Changing it Up

As we take a break from the usual rehearsal, we finally invested some time in the costuming aspect of the production. Today was mostly geared towards trying on our various outfits and working out any kinks. Considering M.C. is the only really tangible character of the whole story, my costume is simply a t-shirt and pair of jeans. Simple enough. The rest of the characters are wildly colorful and mismatched. Looking over everyone as a whole, I probably would have like a more consisten color scheme despite the varying personalities. I'm not sure if the colors themselves will be enough to draw in the first and second graders. If anything, I feel as though we need to add some decoration to the outfits, but what?

After costume checks, we each shared our character analyses with each other to ensure that we were all on the same page. It was quite interesting to hear some of the things that came out of my classmates' mouths. The backgrounds of our characters went to both ends of the spectrum with overbearing sisters to martian-like friends. If anything, the character analyses put us more in the mindset of the characters we're trying to portray although I'm not sure if anybody will be influenced by it in their performance.

Director for a Day

Today marks the beginning of a new semester, and thus a new start for everyone. This time around, our teacher has decided to structure some of the extracurricular activities differently. In addition to viewing our school's production of Fiddler on the Roof, we will all be required to see another outside production. Besides seeing productions this semester, we will begin reading additional plays of our choice, two to be exact. Then we set up another research assignment on children's theater because though we are all using Heads & Tales as one of our acting credits, we haven't been exactly involved in the process. Most of the time has simply been devoted to learning lines and rehearsing while our teacher would essentially tell us what to do. Our teacher is hoping that with this research we can bring more to our characters and develop them beyond their "toyness". In addition to research on children's theater, we have all been required to write up a character analysis on each of our own roles in the production. Since nothing much besides the typical rehearsal occurred today, I'll flush out a bit of character analysis now. Oh and before I forget, our teacher has decided to do this sort of round-robin routine where each day another student acts as director for the day. I actually completed my day as director a couple weeks ago when our teacher was out sick. The day I filled in as director was mostly dominated by working out blocking that we never had a chance to before. There wasn't much directing for me to do besides making the occasional suggestion and moving the rehearsal along. Overall everything went rather smoothly, since directing to me seems just like any other leader position in a group environment.

As "M.C."/Madeleine Claire formerly known as T.J., my character is definitely characterized by her youth. Though not completely naive, M.C. also seems to be an 8-year-old at times. Throughout my performance I know I waver in age as M.C. strives more towards a 12-year-old at one point while giving the vernacular of a child later on. M.C. definitely has a passion for creation, though not specifically school. She would much rather spend her time reading a story than doing some book report for class. It's almost as if school stifles her creativity. M.C. is always courteous and friendly in her demeanor, anxious at the opportunity to engage in something out of this world. She is not, however, lazy in the least sense as she constantly reminds the Professor of her ultimate assignment. As open as she is to new experiences, M.C. lacks the self-confidence to trust her own creativity. Even when the Professor compares her to famous women, M.C. shys away from the attention. Though M.C. lacks self-confidence in this aspect, I'm not quite sure if that should be portrayed from early on considering her character is gregarious.

Paint the Simple

Mask day has come yet again. If I remember correctly, my last entry about our ongoing mask project came the day we actually plastered them together. Well they've been drying for about a week or so, I believe, and today we were finally able to peel the base away from our plastered version. I was quite surprised to see out easily the petroleum jelly made the entire process. Afterwards we began to pain our masks with whatever designs or colors we had imagined. Staying in line with my Korean tradition for mask making, I chose a somewhat neutral skin tone to paint the majority of my mask with. This tan color was also meant to somewhat represent the giant that my mask was made for. Then, I used accent colors like turquoise and red to contrast with the tan for the giant's eyebrows and lips. As with Korean tradition, I kept the red, rosy-circled cheeks in perfect symmetry. Looking back at my mask, I thought it seemed somewhat simple, but I realized that I was a vital component of Korean masks. I decided to diverge just a bit from the tradition by improvising a different hair piece that I imagined. Initially I had wanted to attach this comb-looking hairpiece to the top of my masks, but without time to construct one, I used blue and yellow to highlight a painted on head-crown. This will all make more sense once I am able to upload a photo of my mask. More to come...

