independent

For my independent i am producing a solo performance, i have chosen as my stimulus a monologue called "miedo". From this stimulus i wrote several names i thought could be the title of my performance but came up with my concept, CORNERS. I chose this because i think it describes the situation of the woman in the monologue who is stalked by her boyfriend, i thought she was trapped, with no escape, but she really can escaped it is more like she is cornered between the sword and the wall kind of thing, there is a chance she can break free. So i want to create  an anguish and desperate atmosphere and i think the concept of cornered/corner can help me do this. I have thought of different ways in which i could cause this feelings in the audience. The music should be very agitated but paused at the same time, it should change and leave the audience hanging in the air for a couple of seconds and then go back again to the persecution type of rhythm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsG60EPZsEw This youtube video made me imagine another vision of the corners, every time you want to turn on a corner you don't know what you could find on the other side, so this gives the feeling of fear and anguish because you are terrified of what you could find on the other side, in this case the boyfriend. I chose to use three different settings in which the scenery would be three different elements. In the first one i will use wooden black blocks nothing else, this will be set in "la perrera" then the second one will be in the boys changing room next door in which the element will be black pieces of cloth that will hang from the celling, and the last one will be the girls changing room that will have the element of black wooden panels. These three elements will be the only thing the actress will work with, i want the play to use random and simple elements because it will allow me and the actress to create many different sceneries and props from this simple ones. It would be more or less the idea of supermarket because we didn't have any elements there we just did what we wanted and by having this elements that don't mean anything it will be easy to create whatever we want with them. I have been looking for quotes from suspense and thriller books to use them in the monologue, i have been reading "The pit and the pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe and have rescued several lines i could use about how she could feel. Because i will use very few and simple elements i will use Craig's Four Moods to change the atmosphere of every room, this will change depending on the feelings the actress will feel as she says the monologue. It will be cold to try and make the audience feel more alert, uncomfortable, desperate and alone. The textures will be between rough and porous, this will be applied to the clothes that hang from the celling, the wooden blocks, the wooden panels and the actress clothes. 

I want to make the atmosphere sometimes creepy, but would this be too much? If the music is too dramatic and has too many instruments, would that in someway change the atmosphere i want to create? Would it look exaggerated if i make the actress go crazy?

independent project

For my independent I used as as stimuli a monologue called miedo, this monologue is short so I have to translate it to english and alter it so it can be longer. It is about a woman that is desperate and afraid because her boyfriend threatend her. I wanted to create an atmosphere of anguish and desperation, for this I will have to investigate different ways to create this atmosphere, by music, lightning and actions. I thought of using the four moods of craig to change the vison of one space just with light. First I thought that I could work with a very realistic sceanery but then I thought that using different elements that would help the actress play like panels, black blocks, pieces of cloths hanging from the cealing. Then I thought of using three different preforming spaces, la perrera, and the two changing rooms that are next to it. This will help the dynamics of the play and it will help when it comes to represent the flashbacks she has.

MI-YU-KI !!

we finally finished miyuki y los tres demonios. We had a lot of problems with make-up because Nicole didnt buy as much as i told her to, we had to use the vaseline adn the zinc oxide but it turned out fine. Using the same make-up would have been better because it would have given the actors the same texture on the skin and the same color.

Props was a disaster due to lack of organization and work. We had to do the flying cuo like 30 times because non of us including myself took the time to really fix it once adn for all. The first day of preformance the cup was a mess, the wire that hold it moved a lot and the cup wasnt straight as it should ahve been. This erros broke the illusion we were trying to create by making one stable glass fly across the kitchen. Another problem we had with the props was the piece of cloth form Miyuki´s dress that the onis finf with their brother´s head which was suposed to be stained with blood and it wasnt. Other thing i was hoping would work better were the streamers. Abby and Nicole didnt knew how to use them and we didnt have enough to waste and practice. We had to use less in the general rehearsal in order to practice but even on the 2 day of preformance Mauricio used 4 more to practice and still didnt made any difference in how they threw the streamers. If they had have more chance to practice them it would have looked a lot diffrerent and better.

We had a lot of issues with the actors themselves, first because they didnt care about their props or costumes. I had to fix several hand fans because the geishas werent able to be carefull. The same with the ninjas who broke lots of the swords we gave them. One thing that would have made the acting of the geishas better is the practice of their dance with hand fans all the time, most of them didnt bring one when we told them too aso when they had one the day of the presentation they didnt knew how to use them properly.
The costumes of almost every actor in the play got stained with make-up, i think thta if we had had more control over them they would have mainteined order and would have not ruined their costumes.

