Entry Six

Pre-examination Showcase

Pardon my late entries. Blogger has been giving me problems for quite some time. Livejournal next time! But I digress.

Anyway, we had another showcase on Thursday to the J3s. This showcase incorporated all our new changes, including script and movements for each scene. Chenxing was absent so we could only showcase 3 out of 5 scenes. And the 2 scenes that were not shown were actually the most important scenes as they are actually the main scenes that show our DV.

But despite this, the J3s were able to get an idea of the DV of our piece(wow!) as well as some of the ideas that we were trying to push forward. Such as the idea of control, abuse, and struggle. And here are some of the comments that they gave us:

Movement Wise
They felt that we were still not purposeful enough in our movements. It seemed as if we were carrying out the movements as if it was memorized, but not as if it was part of our character. So, inner monologue is important. We must not only do it, but also feel it. There were also certain scenes that they felt was weird. For example, the vomiting part of the Parent/Sibling scene. It seemed as if the Parent had an upset tummy halfway through. Anyway, we plan to portray the video of my mouth saying deregatory words, making the intention of verbal abuse more clear. The Child/Sibling scene is still a crowd favourite, just that movement intention must be made more clear. They also felt that the timing for all our movements seemed off, but this can be solved with more rehearsals, and making our movements second nature!

Light/Sounds wise
They felt that our lights were okay. Kudos to our lighting tech. Only concerns were that there needs to be better demarkation of spacing so that our expressions can always been seen by the audience. Overspill is inevitable, but we still need to take note. We also need to learn the justifications behind each of our lighting choices! In the case of our sound, they felt that there were times that the song choices overpowered our movements. And that sometimes, they felt the emotions not because of our movements, but because of our song choices, so this has made our movements less impactful. Even though lights/sounds is one of our skills, the main crux of our performance is still our movements and so we will have to work on this.

All in all, the J3s felt that our concept was interesting and has a potential to develop further!

Post Showcase
And so, one thing that we are trying desperately to do right now is to incorpate Laban's movement analysis's effort drives into our movements. Theories involving our weight, direction, timing, flow. This will help to show the transition in characters more clearly. This should have been done long ago, but it ain't over till the fat lady sings!

In terms of script, final changes will be made tonight. Even though its the last draft and still seems sparse, Expressionistic scripts are supposed to be like that, so that it allows more room for the creation of movements. (ie. less restrictive)

We must remember, we are not miracle workers. We don't aim for perfection. We aim for Excellence!