This school play was a completely different experience than any other previous ones, I think it’s because this time I felt much more attached to it, be it for the fact that now we were part of the stage design and production, or also the fact that I came to every rehearsal this time. An activity that takes so much of your time becomes like your priority, and for the, what, three months that the play took to put together, it was basically all that I could think about, specially the last month or couple of weeks before the play, because of the pressure and excitement. I think the play was a bit chaotically arranged at first, but as time went by, everything started piecing together, the idea of each scene working by themselves separately at first seemed as if it wasn’t going to be very good, due to the fact that there were only three directors, but amazingly it managed to work just fine. In my scenes for example, specially scene five, at the beginning when there was no director, the actors would just mess about and wouldn’t take things seriously, but then as some people were kicked out or left the play, and pressure started building due to the proximity to the play, the actors started taking things more seriously and ended up giving ideas and working as a team. In my opinion, the play exceeded my initial expectations, probably because it all seemed to come together at the end of the process and seemed quite disorganized and messy before that. Only one thing concerns me now that the play is over, and it is the fact that this last one has highered the bar, and will raise bigger expectations for next year, which makes me nervous, not because I don’t think we are a good drama group, because I do think that when we work together we yield good results, but because what the IB 2^nd year group did was more than good, and sometimes these things just occur, unexpectedly, and that’s what worries me.

I’m all excited about Paucartambo and I’m all ready and set up. I even did my baggage already. We’ve done so much preparation and studying about it and Andean theatrical culture that I just can’t wait to see it with my own eyes. Obviously there is a concern, not the weather or how we are going to share rooms, but how we are going to be able to see and analyze the whole party in the very limited time that we have, and only with our point of view. By point of view I don’t mean our opinion, but the actual things that we see, our visual perspective. Its going to be challenging and I think whaty will be the most helpful in this is to have a clear research question so that we spot the precise things were looking for.

Is it possible to analyze and condense hundreds of years of culture and tradition that has evolved in the party in only one visit? What about the dynamic elements which will seem fixed if we only go 1 time?

(this post was saved in the drafts folder for some reason, as seen on the image above, and it dates 10/07/11, also the post will be published as if it were sunday because thats the original date written.)

I cant believe the play is finally over, what one seemed like a never-ending eternity now seems just a small glimpse of time. I feel that my work in terms of costumes (set design) has taught me a lot of things, but not in the explicit sense of actually designing costumes, but in the sense that it gave me a broader insight into how intense the job of a designer can be, for I had to finish designing the costumes in quite a short amount of time and one has to think about all the other design elements so that they fit in the play, taking into account colour, shape, how well they will work on the scenes, etc. It certainly made me see this "artistic" world, which I naively deemed as being about feeling and thought rather than hard work as something really labour-intensive. When I saw scenes in the dressed rehearsals I felt really relieved, not only because the costumes looked quite well with the overall design of the play, but also because it meant the realization of the work I had done with the help of Arianna throughout all this period of time. If I could go back and change some things about the designing process I would've probably done more research before starting to draw the models, so that I had more variety of styles and more accuracy in terms of Kabuki. Which is probably the most important step a designer has to take before starting to work, for without research there isnt much to work with. Overall the design experience has taught me many different things that I will be able to apply in the future. I heard pretty good comments about the play overall and some mention about the costumes which I was quite happy about, mainly about the Exorcists costume change which seemed to attract the audience's attention. I would've really liked to see the play as a whole to see how well the play worked and which elements couldve been improved, but unfortunately as designers/actors of the play we were unable to because we had to act in the dressed rehearsals and couldnt sit down and watch our design work, but nevertheless it has been a really good experience.

As an actor in the play, I have to say that this particular acting experience has been like no other done before, mainly due to the fact that this is a completely different type of theatre than what were used to, and the approach into creating a character is totally different than representational theatre. So no we had to work from the outside inwards not from the inside (feelings, psicological emotions, etc) outwards. I would be lying if I said I didnt enjoy this experience, on the contrary, it was actually pretty fun. Not needing to have a genuine emotion behind your actions is something that was quite unknown to, I guess, all of us that acted in the play, because we had never come across this concept before. To be honest, I still couldnt get rid of the old way of creating a character throughout the process, for I used the context of my character to express the hatred and frustration he had after killing his fiance. It was hard for me to get rid of the way I had  been doing theatre throughout my whole education and try and replace it for a completely opposite one. My way of dealing with this was to incorporate one with the other, try and be as superficial as possible, and focus a lot on the visual and physical aspect but still have a few guiding feeling behind it to make it feel (for me) more natural and easier to act out. Incorporation seems to be a way to survive when different ideas clash, be it in religion and cultural beliefs such as we see on Paucartambo, or different types of Theatre ideologies like in this play. I think that our capacity to merge two completely different things make us who we are as human beings at this point in history, where almost everything around us is a mixture of different things and cultures, it is definately a way forward, acceptance and integration, rather than purist ideas. Thats why I deem the Andean culture to be a very wise one, because even if it isnt the most developed one in terms of technological advances and modern economics, its fundamental principle of cultural survival dates back to inca times, and this integration is what we are discovering in modern times as a way of development. Anyways, going back to the play I really enjoyed acting on it, and it is an experience that i will certainly rememner and look back on on the coming years. Im really happy with how this play came out to be, and hope that next year we do an even better job.

1, 2, 3 MI - YU - KI

Will the world ever reach a a stage of cultural uniformity through integration? And how can small cultures survive against larger ones?