In terms of acting i think the spies could have used more energy all the time, especially in scene 8 when they meet with miyuki, before they do so they look for her and do these acrobatics but as the look for her their movements werent strong or clear enough as i had expected. Also the onis in scene 1 and a long the play as well i think they were lacking concentration and energy. They walked like normal people and should have bent their backs and moved their heds side to side, several things that would have turned them into onis. The spiders also lackes volume in their voices and enery in their movements. When they shouted to Sr.Feudal they didnt scream at all as they should have done, then as they fought with the exorcists they didnt define their movements and so it looked very vague and dull. Then the pronaunciation of Miyuki in her monologue i think could have been better, especially pronauncing the letter "d". The geishes of el Sr. Feudal lacked full concentration all four of them and that took away the energy fom all the scenes they were in. They didnt reacted when the witches apear or when the spiders fight with the exorcists. I think those reaction if marked well they could have brought the scene to a whole new level where everybody reacts and the audience can see and understand easier what it going on the scene.

Would the moths we took from Miyuki appereace have changed the way people saw her? Would it have caused a more distante relationship between the actress and the audice duw to having a koken on stage?
It took 3 months to all of them, the difference between people that trained that long and Nicole Heise who trained for only a week wasnt too much. Would the extension of the training have changed the results a lot?

dance dance dance

We went to see two isaralei dances. in the first dance there were 3 people, 1 woman and 2 men. it had almost no music, but they still followed a beat and a rythm. what i think was the key to the dance was the light. in both cases it began in complete darkness and the light didnt lit at once, it lit very slowly until it reached its full brightness and after it did there were a series of games with the light, changing the colors and the brightness. the game of lights helped in the understanding of the meaning of the dance because there was no music so the light would help me understand the feelings the dancers wanted to portray. there were moments in the dance where the men played a lot with the woman and i didnt understand what it meant, but once i saw the second dance (which was about 2 gay men) i realised the first one could as well be somehow related to sex, love and cheat. That i whay i think the red light that they used also helped me make that link. i liked the dance because it showed a whole story through movemements, every single arm movement or finger movement meant something, they had their bodies completely under control, but there were moments in which i think got too bulgar and physical in a bad way. it turned from a representation of something to almost doing that exact same thing they were trying to represent so i think that if they havent done it in so obvious way that part would have looked better. other thing i didnt like was the lack of music in the first dance, i think it would have gotten me to a whole different level of understanding. because although it was very clear what they were trying to say, i think that music would have made that a little more clear. the way their bodies expresses such story was very good, but if they had shown more their face expression i think it would have been a stronger message of what they were trying to say.

there were only 2 men in the second play and it shown 2 gay men. it as well started with the darkness and then the appearing of light. both dances were relatively short, but the second one was even shorter but it felt as if it lasted hours, what i think made it feel so long was the repetitive moves. there was a very short sequence of moves that they repeted over and over again, the repetition of a so short sequence made it very boring. The music was also repetitive so it tired me even more. i think a more varied routine would have made look better, they could have made a very long dance with the idea of 2 gay men, explore all of what it means to be gay for example, but i think they just limited the view of this and made it superficial eventhough there was a story behind it.

the first dancewas also repetitive at some times, but it looked more like a ritual not so much as a repetitive thing without any purpose. in the first dance there was a why to the repetition, i could see a result when they did the repetition, not like the second one where they only repeted it without a given purpose or result.

maybe a various routine of movements would have made dance #2 mauch more entretaining. dance #1 was very good and i really saw the story and felt what they wanted to represent, eventhough there was no music, would the use of music take some meaning out of it? or would it have improved it?

