell and that was because the decision to deflate one of the balls was made just when we were leaving for Hiram Bingham so we never got to actually rehearse with the new "Implants" so even though Stefano did a good job fixing it on stage when the breast fell, it is something that didn't need to happen. Also I think I should have gone to gamarra to buy everything before because we had many rehearsals where the costumes were not 100% ready so we couldn't know how it would all look like and in my case I didnt know how uncomfortable the doctors clothes really were until I actually tried them on 2 days before the play.
2)Don't be lazy: I admit that because of our laziness the designs for the costumes had to be done 4 or 5 times because we presented things that were either not done correctly or done very badly and because of that the process was stalled a bit.
3) Work Fast: if you dont work fast you loose time and with a thing like this time is very important because we actually had very little time to do everything and we did not realize that until it was too late and then we had to stay in school rehearsing until 7 pm
4) Learn your lines: that one is self explanatory
5) Work as a team: Many things happened throughout the whole process of doing the play that made us loose time, starting with the designs for the costumes, because of the costume team (Nicolas and I) we lost a couple of classes redoing everything and we could not go on with the makeup, sound, props and scenery. Also without mentioning names some people (including myself) did things or didn't do things that made everything go slower and made all of us loose time.
Apart from all these things I believe that our play came out very good, with people saying that "It was the best one act play of the bunch" "It was the best one act play ever" and "Mejor Obra que he visto a lo que EVER! Felicitaciones!" so yeah it went better than expected.
P.S. I went to watch the other plays the next day and they were not all very good. The one from Markham was about 7 jewish kids, it was slow and boring, its game consisted mainly of projecting an image on a piece of scenery but it did not work. Maruf the Cobbler from St. Georges was a kids play so it was fine, it was cute and the little kids did a good job, a little bit too long though. The Gilded Bat from San Silvestre was good time but not necessarily good, aesthetically I really liked its gloomy look because it had a Tim Burton-ish feel and I believe they were going for something like that also because of the way they moved and the makeup helped the look very much. The only problem with this one is that it was fun at first but after the first few minutes it died down very quick and did not pick up so after 7 or 8 minutes I already wanted it to finish, it was the best out of the 4 though. The last one was from Hiram Bingham, it was simple and some of the acting was fun but apart from that it was dull and repetitive, I was really looking forward to this one and maybe that is why I disliked it so much; it had funny lines but it was an already scripted play so no props can be given to the school for that :/.
P.P.S. Hiram Binghams head master congratulated us for our play the second day saying that it was "the only play written and produced by the students" but we all know he meant "It was the only play worth paying for"
Monday, August 27, 2012
Week #16 types of comedy
Trying to get everything ready in time is going to be a big challenge now; I just realized that we have 5 rehearsals left and we dont have the play ready. Even though it is clear that now we are working faster than before and it is not like we are very far away from getting everything ready with time to spare, but what I am worried about is that we may get it ready in time but there wont be enough time to polish the play.
Apart from this I believe that the play is coming together better than I expected, it is mainly because there is one scene in the play where we use slapstick and I am part of it and first of all it is very entertaining to do, second I think it looks very good and third it adds that comedy element that I think the play was lacking. I say this because even though we do have some jokes here and there, they are very few of them and the ones that are there are very lame. I really believe that the slapstick may be the most memorable part of our play because if we are going for a comedic performance this kind of comedy is the one that will be most popular with the audience.
A couple of weeks ago I was discussing with a friend about the different kids of humor in different places, doing this we came to the conclusion that humor in Europe (specially England) is sarcastic and smart, humor in the united states of america is "realistic"or talks about real life situations, we can see this in sitcoms or stand up comedy shows where the comedians mock different real life situations. We were not very sure about how comedy was in places like Japan or China but we had an idea, it is more outrageous, what we meant by that is that for example if you watch prank videos from that part of the world or even game shows you can notice that they are very over the top, with things that would never be accepted by people from this side of the world.
Then we had to decide what comedy was like here in Peru and it was not hard at all, comedy here is mostly slapstick, people here like seeing other people get hit or falling down or geting a pie thrown at their face, and as far as verbal comedy goes we like very simple and raunchy jokes sometimes even being very obscene. We like to see a guy dressed as a woman calling another man a homosexual while falling down the stairs.
That is why I think that if we stick with the slapstick, even though the audience is part of the BSP their perception of comedy is influenced by the country they live in and if we have stupid, simple and raunchy jokes like for example a man dressed as a nurse with big boobs we will have the audience laughing because that is what people here really enjoy, including myself.
