Collaborative debriefing

For our collaborative Me and Olivia have come up with some great ideas and concepts! After about a week of ideas back and forth, discussions, agreements, and disagreements, we have come to a final standing. For the collaborative piece, we will focus on the conceptual theory of nihilism and existentialism. We will set up small and big scenarios to show how each side takes on life and how they behave. (These are going to be to fictional characters representing the two sides soo nothing that the characters do is set in stone, it is merely going to be our interpretation of how a nihilist and an existentialist could react and behave on a magnified scale)  We will have them set up on a very small stage, we want to make the experience to be very intimate and intense for the audience. Something that would be very hard and difficult to set up if we have a piece play out on a larger stage. The reasoning for having a small stage is also due to how the movements are going to be very small. The props are also going to be small. So the Audience has to be right there with us to be able to see what we want them to see. What we know for sure is that we are going to have a Newton Crattle as a ground zero for the moment. It will be placed center stage and the true meaning of it we are still discussing.  

Overall pitch, Directors notebook

For this project I have chosen to work with the play Clybourne park (2009) by Bruce Norris.

The play takes place in the same house and the 2 acts are split up with the first act taking place in 1959 and the second act in 2009. The first act very much focused on how biased many in the white community at the time were against the black community. What interests me is Russ and Bevs son Kenneth who takes his own life after coming back from the Korean war, he is such an interesting character I feel and I really want to showcase him as being “better” than his parents in those few scenes that he has. And when we get any flashbacks of Kenneth I want him to be the most likeable person of all the characters. The Reason for this is because I want to throw in a little more connection between the audience and Russ & Bev. When Karl tries to convince Russ of not selling the house to a family just because they are black I want Russ to have multiple motives as to why he won't do what Karl says. And when he says that he won't “protect” a community that didn’t try to save his son I want it to be a really powerful moment. Then there is the racist aspects of the play, I want all of these to be highlighted but not as hate, as fear. Racism is just people being scared, and I want it to show. Characters that show themself to be very openly racist, the audience must be able to see through their “confident-hate” and see them for what they really are, scared. The second act is going to follow along with the same themes as the first act, I might still add a few more focal points after I have studied the script further and in more detail.

Research on English Renaissance Theatre

English Renaissance theatre is considered to be the period between the years 1562 - 1642, Also known as Elizabethan theatre and is mostly known by plays of writers and directors like; William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. In the early days of theatre in England the practice of theatre was prohibited in London, so all plays took place and were performed outside of the city unlike the London we all know in today's day and age. Almost all of the performances were like a circus in the sense that they were constantly on the move from town to town. Only getting paid after the performance by those who enjoyed it. All of this changed when the first successful theatre opened in London in 1576 “The Theatre” The theatre was very much in likeness to the colosseum in Rome but was way smaller and could only host around 1000 people. The theatre was open and plays were only performed during the day. This forced the actors to be larger than life, meaning that they had to portray and really show what was going on to an unreal extent. For example; If the characters were whispering they had to do so in a very loud manner of fashion, or if they enter a dark room they had to point out the fact that is was dark “OH! It is so dark in here I can’t find you!” even if it was broad daylight and everyone could see everyone. It was the spark that England needed to begin the play and theatre culture that we know today. And sometime around the early 1590’s William Shakespeare started releasing his plays for the public to see and what he did changed theatrical plays forever. He combined Tragedies and comedies into “Tragic-Comedy” This was the start of Theatre as we know it today, multiple elements and conventions that made you feel different emotions and think different thoughts. 

The plays were built up in a certain way, there were still certain characters just like almost every play before. There was always a King, A princess of some sort, a Leading male character who searches for love and the clown. The convention in English renaissance theatre I will be focusing on is the ‘clown/fool/jester’  The clown in all of these plays always seems to be the most simple one but is always the most clever, mischievous, evil or helpful. The character could always be a platform to turn the plot around, he was always unpredictable or could make things worse or better for any of the characters to get what he wanted. The clown was almost always on the “Kings” side (take The 12th night by William Shakespeare for example) In that play the clown “Feste” is the voice for the play's most important themes. Yet he could fit in and morph into any group to get what he wanted. The clown was the only character with an unclear goal in almost all of these renaissance place, he could also switch is goals multiple times throughout the course of the play. While the other characters usually followed along with the main plotline. He was always the wisest yet the funniest and the crowd depended on him for entertainment.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/britlit1/chapter/english-renaissance-theatre/                          

https://blog.oup.com/2016/09/shakespeare-clowns-fools-infographic/

https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/blog/ultimate-guide-shakespeares-fools/

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/English_Renaissance_theatre

I'm Sorry Christopher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hz-Z7DCutQ

Official first draft, Solo project

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mJpf4oL-cXQeWVoLskhh1UZP_UrkowbpPNO8y8h4G64/edit?usp=sharing

Solo Performance Reflection

Over the course of working on my solo project I learned and refined a lot of my acting and some directing techniques. I studied Stanislavkis methods of acting with strong emotions and how to make everything more believable. And putting all of his methods into my character was so much fun, especially the magic if. This method makes you imagine how your character would react to certain situations. This is a great way to find out more about your characters: habits, feelings, emotions, mindset, values and thinking process. So preparing when I was preparing for my solo performance during the entire previous week I would go about my day as usual and when something interesting happened or was said I would of course react or think as myself but then i would always backtrack and think “ what would Ed have said or done in the same situation” This is a great way to connect to a character and it really helped me connect to mine. 

