Last monday, we saw a play called "Interruptor" which was created by the theatre group Cuer2. And it revolved around media and technology these days, and how they affect our lives today.

As the play started, i found it hard to understand and give meaning to the what was happening because it was all over the place. The two actors would speak as children, then they would switch to news reporters, political figures and even the pope, and i just couldnt find a way to connect these, but as the play progressed, a pattern started emerging, when the actors repeated a sequence of different news stories in the same order for example, which started giving an idea of some sort of connection between the little scenes. And towards the end of the play it became clear that the characters on stage were actually children playing as if they were inside a computer or a television, thus creating these random shifts between settings as if the television was changing channels.

The stage had movable walls which were made up of an assortment of cables, discs and broken or old electronic devices, and the scenery were all broken CPU's and monitors and two cushions.and this was enough to create all of the different situations because the actions themselves are part of the character's imagination. So the scenery worked very nicely with the plot. The scenery also gave a slight impression about what the play was going to be about the moment the audience walks into the stage. The lights were fixed for the most part, but there was one light that was lit when the characters "inside" the TV look at the audience thats watching themand it created a neat effect because when one is in front of a screen, the light from the screen is refleced on one's face, and the same thing happened on the other side of the screen this time. Im not certain if it was intentional or not but it created a nice effect.

As far as the acting goes I really enjoyed the character transformations and the versatility of the actors to switch between characters instantly and still do a good performance. The characterisation was really good, and I specially remember one scene where the actors were middle-aged women and were talking about the news and broadcasts, where I really felt i was seeing two middle-aged women discussing about news, not only the body movements but also the voice, if i had my eyes closed i wouldve believed that there were two women onstage and not the actors i had seen previously. Another thing i would highlight would be the moment in which they go from being children to news reporters, in which they go through a little period of transformation as if they were made out of electrical parts, and they make very eclectic and robot-like movements, which accompanied by the sound effects blended really well.

Overall, the message I got from the play was that media and technology, instead of bringing us together as they were intended to, they actually separate us from each other. Human interaction and critical thinking are replaced by digital conversations and spoon-fed information, and that is what is happening right now in the world, the younger generations are learning everyday to use computers and digital means to do everything, and all that makes us human is disappearing.

Obviously its not as if the world was going to lose all human charisma and emotion just because all of the media and technology, because even if it is what's happening right now, our past has taught us that there will most likely be a movement that will go against that in the future, like comparing the middle ages and the renaissance, because after all the world always reaches a point of natural balance.

In the film industry, digital arts and technology have started replacing various previously man-made aspects like stunt doubles which are replaced with digital models or the setting which can now be a green screen, and even acting is being replaced by digital actors. Will this merging of the digital and the natural ever happen in theatre to the same extent?

 

This week has been full of work in terms of the school play and the production meetings, I found that the hardest part was to integrate my research about costumes to the scenery for example, because I have to adapt what I have to the colour scheme of the cyclorama for example, or in terms of props, seeing if the colours of the costumes will blend well with the ones of the props. So all these little details like lengths, colour or sizes depend on the other fields of production. When working on the physical training i found that my imagination, effective imagination, needed some work, because even if I can focus and imagine other situations with my eyes closed, when i opened them i just couldnt focus enough to overwrite the space that my eyes showed me was in front of me. When thinking about it, I realized that only one of my sense was "impairing" my imagination, so I will try and focus more on the other senses and see if it helps the process. When starting our warm-up we made an exercise where we imagined our body being disconnected bit by bit, and once a body part was disconnected then no energy would flow through it, thus remaining immobile, and then we would reconnect them, again without moving, and when finishing this exercise I realized something I hadn't seen before, because in both parts of our exercise we were immobile yet we imagined, and eventually felt all these connections being connected and disconnected, proving that effective imagination happens and we can interpret it as something physical too. When we walked imagining a fictitious imagination, our way of walking eventually changed, like having gravity on another direction or walking as if we were falling, and when creating a character, imagining new situations like that can help create a certain type of walking, even for the school play, the characters which keep they're centre of gravity closer to the ground could make use of the exercise to create they're way of walking.

Looking back, effective imagination seems to be much more present when I was younger. To a certain extent, is our understanding of the world as it is conflicting with our ability to "effectively" imagine new situations?

This week we started looking at voice characterisation in Kabuki and have just started to rehearse the outline of the scenes. This first step towards what will become of the play really gave me a much clearer perspective of what we were aiming at and how much time we had to do it, because previously, when we were just training the body, the play still felt too abstract. In the production meeting on Saturday morning I realized just how much work has to be done by our whole team to get this played finished on time, and it certainly raised the stakes and the pressure. At rehearsals most people seem to have learned what they were taught during the physical body training, which is good because the positions and ways of walking are the foundations of what will become of the acting. Right now I don't know what to feel more challenged about, the production of the play, the research about Kabuki costumes or my acting role in the play, it all seems to have come together. In drama class i was surprised to find that we as a drama group were able to perform the warm up and then the physical exercises without much guidance at all, and to be honest I felt like we even worked a little bit better without anyone supervising because there is much less pressure in the atmosphere. While exploring the costumes used in Kabuki I realized that some skill would be needed to fold and make the costumes because they are not at all simple, it goes beyond the conventional costumes, and im not sure if were going to be able to manufacture such costumes very easily. The more i learn about costumes, the more i realize about their complexity. Little things such as the direction of the folds can express big things like differentiating the living from the dead for example, so these details are crucial in order to have a Kabuki-correct play.

How much has western culture affected Kabuki since the Tokugawa period ended?

This week has been full of work about the kabuki play, not only in the production and design but also the training involved. As we research more about Kabuki, we can apply everything to the rehearsals and physical training. In terms of the physical training we started on our own projects trying the techniques that we saw on Roberta Carreri's video, my training consisted on trying and differentiating extroverted and introverted movements and even trying to combine them. The idea of the exercise at first was a little preoccupying for there would be no sort of aid or guidance, it was to be a srictly personal exercise were us and our effective imagination would lead us to explore and learn more about acting. But once the exercise started, a certain feeling of freedom soaked in, for i could choose which way and in what direction to take this exploration, so it was certainly a refreshing experience, and it also made me connect a bit more with my creative side, which i felt i had left behind a bit. The play rehearsals, even if they seem a bit slow i think are serving theyre purpose, for the people and actors involved do seem to be getting the basic outline of what Kabuki theatre is like, and they are learning the positions and exercises well. Kabuki is a particularily difficult type of theatre, which isnt very comforting to hear when the school play is only a few months away, but im sure we will be able to go through each aspect of Kabuki in a basic manner, and this will proably suffice our audience. My experience of friday's class gave me a slight boost in confidence in terms of what the creative side of designing the play will be like, because as i said i felt previously unnatached with that creative impulse. Overall it has been a demanding yet productive week in terms of the progress of the school play and my learning about acting and theatre.

To Kabuki actors in ancient Japan, was acting just a trade, or was it more of a way of life?