End of the Year

Well, the end of the semester came, and I feel more disappointed in myself than I thought I would. In the end, these blogs came back to bite me in the ass. Hard. Hahaha, oh well, what's done is done and I can't change it so no use crying about it. I wish I could have gone to some of the extra-credit productions but they all interfered with either Choir or Gentlemen. 'Tis the life of an entertainer I guess...

I'm looking forward to acting in The Pirates of Penzance for Sinfonicron this year. Even though I have to cut my break short, I feel like this will be a really cool thing to do, and possibly one of the only ways I can continue to act at William and Mary with all of the other activities that I do.

Catching Up (almost)

Hey, this is going to be a really long posting, as I plan to catch up on all my blogging in one blog…as best I can remember…we’ll see how it goes. I’m going to start with the most recent and work backwards. Here's what I've got so far:

Dec. 7 – We had the last day of class today, which was basically the assessment of the previous night’s performance. Luckily, I had gotten to see the other group perform as they went first, and they did a great job. Apparently, our group kept getting pushed back but in the end did a great job. I had a good class that day and it was great to see everyone one last time before we would never be in the same setting again.

Dec 5 – I went to talk with Prof. Holliday and got a lowdown on the board, which turned out to be a board that I am very familiar with, and that made me happy. We had one final rehearsal later that night in the lab theatre to go over the technical elements, and I got everything done I needed to. I had to tell Abbey and Will what I wanted (I wrote it down) and show them how to use the board because I would be singing in a choir concert while they performed.

Dec. 3 – I’m frustrated. Will doesn’t like the table idea, and I feel like that was the only thing that I could do for lighting, which was what my grade was based off of. However, I got some good-ish news from Jason, who told me to go visit Professor Holliday because he had set up a basic plot – which meant that I could do lights again (yay!).

Nov. 28 – I think that rehearsal today went pretty well. We worked on stage fighting because Kate has the stomach flu and couldn’t make it. The fighting definitely got better the more they practiced, and I think it’s going to turn out pretty good. While they were practicing, I was designing the lights for the show. I’m going with simplicity; a single desk lamp that functions as an interrogation lamp, which will be switched on and off at certain points.

Nov. 26 – I stayed up late last night working out the final details of my play, The Wrapping Paper. I think it came out alright, although I wish that I had had time for people to read it...Well, it is what it is, and I think that the basic story is pretty interesting; one of murder and intrigue and insanity. Fun stuff. One day I’d like to try writing a comedy. Those are really hard to write and I think it would be a good challenge. Rehearsal went well; we practiced in the Dodge room, which was nice because it was quiet. Thanksgiving break was good; I got to see my family and my dog, which made me happy. Everyone came down to my great-grandmother’s house and it was a good family reunion. Today I talked with Professor Aguas, who told me that he had to see something of mine in the performance – that was frustrating because as the producer, I felt like I was doing a lot of work in terms of getting everyone together and being organized and that kind of thing. Since everything else had been designed by Abbey, I took over lighting design.

Nov. 19 – Rehearsal is coming along; the actors are getting used to their lines and I’m busy organizing all the rehearsals. It’s been kinda interesting because I didn’t expect to be doing so much work as the producer that nobody really ever notices, like the organization of everything.

Nov. 16 – Today was the day where we picked our play. It took a while, and we had to meet outside of class to talk about it, and so we finally decided on The Pillow Man because Will, the director, really liked it. I didn’t know anything about it, but I’m just the producer, so whatever, it’ll be fine.

Nov. 14 – Today we had another writing workshop. I kinda feel like they keep saying similar things, but I think that might be necessary as repetition is one of the best ways to learn. I still don’t have a clue what I’m going to write about.

Nov. 12 – Today was the Antigone production presentation. I thought it was interesting to see what they were conceptualizing. Now that I can look back on it, I think that a lot of their vision ended up reaching the stage. It definitely looked pretty cool.

Nov. 7 – The movement based workshop was today. It was pretty interesting, and more involved than I thought it would be. I had no idea what was going to happen, but it was really cool how we all got into the circle and did the “chuck” exercise. It made me wish I had been here to see the Ramayana last year.

Nov. 5 – Today we looked at the Dramatic Action Statement and identifying the differences between Purple, Antigone, and Fences. I’ve started to think of different plays, but I’m not sure what I want to do.

The day where Jason read us his play from last year – I liked this class. It was cool to see someone else’s work that has been in the class before. I like reading other people’s creative things; essays, not so much, but I’ll read anyone’s play. I thought his points about what to do when writing were helpful. His no exit play was interesting, even if it wasn’t really a no exit play and there were a few minor typos. I liked how he really opened himself up to the class about why he wrote this play and what affected him and provoked him to say what he said.

Artistic Vision

For our production of The Pillow Man, I worked as the lighting designer and producer. As the producer, I made sure we had a rehearsal space, organized a schedule of rehearsal times, and made sure everyone was where they were supposed to be. It was more difficult than I thought it would be, as things never go as planned, but we were able to get enough rehearsals in.

I had some initial problems with the design for this scene. The set is a long table with two chairs on one side and one other for the interrogation. I wanted to have a table lamp so that Tupolski (one of the investigators) could turn it on and off. This I felt would help to bring out some of the emotional side of Tupolski and add some variation to the scene when people were sitting down. However, Will, the director, didn’t like my idea and didn’t want it, so I had to scrap that and come up with a new one.

My second design is the one that we will be using. It is a very minimalistic design, because I wanted to highlight the harshness of the interrogatory process. Also, since the scene is set in a totalitarian dictatorship, I felt that the lighting should reflect the harsh ideals of it by being very impersonal. I designed the lights so that there is a single backlight Fresnel (at 100%) that hits the center of the table and two Source 4’s (at 25%) angled in to provide some fill. The Fresnel also lights up our totalitarian flag on the backdrop. I think that this helps to captivate a very intimidating atmosphere so that the audience will be able to know instantly by looking at the set that it is not a happy place. It has a very cold and unfriendly feel to it.