So when performance day finally came around I felt really prepared to express all of Ed’s emotions to my best abilities. And I was really pleased with the way things turned out in the end. The performance went great and I felt really into the character and based on the response from the audience during the talkback I could confirm that my connection to the character could be seen on stage as well. I was also so happy to hear so many different people notice my commitment to the character and how they liked what I did with my performance. Something that was a bit of a challenge at first was finding a way to show Ed’s darker side to the audience without anyone else on stage. So I decided not to SHOW it at all, but let the audience hear it instead. I started the performance by screaming and smashing thing backstage with headlights on stage. This instantly grabbed everyone's attention (basing this on what was said during the talkback) and made everyone interested in what was going on and why it was happening. Then I come out of the backstage door in the far back and breakdown right by the door. I decided to do this to give the audience even more time to be confused and make them want an explanation. But also to show the audience that it is not something that my character is used to doing or likes doing (getting mad, beating up his child, ect.) Then I started Ed’s monologue from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the nighttime. The monologue takes place right after Christopher (Ed’s son) finds letters from his to be believed dead mother. And it went great, the Only thing I wish I had done different would have been to slow the performance down a bit so that I could have had more time to show a bit more variety of emotions such as pure sadness. This would have helped even further to show Ed’s good side. And also showing how deeply sorry he is for lying to his son. 

Beetlejuice The Musical - review

Beetlejuice The Musical

On October, 10. Me and the rest of the IB theatre students saw Beetlejuice The Musical (Written by Scott Brown and Anthony King and directed by Alex Timbers) It was a great experience and I really liked it. The play starts off with Beetlejuice himself needing help from the living, he needs a living person to say his name 3 times in order to gain more power. He finds the perfect house were the owners are just about to die from a tragic accident, how does he know this? Don’t ask me. Adam and Barbara Maitland become the recently deceased couple, and they died in their own house which gives them even more power as ghosts. When they pass they meet beetlejuice, they agree to work together to scare the new owners of their house. Only to find out that one member of the new family, Lydia can see beetlejuice. She is a very depressed girl who recently lost her mother. Beetlejuice tells her to say his name 3 times, she sees opportunity to use Beetlejuice to her own advantage against her father and his new fiance. But after many scary efforts she finally gives in and says the magic words “BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE” He then becomes visible and more powerful than ever before. This is where things start going down hill. They both scare her family out of the house and live on their own for a while. Until Lydia decides to try and find her mother in the nether-world (the after life) She searches the nether-world but she does not find her, but she does find a new bond with her father who followed her there. But when they return Beetlejuice wants more, for he can become mortal again if he marries another mortal. He decides to marry Lydia against her will, she gives in with the intention to kill him when the opportunity arises. And at the end of the wedding she kills him with a stake through his heart, poor Beetlejuice got to be alive again for 6 whole seconds.

 Mr. Brightman did an amazing job with the character of Beetlejuice. He captured the audience in so many different ways. Comedy was of course his main choice but the voice, movement, delivery of lines, look and feel was what really made him such a lovable character. What was most memorable about the play was surely the moment after intermission when they open up in the nether world. The lights was like nothing I had ever seen before in a play and it was completely unexpected, there were squared lights that kept getting smaller and it really created a sense of infinity for the audience. The entire stage had this crooked vibe to it for the entire play, everything was angled wrong and slanted. At first it was very irritating for me to look at but after a while it created this funny feeling that really rubbed off on everyone. This was for sure one of the more important director choices made my Alex Timbers to capture the audience in this fantasy world which is a little crooked overall. Also the songs for the play were sometimes oddly placed after each other. For example; in the nether world Lydia has 2 songs nearly right after eachother were she is just standing on stage singing with no background show or anything else happening. This is fine once or twice in a musical in my opinion, but right after eachother is probably not a good choice. A quick way to make an audience uninterested in her words and the meaning behind her songs. This didn’t happen but it was a pretty close call for me. On the other hand i really liked the Maitland home setting and how it changed when Lydia’s family moved in. It really went from a cozy family home to a small mansion feel when they changed all of the furniture and the walls.

I liked the musical, I would have liked to have fewer songs and focus more on the story. Some songs felt forced and unnecessary, we didn’t need all those songs in the first act. Save some for the second instead of squeezing them all into the first act.

I would rate Beetlejuice The Musical  a solid 8/10.