Tuesday 14 February 2012

Highschool of Stereotypes

[Monday, 13th February 2012]

Monday. Urgh. But waking up early is the only urgh part of the day.


It's theater day! Yeepie!

When I arrived at the experimental theater, the people inside were already busy. They were moving the blocks, and the screens that we used. So I quickly put all my stuff down, took out the masking tape Rey asked me to bring last week, and quickly helped the rest of them. I was tasked to create an acting space by using those masking tape, which I'll be doing on Wednesday before class. Hopefully it'll be done by then.

So the usual stuff began. We took attendances, wrote down all our details, such as phone numbers, emails and blog pages. Then Rey explained about our next assignment, which is having to do a 2 minutes piece of us being alone in a room doing something. Difference is that we can go in and stay inside or start with us being inside and leave the room. He also pose another challenge for us. He wants our super objective to somehow change throughout the course of that 2 minutes. Which was quite challenging for me.

So we started with the activities. Again the ball and the Yes1 - Yes30 thing. This time we all got better and we managed to reach Yes30 within 5 tries. YAY!



Because we managed to do that, Rey upped the level. This time we had a distraction. It was quite like playing monkey in the middle at first. The first few did their distraction as if playing monkey in the middle. That was until Rey stopped and re-explained the whole thing. It was pretty fun and funny because we had to do different styles whenever another person takes over. When it was my turn to distract, I chose to be insulting. There were no hard feelings of course, but I did get a couple of "ohhhhhsss". But it was good fun, because I simply shout out whatever my mouth feels like shouting out. I actually felt a slight resentment towards the people surrounding me due to this character. There was a lot of spontaneity in it and I thought it was awesome.

More people acted as a distraction; there was a "slut", a "gay-who-couldn't-stop-laughing" and some others, and at some points we had to react to whatever they were doing to us. Then it was Lycel's turn. Lycel chose to play a cheerleader, who pretty much slept with everyone. At first we didn't have a character, and it was hard to react, because most of the time I didn't know how to react. But then Rey asked us to choose a character. I chose to be someone who completely resents her. I suppose something like her rival or what not. Some others chose to be a geek, some her lesbian partner, some gays, some nerds etc. I thought it was cool, some of the reactions are plainly based on what we know of the stereotypes. So from the audience point of view, it would have been very entertaining. Sadly though, the ball never got to me, so I didn't get the chance to act much. Don't worry there's always next time!

One thing that was particularly powerful was the scene between Lycel and Filza, and this scene was personally directed by Rey when they repeated it. Filza played this dark "witch" kind of character which I thought was awesome. I thought she played it really well. The basic storyline goes such that Rosanna (Filza) has some power within her and she sees things that haunts Amber (Lycel). She tried to help Amber but by turning her ugly. At first Amber tried to resist, but as she lets Rosanna affect her it became really strong. The atmosphere in the room completely changed to this dark, heavy feeling. You could feel how Amber was starting to get affected by this dark aura. It was chilling.

One thing that made it work was the silence.  Once again I was reminded how silence had worked wonderfully back in theater 101 in Winter 2011.

~ Silence is Golden ~

There were some problem with the acting. There were times when some of us were hesitating of what to do. This is because we were trying to think up of something to do. This wasn't new to me, but having left theater 101 for a year, I needed a reminder.

One solution would be to read their body language. Majority of communications among humans are through non-verbal medias such as body language. Rey demonstrated it by walking slowly and somewhat to me, intimidating way, and then asking me in a soft tone for the ball, to which I stupidly did on impulse replied by saying "No, its mine". Well I think its stupid.

But overall, I had fun today. It was great to be back in theater again. I hope I'll get to act more next time. Practice makes perfect after all right? I shall work on my second assignment and I hope he would like them!

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