I am my own wife

I am my own wife, written by Doug Wright, is a story about a seventy-year-old transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf who survived the Nazis and communist regime, and open a calendestine gay bar on his own. The process of creating the script intrigues me a lot because there is a period that Doug Wright is confused by who Charlotte is and what kind of character he is creating. In order to decipher Charlotte’s secrets and present the character on stage accurately, Doug starts to explore how moment work contributes to the process. He incorporates interviews, first-hand files, newspaper etc. into the moments and creates moments in the perspective of Charlotte. 

I am also interested in the setting because according to the set designer Derek Mclane, there will be a wall in the upstage, displaying furniture owned by Charlotte. Those furnitures are not only props, but also a narrative of the story, showing how Charlotte is living her life. Moreover, there will be a more realistic room in the downstage, and when the lights of the wall in the back come up, the room will disappear. The juxtaposition of the abstract display of furniture and the realistic room shows a contrast between Charlotte’s present life and her mythical stories. So I am looking forward to seeing how the setting achieve that goal.

reflection 2.21

This week we are working on adding tech to the scene. Through lighting, we can build up the tension and create atmosphere more clearly. Firstly, we decide to give every skit a theme color. We used blue wash in the first skit to show the sadness and loneliness of the girl, and red spot light on Joyce to express her anger and evil, and purple wash for Ruth’s scene, expressing her helplessness and confusion. Also, after the first draft we found that the transition is not effective as we expect, so we decide to add more elements of viewpoints like kinesthetic response so we can react to others pace and play around with distance. Also we apply lighting to help us enrich the transition. In the beginning, we have usual house lights to show the scene is based on daily situation, and in the first transition we have the white lights strobing to show the chaotic state of the characters, which also differ from the colored lights we used during the skit. And lights will become more chaotic each transition to add more layers after each skit.

And we have also come up with an ending. Because we want to leave an open ending at last so the characters will address their problems, and each character will have a moment to show that their life has to go on. I fall asleep, Joyce close the computer and Ruth leaves for school, so the audience will have their own imagination of whether the characters have been relieved from the struggle or not.

What we have to do next week is to add voice-over into the scene. For the first skit, because I am reacting to the voice over so we have to experiment whether we should have someone to stop the soundtrack before or leave time for my lines in the soundtrack.

collaborative link

https://youtu.be/CnXtCQ9OTf0

reflection 2.8

    Our group has changed our focus a lot these days, initially we aimed to lessen the importance of words in our work, but we find that too hard to achieve because our topic is abstract as well so there may be inclarity in expression of ideas.

We decide to write three skits in which we show a struggle that the character is going through. The characters may live in an unhappy family, or being bullied by others because she is a stammer, or is suffering from eating disorder, and they do not necessarily solve the problem and reach relief in our scene because actually in life people don’t deal with their struggle that easily so people can more relate with the character. And we aim to visualize the suffering through abstract expression. For example, we try to use a lot of voice over to express the inner feelings of the character in scene 2 and 3. And in scene 1, because the girl is distanced from her family, so we use voice over as her parents instead of having the real parents on stage which can show the disconnection between them and emphasize on the girl’s own feeling.  

    This two weeks we are just working on coming up with the script and how to transition from scene to scene, and we decide to start the play by three actors randomly walking on stage with neutral state and then light focus on one of us then her story begins. We intend to show that everyone is normal when facing others but actually inside everyone has their own struggle and going through pain is human’s common experience. And in the end the characters will do exactly the same as the beginning, walking without emotions to show that life has to go on and the incapability of avoiding the struggle.

    From now on we have to move to stage and experience with blocking and the effect of the voiceover. Also, we try to incorporate the scene of two nature battling with each other into one of the skits so we have to shorten that scene and present the most important part. For next week, we aim to revise what we have and see if we need to add something to build up the characters. Since Bowen is not here anymore, we want to pay less attention to the tech, but we also want to use tech to add on to the story. We haven’t explored how the lighting will be applied in the play so we have to work on that as well. Ruth was sick last week so we have to spend more time on creating the script than we expect so we have to use the time wisely next week and get everything we need down as soon as possible so that we can present it and hear the feedback from classmates and teachers.

reflection 1.18

The stimulus we are using is a performance art called Rhythm 0 in which the artist stands in the public and put different objects in front of her, including roses, knives, cameras, guns etc. People can choose to do whatever they want with the objects provided. Initially, we tried to explore the complexity of human nature because in the performance art, people’s behavior differs a lot after they realized that the artist is not reacting: at first, people take photos with her, decorate her, but gradually, they started to hurt her. So we tried to develop a character who is controlled by opposite human instinct: good and evil. In the short piece we developed, the good and evil is fighting for the control of the people, lead to different extreme behaviors which implies the behaviors of people in the performance art.

