Journal Entry #11

During Monday's class, we went over our homework which was to define terms such as:
-Meisner-Repetition-Stick Work-Ionesco-Andrei Serban-Peking Opera-The Lesson-Romania-Meyerhold-Absurdism and find the links between them. We were then given the task of devising a synthesized play using five elements from the list above.
We decided to use the theme of mental disorders particularily Schizophrenia. We would use repetition with the voices in our characters head repeating the same thing over and over again until our character can't ignore the voices anymore.
Sara then told us an absurd japanese story about a man who over-exercised everyday and could not stand breaking his daily routine of swimming two hours a day.
We continued brainstorming idea's until Mr.Evans told us the story about a man who swam home.
"The Swimmer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIegoQAayFs

In the end, the man finally reaches his house only to find it abandoned and full of weeds. Solitude and the decadence is reflected in the house.

We have decided to use stick work to symbolize the waves of the sea or water. In Shun-kin, they used sticks to represent trees blowing in the wind. Therefore, I think that using sticks to represent the waves moving will be effective. We can also use sticks to represent the pool, hallways, or rooms like in shun-kin.

AFRICAN THEATRE:
We have recently been learning a bit about african theatre and studied some playwrights such as Athol Fugard.
We learned that one playwright uses improvisation in his plays. He begins his plays with an image or object as a basis for the improvisation. He then gets his actors to improvise based on the image they have. After improvising once, the cast will sit down and discuss what they liked or didn't like. They will then react the play.
On Tuesday's class we practised this by splitting into pairs with A and B.
A had to tell B an improvised story with an image of a box as a basis.
B then had to tell the other groups A the same story but introducing a cheetah.
A then told their group member B, the same story.

After we did this exercise, we gathered and asked A from one group and B from the other to tell their stories. We chose the one we liked the best which talked about social problems and morals, which a lot of african plays feature.
Our play was about a boy named Anup who was given a box by his grandma and told not to open it for 20 years. The grandma warns him not to lose the box because if he does, he will become an embarassment to the family. Especially if he loses the necklace with a cheetah on it. One day Anup is having a house party at his house when two classmates who enjoy bullying people, find a box while Anup is in the bathroom.
They open the box and put on all the rings, planning to annoy Anup once he is out of the bathroom. One of the bullies puts on the cheetah necklace and it begins to choke him. The bully then suffocates to death and Anup is terrified. He then falls into depression.

We failed to show the social problems in our play as effectively as we had hoped. The social problems were: never take someone else's belongings, and bullying.
The moral was: If you do these things, karma will get you. (In this case, death.)

We then watched a short clip of an African Play and realized how different our play was to theirs. Their play was about AIDS and how it effects families.
Towards the end of the play however, it began to sound a bit commercial as the doctor outlines the dangers of AIDS and what one can do to prevent it.

We also learned about Theatre for Development which is an educational tool for the development of people. It usually outlines social problems such as AIDS or no sanitation.

Theatre for Development can use several styles of theatre such as:
storytelling, improvisation, music, dance, mime, scenes, participation of the audience, or comic.

The other day, I was watching a film called Religulous when I realized that the interviewer uses repetition to create humor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uL7zjRsO1w

We could perhaps include this type of humor, with our schizophrenic patient.