The Followspot

Monday, January 7, 2008

Today our task was to get a sense of what we will be doing for our CA1 test.
We were asked to take a character from our plays thatwe are playing and do a short improvisation.

Round 1:
Take your chair neutrally and move to the front of the class, introduce yourself and your character and say the line "How did you know that" in your character

Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral is an episodic piece with abstract characters given the way we interprete the text. Hence Prakash and I play multiroles in the performance and we have many characters to choose from. For this character, as there is a chair given, i decided to use the character of the Emperor. Applying the glide effort i worked on with the laban last lesson, i delivered the line smoothly and focusedly. However i felt that there wasnt a clear beginning and ending as every drama piece should have. Hence there was this bit of awkwardness then.

Round 2
Going to a corner of the room, do a one minute improvisation with a character frm your performance to the lines "why why why"

This time, to spare the awkwardness of the one minute performance, i decided to change character. It is also because i wanted to try and vary the exercise with a different character. However, i chose a character with the smallest role in the performance. The minion. With laban punch and glide movements with my body, i moved around the chair, sensing someone and finally taunting that someone with the words "why why why". This time, there was a clear beginning, however, the ending was not as clear as i wanted a cliffhanger to round things up. I did not get to perform this. But based on my rehearsal, i realized that i might not have defined the space clearly with my movement and neither did i define my character. I might want to use a little bit more time to change my movement so that it will define the environment and the persona more.

In a nutshell,
Today i learnt more about how to define your space and character. With the notes Mrs Kamal gave others i realized how different an act can be, with or without the definition of space and character. these are important techniques which i must do well to remember in my performance.

The actor froze at 5:41 AM

Friday, January 4, 2008

Laban created 8 efforts to use for vocal intonation:
Slash, Glide, Float, Flick, Wring, Punch, Push and dab

Amongst these 8, today's lesson was for us to take two or more of the efforts and experiment with them with respect to incooperating them into our perfornace.

We chose Glide, Float and Punch to work on.

For float, it worked will with the liquid movement and our lines. However, it only worked well for some lines and not others as the emotions would be lost when we said them. For instance, "I have come to realize of late that dreaming has become the centre of my life" cannot be said with the float effect as it is rather grounded in meaning. However, other extracts of part 1 can be used with the float effect to create the dream-ish effect we wanted to introduce. However, as I have learnt from this, too much of one effort in the text makes it boring. So Prakash and I intend to incooperate it with some parts of glide as well.

For glide, it worked in creating the dream world effect when mixed with float. However, I felt it worked best during part 2. The glide movement makes me think of the Chinese exercise Qi Gong and I normally end up projecting my words to the Chinese accent, something which the emperor in part 2 would do. It made my character sound refined and of high status when containted to only the vocal part and not the movement. It enhanced my character and definately i will use it in my performance.

Lastly, for punch, it did not really coincide with the performance of the descendants of the eunuch admiral well as the performance is rather rooted in meaning and subtext and not so angsty and full of fiery such as to use a punch effort. However, I found that it worked relatively well for the minion segment in part 1. This, incooperated with the glide to make it a smoother punch, gave a fantastic minion effect.

After my lesson, i've been thinking which laban effort would suit the part 3 children's segment well. And i derived that children normally talk in dabs and flicks and hence to make part 3 a lighter, more childish performance, the conversation would be best held in dabs and flicks such as to give it a more children-like atmosphere. This thought would need to be explored some other time.

The actor froze at 6:39 AM

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Today the focus of my journal, as requested, will be my reflections about the movement we did today. But before that, i would like to put in a quote which i found rather profound today.

"There is sense, even in nonsense" - Mrs Kamal.

Which is rather true. Today Mrs Kamal made us stretch out our arms and legs and walk around like starfish on 2 of its legs. It was an interestingly painful way to walk.

I felt big and clumsy to walk around like that, so i was rather glad when she told us to relax. However, she told us to continue like that and say our lines. My aching arms cried out in pain but i perservered.

After that apparently nonsensical process. We were told to make sense out of it. Mission impossible? We'll here's my attempt.

My third part of the performance of The Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral has been interpreted as two children playing by myself and Prakash. And this movement reminds me, being in touch with my inner self, of terriermon. A digimon i used to like in my childhood days. It had big ears that were the size of hands and a minute body. I felt pretty much like i was mimicking it and decided that since we're acting as children in part 3, the child who loses the sissors paper stone game can have a funny forefeit! This could be part of the dream's nonsensical movements as anything - even the weirdest of things, can happen in a dream.

Another way is that this movement can show the floating of actors, as if in an abstract dimention. Just like the dream world. However, it does not corrospond with us wanting the two actors to seem as one character and hence we decided not to use it during this point in time. But it is still in consideration.

The movement, if done staccato and slow and moving gradually to liquified form could give a reasonable melting effect to show something dissolving or melting into a liquid. This form of movement can also be used; however, not in our performance as it will take too much reconstruction. We could use it in the sense that instead of feeling around with blindfolds, we be floating and slowly liquifying, as if the waves that Zheng He's fleet of ships ride on, telling the story of his past. This would mean a totally new interpretation of the text and we will find ourselves back to square one.

Hence, we have decided to incooperate this movement, minimally into our 3rd scene. Whoever loses, shall talk like that for one sentence!

Aching arms, tired body, improved performance!

The actor froze at 12:11 AM