Mini-tppp (presentation)

Mini-tppp on Prezi

The laramie project - after all

We performed the play twice: on the night of Thursday and on the night of Friday. The first night, the play did not go as expected. We skip three scenes of the play, but after asking the audience afterwards, I didn't hear anybody saying that they actually noticed something was wrong with the play.

The night of Friday was much better. I, myself, could feel that there was more energy on-stage. All the ensemble was feeling the mood of the scenes and following the rhythm.

After the performance, we received very good comments from the audience. I heard somebody say they liked this play even more than the movie! Somebody else said that they were really impressed that, regardless the large size of the ensemble, the play could keep their attention, somebody else, a teacher who has been on campus a long time, said that it was one of the best productions she had seen on school. We were all very happy with the compliments, and we managed to do this in 10 days! It was really a combination of the big motivation of the ensemble and excellent leadership skills of our teacher.

However, every time they said all these good things about the play, the very first thing is to feel very very motivated and eager to make the next production even better; but after it feels like all these compliments are going to something they do no longer exists. It's like, we produced the play but, that's it. It's done. I didn't feel this kind of attachment to commedia dell'arte but it gives me a little bit of nostalgia knowing that the whole thing is done and... it's not like an essay, that you have it there and you can look back at it if you want to. It's difficult to describe why but it makes you feel a little bit of nostalgia.

Because of this, I realize how an actor can develop a personal relationship with the character, and it is something that a professional actor should take care of, to learn how to make a clear separation one's own personality from the character.

Here are some pictures from the performance:

I actor - after laramie project

I 'actor'

Stanislavski/Meisner techniques/processes used effectively.

1. Emotional memory --- I used the emotional memory technique in both of my characters.

• One of my characters is Doug Laws, a Mormon leader. In the lines I say, he says what it is right and wrong according to God. He also says it to somebody who is relatively new to them. I tried to think in a situation where I felt similarly, where I was with somebody relatively new to me and I tried to explain to them what was right or wrong. I found out that I could use the start of this academic year to create that emotional memory: so many people with different views where here that subconsciously I tried to express to them what was right or wrong.
• The other character is Matt Galloway. He is a very young, outgoing and extroverted character, a character that will want people to pay attention to him. He thinks he is very important in this whole thing, and, in my opinion, he thinks he is going to be famous for this. So for that, I tried to recall a moment where I did something I thought was important and I though I was going to be famous for this: this was when I won a departmental competition when I was about 13 years old; I was young and naive, I thought what I had done will be known by everybody which is how I think, Matt Galloway felt. I used this emotional memory for the first lines of Matt Galloway.

2. Repetition --- I tried to use this technique for both characters too. I performed repetition before the performance but I would also repeat this phrases in my mind while I was sitting

• With Doug Laws I did repetition with the phrase "they need to know what it's right." This phrase is also kind of my objective, so it definitely helped me to coordinate my body language with the things I was saying and the pase and tone in which I was saying them.
• For Matt Galloway, I repeated the phrase "I am going to be in Wikipedia" before going into stage. This helped me get into the mindset that I was going famous, that everybody will know about me.

3. Before time --- I also used this technique with both characters, although stronger with Matt Galloway.

• For the very first line that Matt Galloway says, what I thought as my before time was that I was in the back of the bar, somewhere where I was not visible, washing the dishes or cleaning, something mechanical that did not require a lot of mental concentration. Suddenly, they called me and they told me I was about to testify for Matthew Shepard. My first thought was that I got very excited, but then I realized that I had to be careful of what I said to them because I wanted to impress them. --- For all the other scenes I tried to think of my before time as having been talking with these people who want to interview me a long time; because basically that's what Matt Galloway does during the whole play.
• For Doug Laws, in his only scene, I thought of my before time as having been reading the bible, making about it, something that required a lot of my concentration... and then having been knocked on my door so that we could start the interview.

What kind of actor have I become?

The techniques I found most effective where emotional memory and repetition. I didn't feel like before time made a great impact in my way of acting and I couldn't figure out how to apply magic if in any of my scenes. Taking into account the Stanislavsky exercise that we have performed, I think I have become the kind of actor who likes to feel the environment of the scene. I found that very effective, and I think it achieves a high degree of realism on stage. However, to correctly apply the emotional memory technique into acting, lines should be learned very well; but this is something I had trouble with every rehearsal, knowing my lines very well. I think I have become the kind of actor who likes to play with emotions, I found it very fun to explore emotions while saying my lines.

