Final Project

https://youtu.be/RKgXJ6lY6Xs

Reflection of "Life as We Knew It"

This project was different from anything we've done all year. It entailed us getting a little creative with what we thought of in the fact that it was up to us to choose a book to work with. Normally when we act out a scene, it is out of a book that was assigned to us but this time this project was out of something we read on our own time, whether it be a poem, novel, short story, anything. I feel like it was really fun because instead of being limited by certain aspects, being the novel we read, it was fun to finally go and find a book or short story on our own and act it out. We acted out a book called "Life As We New It" by Susan Beth Pfeiffer, the story entails a little girl named Miranda, her older brother Matt, her younger brother Jon, her mother and her boyfriend Peter. An asteroid hits the moon so hard that it moves closer to Earth, therefore changing the weather, making it cold, very cold. Their family is out of the way from town and since the snow is piling up, cannot get there as it is a four mile trek. The family just basically start slowly dying as they cannot eat because they have to save food in order to survive. In our scene, we take certain scenes from before and after the incident and we basically start going after, before, after etc. In order to show this in our scene we used lighting changes, dimmer for after and brighter for before, we also tried to make our characters seem weaker in the scenes where we are reenacting the parts after the incident. The cast for scene was me as Matt, John as Jon, Grace as the Mother, and Maddie as Miranda. In order for all of the cast to have an equal amount of lines, we made sure the scenes focused intensely on one character, some characters got more than one scene that did this but for the most part all of the characters were accounted for and everyone had an equal amount of lines. I feel like as a group we worked well together, we clearly had good chemistry with each other and in acting it is understood that in order for a scene to be good there has to be good chemistry and with us, we all got along and were able to work well together. In total our project consisted of 8 scenes and was around 10 minutes long. Individually I feel like this scene improved my acting skills because I had to learn how to change emotions and the emotions I had to change back and forth between were quite different, in the before sequence I was a caring, loving older brother figure and in the after sequence I turned into an emotionless, hopeless figure who has lost all hope and was basically just waiting to die because his family was dying around him. Overall I feel like we did well on this project and it was really fun. Individually, I'm glad we did this project because it allowed me to explore different fields of acting and expand my views on what is possible for me as an actor, I was also able to improve and learn new things on emotion which is really good because I can use them in future productions. This was a very fun, creative project and I'd definitely do this again.

Project Progress

Our group has made great strides in our project, the majority of our lines have been memorized and staging the scenes have gone smoothly for most parts. However, sometimes we tend to skip lines and/or replace them with others and then further on down the scene the lines get jumbled and we have to start over. We have been troubled a lot sometimes by issues such as switching between before and after as sometimes the audience does not know which is which but we are working towards fixing that issue. The most important part of our scene is character chemistry, I feel like our group does well together because we all know how to work together cooperatively and play our parts the way they are intended to be played. The character parts in a lot of times have to switch emotions, for example, my character has to switch from a loving, caring older brother figure before the incident into an emotionless, feelingless, careless figure who has no hope whatsoever for survival, the same goes for the lot of us, except Johnny, who tries to in a way keep us hoping. I have progressed in the sense that I am learning how to act out the feeling of emotionlessness, I struggled with this before because I normally always feel something whereas the character I played is basically numb to all feeling and doesn't care about anyone anymore not even his own sister when she tells him she is leaving and probably will not return, my character responds with basically and "oh well, it was nice knowing you" type of response. Overall, our group is coming along and we are pretty much ready to film the final project, I feel that this is going to be a very successful project if we all just stick to the script and are all memorized. There is no questioning the skill of each and every one of us to do the job right, its just all about memorization and sticking to it.