Apart from this I believe that the play is coming together better than I expected, it is mainly because there is one scene in the play where we use slapstick and I am part of it and first of all it is very entertaining to do, second I think it looks very good and third it adds that comedy element that I think the play was lacking. I say this because even though we do have some jokes here and there, they are very few of them and the ones that are there are very lame. I really believe that the slapstick may be the most memorable part of our play because if we are going for a comedic performance this kind of comedy is the one that will be most popular with the audience.
A couple of weeks ago I was discussing with a friend about the different kids of humor in different places, doing this we came to the conclusion that humor in Europe (specially England) is sarcastic and smart, humor in the united states of america is "realistic"or talks about real life situations, we can see this in sitcoms or stand up comedy shows where the comedians mock different real life situations. We were not very sure about how comedy was in places like Japan or China but we had an idea, it is more outrageous, what we meant by that is that for example if you watch prank videos from that part of the world or even game shows you can notice that they are very over the top, with things that would never be accepted by people from this side of the world.
Then we had to decide what comedy was like here in Peru and it was not hard at all, comedy here is mostly slapstick, people here like seeing other people get hit or falling down or geting a pie thrown at their face, and as far as verbal comedy goes we like very simple and raunchy jokes sometimes even being very obscene. We like to see a guy dressed as a woman calling another man a homosexual while falling down the stairs.
That is why I think that if we stick with the slapstick, even though the audience is part of the BSP their perception of comedy is influenced by the country they live in and if we have stupid, simple and raunchy jokes like for example a man dressed as a nurse with big boobs we will have the audience laughing because that is what people here really enjoy, including myself.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Week #15 Game Changer
The last time I wrote an entry it was before Paucartambo, and I could write about it right now but with the one act play in a month I think that it is better to write about it right now than Paucartambo. That does not mean that I wont write about Paucartambo, it just means that I will write about it but later, maybe next week or the week after the one act play because right now we are against time and there are other things to write about. Also we will be doing the Paucartambo thing later this year and there will be plenty to write about then.
The designs I have finished up to right now are the boy, the Father in law and the mother in law but I may need to change them because of the black base that may be used. Im not sure if the black base thing will work for this play because in shadow queendom there were a whole lot of characters and it made sense that we would do that because for example half of them used the same clothes or the arch bishop used a big robe so it did not matter and we had masks so it worked, but in the one act play it may look like the characters are missing something. It is true that we did focus more on the puppets and masks in the school play and in this one we are focusing on characterization so maybe it wont matter if we have a black base and some pieces of clothing on top, but maybe the lack of clothes makes the characterization harder to understand or less effective but we will have to see. Maybe the characters don't have to be in full costume to work, and if they do what is the thing that makes an actor be the character appart from saying his lines and doing the actions properly if its not the looks? is it the presence of the stimuli in the characters or maybe how the actor looks with or without the characters costume? what about me I am a big guy if I try to do a character like Salad fingers, Freaky fred or Katz would it work for me or do I have to look a certain way first?
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| Color Scheme |
This past week we continued where we left off with the one act play(appart from the fact that we had already sent in our scenes for the script, that will most likely be completely changed) on tuesday we started with the planning in class and later that evening we continued with a little bit of rehearsing and changing some lines around. On wednesday in class our production tasks were assigned, I got costumes and because the game was supposed to be characters with two sides(each side representing a different character) I had to design costumes that represented two different characters one for each side. For thursday I did the male/female nurse and the doctor.
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| Salad Fingers |
The male/female nurse had two options it would have been either having the male(nurso) use the blue/green from the color scheme and the female(nursa) use the green from the color scheme and have both use classic male nurse hospital clothes but each side having a different color. Option two would have been the same for the male nurse but the female nurse would have used a white short skirt and a white blouse. The doctor will use a white long over coat, a white shirt, a purple tie, black rubber gloves and a black apron.
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| Freaky Fred |
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| Katz |
Later on thursday we continued with the rehearsal and worked on our characterization, my first approach to a character was salad fingers that is a character from a youtube series, salad fingers has a soft voice and gives a very creepy vibe that I thought would go well with the coroner(doctor) because of the way he speaks. Then I thought about Freaky Fred, Le Quack and Katz from courage the cowardly dog but I didn't try them so I just went for an angry doctor, maybe I can incorporate them to the character. But the same day we realized that the game would not work and decided that we had to change it to just everyone having two characters and dressing in a different way for each. That meant that the ideas I had for other characters had to be changed. Having to change the game means that the costumes cant be very complicated and we may be looking at another play that used the black base and just another item of clothing.
