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