Theater Review

This weekend I saw the spring production at CA called "Comedy Tonight". It featured skits written by faculty and staff about any subject as long as it was comedic enough and easily adaptable to the stage. Each actor in the production directed, wrote and acted in a skit which I thought was really cool and a twist on what theatre is and what we've done here as we normally just have a student director or 2 student co-directors. Going into this production I didn't really know what to expect, I kind of just went into it expecting anything and everything to happen because if guys can play girls in this production then honestly, what can't happen? I thought the mix of a musical aspect in the beginning was cool and the fact that they gave Abigail her own solo number was also good and well deserved, I thought that Anna's number was well done and even more impressive that she did it herself, it takes a lot of preparation and self discipline to write your own dance number and she seems to pull it off every time. I have to admit, I wasn't as impressed with the Punstoppable scene as I thought I'd be, I just thought the concept that it entailed was kind of cheesy and didn't fit well with the subject of puns and I had trouble finding the amusement in the puns. In my opinion, the best skit was the Morning meeting skit just because the actors were all perfectly cast and that the things that they talked about were just so true to the real thing which made it even more amusing. All of the actors did a great job of reenacting the real people, especially John as Mr. Dykeman and Peter as Mr. Gilpin, probably my favorite performances of the show. I do not want to overshadow the Bonnie and Clyde skit thought because not only was it quite unique but it was touching as it featured the Leser sisters together in lead roles with this being Charlotte's last show at CA so I found that very heartfelt and well done. All around I thought the show was a success and that all of the actors stuck very true to life with their parts and the show was very well cast, making for a very entertaining entertainment. Another banger from the CA Varsity Players, well done to all cast and crew.

Project Update

After working for a few days on this project we have decided that we are going to plot a book called "Life as We Knew It" as our project. We have cast the characters with Grace as Miranda, the eldest sister of the siblings, me as Matt, the eldest brother of the siblings, John as Johnny who is the little brother of Matt and Miranda, Maddie is the mother, Laura and the father or Peter is Jack. The story is based on an apocalypse like situation where it is snowing all the time, there is no electricity and therefore no heat, food supply is going low and they are all starting to eat less and less and at one point start giving most of the food to Johnny who is the one who is supposed to survive. We are doing five scenes and each of the character gets their own scene where they are the star of the scene. My specific scene is with Grace and I and she is proposing that she go into town to look for a letter from their father but in reality that means she wants to kill herself because the trek into town is miles away and there is no way she could trek back up the hill to the house. Matt, who is normally a very compassionate character who looks for the wellbeing of his family is no longer sane and has completely lost all emotion and makes no efforts to stop Miranda from going and simply tells her not to take this skis because Johnny needs them to which she simply replies that she will leave them behind the oak tree and that he should come get them as soon as she leaves. As a group, we have made huge progress and are all excited to start practicing lines and staging scenes.

Proposal: Final Project

For my idea, I'd want to do the book The Outsiders by S.E Hinton which is a story about a rivalry between two rival gangs, one is called the Greasers who are the poor kids with slicked back hair and t-shirts and jeans and then there is the Soc's who are the richer kids who dress more upscale, this story talks about their rivalry and how much it impacts the life of both groups who fight over everything. The story is told through the eyes of Ponyboy Curtis who is part of the Greaser party but he is not violent and likes poetry and watching movies and going to school. I would want to adapt the scene where Johnny and Ponyboy are in the park and then Ponyboy is jumped by the Soc's who are drunk. Johnny comes to the aid of Ponyboy who is being drowned by the Soc's and stabs one of them and then all of the other Soc's run off. I want to do this scene because I feel like this scene is significant to the whole story and is the buildup to the bigger plot which goes into the portion where they run up to the church and hide there where no one can find them. Staging this would be difficult because we could need something to resemble a fountain for when the Soc's attempt to drown Ponyboy but other than that it'd be quite simple to stage. With this, the costuming is quite simple, t-shirts and jeans for the two Greasers and more upscale clothing for the two Soc's. We would have Ponyboy and Johnny sitting under a tree in the park talking about how Ponyboy's brother had hit him in the face for being out late, causing Ponyboy to run out of the house and run to find Johnny in the park. After about a two or three minute dialogue between the two, we would have the drunk Soc's pull up in their car and start making trouble with the Greasers. In the movie, one of the Soc's splashes whiskey on Ponyboy so we would need a small glass of water to imitate whiskey for that sequence and other than that it would be all words and actions. For the real stage setup, we would have the fountain at centerstage and the tree that Johnny and Ponyboy sit under at stage right, the Soc's would pull up from stage left and walk towards them stumbling and stuttering to each other, walking in front of the fountain where in that case the confrontation would start and that would how the staging would be. In terms of timing, the scene would probably run around 10-13 minutes in length with each character having at least 10 lines each. Overall, this scene is a classic in literature and in film history and is very open to adaptation and it'd be fun to put a unique, theater-ish type spin on it.

