And so, our last school play comes to an end. After months of preparation and hardships, it was all over in only 3 days. 


It was the first time I actually got to see the play, since in previous years I had to act, and was limited only to my own experience in the scenes in order to measure the degree of success we had achieved on said play. I had high expectations in terms of being able to watch the play this time, to be able to see all of our work as if through the eyes of the spectator, and enjoy it as one would.


But as always, reality was far from what I expected, while watching the play I was not able to see it as a spectator would, maybe because I had seen it many times before, maybe because I was focused on the things that could or did go wrong, but I could only see actors on a stage instead of characters in a story. I was not able to experience the thrill I do whenever I go see a play, to be transported to a place that doesnt exist, where gradually you begin to forget you're sitting in a chair in an auditorium and all that exists are ideas, expressed through characters situations and the relationship between what you see and hear and what you feel.


What I experienced these past three days, was only the continuation of my everyday experience, I guess i was completely concious that what I was seeing was completely real, in the sense that I was not able to immerse myself in the fiction, I was not able to play the part of the audience. So I realized that the audience plays a crucial role in theatre, not only as a measure of success but because it is their experience that we seek when we make a play.


Overall the comments ive heard about the play are fairly mixed, some really liked certain parts, specially the shadow puppets scene, and some told me that due to pronunciation issues some bits were confusing and difficult to understand. And even though I appreciate positive comments, I feel relieved when I hear criticism, because it is the only way to really know what the audience thought was lacking or went wrong, and its only through mistakes that we can improve.


If a play is seen as a failure to the director or people involved in the production of the play because of technical issues or sloppy acting, but seems to have been a success to the audience, who's opinion counts the  most, the one thats coming form a person that has seen an unexpressed potential, or from the one who is oblivious of the whole process but enjoys the final product.

This week has been intense, the school play is only days away and there is still a whole lot to do. 

Above all, these last few rehearsals we have been experiencing technical problems, puppets that break to pieces, costumes which make acting difficult on stilts, props which don't stay in place, and unfinished scene changes. Not to mention we still haven't seen the play on one go, we struggle to make it past the first Act without running out of time. 

Something interesting we've noticed is that actors and backstage seem to be fully concentrated in the scene changes, even though they are not all complete, and some things are left undone, the actors are focused. Maybe its the time pressure, maybe its the apparent simplicity of only  moving a few things around and each person doing only one task. But what I do know is that the only moments where I've seen the play come "alive" so far is precisely in the scene changes. The scenes themselves, even though complete, or at least close to completion, lack that factor which changes a stage, actors and words into theatre. And I'm pretty sure that concentration and focus have a lot to do with that transformation. 

Its somewhat frustrating to see actors "pretending" to act, only performing "make-believe" actions, and not immersing themselves in the situation. Where all they need is that little extra push of focus, of believing what they are doing and stop being the actor on the stage, and becoming the character in the scene. I've discussed this with some friends and they all seem to believe that this lack of concentration disappears when the play is shown to an audience, and all the pressure seems to instantly translate into concentration. But I have my doubts about this assumption. First of all I believe that in order for the actors to develop their characters and explore their actions, they have to be in this state of focus beforehand. That in order for there to be coherence or an actual understanding of the subtext the actors must be immersed in their character and the situation around them.

Due to a lack of this concentration, what we seem to get is actors reading out lines, without the right intention, performing actions which have no significance, and expressing empty emotions. The play itself goes nowhere, and the audience's attention will most certainly be lost as well. 

I do not blame the actors entirely, it was our job as directors to express this vision to the actors, to surround them with context, giving them space to play and explore. But our vision was not clear at all, the plot kept changing, some parts seemed unnecessary, some parts seemed to contradict others, and so, due to a lack of vision and understanding by the directors, the actors found themselves confused.

I'm unsure as to how the "last-minute concentration" as my friends suggest, will transform what we have into a working play, or at least an appealing performance for the audience. Now I realize how crucial it is for a director to have a clear vision from the get go and stay true to it throughout, since it is that vision that translates into a play, and it sets the path for the actors to follow. 

To what extent are actors ever a character and not just a person pretending to be a character, and who does this transformation depend on? the actor or the audience? The concentration of the actor or the state of fiction which the spectator automatically creates when going to see theatre? 