Homework next thursday:
prepare a micro-tppp 8-10 minute oral presentation on your Theater journey in Year 1 Focus on 2 productions you have been involved in. Include 5 images (pictures/photos) in your presentation.

The Laramie project

To end our Year 1 Theater course, We were not sure of which play to perform. However, after careful thought and discussion we agreed on doing the Laramie Project, a play about the crime committed against Matthew Shepard, a homosexual murdered in Laramie, Wyoming. We are going to perform only 2/3 of the play, as we have little time (less than two weeks) to perform the play and performing the whole play would be insanity. Our teacher had the kindness of taking his time to choose which scenes to perform and assign characters to the whole group.

The play is from the verbatim theater genre, it is not realistic theater, which is the genre for which Stanislavsky's techniques were developed for. Verbatim theater is a very wordy kind of theater, so we will have to memorize a lot of lines. My two characters are Doug Laws and Matt Galloway.

Doug laws is the leader of the Mormon Church; I picture him as a man of authority, a man who wants to make sure everybody else knows the word of God. I haven't had a lot of interaction with Mormons, I just remember seeing a lot of "missionary's" back home on the streets who are very well dressed people that go to different places to spread the word of the lord. The fact that they are very well dressed makes me think that the leader of this church may think of himself as somebody who always says the truth, somebody in authority. That makes everything possible to sound as convincing as he can be (I presume this is why missionaries dress very well, to be convincing when they are talking to other people about God).

Matt Galloway is a barman of the last bar Matt Galloway was seen in. I always think of barman as very friendly people, they are always friendly people to make their customers keep coming. I tried to find information about Matt but the only information I could find about him is on this blog: http://laramieblog.blogspot.com/ where it says:

"There was Matt Galloway, who runs his father's bar up in Casper, and who still feels the sting of guilt for not having stopped Matthew from leaving with Russell and Aaron that night, and who (repeatedly) made the point of telling me how proud he is that his bar is a place where his gay friends can come in and feel comfortable being who they are.  This from a former small-town frat boy who didn't even know that he knew gay people before Matt was killed.  He remains a funny, talkative, thoughtful and huge-hearted person. "

This blog seems to be run by "Tectonic Theater Project" so I think it may be the blog of the producers of the play with entries of while they were conducting the interviews and preparing the play in general. 

The guilt that Matt Galloway feels towards not having stopped Aaron and Russell is genuine according to this journal entry. In the line where he says:

"Ultimately, no matter how you dice it, I did have an opportunity.... If I had - amazing hindsight 20/20 to have stopped.. what ocurred... and I keep thinkin' to myself "I should have noticed. This guys shouldn't be talking to this guy. If I hadn't put my head down for 20 seconds while I was washing the dishes. This I could've done.. what was I thinking?"

I thought of interpreting this line in a funny way, like he was just trying to lie to the interviewers of how much he cared because he wanted attention. But this piece of information tells me that he seems genuinely sorry he couldn't do anything. I think this goes in align with the fact that he is a "huge-hearted person." With a big ego, as Steve told me, but huge-hearted. He is a person who likes this attention, a person who is very excited that he will be interviewed by this group who wants to take his opinion and make it famous.

The guilt that Matt Galloway feels towards not having stopped Aaron and Russell is genuine according to this journal entry. In the line where he says:

"Ultimately, no matter how you dice it, I did have an opportunity.... If I had - amazing hindsight 20/20 to have stopped.. what ocurred... and I keep thinkin' to myself "I should have noticed. This guys shouldn't be talking to this guy. If I hadn't put my head down for 20 seconds while I was washing the dishes. This I could've done.. what was I thinking?"

I thought of interpreting this line in a funny way, like he was just trying to lie to the interviewers of how much he cared because he wanted attention. But reading the piece of information above tells me that Matt Galloway seems genuinely sorry he couldn't do anything. I think this goes in align with the fact that he is a "huge-hearted person." With a big ego, as Steve told me, but huge-hearted. He is a person who likes this attention, a person who is very excited that he will be interviewed by this group who wants to take his opinion and make it famous.