Physicality

What can I say besides more rehearsing today. At this point, many of us should have known our lines by now, but what can you do when you have so many independent minds at work. What I do know, however, is that I am still struggling with the physicality demanded by this piece. Considering that my character T.J. is somewhat the driving force of the entire piece, it is up to me to keep the beginning part of the piece moving and alive, interesting and entertaining. At times, uknown even to myself, I do become self-conscious, thus under-whelming the audience. Must remember to explore all possibilities. In addition to exploring blocking, I must all add a certain liveliness to my character who tends to stray to the boring and lame side as a result of the cheesy writing. At the end of the performance, I must rewrite a portion of the piece in order to fully develop my character's change throughout the piece, as opposed to the hurried ending provided by the writers. What's an actor to do?

I Can't Make Heads or Tales

Without our teacher today, our class forged on our own going back to figure out some creative blocking. Though stage directions are of course included, the script requires a something little more to bring it to life. At the end of the day, the show amounts to being somewhat bland. I feel as though we haven't all reached the point where we are totally comfortable with exploring different ways of interpreting a certain scene. What with the younger audience for our performances, it is of the utmost importance to exaggerate everything just to get the meaning of the words across. At this point, everyone just needs to be fully committed to their characters. We just need to take everything that we're doing now and bring it to the next level. Maybe once we have lines down, my classmates will be less tied up in their lines so they can pay more attention to their actions.

Gauche

As we continued working through the script today, the time seemed to pass extremely slow. I don't know if me and my classmates were just groggy, but the performance we were putting on felt bland. Since children's theater may be a new genre for many of the newcomers in the class, they don't exactly realize just yet how exaggerated their actions have to be (even more so because the audience will consist of mostly 1st and 2nd graders). Only today did I realize just how awkwardly many of us moved throughout the rehearsal, unaware of the upstaging in our own actions. As the rehearsal progressed, I felt as though our blocking improved as we attempted to internalize crossing behind an actor when they are speaking. Though seemingly short in its appearance, Heads and Tales, is surprisingly lengthy with all the additional blocking that the script requires. Once again we were unable to completely block the rest of the show, but tomorrow we will be working out the kinks, mostly in blocking. A lot of creativity is required on our part as the script does provide a lot of freedom. I feel that for tomorrow's class, we must expand our idea of children's theater and just go all out on blocking. Perhaps because some of my classmates feel as though it is not yet performance time, they are somewhat apathetic in their performance. Icebreaker, anyone?

I'm Plastered, Pt. II

After all the planning and tutorials, we finally began work upon the masks we had designed for each of our own folktales. If you remember, my Indonesian folktale told the story of a beautiful princess who did not want to marry a courting giant. Without much of an idea for what giants look like (except for the one in the Harry Potter movies), I went about designing my own. Although this courting giant seemed royal in a sense, I still wanted to retain a certain foolishness in his character. For that reason I included not only a silly shaped mouth but also a "crown" of hair, as you can see in my sketch above. With the knowledge we had gained from the tutorial earlier last month, we first set about cutting our base mask to get it into the shape we imagined. The forehead was much too large on the base mask so I ended up carving a good chunk of it off while giving my mask a lima beaned shape. Then after plastering a first layer onto the base mask, I began to build on the features of the large nose and hairy eyebrows. I just hope that my mask is thick enough to be durable because I somewhat ran out of time. Anyways, the masks are now drying themselves up in the classroom. We plan on painting them in time. Can't wait.

First Glimpse

Today we finally began rehearsal for our Children's Theater piece, Heads or Tales. It was only then that we realized "opening day" would be in about a little less than four weeks. FOUR WEEKS! In that mentality, we zipped on along, assigning lines to be memorized by next Monday. Though I do quite enjoy the somewhat main character role of T.J., an uninspired student, there are quite a bit of lines to memorize. As we began to actually block the show, I had to be reminded by my teacher of the fact that it was a children's theater piece. This means that actors should be overly exaggerated so that young children are able to get the point of these stock characters. It's almost as if we were all to have masks on while performing the show, considering that we must make each and every movement larger than life. In order to keep their short attention spans, we as actors must transform the story into something fantastic. Costuming will be handled this time by fellow IBer, Kimberly Siegel, while Jenny Kim helps with music. It will be especially difficult to include anything too technical in the piece since there are only five students in the class, who are all actors in the show, which leaves just my teacher to handle the music and video-taping. Oy!