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?

semana santa!

it is the fourth time we re/do the costumes for the play, we realized kenzo and i didn't follow any conventions so we had to do all the costumes all over again, the colors were wrong, the longth of the kimonos were wrong, EVERYTHING.

i went to the beach this weekend so kenzo had to work with mauricio nad pineda so havent seen much of whatvthey have done, but this thursday mr.cajas is comming to start measuring the costiuimes so if they are wrong they have to stay that way because we have no time.

COSTUMES

COSTUMES ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY
i am working with kenzo the costumes and it is very difficult because we lost 2 rehearsls doing kenzos homework and we could do the things we had to do. Today we finished designing the costumes, then i had problems with the kimonos of the girls because mauricio told me that they had to have the openning in the front and i hadnt done it right, so i had to do it all again. Then i struggled because i invented some kimonos for the cookers and because i never did my research in costumes last year as i should have done it i had no idea of what the conventions were, i had to be constntley asking kenzo or mauricio or pineda. That created a huge dependace and i could do all the things i was planning on doing.

today we were going to go to gamara, but we couldnt go. i am planing in going on monday in the morning because we have to call cajas next tuesday and this tuesday we have to have the different cloth to discuss and i am not going to be here in holy week...
the scenery of the play is concerning me a lot because i havent yet hanged the cycloram nor draw the back grounds... then coppellotti isnt doing the things i ask him to do like finding out where are the platforms for the musicians or the measures or how many musicians are there going to be.... !!!

Maybe not colouring the costumes and just going to gamarra and look for the colors i need without having a settled exact color for each character could make my costume work lighter?
Will the thickness of the cloth influence on the effect the costumes will cause in the audience??

valentina corrected my research and helped me a lot, she told me that what my research was lacking wasnt information, but order so she helped ,me organize myself and let me see it much more clear.

i am starting to work on production of the play, i dont have an important role on the training rehaersals like i used to, but i have to start working with the form Vers. Tomorrow i will start working with coppellotti explaining him what we should do and what he should do in order to produce the scenery. I talked yesterday with my aunt and ask her to help me with the designes. We looked at japanese terraces in imgaes google and got several ideas for the blending of the forest and palace. if i blend too much both sceneries, my it get the audience confused? my taziyeh reaserch is comming aloing, yesterday i recieved the response from one of robertos friends and he responded lots of my questions like: the plays are rituals and are seen like that to the people, but that rituals are not necesarily religious and i asked him some more questions. i hope he will replay there are some things about my extended i am not sure about like the dates in which the plays are performed, one of the things i asked him the second time....

first rehearsals of training....

for the first days of training we had to divide the boys and girls into 2 groups roberto had one of the boys and pineda the other i had one group of the girls with miss alicia some times and mauricio got the other girl group. it is hard to teach the girls because they have no enthusiasm to learn so they get tired very quickly and i constantly have to be shouting at them trying to cheer them up with no reaction form them. we have progressed in learing the basic movements of the geisha like walking sitting standing laughing crying and the princess walk, what will be difficult now will be coordinate them in order to make a sequence. because the movements are very slow and it takes a lot of control to move correctly we had to encourage the girls to start working out because it will take a lot of control and effort.

this saturday we had rehearsals and lots of people didnt come because they were on the beach or in the trekking club that is a problem because we will have to loose one rehearsal teaching the boys and girls that were absent to do what they would have learned this last saturday.
in the first weeks of april we will start rehearsing scenes and we will have to start producing dances and movements.

on tuesday we will tell them their characters, i am starting to think that when they find out some of them will leave the play...