12/5/14

Today's Question: Describe how transformation was used in your surreal object performance. What was the effect you observed as an audience member watching the transformation and use of color and music?

Yeah, so we're occasionally doing this sort of thing now, where our journals are more about answering a question that recounting events.

So as the question would suggest, our main task today was a performance in groups. Essentially, we were given five objects (that one would find in a dream) that we had to form as groups - a lobster telephone; a flower with human legs for petals; a half-woman half-alligator (this one was interesting as my group was entirely male); and a melted head on a crutch - and then transformed from one to another.

The transformation helped very much with the feeling of the performance taking place in a dreamlike, surreal state, as well as allowing for the transitions between each object to be less jarring and more... almost confusing, I guess. Something along those lines. I know what I'm talking about, I just can't work out what the words are.

Of course, we weren't the only group who did such a performance, which brings us to the second part of the question. One of the other groups, after performing theirs, were then asked to perform it again with different lighting. The angle of the lighting had a large effect, to begin with - lit from below, the performance seemed much more mysterious and not a little more hostile - but the colours also affected the mood greatly - blue makes it feel more dreamlike, green simply enhances the surrealism of it all and red lighting created a very noticeable sense of foreboding and aggression.

Now here's a cat.

5/5/14

Today we carried on with our chorus performances, after doing a quick warmup that was essentially Chinese Whispers but with mime.

Well, I say we continued, but really we started properly working out what we were doing. Most of the people in our group also magically disappeared, but we got a few more back, pretty much evening out our total.

...Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that last journal. Sorry about that. We've been looking at chorus in performance (multiple actors portray one character - not necessarily one person, but one character, such as 'the women' or 'the builders'), and divided up into two groups to each perform, as a chorus, one half of a chorus section (specifically, the women's section from Medea).


So. We essentially started work today, despite starting last lesson. That time was mostly spent throwing ideas and hoping they'd stick, and by the time we started today we had a nice sticky ball of ideas that we were ready to start sculpting into a performance.
I love and hate that metaphor at the same time.
Our performance consisted of one action for each line, often essentially acting out the main point of each. The main technique that we used was the simple 'integrating audience' one - we surrounded the audience in a circle and performed in pairs around them. We did also use a little canon, but not much.

No other groups really thought to integrate the audience into the performance, but many other techniques were used, including multiple voice and transformation, things that we simply didn't think to include.

I don't really know how I can evaluate my particular performance on this one. I guess I'll just say that I have a better understanding of chorus, how it works and how best to create an interesting and engaging performance using these techniques.

1/5/14

Alright, so I lost the "New Post" button for a while, but I've found it again now.

This day was an all-prac-all-the-time pracstravaganza! Okay, that was pretty terrible, but I'm standing by it.

We started out with a routine/repetition exercise, in which each of us mimed our morning ritual from the time we woke up until the time we left for school. I don't actually have a morning routine, so I just took the things I do most often and put them in a semi-logical order.

I started by waking up, rolling over, falling out of bed and almost going back to sleep, before staggering to the kitchen and making myself an unspecified hot beverage. After this I brushed my teeth, ate five spoonfuls of something from a bowl, put on clothes (somehow, despite my movements really not being able to apply clothes in a real-life situation) and reached for the door handle before freezing to indicate I was done.

A few routines were chosen out of everyone's (Tash's, Kate's and Jack's) and we were divided into groups to learn and exactly copy their routines. I was in Kate's group and thankfully, she simplified and stylised hers to the point where we were all able to learn the routine quite quickly.
We got up, got dressed (via sweeping our hands down our bodies as if to say "look, I have clothes on now"), washed our face (moving our hands in small circles in front of our faces), ate breakfast (the actions you'd normally expect from people miming eating), pulled on our bags (slightly stylised, but relatively close to the real thing) and finished, with our hands on our respective imaginary doors. We seemed to do this all rather well - we were all in sync (or close to it) and we all understood the exact movements we had to perform, something that could not necessarily be said for some of the people in the other teams.

This was all well and good, but then it was time to take it a step further into non-realism. We were told to use canon (performing the same actions slightly out-of-sync, like a round), repetition and timing to enhance our performance and make it appear less real.
Our basic idea was that the two of us on either side (me included) would perform the routine backwards while the other two performed it forwards. This almost worked. The problem was that we decided to do a little canon as well - the person on the end would reverse-get-dressed, the person next to them would take a bite of cereal, cereal, reverse-dressed. Then we would use each other like mirrors to wash our faces, before doing the same thing again, but the other way around - reverse-cereal, dressed, dressed, reverse-cereal.

The problem appeared when we got to performing it, when the person on the end of the line began our first canon segment by reverse-eating. The two in the middle say and compensated for this, dressing instead of the intended eating. I, meanwhile, had not noticed due to our half-masks (which I have forgotten to mention earlier) obscuring my peripheral vision and the fact that we were supposed to remain looking straight ahead, and so only noticed what had happened too late, resulting in me reverse-dressing and looking out-of-place.
This, of course, was obfuscated further when we performed the second canon segment - since we all adjusted to fit the new routine, I ended up reverse-dressing for a second time, enhancing my out-of-placeness and at the same time making me look like the one who had gotten it all wrong.

Now that I'm done complaining, I think it's about time I ended this off here. I felt that I (and the rest of my group) did rather well, but I could maybe work on my awareness of the group when performing. This was I'll be better able to adjust to any changes and not ruin the effect by looking silly, wrong and out-of-place, even though I'm the only one who actually did it right.


Sorry.