However, we realized that the piece is too abstract and monotonic, so we decided to expand our ideas, and no longer focused on the idea of abstraction of human nature. We came up with an idea that we can incorporate our personal experience in the work and combine those stories with the idea of human nature. We decided to review what struggle we have been through, and develop that into a story that can present the complexity and inner struggle of people.

The characters in the play all have been through tough experiences about family, society or internal, and based on different situations, the reaction of characters differ a lot which also show the uncertainty of human behaviors. In my story, the character is ignored and abandoned by her family which lead to mental breakdown and we are going to incorporate the piece we constructed before which perfectly match the mental state of the character.

Tech plays an important role in our story to show the mentality of characters. In my story, I chose not to have the parents actually onstage, instead, I prefer to deliver the lines of parents through background voices and only have the character herself onstage to show the solitude of the character and her alienation from the family.

Our intended audience is everyone because our theme is human nature and we aim to explore the external and internal effects on people’s behavior, so we want to arouse the empathy in the audience and make them understand what the characters have been through.

Our piece is also inspired by Livi’s solo performance in some ways, in her performance, she tries to deliver the emotion of the character through movements and facial movements and depends less on words which is really powerful. So we tried to explore how can a story be delivered through other theatrical elements as Livi did. 

reflection

Until now, our group has come up with a 7-minute long piece showing the basic idea of what we are doing. We have a plot of the evil and good inside the person battle for the control of the people, at last the people burst because she cannot stand the chaos in her head anymore. During the exploration process, we have encountered a lot of problems: we are not in the best casting, our idea is too vague to show, and the plot is not decided yet, but after performing our first draft, we find that we there are some process being made. We did a good job in presenting the relationship between our three characters, and the lighting helps us to create the atmosphere and show the rivalry dynamic between me and Ruth. Also, the lack of actual words actually accentuates the physical movements thus strengthening the dynamic between characters. 

Because we were struggling for a long time so actually there is still a lot of inclarities existed in our short piece. Firstly, we have to figure out a premise of the piece, or there is no context for the audience to relate. We are thinking about relating the piece to mental health in order to make it clear that the story is about a people’s internal struggle. Also, although our goal is to explore the power of abstraction, there has to be a balance between concreteness and abstraction so that the audience can follow and understand what we are trying to convey. Because our activities were all aim to create moments that show emotions, so what we have now are basically all expressive movements. So next we have to

step out of what we were doing and focus on put we had in a larger context without constricting ourselves to one idea and try different things.

collaborative project refelction

So far, our group has made some progress. Firstly, we have a more comprehensive understanding of our stimuli and incorporate the stimuli to our work better. Because we want to show the complexity of human nature presented in our stimuli, rhythm 0, we decided to show how the two sides of human nature can affect one person’s behavior. To achieve this, Ruth is playing the people and me and Joyce are acting as the two sides of human nature. Furthermore, we try to combine both expressive and behavioral gestures together to avoid complete abstraction and explore the balance between them. Also, in rhythm 0, the practice put different objects in front of her for others to choose, thus, we decided to put several props in front of “the people” as well in order to show the relation of human nature and how will she react with the props.

After we settle down our idea, we tried different ways to explore and create moments. We did the activity of writing different words related to our theme and creating moments based on those words. This activity helps us have a common idea of what our project is going to be about and inspires us to have some moments that can be incorporated in our work. Also, we tried some viewpoints activities to explore different elements based on our concept. For example, because we represent good and evil, we want to see how the spatial relationship, level, kinesthetic response can convey our relationship to each other.

But we have also encountered some struggles, because it’s hard to deliver clarity through complete abstract gestures and also some of our key words are similar so it’s not easy to create a lot of distinctive moments. In order to solve this problem, we decided to balance abstraction and concreteness by letting “the people” do some movements that are clear and can be found in daily life and the two sides help or interrupt her from doing that.

Now, we have come up with a moment chart to make the story more clear and in order. In this chart, we order and layer moments that we had or potentially will have together like the one in the Laramie Project. So what we have to do next is to practice those moments and try different ways to present those mome