This week I revisited my extended essay and decided to narrow its scope due to insufficient results in my workshops to fit the larger idea I was behind. I originally planned to investigate if Grotowski's method of the via negativa was a way to improve the actor's connection between their inner impulse and outer reactions, to reduce the lag time between the psychological and the physical.

From the get-go I knew that 20 hours would not be enough time for the process to actually yield any concise results, because from what i understood in Grotowski's book, this is a process which takes years to sink in and show any significant changes in the actors. Even though this was true, I did observe some significant changes in terms of physical tuning, and the exploration of the body by the actors.

The actors went mainly through a process of exploration, mainly through improvisation. This improvisation had no meaning behind it (in terms of creating a scene), the actor would just move through the stage using different body levels, efforts, paces, and perform different actions, but at no point in time should they think what they were going to do next, that was the whole point of the exercise, for them to experience a constant flow of actions that would emerge one after the other without any kind of pre-meditation.

In the process, problems emerged, and there was a lack of fluency, also called articulation, between the movements, this was mainly due to the actors stopping and thinking what to do next, which variation should they use, or which level had they not used, etc, etc. So I tried to create an environment where they didnt feel inhibitions, where they wouldn't fear doing what their bodies told them to. By doing embarrasing things like sticking the tongue out in front of everybody and opening your mouth as wide as you can, or screaming at the top of their lungs, and generally just trying to build up confidence, and a workspace where we all felt at ease with our bodies. This helped a lot in terms of energy and some articulation, yet there were some technical aspects to it aswell. Both the psychological and the physical had to be tweaked for the exercise to work.

After some exercises so that the body wouldnt injure itself when doing differnet ranges of actions, i though the process had taken the right direction. Improvisations became more fluid, articulated, and after the short sessions of this improvisations the actors were exhausted, yet some were extatic, they actually liked being in that "state" in which they just let themselves go to what their bodies desired, even for a few seconds.

It is a shame the workshops were so far apart form ach other, and momentum was lost, I really thought we were getting somewhere, and am really eager to keep looking into this and maybe start a workshop with people who are interested in some time.

To what extent can the results of the workshop be measured? The objective appreciation (articulation) only shows if the bodies are tuned and the actor can think fast, but it does not necessarily mean that the actor is in a state of  complete psycho/physical connection.

This week were getting closer to the play and there is so much more left to do. Previously rehearsed scenes fall apart again due to lack of practice, revisited scenes which were previously finished are now found to be nonsensical. On average, a disaster on a massive scale.


Yet there is always a beam of light amongst the darkness. Today I saw the shadow-puppets scene for the first time, and it turned out to be much more visually appealing and useful as I had previously imagined. The shadows allowed for exploration of "unreal" elements, such as bloody impalings, brutal gut-severing murders and four armed evil queens. I really enjoyed watching the rehearsal of this scene, and I think it will be refreshing for the audience to watch it since it has never been done before at any school play to my understanding. The fact that it is different will also keep the audience's attention, which is of utmost importance to this year's play, since it is going to be performed in English, and usually people lose interest really fast when they cant understand most of what is being said, so they need something more, they need to be given visual stimulus to keep them interested as well.


Some scenes, like scene 3, which were previously rehearsed without masks, lost something since the masks were added. They lost expressiveness and meaning because the intonation of the phrases was not optimal, or clear in its intention, and without face expression it is even harder to express what little was there already, so the masks posed a challenge, but in a way, it showed us what had to be done. The characters on that scene, especially Deborah will have to be tweaked around in terms of characterisation and voice, because the character seems flat, and uninteresting to a certain extent. Reference from other sources, such as movies, books or other plays, about similar characters will help greatly in terms of understanding the behaviour and intention of the characters, that's why actors should be encouraged to invest some time in terms of character exploration in their own time.


What still worries me the most is the use of the human sized puppets, since I have been missing out on the last few rehearsals I still dont know if the movements are organic and believable, or if they still remain rough and non-flowing. this is a major issue in terms of puppet handling, and an issue we knew was going to emerge the moment we chose to use puppets for the play. We were warned that puppeteering was a trade that took a much longer period of time to master than the time we were allowed for this play to be produced, and the idea of the puppets not looking as if they had  a life on their own on-stage is one of my biggest concerns, and could be one of the deal-breakers for the audience's attention.


Not much time left for the play to premier and we still have lots of work to do.
Does the mask hinder face expression in able to allow for body expression to be more focused? Or is this effect just a natural outcome of there not being face expression, without intensifying the already present body expression?