This week we had two performances of "Split" in the Pelagatti  theatre, and both had different outcomes. The first day, we showed the play to Form 1, and even if there were a few mistakes, the audience was quite receptive and did react to the funny bits. Yet, the next day's performance was to the Form 2 students, and even though the performance itself had less mistakes, the audience did not react very much and didn't find it funny. This shows how different audiences can have different reactions to the same thing.That's why its so hard to trying to find "funny" or comical things to put into a script or play, because there will never be something that works for all audiences, taste and humour are different within each person. What we have to do when writing the script and rehearsing is to try and narrow down our audience as much as we can so we have an idea of what these people are going to react to. In our case our audience were school students, teachers and parents, which weren't english native speakers. After having done this, we put in things the audience could identify with, like chicken delivery men, or faulty technology, which we recognize in our society. But even within this audience we had set, we saw different reactions. Which means that if we base our improvements on one audience's reaction, it does not mean that the next audience will react to the things we added or improved, so its just a matter of trying to reach the biggest amount of people possible, because there will always be people that wont like the performance, or find it boring.

We just have one more performance of "Split" left, and I hope the audience will react better than in the last performance. But in terms of how I feel as an actor in the performance about our play, I would have to say that im happy about how things worked out, and I like the final product. At the beginning of the project I was completely unsure about the success of the play, due to the time we had, and that we were the ones that had to create the whole thing, but little by little as we started creating it, and it became more tangible, this uncertainty completely dissipated, and through group work we ended up having a play that worked. Now that we are finishing the PPP, I can see what most of the other plays of the festival lacked, working on a concept. Because really, that was the base that we worked on from the beginning, which made all of our inputs and elements coherent inside the play.

A good performance in the actor's point of view can turn out to be not so amusing to the audience, and viceversa, so, can there be any certainty at any time that a play is going to work?

We finally managed to make a full-run of the play and give it an ending, and were less than a week away from the actual performance. Through the last rehearsals, some issues emerged, one being the voice exploration of Esteban, who struggled to make a high pitch voice, and only seemed to be able to project his voice at a lower pitch. We all tried to help him out in different ways, but he still couldn't, so we had to go through a simple musical scale exercise to test his range of pitches. After some while of repeating the exercise, Esteban was able to find the higher pitches in his voice, but only at a low volume. Finding the ranges of our voice is very useful for character exploration, and to give one's character different ranges of emotion that can be expressed by different levels of pitch and volume. But as we saw, our full vocal range can sometimes be elusive, and can only be achieved by these warming exercises and stepping out of our comfort zone, because we become used to speak in one pitch and register and tend to stick close to it. Warming up is also essential to keep the pace of the play going, because it makes us go into the scenes already in character and with the right amount of energy, if not, the characters probably wouldn't be complete the moment we go on-stage, and the energy would probably be low. If the audience sees low energy at the beginning of the play, they feel discouraged to keep watching and probably wont enjoy it, so its crucial that we have a good start in able to get their attention. One of the things that worries me the most right now is the ending, where the lights stay turned off, and don't come back on again until the play finishes, because the original idea was to make the lights turn off so that we could rearrange the stage in order to show the audience the no-split. Now, without this change, I don't see the reason behind the turning off of the lights, and am not sure whether its going to work so well. Maybe its because I was just accustomed to the idea of showing the no split at the end, or that I dont like the idea of the lights never coming on again, but we will just have to see how it looks in tomorrow morning's  rehearsal in Hiram Bingham College.

Are different ranges of voice necessary to express different emotions? or can a character have a monotone voice and still express their emotions fully?