IB Exam

Overall I think I did well on the Exam. I feel like having the book on the first day made it a little bit of a stronger performance and since I was talking about staging I could really let my creative side show and get creative which I found really relaxing and stress-relieving. I also felt having the book with me was quite a relief so I could refer to it. I felt like I was able to go into depth about the novel very well which was quite surprising to me because I didn't have the book so I was really happy that I was able to do so well on the textual analysis because talking about the staging for me was quite simple. I was able to finish the first paper with ease without any hesitation or looking up from my paper to think because everything was right there in my head ready to be put on paper. On the second paper I felt a little bit more shaky because I only had one poem fully memorized. Although I tried hard to memorize Shihab-Nye's poem, I couldn't get it down pat so I memorized what I could and what I thought I'd need and just rolled with that. I was able to get two solid paragraphs down though which was better than I thought I was going to do, there was a bit more hesitation and looking up to think on this one though because I had to think of how to phrase it since we are dealing with poetry. After writing Shihob-Nye's section of the paper, I started on Dickinson's section and about half way through the first paragraph I hit writer's block and I looked up from my paper for about a solid 20 minutes and then I started writing down things just to write something and try to hit my stride again, which I did eventually but by then i'd written down about 10 or 12 lines of stuff that was just not well put. I did finish the second paper strong though which was good, so overall I think I did alright.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers

The word hope in its own right holds no certain certitude. Everyone has their own definition of the word and what it means to them, in fact, if you ask any two people you probably won't get the same answer from both of them. This masterpiece by Emily Dickinson shows why the word hope has so many meanings and so many explanation. She shows us that hope uses more than just one sense, she uses sight and hearing which shows us that hope is all around us. She uses a lot of unclear language in a clear attempt to get the reader to make the reader make an interpretation of the poem with a base point (being hope).

She uses ambiguity in this poem to make her own meaning of it but also to allow us as readers to make our own conclusions. Her first line ""Hope" is the thing  with feathers" is the first of many lines to use ambiguity basically meaning one point, that hope can fly and take you anywhere you want, other than that as the reader we have to make our own conclusions. I feel like she uses ambiguity on purpose to basically tell us what she feels like hope means to her but only she can understand. This leaves the reader having to make their own conclusions about what hope means to them. I feel like the subject of hope is such an open-ended subject where in explaining it there is always ambiguity somewhere in your explanation so in this poem she makes us think creatively by making us use our senses to make us understand what she is saying. She says she has "heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea" which to me means that no matter what situation she was in she could always hear hope somewhere. In this last line she says "yet never in extremity, it (hope) asked a crumb of me" to me this means that she asked hope for everything yet it never asked for anything back, one might say "well, hope is not a person" well thats the thing, hope is a spirit that needn't anything in return but will be there when you need it most in the extremest of conditions and in the best of times.

In conclusion, ambiguity in this poem is not being unsure, it is being you. It is taking Dickinson's words and molding them into your own meaning, as you read you will see that almost every word she uses can be molded into a new meaning by everyone who reads it. Dickinson had her own meaning of it when she wrote it and never intended it to be understood the same way by any reader as is the deal with most poems unless they are just a story poem (a story written in stanzas using poetic language). All poems are open to interpretation and this poem is a perfect example of that point.

