The Followspot

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