Week #2 Hero in Lumine and the play

Here is a little playlist for you to feast on Click 

Having to write a blog every week will be something that I definitely won’t enjoy at all, I have been told by many people who are doing the IB and who have already done it that I don’t have to see the writing of the blog as a chore but more like a hobby and I do understand what they are trying to tell me and well it is true because as a matter of fact I am enjoying myself right now and it is easy to rant about what you dislike in life (like how irritating is to have to write a blog when you could be doing something else or reading a book for school that you don’t want to read) but that is not the point of anything at all I really need these blogs because they will help me with the course. So future self, if you are reading this please forgive me this is only my second entry and I know I need to improve but I guess you already did you handsome devil.

This second week was pretty long, we went downtown to watch a play called “Vedova in lumine” that I will try to “review” later on, there was also a whole lot of brainstorming about the play and about how to research topics, we presented our research on our selected topic and the play rehearsals began.

Vedova in Lumine

Where can I start, I did not enjoy this play it was boring (at least for me it was) it is just one of those plays where you cant really understand what is going on and you just want to stand up and say “What is this that you are trying to show me” as a matter of fact I think I did not enjoy it because I was expecting to go and see a great play and just got a mediocre play. But actually to get on the brighter side of things if you were to tell me that I need to judge this based on its dance and choreography I would actually would have said that it was good but it is something very superficial that does not make the play better in my eyes. There was one thing that I did enjoy about it; there were a lot of puppets and different ways to use them and even though it is not what I am in charge of in the production of the play it gave me a whole lot of ideas on what to do with puppets something that I was not expecting to happen. So the play was pretty bad but I really liked the use of the puppets and it made me wonder, what other ways of using puppets apart from the traditional ones are there?

My presentation did not go as planned, mainly because I did a poor job with the research and it really is my fault that it went wrong. Knowing that my research was bad and that the amount of information I had was very limited now I realize that I should have been more prepared for it. At least I learned something from this, never be unprepared for anything and if you think you are it probably is because you are. My next presentation is on masks and puppets in other theatre traditions and I chose to do it about some African tradition but I’m not really sure which one yet, it is something that I need to do it quickly because I am running out of time.

And speaking of running out of time the first “rehearsal” of the school play was last week and what I mean by running out of time is that after the first weeks of the school play it seems like time just flies by and you are already acting in front of the whole school. We did what we do every year (or at least what we did these past 2 years) we played the usual games and they explained how the play will be like, nothing different.

The last thing we did this week was watching the movie “Hero” and as a the film buff that I am I liked this and did see the connection with the play and how they want it to look like, but I really found more connection between it and last years play “miyuki y los tres demonios” but mainly just because it was Asian and its look but not because of the story. One of the things that I liked the most was that many scenes had perfect contrast between the light, colors and scenery; there was one scene where a woman is in the forest with yellow-orange leaves on the floor and wearing a red dress that made perfect contrast with everything in the scene. There was also a scene with pieces of cloth hanging from the ceiling where it made the room look smaller when it was actually a big room (something that would be great in the play). I really liked the movie and I hope we can use some of what we saw in the movie on this years play.

As I said before this week was very long but at least I learned something from it. I hope that the play that we will watch tomorrow (La Cocina) is better that “Vedova in Lumine” and that we learn from it and are able to adopt some elements from it. In the end the thing that made me think this week was, how can we use puppets in ways that are not so conventional? How can we make the puppets look alive? What do we have to do to make the play work?