Review of CIDINT

The show The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime featured a charismatic cast with an amazing stage and intriguing lights and sound effects, the show was incredibly futuristic which I enjoyed. The show was based heavily off of the novel which tells the story of an autistic but very smart boy named Christopher who has two goals in the near future, to find the killer of his neighbors dog, Wellington and to get an A* on his math A-level exam. The play stayed very true to the novel in that it did not change a lot of the storyline around a lot and used charismatic acting, lighting effects and sound effects to emphasize the symptoms of Christopher's autism. They also managed to include some comedic elements and language into the play which was fun too.  I do feel like the play was a bit confusing in the beginning as to explaining who was who and what was going on but once you caught on you basically knew the story and understood everything you saw. The lights sometimes made it complicated to know where you were and who lived where but the lighting really came to life in the train scene which was quite well done. I liked the distant affection that the parents showed Christopher as well, Christopher doesn't like to be touched, but when prompted he touches his mother and father's hands as I sign to show them that he does love them which occurs repeatedly throughout the show and just adds a very touching element to the show. I feel the show ended nicely with Christopher getting an A* on his exam and his parents are both very proud of him and it is just a very touching scene and Christopher's own victory, I also like how in the last scene when he asked his mom that since he got an A* on the exam that he could do anything but right before she could respond, the screen cut to black which in my opinion was a genius way to end a brilliant show. In all, I was impressed with all aspects of the play and am happy that I took the time to go see it, it definitely exceed my expectations and I would recommend it to any avid play-goer looking for something new or a beginners first show, be it what it is, it is a great show and I enjoyed it very much.

Nature is what we see

In this poem, there is one stanza consisting of 12 lines and it is one long sentence. The meter changes quite a bit in this poem, the first two lines are 6/1 (6 syllables to 1 line) and then the next lines vary from 7/1, 8/1 and sometimes even 9/1 and then go back to 6/1 for the end.  The rhyme pattern for the first three lines is ABA and then I believe the rhyme pattern for the next five lines is BCABA and the rhyme scheme ends as there are no more rhymes to include. The tone of this poem is uplifting as it talks heavily about nature and all things nice. In this poem she connects nature to harmony which means nature is peaceful. She also connects it to heaven which in a way, I think, is that it is everlasting.

The poem says that Nature is the most peaceful ant beautiful part of our world. She talks about the most beautiful aspects of nature or her favorite parts anyway. She also says "Our wisdom is impotent to her simplicity" which is basically saying that what we know is powerless to how simple nature is because nature is just beautiful and we will never know why or how nature is how it is because it is simply just there which is the definition of her "simplicity". She talks about the senses, sight and hearing and then gives examples of what we can see (the hills, the afternoon, the bumblebee, the squirrel) and then she talks about what we can hear (The Bobolink, the sea, the thunder, the cricket). I feel this is significant because it truly does emphasize that nature is all around us and that it invokes all of our senses.

Themes in Poetry

3 themes I found were religion, family and youth.

With religion, I found in the first poem about the figs that they were related the figs back to Allah and how it seemed that the figs were his fruit. It said "I'm talking about a fig straight from the Earth - a gift of Allah"

With family, I found that in all poems he would talk about his father or in the case of the third poem his Grandmother. In each of his first two poems he says Papa or father, in the first one he says "My father, in Arabic, chanting a song" and in the second one he says "It was never too strong for us: make it blacker Papa". He seemed to relate all of these poems back to his family or include them in it so we can infer that he had a close-knit relationship with his family

For youth, it is clear that since he uses Papa and Father and mother all the time that he is talking about memories of his childhood. He even speaks to being a young age in the first poem when he says; "At age six, I ate a dried fig and shrugged".

Once on This Island

I am writing this from a perspective of a performer who was a part of the cast of the show. The show was about a peasant girl who falls in love with a rich boy when his car crashes in her village and she takes him under her care. After he is taken away by his relatives, the girl then travels to find him, when she does find him, he allows her in and makes her his temporary mistress until Andrea, the girlfriend of the boy, comes home and the boy, who is named Daniel is scolded by his parents for falling in love with a peasant and is forced to throw her out of the hotel. Andrea and Daniel are married and in an absolutely heartbreaking ending Ti Moune, the peasant girl, died of starvation outside of the Hotel where Daniel lives. My part in the play was that of a storyteller named Armand and I played Daniel's father. The performance overall was amazing and everyone did so well. I had trouble keeping control of my emotions as I let tears fall on the last two songs of the play on the last two days of the show. The musical score is absolutely brilliant, all with catchy lyrics and brilliant melodies and some of the songs are more on the beautiful song with heartfelt lyrics and gorgeous chord progressions and harmonies that truly touch the heart and will make any audience member shed a tear or two. Saturday was definitely our best show because the audience got into it and we really saw their emotion towards the end as a few of them cried at the last two songs which kind of made me feel a little better since I had also cried on those last two songs. The choreography that we incorporated into the show was fun to learn and really did flow with the music, each movement that we did had a specific part to the song and everything was just so well put together. I missed two weeks of rehearsal and I did have a hard time bouncing back into things and at some parts even doubted my own abilities to prepare for the show and learn all of the dance moves and remember all of the lyrics but Ms. Guarino and the rest of the cast pushed me and helped me to prepare and made me feel confident in myself and pushed me to put on a great performance and I want to thank Ms. Guarino for believing in me and not giving up on me because I honestly believe any director would have given up on me and just found someone else but she worked with me and helped me along the way and I am happy that I was able to deliver. This production was amazing led by an amazing cast and I am so glad that I was able to be a part of it. I love all of you