---

The first few rehearsals were with script; mostly to get used to the way the stage will be organized and how the organization will change in different scenes. The first few rehearsals didn't have any focus in the way we were going to say our lines itself. An important thing that we did during this first few rehearsals was organizing the things that actors who were not talking were going to do and at which cues like pretending to be reporters, pretending to be protesters, the church, etc. All those things that add on to the play while other people are performing their lines and monologues.

We also focused on staying neutral while other actors where talking.

---

This Sunday, we performed an exercise that would let us get more involved in our characters. Our teacher asked us to divide in groups of three. We separated in different groups and, in character, we asked questions about each other's characters. The point of this exercise was to make us feel into character, to make sure each one of us could handle each of our characters and had things like before time, objectives, and different things clear. Speaking in character gets you used to the state in which you should be while saying your lines, it lets you invoke your character in different situations and, as you know how to invoke your character in different situations, you get a more holistic view of the character which you can then apply when saying your lines.

I felt that, during the exercise, not only my body language and tone of voice changed but also the vocabulary and the structure of my sentences. Each character on stage has a distinct personality that the actor should represent; and this personality includes a whole range of things. An actor has to be able to incorporate all these things to himself.

---

The play takes place in Laramie, Wyoming, a place in the United States. For this reason, it is most likely that all of the characters will have an American accent. I tried mimicking an American accent and in fact I did some rehearsals trying to speak in that accent but then I got feedback from some of the other members in the ensemble; I can't really mimic it :P The fact that I have been living in an English environment for less than a year I think limits me a little bit from learning the lines fluently and being able to speak them without focusing thoughts on them.
"
During the rehearsals, we kept on doing the "putzika" exercise. This exercise focuses on different sounds that are important while announciating. I have taken a video of myself doing the exercise below: (apologies for the poor sound/video quality)

The point of this exercise is focusing on these three sounds, and make sure to emphasize them while on stage. This I found that focusing on those specific three sounds, I could make myself much more clear while speaking, not only on stage but also while carrying out conversations every day! I found it really helpful because I started applying it to every day conversations and I think it makes other people understand me clearer as a non-native English speaker.

The other exercise that we did for voice was the "maaa" exercise, which focuses on projection. For this exercise, we have to open our mouth and start creating a "maaa" sound and projecting it to the farthest point possible. You can watch me doing this exercise in the following video:

This exercise was not as useful personally, given that I think I don't have any problems with voice projection (sometimes my overly loud voice has got me into trouble in the past xD)

God (a play)

A group of people in our campus, most of them theater students, prepared a play written by Woody Allen called "God." The play was comedy; it started with two philosophers talking about the existence of God and those common "philosophy topics." However, as the play progresses, the audience is brought into stage and hilarity comes from the fact that the audience are 21st century high school students and the other characters are some sort of Greek philosophers.

The play was adapted for our campus audience. The play included some references to the things we do in school and our academics. It also included direct references to the audience, which made it funny because they were references to something we knew and are used to it. Commedy is very effective when it involves something that you can relate to, and this play had a lot of those things you could relate to. I had a good laugh.

Another reason why it was a very funny play is because there were a lot of unexpected things. One of the characters was the "writer of the play" and he claimed to even have written the audience! Then another character was God, and was doing silly things. A lot of unexpected things. Very good acting too.

Applying Stanislavsky's techniques to playback

For the this term, I have been doing playback theater as an extracurricular activity. Playback is about interpreting the audience emotions, is about celebrating the audience's stories. The actors are responsible of representing this stories and emotions into different forms.

The actors need to make this representations of emotions and stories very quickly, right after the person tells the story or the emotion. It is useful to think about different ways of representing emotions before, but at the moment of the performance it is completely improvised as it depends on what the person shares.

I have tried to use repetition and I think it works to represent the emotion as clearly as possible. Emotional memory is not very effective in this case because there is a very short period of time for the improvisation. However, repeating the emotion that is about to be represented or a phrase that relates to that emotion can let the actor feel more identified with it and come up with more creative representations of what this person has just said.

Repetition Exercises

Aim of Task:
To practice "repetition," a very important technique developed by Meisner.

Description of Task:
Meisner was the person who, in the 20th century, developed method acting in the United States. Although he based his techniques on Stanislavsky, his techniques did not require a lot of psychological involvement from the actor like Stanislavsky's techniques do.

