Week #20 Almost at the end of year one

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.