production for miyuki y los 3 onis

well.... we are behind all design production for the play. MATAME!
COSTUMES
We had a lot of trouble with the costumes because first we lacked research for the designs and we had to re do them like 4 times. that delayed mr.boxes, and when we called him the budget was too high so we had to meet with him to cut some costumes. We realized that we exagerated too much with some costumes and didnt think in making them cheap. Now we are waiting for the new budget. it will take a lot of time to make them and we dont have too much time, we have less than a month of rehearsals!
SCENERY
The same happened with scenery, i had the designes but didnt gave them to the constructor so when we did it was too late, we had to wait until the constructor came back from vacation so he could build the hanamichi, platform, wheeled platform, frames, and kitchen table. All this was delayed and the actors need them and they are not ready. if i hadnt left it all for the last minute we would probably have all of the things we asked for except the hanamichi and the platform.
CYCLORAMAS
I had to change some designs for the 2 big ones, in the palace i had to rub out all the lines that turned the image in a 3D one because if it were 3D we would be wanting to create a "real palace" but we dont because kabuki doesnt portray realness, but the contrary. The game of equivocatrion in the palace worked a lot with the colors we will paint it with, which are shdes of green and shades of brown which are the colors that represent trees=forest
The thing with the forest was that equivocation in the design of the forest wasnt clear, so we had to re-do the design and create a palace/house design with the branches and flowers. In this case the colors are not as representative as in the palace, we are using shades of brown, yellow and red.
For the kitchen we had a lot of problems with the design, i first drew a very occidental kitchen which collided with all the play,then we thought of a kind of window impression and to give it a sense of a kitchen we drew the shape of the windows like knives, boxes and bottles. When it came the time to paint it we struggled because we had to choose specific color sthat didnt crash with the big cyclorama behind so we did little designs of how the kitchen would look like with different colors and placed it infront of the big one. This helps visualize how it would look like, just choosing colors and not testing them first is not a good idea.
We decided at the end to paint the frames of the windows grey so the colors that touchwed the edges of the big cyclorama would clash with strong colors. we painted the knives black so they could stand out, and i think that is a good color for the knive as well becasue it could be a weapon, so it could represent death and death in kabuki is represented by the color black. The bottles were painted green (bottle green) and the boxes white so it would give some light to the image.

hope it isnt as bad as last week.... i tried harder i sware

ppp

We spoke about the stimulus of the ppp last class and we learned how to research it and how to use it in order to develop a good concept. Once you have the stimulus you look for it in google images because it gives you a very graphical idea of what the stimulus is. After that you search for information you. Have to understand everything about it, not only superficially like how does it look like but what are the beleifs of that element, for example a jaguar or angels. Once you have researched a LOT you do a mental map in order to see all the ideas from the stimulus together and develop a concept. If your stimulus is angels for example you can't choose a concept like: "everybody will have wings in the play" because it is too superficial, is a physical characteristic of angels and that shows no research at all because that concept could have been developed from the simple look at the picture of it or not even that, just from general knowledge. What could be an interesting concept is the idea that they don't have a specific sex, there are no males or females. That could be a very good concept in which you can use the characteristics of one sex to empower the other. For example you make a play with very tough women like lady macbeth, medea and abihail they 3 have "male" characteristics according to the stereotypes and in a way this makes them very powerful. This will create a much more interesting view of the play than the fact tht everybody wears wings.

es pedro de valdivia cachai!

we went to see pedro de valdivia to the alianza francesa theater. It was performed in an open stage, where the audience was lifted up in several level in order to get a better view of the stage. This actors are very similar to Yuyachkani i think, because the three of them dominated a lot of musical instruments and did a play of historical background which is mostly what Yuyachkani does, very much similar to the last play we saw of them, Sin titulo.

The play was about the conquer of chile, what we expected was the accent along the play, but the actors did well in avoiding it at certain moments, just using it for specific lines making the accent more intresting, or at sometimes more funny. There was a problem with the music and the talking at the same time, because the instruments were so loud the voices were barely a whisper.

All the play was done with the sound effects that they created with their voices or with the instruments which gave another sensation of sound effects that a simple track of music would have had. They also used a lot their body in terms of props and representing something, when they had to ride the horse they just pretended they were without the use of any prop. When one of them was writing a letter he also pretended to have it even though they could have it . Why did they choose to not have the letter to write in when they could? Did the letter meant something they didnt want to show in the play? Maybe we should think about this for the set of props in our play...

There were some game with the lights i think we could use for the suicide scene of amparo, when the lights only iluminated from above and a very strong shadow appeared reflected in the back of the stage making it look big and black. it had a much bigger impresion when the face of the actor which couldnt be seen with the big shadow behind was reveled with the light that came out of the chest and illuminated his face as if it were gold.
would the shadows be affected by the amount of cloth we are going to have on top? Is the image going to be as clear as in this play, or is it going to be just a big shapeless shadow with no effect in the audience?

Another game they did which i think worked really good was the puppet. It was great to see the the puppet move in the same way and at the same time as the actual pedro de valdivia, this effect i think could work really good when the witches want to possess or capture the sr.feudal and carlitos, having the withes move in the exact same way at the exact same time as the people they are capturing.
but would the effect be the same due to the lack of difference in size? The puppet was much smaller, here the four of them are almost the same size, would that affect the effect?