Surrealism Evaluation
Throughout the rest of the term of the performing and production arts, we worked on surrealism and identity further. We worked with different stimuluses and theatre group exercises like Paper Birds. The first stimulus we looked at after the midpoint was the quote “Your identity is like your shadow, not always visible, yet always present”. We created a performance using this quote as part of our dialogue. One of the people in our group left but I think we could’ve possibly resolved this problem better as we just had one person from our group not doing anything at the start of our piece. The next stimulus we were given in new groups were lyrics to a song. This song was about a woman singing about her identity and how the things surrounding her define her identity as well. We didn’t finish this as we had to move onto our final performance, but I wish we got more work done and blocked what we wanted to do as a group. We worked on a Paper Birds workshop. There was a point where we had to act as an emotion on a card but no one else knew what was on the card. I wish I expressed the emotion I had a lot more so the other people could quickly figure out what emotion I was feeling. We then moved on to our final surrealism piece. The theme is identity. This consisted of Frantic Assembly techniques, a chair duet and one of our own choices. We chose the favorites technique. A quote, song lyrics and a poem. We had to use Paper Birds technique that was new to us called camera angles. The first stimulus we found was our song lyrics. I found the song called “Who We Are” by red. The lyrics are “How did we let go, how did we forget that we don’t have to hide, we won’t believe the lies again, we won’t be paralyzed.” The first thing we did was create a chair duet. We tried to include movements where we covered our faces to show identity. I think we could’ve possibly made this longer though. We then moved on to the next scene where we faced the back, someone says the first lyric and then we used the favorites technique to move around the space where we transitioned to a hide and seek scene which is when I say the next lyric. I then join in the hide and seek and when the seeker counts to 5, we duck. That is when the third lyric is said by the seeker. Then we all approach the seeker and do a trust fall then push him onto the floor to start the next scene. This section is the scene where we eventually changed to masks. We kept the seeker counting but for every two numbers, he was given a section of a mask. But the person who gives the section to him shuts down. I think this new scene is less messy than the original scene. Our lift is at the end of our performance to stand for me finding my character's identity in her passion. This lift was successful despite the fact we lost one of our cast members due to illness. We successfully recreated our performance, putting ourselves and each other into the areas where the missing cast member would’ve been. In conclusion, I think we could’ve used our rehearsal time a lot more or used our breaks to go into our rehearsal space to add more to our piece. Our last rehearsal went well. We added a new scene and rehearsed it, including the person who was off back into our piece. We got a lot of work done during this and were able to finish the performance. We had to record our performance in January. Our feedback was our piece was very smooth, sharp, eerie and effective but we as a group had to work on projection. My feedback on sound was the sound fitted in well with our performance but they thought that a song with lyrics could also make the performance more effective. I need to work on projection and using tone to reflect the emotion I’m trying to pursue.