Theatre Journal
Within our last week of work leading up to our performance, we've been really trying to work out the kinks in our piece. We've been constantly editing and re-editing our script as well as the blocking involved. We've been working around with the concept of now having characters for everyone and trying to encapture them without losing who each person is real life. We want to try to make each character real and relatable. With all of the reframing of the piece, specifically with blocking, it's definitely added another challenge specifically to my job. I've been having to remap and replot which lights happen when for the moments because even a character's slightest movement will affect what lights I can use to get the right affect. We'll really have to hunker down and refine this piece even more, but I know we'll be able to it.
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Several weeks ago, the students in the IB Theater class were given the opportunity of seeing ArtsWest production of Peter and the Starcatchers. I initially didn't know what to expect because I had known the basic premis of the story but was excited to see the full story and how it was interpreted. The Theater itself was very small and had only few rows of seats surrounding three sides of the main stage. The actors would also act within inbetween the rows of seats and interacted with the audience the entire time. One of the elements that I really enjoyed was how all of the sound and music in the show was made on stage by a member of the cast, so it was all more organic and realistic. Each of the characters were incredible and so well-developed, that I was amazed to hear that the cast was made of professional actors, as well as college and high school students. Within the script there were jokes created by the cast relating to current events that had each of us curling over in hysterics. One of the things that I loved the most was how even though it was a children's story, it's made for all audiences and can be enjoyed by all.
In the week before winter break, we watched our video of our performance and had a lot of realizations and had to make a lot of decisions. We noticed that each of our scenes between characters were not cohesive enough and that thee element of time had been very ascued, so we eventually decided to have each character enter and be on stage individually, that we would have everyone be on stage the entire time. We also wanted to working on cleaning up our moments, to make them more precise and easily understandable. One of the other big elements that had to get changed was the aspect of not having someone to run the lights, who understands the lightboard and what needs to happen in the way that I mapped and planned them out. So this led us to taking my character out entirely so I could focus on lights, to make sure everything runs smoothly and also take care of sounds cues as well. Initially, it seemed like all of these revisions were going to be to tasking and that we wouldn't have enough time, but we eventually realized that they were all very necessary to make sure that our piece is the best it can be.
Two weeks prior to going on winter break, we chose to film our piece before our main performance so we could see how our piece appears and look at elements we might want to change. So in prep for video taping the piece, we worked on solidfy and adding more elements to the set including things to pack in boxes, the radio, the projector, the glass box that shatters, and other pieces to help dress the set. We had a difficult time when some of our members were sick or not present for devising so we had to make som conscious decision without them for the time being. When we lacked a majority of the group we chose to work on our own person things that need to get finalized for the video taping. With having the pressure just of the video taping alone, we wanted to make sure we were cohesive as a group and that our message is properly portrayed through our piece.
Within the last our group really wanted to working solidifying physical elements whether it be the set our ourselves as actors. We typed up all of our solidified nostalgia moments and for my job specifically, I typed up the entire light cue sheet including levels and which lights go up according to who is and isn't on stage. We also tried to incorporate more props and elements into the set itself by adding boxes, a makeshift bed, as well as other pieces that can be packed into the boxes since our main container is one of us moving out of our childhood home. After that we tried running different parts as much as we could to figure out what emotions we are trying to portray and if it will be easy for our audience to interpret them.
As we are in the last month of our work and we are quickly approaching winter break, we discussed and planned out a schedule for what needs to be established by what date and so on. And with knowing that it is a devised piece and elements are bound to change and that the schedule is more to give us an idea of where we should be by certain points. We went back and reviewed the previous elements of other IB journals for the collaborative piece and thought about what we wanted to include in our own. Luckily we've been continuously documenting our work whether it be written, recorded vocally, taped, or just with pictures and drawings. We also reviewed what main elements we wanted to try and remember that we wanted to grasp in our piece when we used the Stanislavsky exercise. We really want to try and keep our piece authentic and true to us, as if we were actually living that scenario.
With having a rough outline of the plot of our devised piece, we wanted to be able to work with the stage fully. So for the next available class, our group set up the stage and adjusted the lights according to our production, but set the lights in such a way that the light plot is balanced and can be used for other productions as well. We finally had everybody in our group and worked on the ins and outs of everyone's scenes and had everyone make lists and maps of the work needed to do for their job, for instance I am the Lighting designer, so i have mapped out the light plot, and have sketched out what lights come up, what level they need to be at, and when they need to change for each scene. What's probably been the most difficult for everyone is that we've purposely chosen to play ourselves in our piece, which can be a very awkward thing to do, I mean how do you act as yourself?
Within this last week after having our teacher ask to see the progress we have made with our piece, was the motivation we needed to start putting all of the elements together and create our story. We worked on the transitions from moment to moment. We worked on the stage and placed boxes as place holders for how are set will appear. We also worked on adjusting the lights to highlight different parts of the stage for each person's moment, as well as put different gels into the lights to balance out the cool and warm tones. After we had sketched out the basic plot of our piece we decided to just run through it to see what would happen because we wouldn't know unless we tried. We got into a somewhat heavy discussion about whether or not the person in their moment would read their dialogue or if someone else off stage would read so we chose to try both to see what it would look like and eventually decided on having the person in their moment read the piece.
This last week, we had talked and explored our ideas and thoughts about moments and decided that we needed to get more comfortable with just acting in general so we decided to play some improv games. The main one that we stuck with was "freeze" where two characters start a scene, someone will say freeze, and then take one of the people's places and start a completely different scene based off how they were positioned. We then wanted to keep working on establishing more concrete elements of our production and decided to define each of our roles. We weren't going to be the only person with input on our certain areas but essentially be the main person who comes up with ideas for that area and who is willing to take input from the rest of the group. Because I'm a junior and the seniors have to take on the bigger roles, I took on the role of lighting designer because I already understand how our school's light board functions and know how to achieve other people's ideas and because it's important but it doesn't have the most weight to it. We also then tried reading each other's different ideas on Nostalgia aloud and worked on reactions and creating the concept of two different worlds.
In the past week, we wrote down potential items, pieces of work, art, song, and other things of the sort to be aspects that could potentially help our piece, including the objects, images, and songs that we initially brought in for inspiration, whether we end up using the pieces or not. We then tried looking up different exercises by other theater practitioners whether it be for devised theater or not to see if they could potentially aid us in our journey of discovering our devised piece. The main theater practitioner that we ended up looking at was Stanislavsky because we felt that his ideas and concepts related most to what we wanted to achieve with our piece. The main approach that Stanislavsky always took was the aspect of trying to relate to whatever character you are trying to portray and truly feel what your character is feeling, and since our piece is based of personal experiences it was easy for us to understand. One of the exercises that we all ended up liking and found really touching and personal, and that made us very vulnerable gave us the capability of trusting was an exercise by Stanislavsky called "what if". The exercise essentially was having us all face the wall and some what say a statement of "what if you were doing such and such" and we would stand still but have our body and face react as if we were in that moment. I personally really felt the exercise work when one of our group members had said "imagine if you had just found out that you lost someone very close to you" and a few of us including myself actually started tearing up. Below I will put some of thoughts that I was feeling in that moment.
In our next class period, we then decided to work on moments and just have each of our members individually interact with different objects that would be on our set that would portray someone moving away, so moving boxes, furniture, and other memorabilia of that sort. It opened us to find different ideas and how we want to go about discovering our individual moments. We also took a time lapse of the work we did that day. |
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