JOURNAL ENTRY: 10

         I literally feel so miserable these days as our workload has increased tremendously. Some time I feel that my assignments are haunting me- IA, EE research question, FOA, Directors notebook. Our theatre classes are quite different now, as we have started working on our play “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW WHAT I LEARNED FROM BEING A ZOMBIE”. We have finished working on blocking for about 4 scenes.  In preparation for this play we also learnt different tips for actors and also about memorizing lines, which were very help. I have 3 different roles in this play and I must say learning lines for ensemble scene was much difficult than learning my monologue. As in the ensemble scene I have to be very attentive as there will be 18 zombies in the scene. I really enjoy preparing for the play as our whole class is involved and this play will be the first time, which we will be actually performing on the stage. I feel that this is great opportunity for all of us as being theatre students.

            The only assignment we had this week was to read our play parts and find our goals and obstacles which all of us did not really understand so we during class our teacher had explained what we had to actually do and we had to hand our second draft of our goals and obstacles of our character which I haven’t yet because I missed school on Thursday.  Even though my teacher had explained our assignment I guess I was still confused, so as for the instructions I read all my parts couple times and I ended up learning all my lines much better as before I would sometimes for forget certain lines or words.  The main purpose of this assignment is for us to understand our character. Understanding our character really helps us to perform better and also makes us confident while acting in even the if it’s the silliest character.

            Director’s notebook is one of our theatre assessments. This is the second time we will be doing our directors notebook as we had done it in 1^st semester. The director’s notebook allows each one of us to be directors and direct two moments of a published play. The director’s notebook allows us to be very creative and design two moments. I am pretty excited to be director as this time I will surely be more prepared. I am still not sure which play I want to direct yet but I guess I want to do it on Glass menagerie because I am really familiar with the play and also because I really like it.

       
                            JOURNAL ENTRY: 9

        It been already been a week since school started after spring break. I truly enjoyed project week and spring break but now its time get back to work. Anti Realism was the last chapter we had learnt about but we were not really done as we had a quiz on it on Thursday. I did understand anti realism after reading the handouts and after the discussions we had in class. In my opinion anti realism is much more entertaining and appealing than realism for example symbolism plays are filled with images, metaphors, dream sequence, fantasy and there are mainly about themes such as nature, death, fate, idealism and life force. I really like how anti realism uses lights, different sound effects, different prop, stage affects which acts as an attention grabber. The different styles of theatre under anti realism such as theatre of absurd, theatre of alienation, theatre of cruelty were all unique in their own way. The different videos we watched gave us a good understand of the different styles of theatre  Frankly speaking I really found “jet of blood” very creepy and quite terrifying and “Quad” dint make any sense to me but some how I still felt like watching it to know what’s going to happen next but at the end noting so exciting happened. Samuel Beckett’s play an “act without words” a kind play that I had never seen before but it was quite irritating at times and it felt good watching a female protagonist in “mother courage”. 

          We have recently learnt about theatre of the oppressed and I liked the concept how audience would be able to engage in the play. Miss rose gave the example how the actors at a point would just freeze and the audience would go to the stage and organise everything according to them. I was quite amazed hearing this as I never knew this kind of things happened in theatre. I just kept imagining that the actors must be very skilled and prepared, as they don’t know what’s going to happen. Every time I learn about a new theater company. It just makes me quite surprised and amazed thinking about how all the theatre companies are so creative and different form each other yet they all have a similar purpose which is to entertain their audience or to teach the audience a lesson.  My friends and I (theatre students) are also going to participate in theatre festival.  The title of the play is “All I need to know about a zombie” by Jason Pizzarello. Each one in the class has about 3 roles and I guess everybody is quite excited. I am also excited mostly because as a class we hadn’t really done acting on stage and this play included all of us which such a good opportunity to learn new skills. Yes, I am excited but at the same time I am nervous and scared because it’s already been a year since I last acted in a play but I IB has surely made more confident. In preparation of this play we have started doing different exercises. We first started with relaxing the brain and the body where we did different kind of stretching’s to loosen up our body. The trust game was quite scary at first but was fun as soon as we started to trust our group members. My favorite exercises were the Exuberance exercise where we did different movements and we also had to say a word or make sound effect and the last thing we discussed about was discipline. Where we discussed about being a disciplined actor and some of the rules we needed to follow. I really love doing different exercises and playing different kind of games as it helps us to be more open and comfortable among each other.

            I hope noting but the best for our play that is coming up but for it to be the best we all need to work hard and cooperate among each other.