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| Le Quack |
Monday, July 9, 2012
Week #14 Pre-Paucartambo & one act play
Here is a little playlist for you to feast on Click
In less than a week we are leaving for Paucartambo and I have yet to decide what I will research when I get there, I was thinking of doing something like the use of the space or the use of the masks. If I can I would really like to focus on something like a single group like for example just do it all about the Maqtas or the Qollas, but I dont know if that would work for me because I would be missing out on the others by focusing just on one, however if I did want to do it about one group of characters it could be the Maqtas because they are always present. Focusing just on one would be really hard and knowing myself I will do a better job if I focus on a less specific aspect of the festival like the role of the audience or costumes or anything that could be applied to all the comparsas for that matter. One advantage I will probably have will be that altitude does not affect me as much (or it did not affect me as much the last time I was there) so I wont have to worry about fainting or feeling sick and if I do all I need is a mate de coca and im back on my feet.
When we get back from Paucartambo and the vacations end we will have to continue with the one act play and I am not supposed to talk about it yet because its still in development, so I will just say some things about it. We already have the setting, the characters and the game, we have some of the story maybe and outline of the outline but we already have something to work on. We have had two meetings, the first one was bleh a little bit slow we did not get much done, I would not say it was a complete failure but we did not get much from it appart from the setting and maybe some other ideas like the characters. The second meeting was productive we came up with the game we assigned which characters each one would have and its safe to say that we are ready to start planning the story and all the rest. We have two meetings left before we leave for Paucartambo, so I guess that we really need to step up our game because we cant go to Paucartambo with what we have right now.
The game could be compared a little bit to last years game because it has something to do with "two sides" and a little bit with the game used in "The other side" because it also deals with two different personalities but not of the same character. We are just starting with the one act play so I am not very sure of what to think about it right now but it seems like its going on the right direction specially because we are so many in the group so we wont have the problems other groups had before of having to call people from other grades to help, we are calling someone but it is not because we need more people to play more characters, in fact we have a 13 characters in total: a doctor, a lawyer, manager, a grandmother, a good wife, a bad wife, a priest, a little kid, a mother in law, a father in law, a male nurse, a female nurse and a dead man. So lets hope that we can pull through and live up to the reputation our school has had for years.
In less than a week we are leaving for Paucartambo and I have yet to decide what I will research when I get there, I was thinking of doing something like the use of the space or the use of the masks. If I can I would really like to focus on something like a single group like for example just do it all about the Maqtas or the Qollas, but I dont know if that would work for me because I would be missing out on the others by focusing just on one, however if I did want to do it about one group of characters it could be the Maqtas because they are always present. Focusing just on one would be really hard and knowing myself I will do a better job if I focus on a less specific aspect of the festival like the role of the audience or costumes or anything that could be applied to all the comparsas for that matter. One advantage I will probably have will be that altitude does not affect me as much (or it did not affect me as much the last time I was there) so I wont have to worry about fainting or feeling sick and if I do all I need is a mate de coca and im back on my feet.
When we get back from Paucartambo and the vacations end we will have to continue with the one act play and I am not supposed to talk about it yet because its still in development, so I will just say some things about it. We already have the setting, the characters and the game, we have some of the story maybe and outline of the outline but we already have something to work on. We have had two meetings, the first one was bleh a little bit slow we did not get much done, I would not say it was a complete failure but we did not get much from it appart from the setting and maybe some other ideas like the characters. The second meeting was productive we came up with the game we assigned which characters each one would have and its safe to say that we are ready to start planning the story and all the rest. We have two meetings left before we leave for Paucartambo, so I guess that we really need to step up our game because we cant go to Paucartambo with what we have right now.
The game could be compared a little bit to last years game because it has something to do with "two sides" and a little bit with the game used in "The other side" because it also deals with two different personalities but not of the same character. We are just starting with the one act play so I am not very sure of what to think about it right now but it seems like its going on the right direction specially because we are so many in the group so we wont have the problems other groups had before of having to call people from other grades to help, we are calling someone but it is not because we need more people to play more characters, in fact we have a 13 characters in total: a doctor, a lawyer, manager, a grandmother, a good wife, a bad wife, a priest, a little kid, a mother in law, a father in law, a male nurse, a female nurse and a dead man. So lets hope that we can pull through and live up to the reputation our school has had for years.
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