Scenework Reflection

Right now we are making decent progress and have a firm, steady basis on the direction we are heading in with this assignment. We have a firm script that we are still cleaning and polishing up but other than that all we have to do is memorize our lines and we will be ready to perform. We need to work on memorizing our lines and remembering our blocking but otherwise, the chemistry between the actors in our scene is really good, we all get along and are the same page about everything. After watching others work, we feel like we are in good shape about most things, today in class, we just took time to run through our lines and try and get some memorization down while we could have been running some blocking as well which we should have done, we just read our scripts aloud and tried to memorize what we could which was basically our whole first scene and a lot of the second scene. Our progress up to this point has been quite stellar and we are in a good spot and are ahead of a few groups in terms of our preparations and our performance is looking very promising. Our interpretation of the text is clearly interpreted in the scene quite clearly, we will be using more props and costumes to depict where we are and who we are so yes, I do believe that the audience will understand who we are and where we are and that we will do a good job of interpreting the scene to the audience. Also we are having issues with timing and how fast we speak. We are all decently fast speakers so we are definitely going to have to slow down if we are going to get 20 minutes in, also we could add a little bit more dialogue to our scripts for some characters such as Papa Ge's character who doesn't speak as much in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th scenes as much as he speaks in the 1st scene. Erzulie also fades out near the end of the performance but Erzulie did almost all of the talking in the first scene so she has enough lines, Asaka and Agwe have  dialogue in, I believe, the 3rd scene. If anyone needs more lines it is definitely Papa Ge because I feel like maybe sometimes he doesn't speak enough towards the end and the way the performance is enacted, he is supposed to stand in a corner with a toothpick in his mouth muttering comments whenever he feels like it. I feel like that if we leave him standing around for too long that the crowd will forget that he's there and when he finally does say something in the 3rd or 4th scene, they will be like "wait, who's that again?", so if we need to amp up anyone's line count it's definitely Papa Ge. Other than this I feel like our performance is stellar and that with a little bit of time to run our performance in the black box and memorize we will be ready to give a good show.

Proposal

For this project, we decided to change the perspective of the story of My Love, My Love. The main characters of the script will be the gods- Erzulie played by Charlie Swan, Papa Ge played by Taylor, Asaka played by Grace Greene and Agwe played by Michael Davis- and the story will be told from their point of view. Desiree always looked to the gods for guidance in the beginning of her journey, and though we, the readers, do not see much of them, they are accredited with responsibility for many of the story’s events.  They are the puppet masters of everything that goes on on Earth. To show this in our scene, we have set the gods in a control center. The setting is going to be an office where each god handles their daily tasks of controlling the universe. The gods will be doing tedious office work, but their decisions will be affecting many lives. The Gods will receive mail concerning their “principles.” (Erzulie will deal with love, Agwe with storms, etc.) The scene is going to show a fantasy-reality situation. The Gods are going to be dressed as businessmen, but they are going to be making decisions about people’s lives. We’ve decided to present the story this way to show how the gods just treated people as their pawns. 

The main conflict for our scene will be gods messing in each other’s departments. Agwe will be messing with Erzulie’s and no one will be listening to Papa Ge. Asaka and Agwe are in an underlying conflict that has disrupted the entire office (proving once and for all that office romances are not a good decision,) but most of the story will be focused on the gods trying to navigate around each other in regards to Desiree’s life.