igallogly’s Blog

Alright, so this week in theatre, we did an excercise on seven “dealies”. They were sex, drugs, alchohol, family, friends, food, and money. The class activity was basically to write these seven things on slips of paper, put them into a manilla envelope, and to draw cards with replacing them after each draw so it was possible to draw a card more than once. Once we drew a card, we then had to write a list of five ways this “deadly” has effected our lives in a negative way. Although I personally found it quite difficult to devise ways a few of these have effected my life, it really made me start thinking about how it might have effected other people’s lives and, indirectly, mine. Like with alcohol for example; I’ve never been drunk or anything like that. But I have family members who have been. And although their drinking might not be excessive, it has still affected my life in some sort of negative way if I really think about it. This activity just really made me think outside the figurative box because the things like sex, drugs, and liquor havent really made too huge of an impact on my life in a direct way. The things like family, friends, and money have had a negative impact on everyone’s life though, without exception. But I honestly wouldn’t trade any of the negative effects any of these seven “deadlies” have had on my life to date because any hardship or trials that I may have gone through up to this point in my life has helped shape me into the person I am today, and if even ONE of those so called “negative effects” were removed from my life, I might be a completely different person, a person I may not be satisfied with.

So although everything in life has a negative effect, those things that we go through that we may not enjoy oing or we may find painful mold us into the people we become in the future and if we don’t fully experience everything life has to offer, we might not fully develop into the person we want to be, a person that can handle any hardship and can stand strong for what they believe in. Although that doesn’t mean we should throw caution to the wind and do completely irrational things just for the sake of doing them. It just means that we should take what life gives us, deal with it, learn from it, and ultimately grow into a better person because of it.

Sometime over third quater, i was working on my RI. i had thought of doing Rakugo for it because i think it is a very interesting type of theatre. its a type of like stand up comedy just in japanese. i was going to do it, but when researching, i realized that scripts for it didnt exist because this type of theatre is handed down orally. i was quite disappointed upon making this discovery, so i went home and cried.

in early january, I was working on my PPP. The PPP is a Practical Play Proposal, and in this I had to come up with the idea for a play idea and design the set set and all the lights and everything for it. it was actually quite fun and i really enjoyed doing it. it really made me realize how much work goes into creating something like that and how you can create themes with the use of colour schemes and other simple things like backround music or set placement. it just really made me think of every aspect of theatre and how they work together to create an entire fluid play and how they dont work properly seperately.

this week in theatre, we watched the musical A Sunday In The Park With George. This musical was absolutely terrific in every way. The acting was done supurbly and the set was amazing. The songs were done by Stephen Sondheim and it was much like that whicj was in Sweeney Todd.  The way the music all worked together with the lines and everything was amazing. Some of the songs were incredibly hard and difficult and I can’t imagine how much work was put into it. I think for the next musical, I’m going to put a lot more work and be much more dedicated to it.

this week in theatre, we’ve been watching the seniors do their TPP’s. its kind of intersting to see everything that they are doing and to hear Koller’s comments on what they are doing. none of them that i heard were apparently very good because they werent reflecting enough. i will make sure to reflect a lot and everything in mine.

this week in theatre, we are still working on the blocking without a script. Surprisingly, many of the actors still don’t know their lines. i cant even imagine how frustrating this might be for Sally, our director. she has showed us our blocking, but we still arent doing everything that we should be. we arent expanding on our characters very well. so this production might be a little bit of a disappointment. and i still havent gone home and researched my character at ALL, so i suppose this might be partially my fault. i feel kinda bad about it, but no one else is really motivated to so really well, so its a little dificult to get inspired to do better. like not even the seniors are motivated, and this is a huge assignment for them. its a little annoying.

this week in theatre, we have finally gotten off book!! At least kind of.. We were supposed to have memorized the first act by the first class of the week, but it didn’t quite go so well. I mean, I personally didn’t do too badly, but some others did. i wasnt too prepared though. i didnt study at all, but Mr. Koller told me that i was one of the ones who knew their lines really well. it kind of shows me how hard it would be for a director to keep their cool when their actors are so unmotivated. it makes me think that i should maybe start working harder in this play. Ben is still fooling around and not doing his work.. =/

in theatre this week, we’ve been working on The Diary of Anne Frank more. we’ve been mainly blocking and thats going alright i suppose. Ben is actually extremely inefficient as a set designer because he doesnt work at all. it gets pretty frustrating. at the moment, we are still on script, so it makes it incredibly difficult to properly block everything. but we are persevering. im finding that im having trouble really figuring out who my chacter is and how to properly portray him. im just not really seeing how his personality shines out through the lines that i have. i dont know much about the real life person though, so im thinking it might be a good idea to go home and research Mr. Vann Daan more and figure out how he might respond to certain situations. hmm.

in theatre, we’ve been working on the play The Diary of Anne Frank. this week we did casting. for the auditions, i was pretty nervous because ive never really had any acting experience before. i mean, i did Sweeney Todd, but ive never seen acting as being my forte. i wasnt quite sure what part i wanted to be, so i decided to audition for all the available male parts. when auditioning, the seniors apparently thought i did a really good job on Mr. Vann Daan, so thats the part i was cast as. the reason was because i played being angry quite well and i was convincing in my actions and intonation. i was pretty excited about that because acting angry in that way is a lot of fun. i wasnt really too nervous about it because it was just in front of people i knew and am friends with.

This week in theatre we’ve been doing a lot of work on movement. On teusday we started out the class talking about our RI and how to do it and what IB wanted. Right after that, we started some movement excercises. We began with an excercise in which we imagined a fly was buzzing around the room and we had to go find and catch it. We had to account for how a fly moved and how it would react to certain things. I don’t think it was a very successful excercise because it felt kind of dumb to do. But the concept of it was great. The point of it was to make us realize how much small things affect the effectiveness of an actor. Small things make the character more believable. Another thing we did was pick a partner and sculpt eachothers body’s and faces into different emothions. It was a really good excercise because it was awesome to see so many people’s interpretation of the same emotion. It really helps getting different perspectives on things. It was kind of hard for me to take it seriously though because I was partnered with Tyler and he was goffing off a lot of the time. But it was still a lot of fun! And really effective because we could see how different ways of carrying yourelf can make certain emotions and characters seem more believable. Like a happy person wouldn’t be scrunched over or anything like that and an evil person probably wouldn’t be standing up straight with perfect posture and everything.