So what we did to practice Meisner's repetition exercises is first, find a partner. Now, once we had a partner, Steve showed us what the dynamic of the exercise was going to be. We chose a phrase both of us would take turns to repeat. So partner would say the phrase, then partner B would repeat the same phrase, then partner A would repeat the same phrase and so on and so forth until our teacher told us to stop. We did it for about 2 minutes. The exercise seems very simple, but it can become hard! Repeating the same phrase over and over again can confuse you and make my your tongue tangled. It can also become a little bit annoying to listen to your partner say the same exact phrase over and over again. It seems simple but it's complex once you do it!

Then, Steve told us that each one of us would pick an specific phrase. Partner A and Partner B will choose an specific phrase, like an observation about the environment, and repeat over an over again; Partner A will say his phrase then Partner B will say his phrase and so on and so forth. We repeated our phrases for about 2 minutes. This one was less annoying than the other exercise, perhaps because phrases were alternated between each other.

Now, our teacher told us to change the dynamic a little bit. We would keep on saying things repeatedly but now, we would not repeat the same phrase but we would change the phrase as we felt it was appropriate. Impulse is the word Steve used for this, he told us to keep on saying things repeatedly but only change the phrase if we felt an impulse to do so. We did this for another 2 minutes, approximately. I basically only changed my phrase when I noticed something different in my partner, most of my phrases were like an observation I was making about my partner, like "your hair is black" or "you are short." At some point though, I started saying "you are annoying" and "I want this to end" because I was becoming desperate of hearing my partner talk to me repeatedly.

Other classmates went to the point where they started shouting at their partners things like "leave me alone" because they were so annoyed by them. Another interesting comment that one of my classmates made is that it was hard for him to change phrase because most of the time he would feel an impulse to change his phrase only halfway while he was pronouncing his phrase, so he ended up not changing his phrase because by the time it was his turn to talk again, he had lost the impulse. Our teacher told us that, in that case, we shouldn't say anything because the impulse was already gone. I felt a little bit like this sometimes, but I changed my phrase anyway.

Now, after doing this, we changed the dynamic a little bit. My partner and I established a relationship and a role each one of us would use. We decided we would be co-workers. Our teacher told us that one partner had to go outside, I went outside. The other partner had to stay inside and perform a task that requires mental focus, like doing homework. Now, the ones who were outside, our teacher told us to imagine a before time, something that had just happened referring to the relationship we had agreed on. After we thought about our before time, we went in and did the repetition exercise again.

The before time I thought about was that I had been talking to our boss and he was not very happy about the performance of the company and he would have to fire one of us. So when I came in, I started saying "the boss" to which he replied "what." As I felt like he was not paying, I had an impulse to change my phrase to something he would pay more attention to like "one of us, danger." I felt a little bit of frustration as I couldn't capture his attention. My partner also changed his impulses as the exercise continued.

Now, after approximately three minutes, our teacher stopped us. He told us that the same partner that had gone outside of the classroom should go out again. Now, he told us that we should think about an objective, something we should convince our partner about.

The objective I thought about was that I wanted to convince him that we should go and talk to our boss about what had happened, so that none of us had to leave.

I went inside and I started my phrases pretty much the same. I felt more involved though, because I now had an objective. My facial expression changed as I saw that my partner did not pay attention to me, it was a face of kind of being worried and frustration - worried because one of us might have to leave his job and frustrated because I didn't feel like my partner was paying me attention.

I felt like the exercise I did with my partner was good but perhaps not as involved as the exercise other people did. I could see other people standing up and shouting and each other. Their rhythms, tone of voice, changed. I didn't feel a lot of change for our couple, though.

Reflection:

I think this is a good exercise to get into the emotional state of the scene because it really forces you to focus on what you want to do. In "real life," most of your actions are motivated by an objective, things are normally done for a reason. By doing these exercise, you get used to that, to remember that since this is realistic acting you should also have an objective on stage. Objectives are also useful on stage when you may forget your lines: if you know your objective, you can still communicate the same message. Focusing on the objective also makes your body language go according to your words. It can be as powerful as Stanyslavski's emotional memory but not as hard, psychologically.

Conclusion:

I think something that Meisner and Stanislavsky have in common is that they both try to get you fully focused on the current moment, they both try to coordinate your physical actions and what you say with what is happening at the moment; and that definitely helps making the scene more realistic because in real life, as things happen naturally, you are always in the moment.